The Pope says we're obsessed with scientific reality!

Son Goku

The "Copenhagen Interpretation" is accepted as science. It is the basis of modern quantum physics. Many worlds tries to get around the problems arising with causailty. It is sound science but I dont accept it as true!

What?
They're both different views of the R process, but neither every really comes up or matters at all.

bonkey wrote:

I know this is OT, but doesn't Hawking Radiation require the creation of subatomic particles "from nothing" ?

In QFT, virtual particles like those created near the horizon are a way of breaking down the dynamics of the field for a nearby observer. Somebody on the other end of the hole would see a different process occurring. Basically the whole notion of "particle" is observer dependant in curved backgrounds.
What’s a vacuum for one observer could be a sea of particles for another. So I don't take the position of saying an electron and a positron were produced, rather the field evolved into a different state, which looks like electron positron creation for some observers.

Electron-positron pair production and quantum vacuums do not require black holes to exist. so he was using something which does not require black holes in the new context of something near the event horizon in a black hole.
And Hawking said "let there be electromagnetic radiation" and there was light.

What does this mean? What is a quantum vacuum?
There is a big difference between regular pair production and black hole pair production, a difference that will take several years for the community to fully come to terms with.

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

Nobody is talking about that though. [i.e. that Knowing them and not being so prepared to convey an air that "science supersedes religion" is a worthwhile exercise, in my humble opinion anyway, however honourable that is.]

Yes they are!
It was specifically mentioned that I was trying to attack science and that that was dishouourable!

All we're saying is that Science isn't like religion in practice. You're criticising things from an extremely removed metaphysical level, where everything is shaky. That isn't an interesting position because it doesn't say anything new about either subject.

But science has metaphysical foundations. they may happen to be "more solid" than anything else but they arent safe from attack. this is the only form of attack in which pseudo scientists can be partiallially syccessful.
Knowing the arguments is worthwhile in my opinion.

There are obviously differences between science and religion, but if you claim them to be the same and then attempt to prove it by moving into the super-philosophical you destroy any meaningful discussion.

I didnt claim they were THE SAME! I claimed that critiques of pure reason (not to coin a phrase:) ) can be made in theology . And much theology has this SAME rational basis that western science has. And it isnt as if The Pope is anti-science or science is anti-Christ. fundamentalist christians and scino religions should NOT be limped in with main stream Christianity!

For instance I know that the foundations of science are totally water-tight and I said several times I wasn't having a go at religion.

fine about not having a go. Which "foundations" are watertight?

However sciences foundations are shaky on a level so abstracted from the practice of the subject that I don't really care about them,

and a priest can say good works are all that is necessary and his faith does not matter. but theology would argue that it DOES matter.

Also you are suggesting that science is all about "practice of the subject" applied science in a pragmatic sense. It isnt! In fact there is argument to suggest that now fields of science (you could call them "great leaps and advances in science " but I already pointed to the problems of that) open up because of people who dont focus on the practice of science which the vast majority of scientists do. The "paradigm shift" comes from the fringes and from these abstracted metaphysical musings.

similar to how there are questionable assumptions made when I attempt to eat a sandwich. Similarly any similarities with religion are on an equally removed scale.

You are now creating a taxonomy of "practical science" and "metaphysical" science which underpins the formr. how can you suggest that practical science is so far removed from its metaphysical underpinnings as to negate paying any attention to them?

I mean I undrstand a scientist of animal behavour may not be interested in the physics of atoms or molocules but the behaviour of chemicals in the brain is of interest to them and to psychologists. these chemicals in turn depends on chemestry which in turn depends on physics. I accept the biologist may not be interested in that but a breakthrough in chemistery or physics may have untold consequesces on behaviour.

Off the top of my head the example from Larry Niven of life extending drugs or of teleportation has in the future huge implications on society.

I accept most scientists may not delve that deep but as i alluded to from Ziman , skeptics should relate to logical fallacy and the history and philosophy of science because this is exactly where pseudo scientists try to fudge the issue and many very very brilliant scientists are neither well versed
it this field or in public relations.

Call me crazy, but if a theory says X and Y should be observed at time T with properties o,n,m and when you run the tests in every scenerio that is what comes out, then the theory is as good as you're going to get.

and the theory of the sun rising every day was as good as we got until someone said "maybe the sun is not rising at all but the Earth is turning". and if they stuck with just that for 5000 million years they Sun would one day expand and engulf the earth and as good as they got they would be extinct!

