The model of the universe changes every ten years. Think for a moment about the sky--at night, it is mainly dark. That means that the light-record, stars, galaxies, radiation, has not had time to reach us yet: we can't yet see or understand all that missing information. Without all those pieces of the puzzle, it is just conjecture. Every few years, the universe "gets larger", which means we see farther.

@brianluce
It is just one of the several cosmological models, among the so-called cyclic models: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model The article was submitted two years ago to the electronic preprint archive, the arXiv, which is not peer reviewed, and as far as I can check, the author never managed to published it elsewhere. I am not saying this all wrong, but it's just one of the numerous theories with no follow-up development. You may check daily yourself hundreds of new cosmological theories on the http://arxiv.org/archive/astro-ph or if it is too overwhelmingly big, check for example some of the blogs that are run by the cosmologists, such as http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/

As MIT's review says:

It's easy to dismiss this idea as just another amusing and unrealistic model dreamed up by those whacky comsologists.

As MIT's Technology Review said,

It's easy to dismiss this idea as just another amusing and unrealistic model dreamed up by those whacky cosmologists.

As a science journalist, I know better than to present my producer with a story which is not new or doesn't somehow stand out against the rest. It would have no merit.

Now, the review does go on to give reasons why this particular research deserves our attention.

That is until you look at the predictions it makes. During a period of expansion, an observer in this universe would see an odd kind of change in the red-shift of bright objects such as Type-I supernovas, as they accelerate away. It turns out, says Shu, that his data exactly matches the observations that astronomers have made on Earth.

This kind of acceleration is an ordinary feature of Shu's universe.

That's in stark contrast to the various models of the Universe based on the Big Bang. Since the accelerating expansion of the Universe was discovered, cosmologists have been performing some rather worrying contortions with the laws of physics to make their models work.

I thank the Review for pointing out Shu's work. It's worth considering. What scientific writing does best is shake up our ideas . Only once in a blue moon does one of these articles identify paradigm shift, but that's what makes it exciting.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift#Examples_of_paradigm_shifts_in_the_natural_sciences

My concern is mostly about the presentation of the astrophysics & cosmology (and other sciences in general) in the news by selecting a single work as the revolution in our understanding of the Universe without doing any attempts to research more into the problem.

People have problem with other approaches. So, media choose best working one. No one will be excited if they'll tell them that 1000 alternative views exist and it looks like in next few million years they won't be able to decide that is right and that is wrong. :-)

Imagine, that I would post at this forum that the "new RGBW coding in Sony Stacked Sensors would revolutionize the low-light capabilities of the digital imaging", just by citing solely the Sony August press-release without checking that the same company later abandoned the RGBW coding, as it has failed to meet "certain conditions of Sony's image quality standards".

I feel your pain. Are you a Physicist?

I'm actually working on a new cosmological theory I invented that will revolutionize physics. The cool thing about my theory is that instead of math (I'm not good with numbers) I use emoticons. :)

I guess one of the reasons why so many people are into cosmology is that it is relatively easy to formulate an exciting new theory that can not quite as easily proven wrong (or right, but that's not so important).

Just think how frustrating it might be in comparison if you, for example, worked out a new physical theory on melting points of alloys, and if it's wrong, any craftsman with an oven and a thermometer can refute it within an hour.

Models that avoid to make any easily verifyable prediction are so much more likely to last for at least a while.

And if one's physical background is not good enough to write down a good looking cosmologic theory, one can still go the whole way, way beyond the "big bang" theory, even beyond nature, and postulate supernatural phenomena or deities - which are immune to any verification or reasoning.

I'm with VK and karl on this one. I always find it interesting to look at why people believe these theories, and defend them to the death. Any simple and rational look at Big Bang is gonna yield a ton of unanswered questions. The primary one being "How the hell can you really even think to come close to guessing/inferring/deducing what occurred ~17 billion years ago?". On the other hand, I think many people that speculate and discuss these things are just passionate about science, and that's cool too. But get real - claiming to know what happened billions of years ago?...Really? So why do people believe Big Bang? Who knows...but it strikes me as curious that it's a real simple theory 'First there was stillness...and then a lot of activity...and then the world as we know it'. Kinda biblical. The bottom line is this: what's most interesting about unprovable theories is not whether they are correct or incorrect...but rather "how was this theory even thought up...and why do people insist on it being right". My 2 cents.

It's possible that we are looking at very old light, but the observable universe is about a thousand parsecs. Way way smaller than what is published. That's the part they always leave out. You can read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_distance_ladder We are constantly recalibrating the size of the universe because there is no sure way to measure it. However, there is actually some good science for the latest measurements, even though we said the same thing ten years ago, and the measurements were different. Basically, the universe scales with whatever data we throw at it.

There are more observational data available which can be used to test the cosmological theories. As it was mentioned on the original post from the"Technology Review", there is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMBR), which existence and the structure is now well-established. The CMBR has a thermal black body spectrum at a temperature of 2.725 K, and the glow is very nearly uniform in all directions, but the tiny remaining variations show a very specific pattern, "fluctuations". Although many different processes might produce the general form of a black body spectrum, no model other than the Big Bang has yet explained the fluctuations.

Besides, there are here are independent data on the stellar evolution, which allow to cross-check various cosmological predictions. You may know more about a huge effort devoted to studies of galaxy formation and evolution by using observations of distant, or high-redshift, galaxies. These surveys are looking for signs of recent (or instantaneous) star formation in the galaxies at different distances, which are observed due to the finite speed of light at different cosmic epochs. An alternative, and complementary, approach focuses on galaxies nearby enough to be resolved into their component stars. For these systems we can use well established stellar evolution theory, together with photometry and spectroscopy of individual stars of various ages, to interpret the “fossil record" of their star formation, and to trace the evolution of each from its formation to the present time.

In fact, the impossibility to explain the observational data leads to dismissing one theory in favor of another. One thing is true, there are cosmological theories which are impossible to verify, since they involve speculations about matters outside of our observable Universe (for example, the idea of multiple "parallel" universes). However, let's return to the original post, the presented paper claims at least two verifiable assumptions: the suggestion that the gravitational constant and the speed of light are not constant. These are the fundamental physical parameters, that can be tested in the experiments.

It's possible that we are looking at very old light, but the observable universe is about a thousand parsecs.

@DrDave Have you ever thought what would happen if everything in the world had shrunk to half size overnight? How would we know? One would be half as tall, but the ruler would be only half as long, so how one could tell?: http://www.phys.unsw.edu.au/einsteinlight/jw/module6_constant.htm

Choose a cosmologist from your own country and you've got a better chance.

No worries, @goanna . Australia has many great cosmologists.

Regarding the news coverage: in recent years it become more and more common in the news to present the cosmology as some kind of religion, where the cosmologists are some kind of new prophets trying to create new dogma. It is partially the cosmologists fault, as they introduced too many physically unproven phenomena, dark matter, dark energy, etc. Remember that at the moment these are just parameters to fit in the data, but each of the new parameters would be scrutinized in various branches of physics and astronomy.

There are various kinds of journalism (blogging is also a journalism), and sensationalism is not invented now. By the way, the similar scientific study could be presented in the news in a different way: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12571965

I'm sorry for the long post.

I made separate topic

http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/4795/science-rules-and-beliefs#Item_1