Science Fantasy

Aside from being the term my mother uses to mean "science fiction, or fantasy" (being interested in neither of those genres herself) science fantasy is what happens a lot in cosmology.
I really don't understand what the big huff is about evolution. There's evidence for evolution. You want crazed whacked-out theories full of holes and idle speculation and things that are there solely because they're mathematically/aesthetically pleasing? Cosmology's your field.

One of my very valued and respected professors is a theoretical cosmologist. I love him quite a lot, but....his work is literally insane. Let's see if I can explain this so that anyone who reads this can understand. (since I don't understand, and he's patiently explained it to me a number of times, and I doubt any physicists are reading this)

One of the fundamental laws of physics is that there are electric charges--discreet, contained, little bundles of charge that you can't break apart further, and the movement of these charges (electrons) is what gives rise to current, separation of these charges causes voltage, and the combination of all these things runs your refrigerator.

And since electricity and magnetism are really just forms of the same thing, since there are single electric charges, there can't be single magnetic charges. All magnets have two ends (a north pole and a south pole, and opposite poles will attract and like poles repel), no matter how many times you cut them. When they stop having two ends, they also stop being magnets. It's a fact--steal a bandsaw and try it, if you don't believe me. Your fridge will come in handy here too.

So one of the main problems I have with cosmology is that people look at it in completely different ways. Some people look at the temperature of the universe (which is a pretty steady 2.718 Kelvin, or about negative 455.7 degrees Farenheit) and say "well, this is pretty uniform, let's think about how the universe got so smooth from its initial expansion." Others look at the stars, planets, and galaxies as compared to the vast emptiness of space and say "hey, the universe is really unevenly distributed. Let's think about how it got so lumpy."

My professor has a really lovely theory about the formation of the universe that involves things called cosmic strings, which as far as I can tell are just really massive strings of...stuff. This is another problem with cosmological theories--they often rely on particles that haven't been discovered or properties of the universe that only their theories predict. While this makes them great for experiment, you try finding a cosmic string made of stuff, when all you know is it might weigh as much as the earth or as much as the sun or maybe as much as our entire galaxy, and it might be thinner than a hair or maybe as thick as a rubber band.

Anyway, the other problem with this theory of his is that it requires there to be units of magnetic charge randomly roaming the universe at some point billions of years in the past. Apparently this is okay because of some fancy math manipulation of some equations where you basically just switch electricity and magnetism. Which is all well and good, but what the fuck?

It's like attending a lecture on evolution, and everything the person says seems a little far-fetched, but you run with it because hey, s/he's smart, and then at the end they say "and we confidently expect to have found 100,000 year old unicorn fossils in the next five years."