Constatine
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- Sep 28, 2016
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These type of statistics are very misleading. The calculations they do to come up with such numbers relys on many assumptions that further lower the odds (by a lot). Never trust a scientific work that pushes an idea in a persuasive fashion(though I did not read the whole article so this might be fine), and never ever trust "chances this is true" statistics in physics.Read an interesting article from Scientific American about this paper today.
Have Astronomers Decided Dark Energy Doesn't Exist?
So they're saying that even if you grant the CMB and baryon oscillations can be attributed to theories that don't call for an accelerating universe, this study still concludes there's a 99.7% chance that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. If you grant that the standard theories of CMB and baryon oscillating stand even a tiny 10% chance of being true, this pushes an accelerating expansion universe odds to well over 99.999%. You can be really mean and cut that back by orders of magnitude to 99.99%. That's still a big hurdle to overcome and corresponding requires a lot of evidence to prove wrong. It's unlikely anything short of a prediction that linear expansion makes that conflicts with accelerated expansion is going to do the trick.