![big-bang-8[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/big-bang-81.jpg)
New evidence, based on detailed measurements of the size and brightness of hundreds of galaxies, using The Tolman test for surface brightness, indicates that the Universe is not expanding after all. I’m betting that somewhere, some activist is trying to figure out an angle to blame climate change. (h/t to Roy Spencer)
From Sci-News.com: Universe is Not Expanding After All, Scientists Say
In their study, the scientists tested one of the striking predictions of the Big Bang theory – that ordinary geometry does not work at great distances.
In the space around us, on Earth, in the Solar System and our Milky Way Galaxy, as similar objects get farther away, they look fainter and smaller. Their surface brightness, that is the brightness per unit area, remains constant.
In contrast, the Big Bang theory tells us that in an expanding Universe objects actually should appear fainter but bigger. Thus in this theory, the surface brightness decreases with the distance. In addition, the light is stretched as the Universe expanded, further dimming the light.
So in an expanding Universe the most distant galaxies should have hundreds of times dimmer surface brightness than similar nearby galaxies, making them actually undetectable with present-day telescopes.
But that is not what observations show, as demonstrated by this new study published in the International Journal of Modern Physics D.
The scientists carefully compared the size and brightness of about a thousand nearby and extremely distant galaxies. They chose the most luminous spiral galaxies for comparisons, matching the average luminosity of the near and far samples.
Contrary to the prediction of the Big Bang theory, they found that the surface brightnesses of the near and far galaxies are identical.
Full story: http://www.sci-news.com/astronomy/science-universe-not-expanding-01940.html
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Physicist Luboš Motl isn’t impressed:
It is quite a bold claim but not shocking for those who have the impression based on the experience that these journals published by World Scientific are not exactly prestigious – or credible, for that matter. The sloppy design of the journal website and the absence of any TEX in the paper doesn’t increase its attractiveness. The latter disadvantage strengthens your suspicion that the authors write these things because they don’t want to learn the Riemannian geometry, just like they don’t want to learn TEX or anything that requires their brain to work, for that matter.
…
The point of the paper is that the expanding Universe of modern cosmology should be abandoned because there is a simpler model one may adopt, namely the static, Euclidean universe. Their claim or their argument is that this schookid-friendly assumption is completely compatible with the observations. In particular, it is compatible with the observations of the UV surface brightness of galaxies.
Read more of what he has to say here: http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/05/claims-universe-is-not-expanding.html#more
The cartoon I published Friday might be prescient.
The paper:
UV surface brightness of galaxies from the local universe to z ~ 5
Int. J. Mod. Phys. D DOI: 10.1142/S0218271814500588
Eric J. Lerner, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc., USA Renato Falomo, INAF–Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova, Italy Riccardo Scarpa, Instituto de Astrofısica de Canarias, Spain
The Tolman test for surface brightness (SB) dimming was originally proposed as a test for the expansion of the universe. The test, which is independent of the details of the assumed cosmology, is based on comparisons of the SB of identical objects at different cosmological distances. Claims have been made that the Tolman test provides compelling evidence against a static model for the universe. In this paper we reconsider this subject by adopting a static Euclidean universe (SEU) with a linear Hubble relation at all z (which is not the standard Einstein–de Sitter model), resulting in a relation between flux and luminosity that is virtually indistinguishable from the one used for ΛCDM models. Based on the analysis of the UV SB of luminous disk galaxies from HUDF and GALEX datasets, reaching from the local universe to z ~ 5, we show that the SB remains constant as expected in a static universe.
A re-analysis of previously published data used for the Tolman test at lower redshift, when treated within the same framework, confirms the results of the present analysis by extending our claim to elliptical galaxies. We conclude that available observations of galactic SB are consistent with a SEU model.
We do not claim that the consistency of the adopted model with SB data is sufficient by itself to confirm what would be a radical transformation in our understanding of the cosmos. However, we believe this result is more than sufficient reason to examine this combination of hypotheses further.
woops……..
Excess atmospheric CO2 is warping the minds of scientists – it is settled, and much worse than we thought.
Well… I was told right here that there is no motion between between the stars, rather ONLY space expansion. Based on that assertion of semantics, the Universe is static and only space is growing. pshaww! This is an article sure to get 200 comments. Traffic must be down. I’ll check alexa.
Fred Hoyle went to his grave denying the “expanding universe” theory.
There has been some chatter that the speed of light, which is constant, may have been different during the very early stages of the initial inflation.
The physicists aren’t always right.
I do know that Einstein thought that continents could not move vast distances, that Lord Kelvin thought that the earth could not be older than a few tens of millions of years old, that Alvarez thought that volcanism had little to do with the general demise of the dinosaurs, and that John Cook thinks that 97% of scientists publishing in climate science journals believe that climate sensitivity to c02 is high.
