Critical Dialogues in Cosmology

N.B. The following pages make heavy use of Tables and HTML 3.0 features, thus they may not look their best under older viewers!

Scorecard

At the Princeton meeting "Critical Dialogues in Cosmology" there was a session in which models for structure formation were rated. The session was chaired by Jim Peebles, with Carlos Frenk acting as Devil's Advocate. Here are the results.

Hubble Wars

There seemed to be general consensus that this was the first meeting in which the two sets of error bars overlapped!

Wendy Freedman - H₀ = 70 ± 10
Gustav Tammann - H₀ = 55 ± 10

The first speaker presented the case for the short and young universe, while the second speaker presented the case for the long and old universe.

Memorable Quotes

These quotes are verbatim accurate (not!).

"Cosmology is the grandest of the environmental sciences" - Martin Rees
"Inflation comes in several variants: old, new, baroque, decadent and eternal" - Martin Rees.
"Is the question going to be decided on the quality of the scientific argument or the quality of the transparencies?" - George Efstathiou
Dave Schramm pointed out that Bishop Usher measured the age of the Universe to 9 significant figures, thereby demonstrating the difference between accuracy and precision.
"That's a boring question" - Gustav Tammann
"H₀=70 is pre-Copernican" - Gustav Tammann
"I've got one of those too, but I left it at home" - Bob Kirshner
"Brilliant!" - Dick Bond after dropping all his transparencies at the beginning of his talk
Speaking about the similarity between flat earth and flat Universe arguments: "the earth could have been the size of a pea, so if it's flat over all of New Jersey it's unlikely to get curved in the next couple of miles" - J. Richard Gott III
"You still need to predict why the radius of curvature over the CMB wavelength is 10^67, noting that 67 is roughly 137/2" - J. Richard Gott III
"It's not the job of the theorist to defend his model at all costs" - Joel Primack
"By 1998-2002 Omega_0 will reach 1 in open universe papers" - David Spergel
"Most people work on topological defects because they're more interesting" - Albert Stebbins
"The lovely green models are the best" - Michael Turner
"The Standard Model wasn't the end of Particle Physics" - Frank Wilczek
Speaking about Cold Dark Matter "The King is dead, long live the King" - Jerry Ostriker
"No observational problem will not be solved by more data" - Vera Rubin

Visual Highlights

Bill Unruh showing the inflation video from Interstellar Media, and Alan Guth responding with the inflationary paper production rate.
Joe Silk showing the comic-book cover from "Turok, dinosaur hunter"
The birthday cake catching fire!

History of Beliefs

Martin Rees gave the introduction to the meeting, in which he showed plots of how strongly cosmologists have held various beliefs over the course of the last 35 years.

Omega vs Time

David Spergel showed a plot giving the value of Omega preferred by cosmologists as a function of time. Here is a loose interpretation of this plot, where we plot the redshift at which curvature domination sets in, as a function of year (specifically z_curv is 1/Omega - 1).

French translation here.

Douglas Scott & Martin White
dscott@astro.ubc.ca
Last revised: 11th July 1996