I am amazed that humans can be as correct about the universe as the Standard Model's success has shown.

the standard model has been shown to be wrong! Where do you think "inflation", and the more recent "dark energy" came from? The measured rate of expansion and the theoretical constant rate didnt match up with the measured size of the universe. It couldnt have been constant so they added these artifacts to the standard model. If you keep adding to fit the observations how is it so amazing that the theory with add on fits what is observed?

All this philosophy of science stuff is very tangential, because although correct the arguement doesn't really matter at the end of the day. It still doesn't answer "Why is your kettle working". Only Feyerabend really attempted to answer this.
In essence "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet and I'll show you a hypocrite".

i dont subscribe to constructivism or relativism but I find it very difficult to argue against this "accepted standard" among educational academics and sociologists. In that scence I am a maverick who has "faith" in opposing theory and believes in science as looking at the "real world" and not some abstract negiotiable construct. But i am aware what the constructionist may claim.

To me you've just sprung into "Defend Religion"-mode without listening to whats being said.

Have any opinion you want. that is your perogative. But if you claim I jumped to defend religion then care to produce some evidence? All I stated was that mainstream religion has rationality and has the SAME rationality as "western" science. they are not opposed to each other. religion isnt "under attack" from science so I dont see how it needs to be defended.

I understand that the Pope is a very intellignet man and on societal issues he has keen insight, but in this case he has said something silly.

I dont see that ther is anything silly if he stated people are focusing to much on the material world or that believing in science can explain everything (or at least everything sufficient for human live) was not good enough. There ar things which are outside of science which are also important probably more important. Someone born without an ability to reason logically would not stop being a human being.

Son Goku

ISAW wrote:

fine about not having a go. Which "foundations" are watertight?

Typing mistake. I meant "Aren't Watertight".

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

What?
They're both different views of the R process, but neither every really comes up or matters at all.

But given you claim about scientists working in a practical sense do you agree that the manufacture of silicon chips is based on quantum theory e.g. the ability of particles to spontaneously disappear and appear elsewhere and "tunnel"?

What does this mean? What is a quantum vacuum?

...the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. By definition, it contains no physical particles. The term zero-point field is sometimes used...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum#The_quantum-mechanical_vacuum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_state
The uncertainty principle in the form implies that in the vacuum one or more particles with energy ΔE above the vacuum may be created for a short time Δt. These virtual particles are included in the definition of the vacuum.

There is a big difference between regular pair production and black hole pair production, a difference that will take several years for the community to fully come to terms with.

Ah so we can forget isotropism and homogenity and forget the "laws of physics" ? hey wait! maybe there is some underlying model of which our universe is only a subset ?

Mind you getting back to the earlier definition of an ability to eventually measure something in theory and that being a definition of science, could we create conditions of quantum black holes and hawking radiation?

Such an energy is orders of magnitude greater than can be produced on Earth in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider (maximum about 14 × 103 GeV), or detected in cosmic ray collisions in our atmosphere. It is estimated that to collide two aggregates of fermions to within a distance of a Planck length with the currently achievable magnetic field strength would require a ring accelerator about 1000 light years in diameter to keep the aggregates on track. Even if it were possible, any collision product would be immensely unstable, and almost immediately disintegrate.

so all we need do is build a 1000 light year wide particle accelerator rather than the 38 km LHC. so does that mean since in theory we could build such an accelerator that this is therefore science?

Son Goku

ISAW wrote:

the standard model has been shown to be wrong! Where do you think "inflation", and the more recent "dark energy" came from? The measured rate of expansion and the theoretical constant rate didnt match up with the measured size of the universe. It couldnt have been constant so they added these artifacts to the standard model. If you keep adding to fit the observations how is it so amazing that the theory with add on fits what is observed?

That's not the Standard Model, that's the Friedmann-Walker model of cosmology.
I'm talking about the Standard Model of Feynman, Gell-Mann, Wienberg and Glashow, which has never failed a single test without ever being adjusted. I certainly find that amazing.

As for the Friedmann-Walker model of Cosmology, Dark Energy, as any text book on GR says, isn't artificially introduced, it was artificially removed. In the field equations we never knew what value lambda should take so we set it to zero. However when we looked at the Cosmos in enough detail we found the dynamics only matched the solutions to general relativity with a non-zero lambda. Dark Energy was reintroduced after it had been artificially set to zero.