I don’t claim any scientific knowledge on this subject, but I have always thought that the standard model for the “creation” of The Universe is bunkers. First of all you cannot address an object like The Universe as “The Universe” as you cannot define anything you know little about and most of all the extent. We simply do not know “the extent”. In fact The Universe may be limitless. Secondly nobody can convince me that the mass of even what is known of The Universe could come out of a pea size body more or less exactly 13.7 (or whatever it is) billion years ago. Thirdly nobody has been able to point out where the centre is from which The Universe is expanding. If Mother Earth is not the centre then surely everything would not be moving away from us. Some stars and constellations would mover towards us. Maybe we are the centre of The Universe as old religion will have us believe. The “creation of The Universe” idea may also be a remnant of religion. It has to have been created thorough a Big Bang, but who then created the tiny pea shaped body preceeding and being at the centre of the creation process?
Just come back from a cruise & we almost fell off the edge of the Earth. I always knew it was flat but no one would believe me.
So no Big Crunch or Big Freeze or Big Rip. Black Holes ?
The “Red Shift” must have turned into another color!
Despite the questionable nature of this paper it does help show that real science is never settled and real scientists never fear challenges to current dogma.
I don’t understand why this is a big deal. Doesn’t everyone know the world is flat, carried on the back of four elephants that are standing on the back of a turtle swimming through the cosmos?
Sorry to say, but Luboš’ comments, at least those posted here, are shallow substance-free disparagements. Maybe the paper is wrong, maybe it’s right. Maybe the data are inaccurate somehow, or mean something different than what the authors describe. But it looks like an honest effort.
All things being equal I’m going with Luboš Motl. But I don’t think that how a website is designed, has anything at all to do with whether or not the universe is expanding. Lubos just needs to get those snide remarks in.
REPLY: Well what’s funny is that his website (Luboš) crashed my Firefox browser when I visited it this morning. – Anthony
I observe a flat earth with a blue dome over it, at least during the day time. It’s that black dome with twinkling things all over it that throws me – but the earth is still flat no matter what coloured dome it has over it.
It’s turtles all the way down…
“In fact The Universe may be limitless”
See Olbers’ Paradox.
Earl;. no its CO2 which is colourless so the red shift is not happening but as CO2 increases so does the expansion of the universe, because heat causes things to expand. Can I please have £200,000 to investigate this further?
Pat Frank says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:41 am
Sorry to say, but Luboš’ comments, at least those posted here, are shallow substance-free disparagements.;
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Read his whole comment. Once he gets past his ire, he has criticisms that are devastating. His point that their theory doesn’t explain red shift which they shrug off as being caused by “something else” (but they don’t know what) pretty much kills the paper by itself, but so do the other points he makes.
Is this a chance to air the “Flydlbee hypothesis” of the universe?
They say that equal quantities of matter and antimatter were created by the Big Bang, but the anti-matter “disappeared”. No explanation given. There has recently been an experiment to see how anti-matter moves in a gravitational field, but no results have been published as far as I know.
I predict that anti-matter will be repelled by the gravitational field of ordinary matter – it’ll fly upwards.
In that case, immediately after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter would have separated like oil and water, and half of the galaxies we see would be made of antimatter. The total gravitational field of the universe would be nil, and the rate of expansion would be constant since the Big Bang.
Matter and antimatter galaxies would never collide any more than two North poles of a magnet will ever collide. The age of the universe will be rather different from our present calculations.
Just an idea!
the universe is eternal and infinite………..claims of the big bang or any “creation” are just silly……
@ John Peter :
“The “creation of The Universe” idea may also be a remnant of religion. It has to have been created thorough a Big Bang, but who then created the tiny pea shaped body preceeding and being at the centre of the creation process?”
——
Here on Planet Earth, we are conditioned from birth to “know” that everything has a beginning and an ending.
But … who’s to say the universe had a beginning and/or will have an ending? Perhaps it has simply always been, and will forever be.
Various scientists tell us there was a beginning, the Big Bang. Although there may be some merit to this belief, the honest reaction is … perhaps so, perhaps no.
Various religions teach of a Creator. Once again, although there may be some merit to this belief, the honest reaction is … perhaps so, perhaps no.
Until such time as either can fully explain the conditions immediately preceding the event that supposedly “began” it all, both are conjectural. Thus, one wonders what all the fuss is about.
If one chooses to take sides, that choice relies upon one’s basic philosophy of life and beliefs flowing therefrom … not at all unlike the debate surrounding the euphemistically labelled “climate change”.
Cheers all.
As I understand from the LHC , the proton and antiproton have exactly the same mass (to about 10 d.p.s) and so experiences the same force from gravity (i.e. attractive) Antimatter only seems to be of the opposite charge, all other things being equal.
Wow. These guys are playing “dunk tank” and they’re sitting in the chairs.
