As you may know I've just attended a conference in Sesimbra, Portugal. I was invited to speak on QI at the Demystify 2025 conference and it has been a tremendous experience, both because of the beauty of this area (my hotel balcony overlooked the turqoise sea and the seafood was fantastic) and especially the stimulating talks and conversations I have had. I won't give details of the talks, because they will appear online soon, but I'd like just to provide some highlights.
The first talk was by Alexander Unzicker who proposed, half in jest, a Department of Scientific Efficiency (DoSE) to get rid of all the grift in physics and eliminate physical constants. Then Eric Lerner outlined some of the problems with the Big Bang theory such as the Lithium problem: there is only 1/3 as much as there should be. Patrick Van Raes presented two ideas from Robitaille, the Liquid Sun model (the problem is: how can you get fusion then?) and R's theory that the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation is actually being emitted from the ocean which explains why it has only been seen in satellites close to the Earth like COBE and not in those far away like Planck. There was then a spirited argument especially from M.L Corredoira, because some claim that Planck has seen it but they just didn't bother to put it in the paper because everyone assumed it was true anyway.
Then Indranil Banik showed that you can explain the Hubble tension (a higher redshift than expected of nearby supernovae) if you assume we are in a local void (underdensity) so that nearby over-densities are pulling everything out of the void more strongly than expected. He has been looking at Baryon Acoustic Oscillations which are waves left over from the early universe. They expand as the cosmos does. Redshift can be redefined using their observed size. He has shown that assuming a local void predicts their size quite well and the Hubble Tension (a big problem in cosmology) is reduced from 3 to 1 sigma. i.e. it goes away (see reference). He gets a lot of pushback from people using the cosmological principle (the cosmos must be uniform on big scales), but I think that argument falls rather flat... I don't see the problem with having a local hole and the Hubble Tension is a major issue of today.
Then Andre Assis, lovely guy, said that the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) is actually evidence against the Big Bang, because its temperature was predicted far better by the earlier steady state theories than by the Big Bang models. Andre later kindly advised me to relax a bit, and also to study the electromagnetism of Weber, which I like already because it gets rid of the abstract concept of the field.
Alexander Unzicker then spoke on the Variable Speed of Light (VSL) cosmology. A curved space with a constant c is equivalent to a flat space with a varying c. I admire this guy more than any other physicist of our time, but of course, as he admits, even if the standard form of VSL is true it still agrees with general relativity so we are back to all the problems with galaxy rotation. Nevertheless, I agree the VSL is the way to go, it fits better with QI and is directly testable, unlike curved spacetime.
My talk went well. I presented my QI cosmology with a varying G. One guy asked if that means I can solve Sagan's faint young sun paradox. The early Sun, under standard physics should have been dimmer, but oddly the Earth was not generally a snowball at that time. Indeed, a higher G in the past leads to more intense stars: more confinement, more fusion, but Indranil Banik suggested it would make them burn too quick, unless c varies as well. Interestingly, a varying G would also mean a smaller Earth in the past.
Then an interesting and bold talk from Unnikrishnan who claimed that he has disproved special relativity by doing, for the first time, a one-way speed of light test. He claims that c depends on the observer's motion. I need to read his paper before commenting on that one!
As a finale I had a chat with Indranil Banik that was so interesting and covered so much ground (from quantum thrusters, to Milky Way satellite galaxies to how to build a cosmology) that we talked from 7pm to 3am. He said he would invite me to talk at the Cosmology Institute in Portsmouth. This was the overall hope of this conference, which was organised brilliantly by Anastasia Bendebury and Shilo DeLay (on X, @demystifysci): to build a bridge between the mainstream and mavericks.
References
The Conference website: https://demystifysci.com/demysticon-2025
Unzicker's first talk at the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOdyPNYo8Po
Indranil's Hubble Tension paper: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/540/1/545/8129689
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