Also you are suggesting that science is all about "practice of the subject" applied science in a pragmatic sense. It isnt! In fact there is argument to suggest that now fields of science (you could call them "great leaps and advances in science " but I already pointed to the problems of that) open up because of people who dont focus on the practice of science which the vast majority of scientists do. The "paradigm shift" comes from the fringes and from these abstracted metaphysical musings.

No they don't, the are scientific musings, not metaphysical musings. What I'm saying is that it is best to argue about the practice of science, even Einstein's deduction of GR is in the practice of science. Practice doesn't mean applied, it means the everyday workings of the subject. It is best to discuss science in the way it is done everyday, in the way people work things out, even those on the fringe, that is the best way to analyse it. The removed view, although important, misses out on alot of what makes science science. It's this practical everday stuff that should be compared to the rationality of religion, if you want to compare them.

I didnt claim they were THE SAME! I claimed that critiques of pure reason (not to coin a phrase ) can be made in theology . And much theology has this SAME rational basis that western science has. And it isnt as if The Pope is anti-science or science is anti-Christ.

You have to admit he has said some very off-colour stuff about science.

But if you claim I jumped to defend religion then care to produce some evidence?

You kept acting as if I was having a go at it, despite me saying several times I wasn't. I specifically said twice that I don't think religion/theology is irrational and your responses contained a defense of the rationality of religion.

What I'm saying is that the rationality in science and religion is a different rationality because they have different goals. Even though you can make the arguement that they are the same, if you look at how people do the subjects they are very different. Einstein didn't use the same class of reasoning as Aquinas. They are both rational, but the rationality is very different to the point of being almost uncomparable and I don't think their common history changes this.

Although maybe you've being saying something similar and we've just being talking past eachother the whole time.

Son Goku

ISAW wrote:

But given you claim about scientists working in a practical sense do you agree that the manufacture of silicon chips is based on quantum theory e.g. the ability of particles to spontaneously disappear and appear elsewhere and "tunnel"?

I don't get what that has to do with Many Worlds or Copenhagen.

...the quantum state with the lowest possible energy. By definition, it contains no physical particles. The term zero-point field is sometimes used...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum#The_quantum-mechanical_vacuum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_state
The uncertainty principle in the form implies that in the vacuum one or more particles with energy ΔE above the vacuum may be created for a short time Δt. These virtual particles are included in the definition of the vacuum.

Exactly, but not in curved spacetime. Since there are no symmetries in general in curved spacetime no observers agree on what is the state with no particles. That's the fundamental difference, between pair production in general and curved spacetime pair-production.

ISAW wrote:

Ah so we can forget isotropism and homogenity and forget the "laws of physics" ? hey wait! maybe there is some underlying model of which our universe is only a subset ?

I don't get what you mean. Isotropsim and homogenity refer to mass distributions, what has that got to do with the difference between curved pair production and flat pair production. I also don't get what the "forget the laws of physics" part means. I'm not being pedantic, I actually don't understand.

Mind you getting back to the earlier definition of an ability to eventually measure something in theory and that being a definition of science, could we create conditions of quantum black holes and hawking radiation?

Yeah, it contributes to the CMB and Lamb-shifts in orbit. I'd like to see stronger tests, but it's doing well so far.
Also I don't know what a quantum black hole is.

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

Exactly, but not in curved spacetime. Since there are no symmetries in general in curved spacetime no observers agree on what is the state with no particles.

By "curved" I assume you mean a region completly closed or curven in on itself. Like a "black hole"? Or like the Universe as a hole? But then for the "universe" analagy one of the pair would have to tunnel out of the universe which is a bit odd! So maybe it isnt a proper analagy? Unless - another universe maybe?

That's the fundamental difference, between pair production in general and curved spacetime pair-production.

i thought the only difference was that during this delta T small time interval that gravity (or the huge difference in curvature between the individual particles ) sweeps them apart and one which is close to the event horizon (on the inside whatever "close" means) tunnels out of the black hole and gets swept away into space. thus the black hole loses an electron sized particle. I dont know the rate (i.e. how many positrons or electrons "evaporate" off the hole per second ) but eventually with small black holes they lose matter to where they reach a level where there isnt enough mass/energy to sustain total curvature and they cease to be black holes.

I don't get what you mean. Isotropsim and homogenity refer to mass distributions, what has that got to do with the difference between curved pair production and flat pair production. I also don't get what the "forget the laws of physics" part means. I'm not being pedantic, I actually don't understand.