Tom Trevor says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:41 am
All things being equal I’m going with Luboš Motl. But I don’t think that how a website is designed, has anything at all to do with whether or not the universe is expanding. Lubos just needs to get those snide remarks in.
REPLY: Well what’s funny is that his website (Luboš) crashed my Firefox browser when I visited it this morning. – Anthony
My Firefox browser is crashing continuously.
Must be due to the fact that Fire Fox management simply ignores political correctness and submission to any consensus.
This is plain sabotage.
“In this paper we reconsider this subject by adopting a static Euclidean universe (SEU) with a linear Hubble relation at all z…”
That is why the preservation of original, unadjusted data is important. The preservation of raw data allows later scientists (and sometimes even amateurs) to make observations and discoveries not presently entertained within the prevailing paradigm or current theories.
Thank you for bringing this abstract about the static Euclidean universe. WUWT is such a pistol, I never know what I will find. (:
The Big Bang theory already has anomalies. Even though astronomers don’t put it like that. This would just be another. Even if true, I am pretty sure that by itself this would not refute the theory.
They will find an explanation.
Off the top of my head, from memory, here are other anomalies, explanations for which have been given
– Cosmic Background Radiation is too uniform that it should be
– some quasars have red-shifts > 1; they aren’t randomly distributed; they are just weird
– gravity waves not discovered (recent study was retracted, basically)
– not enough time since the BB to form a galaxy, much less galactic super-clusters
– superficial spectroscopy of early stars does not show different composition than later stars
– temperature of inter-galactic space had to be down-graded
– a few quasars sort of appear to be connected to galaxies which have a different red-shift than the galaxies
-sun produces too few neutrinos
btw ASFAIK astronomers have skills that take many years to acquire. They respond to their critics. Their job is incredibly difficult and pain-staking.
in contrast to you know who…
btw, I am totally agnostic on the Big Bang
OK, maybe Fred Hoyle was right after all, but whether there was a Big Bang or not, the answer won’t have us putting up silly wind turbines and solar panels all over the place to try and make it stop. Let the cosmologists have their harmless fun.
Comment on Mr Peter’s comment above, Hello. Mr Peter wrote “nobody can convince me that the mass of even what is known of The Universe could come out of a pea size body more or less exactly 13.7 (or whatever it is) billion years ago.” Convincing Individuals does not render a claim true or false. In this case skepticism reveals a lack of effort on the commenter’s part to keep abreast of 20th and 21 century developments in cosmology and the mind-bending geometries and tough non-intuitive maths . There are plenty of interesting and well written layman’s reviews out there that explain the fallacy in Mr Peter’s next objection: “Thirdly nobody has been able to point out where the center is from which The Universe is expanding”. He here is doubtful of an assertion that has not been made, on the quite logical assumption that if something is growing, expanding outward in all directions there must be a central focus which can be calculated, like a spherical balloon will have a radius, say 2 inches then 4 inches from some point in the middle of the balloon. The usual metaphor to get over this misunderstanding is to imagine our 3-d spherical (which does by the way “go on forever” that is space is not curved or doughnut or saddle-shaped) universe is embedded in a n-dimensional hyperspace or a 4-d sphere and imagine the 3-d universe is now a 2d surface of that balloon. Where is the center of the expansion to a 2-d global warming skeptic living on a blue planet on the surface of said balloon? Though it would appear to the 2-d denizen that each object is receding equally therefore, she concludes, we are the central point – all that exists emanates outward from here.. So it is for all points in the sky. There is not center, and nothing that the universe is “expanding into”.
Here are a couple of good books:
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality by Max Tegmark
A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing by Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins
Warped Passages by Lisa Randall
Edge of the Universe: A Voyage to the Cosmic Horizon and Beyond by Paul Halpern
The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe
The Shape of Inner Space: String Theory and the Geometry of the Universe’s Hidden Dimensions by Shing-Tung Yau
Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel
A Most Incomprehensible Thing: Notes Towards a Very Gentle Introduction to the Mathematics of Relativity by Peter Collier
Ok more than a couple, sorry, I can’t get enough of this stuff myself. Also if you can get your hands on the audio tapes of The Great Courses (formerly ttc the teaching company) intro to Einstein* it’s a super fantastic listen for those long lonely commutes.
*Einstein’s Relativity and the Quantum Revolution: Modern Physics for Non-Scientists, 2nd Edition
Professor Richard Wolfson
http://www.thegreatcourses.com/tgc/courses/course_detail.aspx?cid=153
“We do not claim that the consistency of the adopted model with SB data is sufficient by itself to confirm what would be a radical transformation in our understanding of the cosmos.”
No, of course not. This is as it should be. And yet, if you want proof (I should say more proof) that there’s something rotten in the state of climate science, simply consider the jubilant alacrity with which M. Mann’s LIA and MWP overturning hockey stick was embraced.
