I totally mean it: Inflation never solved the flatness problem
A bit of a tangent, but I&#x27;ll try to make it relevant to the topic.<p>My third-year Cosmology course was the single most confusing and hand-wavey course I&#x27;ve ever taken during my Physics degree. It seemed to be mostly a grab-bag of &quot;clever insights&quot; (the cosmological constant being &quot;wrong&quot;, but then later turning out to be &quot;right&quot; being the most flagrant). Maybe I just had a bad lecturer, but at the time I was working in an astrophysics research group, and I asked a few of the post-docs about cosmology and they didn&#x27;t have any convincing answers either (to be fair, our research topic was asteroseismology not cosmology). It just felt as though there was a lot less rigor in cosmology than in other sciences that I was more familiar with. They definitely had some evidence for the theories presented, but most of the actual derivations felt deliberately vague and confusing.<p>All of that being said, it feels like the author has some axe to grind and is herself engaging in unscientific dogma. Even I can tell that some of her comments on cosmology (the point about the curvature density parameter specifically) are not quite right, and I&#x27;m a little confused about her tirade on &quot;parameters close to 1&quot; -- not to mention that she just shrugs it off with &quot;I have no idea&quot; rather than following up.<p>The points she made about choosing parameters are very odd, bordering on incorrect, as she appears to be trying to claim that unless you have a theory to derive initial parameters then the initial parameters are useless. But that&#x27;s ridiculous, it&#x27;s like saying (using her analogy) you need to have a theory for the position and speed of a particular arrow in order for Newton&#x27;s laws to be correct. Fitting a model to data, by searching for an optimum parameter, is an <i>incredibly</i> common practice and is one of the most common ways of doing data science. However, saying that you need to know the probability distribution of some parameter is definitely true.<p>It also appears that the author&#x27;s views were challenged by another astrophysicist in her previous blog post, and she doesn&#x27;t address this at all (in fact, she doubles down).