Sorry I meant that the laws of the universe are the same. Charge and mass of particles are the same and behave according to the same underlying laws whether inside or outside the hole. then again does charge make any difference? certainly electron sized masses anyway and spin. So electrons behave like electrons whether just inside or just outside the hole.

Again all we need do is make a small black hole and wait say ten billion years and see if it evaporates. so this makes it science does it? surely we wouldnt have to wait as long till we die and find out about the afterlife

Anyway is my understanding of "hawking radiation" niave?

Yeah, it contributes to the CMB and Lamb-shifts in orbit. I'd like to see stronger tests, but it's doing well so far.
Also I don't know what a quantum black hole is.

sure I dont know what a photon is but that doesnt stop me believing in them. If you want a definition i mean what is the smallest possible mass with which one can form a black hole? Hawking I think postulated that such artifacts couls have been created at the time of the big bang.

Son Goku

By "curved" I assume you mean a region completly closed or curven in on itself. Like a "black hole"?

By curved I mean a region with strong gravity, such as near the Sun.

i thought the only difference was that..... they cease to be black holes.

You see electrons themselves are a result of the symmetry of the surrounding spacetime, so is the vacuum state. In a curved background the symmetries are different or possibly completely absent, which doesn't allow all observers to agree on what is a vacuum and what is a particle. As such the whole notion of pair production is observer dependant. There is a whole class of observers who see no such particle leave the vicinity of the hole.
The only observers who do see a positron coming out are ones very far away from the hole, significantly into the future.

Again all we need do is make a small black hole and wait say ten billion years and see if it evaporates. so this makes it science does it? surely we wouldnt have to wait as long till we die and find out about the afterlife

It's an extreme hypothetical scenerio created to allow QFT to be put into a curved background. When this is done the theory is then scaled down to testable situations. Real world tests are Lamb Shift and the CMB.
(However the CMB actually contains the expected contributions from Hawking emission from black holes, which is an actual test).

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

Typing mistake. I meant "Aren't Watertight".

Oh rignt. completely caught me off guard there by claiming the exsact opposite of what you catually meant.

Well then we happen to agree on this point. I would not be so brave as to suggest it however because...

Seeing as you "know" it I suppose you can provide proof of this negative and show the foundations of science are not watertight?

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

I don't get what you mean. Isotropsim and homogenity refer to mass distributions, what has that got to do with the difference between curved pair production and flat pair production. I also don't get what the "forget the laws of physics" part means. I'm not being pedantic, I actually don't understand.

Isnt the mass distribution throughout the Universe which determines whether it is flat or curved? Have you not yourself claimed that curced space is a result of localised mass anomolies? What is the phrase ..."matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move" is it?

I am reminded of Witenstiens claim (excuse the paraphrase) of philosophy being a consequence of misunderstanding language. It seems the Theory of Everything might well be a consequence of misunderstanding geometry.

Joking aside it seem that science is saying "the laws apply everywhere" and also saying "in certain places the laws are special cases which we dont understand yet cant measure and cant explain. They are still the same underlying laws its just we dont seem to be able to match theory or measurement up with out theory". In short our wonderfully simple theory has had to patched up with "inflation" and "dark matter" and "dark energy" and exocit particles. Okay the particles we can maybe actually measure but the rest came not from a theory but because waht we saw didnt fit the tidy version of the theory.

Actaully this leads me back to the Intelligent design argument.
The ID people go on about the "fine tuned" Universe where we live in a Universe which had to be balenced to one part in ten to the forty to arrive at the way science measures it today.

But dont they really mean "balanced (after adding in a whole list of patches and add ons which were added in - ironically to 'balance' it)"?

Anyway back to the point about even spread of mass and laws of physics being the same everywhere. In a "perfect" Universe with even spread we wouldnt exist to contemplate the "perfection" would we? And if the laws of physics are the same everywhere then how do they explain pair production inside black holes?

Son Goku

ISAW wrote:

Isnt the mass distribution throughout the Universe which determines whether it is flat or curved? Have you not yourself claimed that curced space is a result of localised mass anomolies? What is the phrase ..."matter tells space how to curve and space tells matter how to move" is it?

It's the result of mass, but not mass anamolies. Anyway Isotropy and homogenity are just two possible gross conditions for a matter distribution, but still have nothing to do with pair production in particular.