I don’t know much about a lot but one thing i do know is doppler redshift. And I can observe it. I know it’s happening, as do far better qualified men than me. So it is with extreme confidence that i call this utter hogwash.
As for what’s at the edge of space? Currently I’m firmly on the brane cosmology bandwagon for no other reason than I like it and it will make for some super special sci-fi novels.
This paper appears to be deeply flawed. Moreover, BICP2 provided the first direct evidence of gravitational waves rippling through the earliest space-time indicating the very early universe underwent a period of faster then light expansion now known as inflation. Inflation by it’s very nature is indeed an expanding universe.
A universe that cannot change cannot happen. Without change, the universe could not have come about and evolved. There would be no stars or planets; therefore no Earth, no climate to change, no IPCC, no Michael Mann and no WUWT!!
“In fact The Universe may be limitless”
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if it isn’t, what do we call that thing that lies between the universe and infinity?
our local universe may of course be finite. formed by the collapse of a star in our parent universe, our universe is the remnant of that star. what we perceive as a black hole is the birth of a child universe. due to acceleration and time dilation the child universe exists near infinitely far in the future of the parent universe, as do all other child universes.
it is time dilation that solves the problem of Olbers’ paradox. the entire process is a fractal, such that each new generation differs from the previous in scale, but not in complexity. like looking a Mandelbrot set, it makes no different how far you zoom in, the complexity remains unchanged. In absolute terms the child is smaller than the parent, but this has no meaning for the child. It cannot be measured.
over time this process leads to a near infinite number of universe, increasing exponentially, where all possibilities are played out. we see this as quantum mechanics.
There has been some doubt for some time as to whether the red shift phenomenon has been interpreted correctly.
If the shift can be accounted for by any mechanism other than expansion of the universe then the big bang theory is under threat.
One possibility is that light travelling through the universe loses some of its speed via interaction with the medium through which it passes.
Unfortunately we cannot detect any such interaction in our restricted locality and so cannot determine whether it exists or not.
As time passes our physicists have noted increasing discrepancies between observations and the basic principle of a universe that is constantly accelerating its expansion. That is the reason for the need to speculate as to the existence of dark matter and antimatter.
Unfortunately there has been no verifiable observation of dark matter or antimatter.
The parallel with so called CO2 induced warming of the Earth is interesting.
Perhaps both established paradigms are wrong ?
zootcadillac says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:44 am
I don’t know much about a lot but one thing i do know is doppler redshift. And I can observe it. I know it’s happening, as do far better qualified men than me. So it is with extreme confidence that i call this utter hogwash.
As for what’s at the edge of space? Currently I’m firmly on the brane cosmology bandwagon for no other reason than I like it and it will make for some super special sci-fi novels.
**********************************************************************************************************************8
http://electric-cosmos.org/arp.htm
Inherent Redshift
Arp believes that the observed redshift value of any object is made up of two components: the inherent component and the velocity component. The velocity component is the only one recognized by mainstream astronomers. The inherent redshift is a property of the matter in the object. It apparently changes over time in discrete steps. He suggests that quasars are typically emitted from their parent galaxies with inherentiredshift values of up to z = 2. They continue to move away, with stepwise decreasing inherent redshift. Often, when the inherent redshift value gets down to around z = 0.3, the quasar starts to look like a small galaxy or BL Lac object and begins to fall back, with still decreasing redshift values, toward its parent. He has photos and diagrams of many such family groupings. Any additional redshift (over and above its inherent value) is indeed indicative of the object’s velocity. But the inherent part is an indication of the object’s youth and usually makes up the larger fraction of a quasar’s total redshift.
In addition, these inherent redshift z values of quasars seem to be quantized! Unusually tight groupings of those calculated values occur centered around values of
z = 0.061, 0.3, 0.6, 0.96, 1.41, 1.96, etc… such that (1+z2) = 1.23(1+z1). [For example, 1.23(1+0.3) = 1.60].
The very existence of this quantization alone, is sufficient proof of the failure of the idea that redshift is only an indicator of recessional speed (and therefore distance). This quantization means (under the redshift equals distance interpretation) that quasars all must lie in a series of concentric shells with Earth at the center of the entire arrangement. Copernicus found out a long time ago that Earth isn’t at the center of anything!
Do you know everything ZootCadillac?
and the universe is infinite. It has to be or you would have something existing in non existence. Draw that on a Venn diagram.
dark matter and dark energy are better described as “we don’t know”.
The universe is not expanding, we are shrinking.
CO2 causes Global Shrinking! We’re dooooomed!!!!!
PS and that means the red shift is due to light loosing a minute amount of energy over vast amounts of time.
I have been watching this group of scientists (http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/) for several years and have been very impressed with their advances in fusion that have real promise to provide cheap , clean power in the near future. Dr. Lerner seems well informed and grounded in sound science.