I am reminded of Witenstiens claim (excuse the paraphrase) of philosophy being a consequence of misunderstanding language. It seems the Theory of Everything might well be a consequence of misunderstanding geometry.

What does geometry mean to you? I know this is mainly a joke. However only General Relativity involves geometry, most proposed theories of everything are mainly algebraic.

Joking aside it seem that science is saying "the laws apply everywhere" and also saying "in certain places the laws are special cases which we dont understand yet cant measure and cant explain. They are still the same underlying laws its just we dont seem to be able to match theory or measurement up with out theory".

You have to remember that the "Laws of Physics" is a popular phrase and not really one used in physics. Largely because it is nonapplicable. A Quantum Field is a generic physical entity which evolves in a certain manner. You can place the field over flat spacetime or curved spacetime. In curved spacetime its evolution is more involved and gives rise to different effects. There aren't laws that read off like sentences saying x and y can't occur.
A Quantum Field evolves differently in a curved background giving rise to different effects which are hard to understand.

In short our wonderfully simple theory has had to patched up with "inflation" and "dark matter" and "dark energy" and exocit particles. Okay the particles we can maybe actually measure but the rest came not from a theory but because waht we saw didnt fit the tidy version of the theory.

You see, you are confusing cosmological models with underlying theory.
None of this stuff patches up General Relativity, because it is all predicted by it. However the specific solutions of GR that we used can ultimately only be selected by experiment, because of free standing parameters. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are not "patches" or "fudge factors". Saying they are simplifies what's going on too much. The difficulty with Dark matter and Energy is that they aren't "patches".

Anyway back to the point about even spread of mass and laws of physics being the same everywhere. In a "perfect" Universe with even spread we wouldnt exist to contemplate the "perfection" would we? And if the laws of physics are the same everywhere then how do they explain pair production inside black holes?

What do you understand the "Laws of Physics" to mean?
Quantum Evolution is different in a curved background, that's all it is. It's different because the space is curved. Much like how water will move around in a beaker differently to how it moves around in a bath. The shape of the container effects propogation.

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding what people mean by "The Laws of Physics". Black Hole pair production is an effect not a law. If by "Laws" you mean the underlying principles, then pair production is different in a curved background, becuase of the "laws".

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

It's the result of mass, but not mass anamolies. Anyway Isotropy and homogenity are just two possible gross conditions for a matter distribution, but still have nothing to do with pair production in particular.

sorry
for "anamolies" read "clumping".

I think by homogenous I meant that the 'Laws of physics' do not distinguish different points in space.

What does geometry mean to you? I know this is mainly a joke. However only General Relativity involves geometry, most proposed theories of everything are mainly algebraic.

Homogenity is geometrically dependent.

You have to remember that the "Laws of Physics" is a popular phrase and not really one used in physics. Largely because it is nonapplicable. A Quantum Field is a generic physical entity which evolves in a certain manner. You can place the field over flat spacetime or curved spacetime. In curved spacetime its evolution is more involved and gives rise to different effects. There aren't laws that read off like sentences saying x and y can't occur.

But that is like saying yu have an mathematical interpretation or solution. fine. But what is the point unless one of these solutions relates to the Universe we actaully live in?

A Quantum Field evolves differently in a curved background giving rise to different effects which are hard to understand.

Great. now we don't even have a solution and if we do we might not have recognised it!

You see, you are confusing cosmological models with underlying theory.

Yes I shouldnt have stated "theory". I should have used "cosmology". given I was referring to "big bang cosmology" I hope you will forgive me. But homogenity and isotropism are accepted principles of cosmology according to all contemporary observations. You can of course throw out the cosmological principle and still have scientifically sound and mathematically sound models but I really don't see why anyone should go there.

None of this stuff patches up General Relativity, because it is all predicted by it. However the specific solutions of GR that we used can ultimately only be selected by experiment, because of free standing parameters. Dark Matter and Dark Energy are not "patches" or "fudge factors". Saying they are simplifies what's going on too much. The difficulty with Dark matter and Energy is that they aren't "patches".

fine. I accept that also. now given all the above "fits" could you tell me of all the possible solutions to GR which one is the actual universe we are living in?

What do you understand the "Laws of Physics" to mean?

ah well you have me here. I dont really accept the position that there fhave to be any which apply across the board. But things like "gravity is attractive" "Like charges repell" etc. I am tempred to state "The universe is everything that is the case"

Quantum Evolution is different in a curved background, that's all it is. It's different because the space is curved. Much like how water will move around in a beaker differently to how it moves around in a bath. The shape of the container effects propogation.

I can live with this if you are saying "we dont know exactly how black holes affect how particues behave but there is strong verifable evidence to suggest that inside a Black hole it ain't Kansas for the average electron"

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding what people mean by "The Laws of Physics". Black Hole pair production is an effect not a law. If by "Laws" you mean the underlying principles, then pair production is different in a curved background, becuase of the "laws".

Do i mean the "underlying principles" ? Hmmm. I guess I do. Now I know what I meant but I still dont know what "underlying principles" are. But thats okay isnt it since Physicists dont know how things behave in black holes?

Son Goku

ISAW wrote:

Homogenity is geometrically dependent.

Homogenity is algebraic, not geometric. It's a statement about the algebra of the equations and doesn't depend at all on the geometry of the space.

ISAW wrote:

But that is like saying yu have an mathematical interpretation or solution. fine. But what is the point unless one of these solutions relates to the Universe we actaully live in?

Solutions? Fields don't enter the mathematics as solutions to any equations, they are the equations and particles are solutions to them. There would be no point in them if they didn't match experiment, but they do, so they have a point.

ISAW wrote:

Great. now we don't even have a solution and if we do we might not have recognised it!

The fact that space is curved changes the consequences of homogenity, which is why the situation is more complex. Literally if you state that some expression should hold across an entire space, the impilcations of that are different if the space is curved to when it is flat.
We do have a solution and it works, as the WMAP has shown. The trouble with pair production is that it throws up the issue of particles being frame dependant and therefore suggests QFT should be rewritten in a form which makes it easier to understand in curved backgrounds where we can't globally rely on the notion of particle.

ISAW wrote:

You can of course throw out the cosmological principle and still have scientifically sound and mathematically sound models but I really don't see why anyone should go there.

I don't think we should either, but why are you saying this. Nobody is throwing out homogenity and isotropy. If you throw out homogenity you lose electrons and quarks.

ISAW wrote:

fine. I accept that also. now given all the above "fits" could you tell me of all the possible solutions to GR which one is the actual universe we are living in?

Ones with small Omega(roughly speaking matter density) and a polynomial time dependant lambda.

ISAW wrote:

Do i mean the "underlying principles" ? Hmmm. I guess I do. Now I know what I meant but I still dont know what "underlying principles" are. But thats okay isnt it since Physicists dont know how things behave in black holes?

Nothing I've discussed has anything to do with the interior of a black hole. The interior is irrelevant, all of this physics is defined externally.

ISAW

Son Goku wrote:

Homogenity is algebraic, not geometric. It's a statement about the algebra of the equations and doesn't depend at all on the geometry of the space.

I stand corrected. I thought the principle expressed a view of the universe as a whole and not a mathematical interpretation of it. You have given me some food for thought and I will have to think about it.

Solutions? Fields don't enter the mathematics as solutions to any equations, they are the equations and particles are solutions to them. There would be no point in them if they didn't match experiment, but they do, so they have a point.

I thought twas he actual universe we lived in was one solution to the field equations. Was i wrong about that?

The fact that space is curved changes the consequences of homogenity, which is why the situation is more complex. Literally if you state that some expression should hold across an entire space, the impilcations of that are different if the space is curved to when it is flat.
We do have a solution and it works, as the WMAP has shown. The trouble with pair production is that it throws up the issue of particles being frame dependant and therefore suggests QFT should be rewritten in a form which makes it easier to understand in curved backgrounds where we can't globally rely on the notion of particle.

by "frame dependent" do you mean (on one case anyway) in a srtong curvature/field such as a black hole?

I don't think we should either, but why are you saying this. Nobody is throwing out homogenity and isotropy.

Fine. i just wanted to make sure we are sticking within "normally assumed" principles and not going into exocit theories. I have enough problems trying to understand the implications of "bog standard" physics.

Ones with small Omega(roughly speaking matter density) and a polynomial time dependant lambda.

How many solutions is that subset?

Nothing I've discussed has anything to do with the interior of a black hole. The interior is irrelevant, all of this physics is defined externally.

But isn't this all arising from what "Hawking Radiation" was? i.e. pair production within a balck hole where one of the pair escapes? So wuldn't the interior of a black hole come into the issue if the particles actually came from there?

pH