The missing pieces of the puzzle are “dark matter” and “dark energy”, which both strike me as band-aid hypotheses proposed to preserve the Big Bang theory, in spite of pretty clear conflicting evidence (eg. non-Newtonian rotation of galaxies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_rotation_curve). The real test will be if this new paper’s hypothesized non-expanding universe can lead to a consistent explanation for 1) red shift with distance and 2) a changing physical laws (like gravitational attraction) at great distance, both of which are needed to square the theory with observations. There is also the small issue of the microwave background which needs to be explained absent a big bang.
Static? That does not make sense. It is either expanding, contracting, or getting ready to contract. I think the current thinking is the universe is open and will continue to expand. The alternative is it is closed and will eventually reverse and contract – possibly into another big bang.
Steady state just does not work.
There are interesting questions about weather 14 billion years is long enough for the big bang to have evolved into the universe we see. I frankly don;t have a clue.
Our Universe exploded into a pre-existing Universe. The stars we see at the fringes of our universe are in fact remnants of the pre-existing universe that had almost reached a point of contraction. I thought everyone knew this?
😉
Steve Fitzpatrick says:
May 25, 2014 at 11:23 am
“(eg. non-Newtonian rotation of galaxies: ”
A possible non-Dark-Matter explanation for that could be turbulences in the galactic magnetic field.
Transfer of angular momentum; magnethydrodynamics simulations.
The idea comes from the question of why accretion disks can form under densities that rule out collisions.
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~jstone/disks.html
From the article:
“ In addition, the light is stretched as the Universe expanded, further dimming the light.”
This “stretch”, is this not Doppler shift?
Doppler shift affects the frequency(color) of the light.
How does it “dim” the light?
@John Peter
Physicists ,and in this case astrophysicists, know a lot more about the observable universe than people pontificating and philosophizing in their armchairs. The Big Bang model did not spring out from a science fiction imagination, but it accommodates the great number of observations of the observable universe, with hard numbers not hand-wavings. You sound horrified , like the church, who could not accept the heliocentric system, which was the most economic mathematical mode of those times.
This model they are proposing has serious difficulties with special relativity, which the link to Lubos Motl’s blog above explains, and with cloudy logic : they have nothing that can explain the redshift of the atomic spectra which is used to estimate distances in the general relativity model , but they do use the distances for their euclidean model.
>If Mother Earth is not the centre then surely everything would not be moving away from us.
You are thinking in three dimensional space. We have very good experimental evidence that space is four dimensional, with innumerable experiments and hard numbers. 3 space dimensions and one time dimension are needed to describe the observable universe. It is the theory of special relativity which is continuously validated in our lab experiments.
We each of us are sitting at the center of the universe that started 13.7 billion years ago, the model fits the data. Every point of the observable universe was at the 0 point of the beginning of the Bang. A good analogue is a bread with raisins rising in the oven. The elastic dough expands and blows up, each raisin distancing from each other raisin.. Sitting on a raisin you would see all the others running away from you. A better analogue is a balloon, a soap bubble that starts expanding from a (0,0,0) point. All points on the balloon are expanding away from each other, and all points were at the center of the beginning of the expansion at (0,0,0).
Now we think we have evidence from the first 10^-34 seconds from the beginning, to 10^-32 seconds where the model expects gravitational waves to dominate. At 10^-34 the diameter of the observable universe was 1 meter, not a pea. A lot of physicists are working hard for the quantization of gravity, which, like the quantization of other forces, we expect will give us answers for the (0,0,0,0) .The reason we talk of an explosion is the classical expectation of extrapolating the model to the origin. After 10^-34 seconds “it walks like a [duck], and it quacks like a duck, so we expect it is a duck”.
anna v says:
May 25, 2014 at 11:44 am
“We have very good experimental evidence that space is four dimensional, with innumerable experiments and hard numbers.”
Ok, then please cite one experiment that shows that space is four dimensional.
Anthony – try this URL for Lubos’s website:
http://motls.blogspot.com/?m=1
It removes some clutter from that award winning blog.
Stephen Wilde, I like this:
“One possibility is that light travelling through the universe loses some of its speed via interaction with the medium through which it passes.”
I have thought of this as well,( an ever-expanding universe being untenable to my mind.)
The speed of light, C would be slightly different for red than for blue. The difference being in-detectable except at huge distances.
Though, Einstein I’m not.
1. Since an IE automatic update, WUWT format is fried, but Firefox works for me as expected.
2. Assume Big Bang is OK, with a repulsive force enough to separate all that mass at high(!) speed. As distance grows, the repulsive force may no longer be able to keep all that mass from flying farther apart. Eventually, the Universe reaches an apparent steady state (or shrinks!). That may be where we’re at.
3. Assume energy & matter wave nature of light is correct. On light’s travels for billions of years, it will hit/graze many tiny specs/other light waves and lose some energy. But light keeps traveling t the same speed, so maybe the diminished energy shows up as a red shift. Does red light have the same (or higher/lower) energy as blue light?
Davidmhoffer wrote (May 25, 2014 at 9:53 am):
‘His point that their theory doesn’t explain red shift which they shrug off as being caused by “something else” (but they don’t know what) pretty much kills the paper by itself…’
I don’t think it does. The paper was empirical and did not set out to propose a new theory to explain the authors’ new observations. It cannot be faulted for not doing what it didn’t set out to do.
As the Abstract says, these observations do not refute the expanding universe hypothesis by themselves. Nevertheless if they are valid then they do call it into question.
I really love wuwt on most thread people are just yelling at each other but here they are well thought out and a pleasure to read.
For a full explanation of our new results and background on the many other observational problems with the ever-popular “concordance cosmology” I invite readers to visit http://www.lppfusion.com. You’ll find there access to the full text of our peer-reviewed paper with all the data and math. You’ll also find the links between research in astrophysics and cosmology and our effort to develop fusion as a source of cheap, clean energy on earth.
I would note that Motl does not critique our surface brightness data that indicate that the universe is not expanding. He only is interested in stating that general relativity “proves” that the universe must expand. But the scientific method does not work that way. You can refute theory with observation—but you can’t refute observations with theory unless you want to throw out the scientific revolution and go back to Ptolemy and Aristotle. Maybe Motl does.
davidmhoffer says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:53 am
Read his whole comment. Once he gets past his ire, he has criticisms that are devastating. His point that their theory doesn’t explain red shift which they shrug off as being caused by “something else” (but they don’t know what) pretty much kills the paper by itself, but so do the other points he makes.
Sorry David, this does not sound reasonable to me.
To my understanding they tried to cross-check the the theory based on its prediction.
And it looks to me that its predictions were not confirmed.
There are other contradictions too – cosmos at least 250 times bigger than visible universe:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422579/cosmos-at-least-250x-bigger-than-visible-universe-say-cosmologists/
and for red shift there might be an explanation, as per the below paper, not sure if there have been any further developments on this?
http://vixra.org/pdf/1105.0010v1.pdf
Um, I’ve talked to extraterrestrials (don’t start!) and, indeed, the dimness of the galaxies furthest out, is indeed (stop repeating, Tom), yes, global warming. You see, the galaxies farthest away are the oldest; obviously because they’ve had time to travel farther. Therefore, those intelligent beings on those planets in those galaxies are also older; much older and wiser than us. And, millenniums ago they discovered that their own CO2 emissions (from their own SUVs, suburban homes, and AC) were going to destroy their own planets. So, millenniums ago, they instituted their own versions of our Earth Day. Naturally, of course, their languages are different so their planets have names other than Earth. So, some of their Earth Days are actually called: Meiorstupideeopoly Twit; Imbeciliousimore Twiddly; Moronimax Dee; Minibraincellem Twiddly; Jupiter Dum (ok, I’ll stop, and yes, they actually do have a planet called Jupiter – what a coincidence).
Anyway, just like us, they decided to turn their electric lights off (see where I’m going with this?) on their own versions of Earth Day. (P.S. I wonder if there’s a reason Earth Day is never called Earth Night?) Anyway, with time, they realized the incredible, mind-blowing, wisdom of this action, and decided to keep their lights off permanently. And that, is why the farthest away galaxies are actually dimmer.
Ok, changing the meme: Wouldn’t a static universe actually be a dead one? Ah, but it would be sustainable. Perhaps science has fashions too.
Universe is Not Expanding After All
But to say this makes absolutely no sense. The very nature of space requires that it either be expanding or contracting. It cannot remain static while matter is flying all about. So whatever they found it is almost certainly not evidence for a static universe.
MarkG says:
See Olbers’ Paradox.
OP does not preclude an infinite U.
=======================
Stephen Wilde says:
One possibility is that light travelling through the universe loses some of its speed via interaction with the medium through which it passes. Unfortunately we cannot detect any such interaction in our restricted locality and so cannot determine whether it exists or not.
c travels at different speeds depending on the medium. Recently photons have been slowed down to inches per second. Max c only applies in a vacuum.
A few thoughts – All should be critiqued or improved as future readers see fit.
1. I have great reservations about any “Theory” that requires 90% of the material in the universe, and 80% of the forces controlling that invisible and visible material to be both “invisible and undetectable” simply because the “mathematics’ (itself undecipherable and invisible and invoking many undetectable dimensions!) requires it. Today’s culture requires (demands!) that we trust the High Priests, regardless of whether we understand them or if they have any proof of anything, with everything. At least in all past religions, the high priests were honest enough to admit who they served. Further, they admitted each “god” they served was their superior and was worthy of their morals and their adoration.
Today? We see today’s priests of total government and Gaea adoring far different things, far different ideals. And no morals at all.
Rather, it is far easier to believe “The Universe was created in the Big Bang (by Something we do not yet understand), and then evolved into what we actually detect and measure now.”
2. A static universe requires very, very little matter to be created constantly. Something, as I recall, on the order of 1 particle per year per cubic kilometer of ’empty” space has to appear from “nothing” (or from “somewhere” else) for the balances to work out.
Hawkings may have worked it out when he points out that the center of black holes may emit particles randomly. If anything can leave a block hole quantumly with ANY probability greater than 0.0, then clearly that particle cannot predict where “it” come out. Nor “when” it will come out and become a “visible” and mass-containing (or mass-measurable) physical object. Regrettably, we are personalizing single particles, but that is a limit of the language we share.
If you must claim “The mathematics doesn’t let anything leave a black hole” then is it not far simpler to “jump” a particle from within a black hole into space than to miraculously create every particle in the universe into a meter-diameter sphere in 10-34 seconds?
Thus, all that is needed is one particle per year per cubic kilometer to show up. If, as claimed, there are block holes several times the weight of the galaxy at the center of every galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies containing trillions of star masses, then one merely needs to determine how particles are required to “jump” from any black hole anywhere into a “real space” …..
Arp must be smiling. This will surely drive Dr. Suzuki into an insane fit. Gore will probably join an ashram in Rishikesh and give up his blotto lifestyle. This also might please Einstein……Such a big universe, so many surprises, we know so little.
Perhaps its because their strings got stretched to the max and these babies don’t break. Also, how long could an expanding universe continue against the molasses-like dark matter! We had a discussion earlier about hard and soft sciences – it seems the hard sciences have been softening over the past half century or more. Surely eventually we will hear a critique by sociologists and post modernist philosophers on this as it would seem to be a subject of the behavior of heavenly bodies.
Of all the theories I’ve heard about the universe, this is the first one I’ve seen that makes such a claim.
Now it could be possible the paper could be full of bologna, but then again you see theories updated and changed all the time.
Now if this study turned out to be accurate, I could imagine the scientific world trying their best to run around the data and come up with new exotic terminology to explain everything like they do now because the other option is to conclude that the universe and everything in it has a creator (at least it doesn’t involve the coining of increasingly exotic quantum-level machinations that tries to fill holes poked in existing origin theories 🙂 ).
Oh and they haven’t mentioned the ‘red shift’ which is clearly evident in climate science and policy. They may be hiding the shift.
The universe doesn’t have to be infinite. If it is big enough, everything in it will begin to be replicated, even our entire observable universe.
I reckon that scientists should always keep the possibility that, based on history at least, all current theories about anything could be wrong or at the very least need modifying – the progression of technology adds a dimension that allows for new measurements that can lead to new ideas …..as humans we seem to find comfort in ideas and if we identify with them then, surprise, our identity changes ….
There are a number of people on here who seems to willing to dismiss this theory without having the data to check it and one who dismisses it because someone they respect has dismissed it ! Seems like what a lot of people on here complain about with climate “science”
Some science may never be settled. Other science is, more or less, but only after a long time.
Copernicus proposed that the earth moves in the 16th century. Galileo, Kepler, Newton, et al provided support for the hypothesis in the 17th century. Telescopic observation of light seemed to confirm the theory in the 18th century, but it was not demonstrated objectively true by direct observation of our planet until the 19th century. In the 20th instruments in space can watch its motions in real time.
Here is another set of experimental data the big bang theory has problems to explain:
Mystery over apparent dearth of lithium 7 in universe deepens
(Phys.org)—Researchers studying the cosmos have been stumped by an observation first made by Monique and François Spite of the Paris Observatory some thirty years ago; they noted that in studying the halos of older stars, that there should be more lithium 7 than there appeared to be in the universe. Since that time many studies have been conducted in trying to explain this apparent anomaly, but thus far no one has been able to come up with a reasonable explanation. And now, new research has deepened the mystery further by finding that the amount of lithium 7 in the path between us and a very young star aligns with would have been expected shortly after the Big Bang, but doesn’t take into account the creation of new amounts since that time. In their paper published in the journal Nature, Christopher Howk and colleagues suggest the discrepancy is troubling because it can’t be explained with normal astrophysics models.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-09-mystery-apparent-dearth-lithium-universe.html#jCp
anna v says:
May 25, 2014 at 11:44 am
@John Peter
“Physicists ,and in this case astrophysicists, know a lot more about the observable universe than people pontificating and philosophizing in their armchairs. The Big Bang model did not spring out from a science fiction imagination, but it accommodates the great number of observations of the observable universe, with hard numbers not hand-wavings. You sound horrified , like the church, who could not accept the heliocentric system, which was the most economic mathematical mode of those times.”
How pleasant for the rest of us that you have posted again. I haven’t seen your posts in years.
Rather than behaving like the medieval church, I think some of us are just celebrating the fact that there is more of a give and take in physics than in climate science. Freeman Dyson has said as much. Do not expect us to swarm in mass away from the Big Bang Theory.
Lerner has been fighting the Big Bang Theory for years. I ran his book back in the 90’s.
http://bigbangneverhappened.org/
My thoughts on the bigbang theory (for amusement) is simple, the whole universe is E=mc2. Basically, all galaxies tend to form in pairs, so a pair or pairs of galaxies far off in the distance would be moving away from each other as they are much older, and the older they are the further apart they are which gives the impression of an expansion, galaxies nearer to us which have formed more recently such as our milky way and the Andromeda galaxy would give an impression that the universe is static, depending on how you count this difference the outcome will change.
Galaxies are formed from two or more giant black holes (Dark matter) when two giant black holes are attracted to each other they begin to destroy each other, the closer they move toward each other until they collide and whats left eventually begins moving away again.
Therefor the universe is both constantly expanding or static AND contracting, although we can’t see the contraction due to this part of the process being done by massive black holes or ‘Dark Matter’ and we can not see them until they have collided or are in the process of colliding. (c) Sparks~
(P.S no steeling my theories 🙂 )
I don’t at all get the assertion that “the Big Bang theory tells us that in an expanding Universe objects actually should appear fainter but bigger.” The article seems to imply that because space is expanding that objects in space will expand or stretch out as well. As far as I’m aware, that has never been thought to be the case since gravity easily defeats any expansion of objects at the smaller scales. For example, according to my quick calculations, the Hubble constant should cause matter on opposite sides of the Sun to move apart at 0.26 millimeters per day. That would have no influence on the size of the Sun, since such a tiny rate is canceled out by gravity.
The comments at Sci-news are fun. In one, Astro-82 is outraged that someone has claimed dark energy, black holes, and neutron stars don’t exist. I’ll grant that dark energy may not exist, he splutters, but black holes and neutron stars have been ALL BUT directly observed.
That’s just super…
Bit like the Higgs boson then.
And quarks.
And gluons.
And strings.
And so on.
@ Bill Taylor, @ ferdberple, @ Kelvin Vaughn, @ dbstealey,
Regarding the infinity/eternity of the universe, there are logical problems. If the universe is eternal (that is, has always existed) then there is an infinite number of moments back in time. This leads to the paradox that today can never exist, because no matter how many moments in time pass, there will always be an infinite amount yet to pass before right “now”.
If the universe is infinite in extent (as well as time) then it cannot actually expand. There is nothing for it to expand into. If the universe is finite, then we face the difficulty that there is something beyond the universe that limits it. In either case, the expansion of the universe is contingent on realities beyond our comprehension.
I have always had a hard time with the expanding universe theory. Primarily because of the requirement for dark matter. If dark matter is so prevalent then why don’t we have any here?
Bill Taylor says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:06 am
the universe is eternal and infinite………..claims of the big bang or any “creation” are just silly……
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So why is any hydrogen left? Wouldn’t stars burn it all in an infinite time?
Mencken said that he expected that in a century the reigning scientific paradigms would be as obsolete as the paradigms of a century past.
albertalad says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:50 am
This paper appears to be deeply flawed. Moreover, BICP2 provided the first direct evidence of gravitational waves rippling through the earliest space-time indicating the very early universe underwent a period of faster then light expansion now known as inflation. Inflation by it’s very nature is indeed an expanding universe.
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This is a result that definitely needs confirmation. The signal found was much, much stronger than expected and might well be due to dust scattered by supernovae in our own galaxy. IMHO it’s way to soon to be a believer.
I note that no-one has found a fatal flaw in the paper itself. Red shift has been cited, but Stephen Wilde (May 25, 2014 at 10:57 am) says “There has been some doubt for some time as to whether the red shift phenomenon has been interpreted correctly.“. I too am not totally convinced by Big Bang theory, though I accept that there is a lot of evidence. Wrt this latest paper, while it does not seem credible, I would like to see it disproved on its own merits before completely discarding it.
—
John Peter (May 25, 2014 at 9:25 am) says “[..] The Universe is expanding. If Mother Earth is not the centre then surely everything would not be moving away from us.“. All distances between objects would be increasing, so all objects, viewed from Earth, would appear to be moving away.
Dire Wolf says:
May 25, 2014 at 2:57 pm
“…This leads to the paradox that today can never exist, because no matter how many moments in time pass, there will always be an infinite amount yet to pass before right “now”
Time is relative therefor there is equal infinite possibilities for the present to exist. There is no paradox!
🙂
Time is relative only to the present. It is absolute to the past. The paradox remains.
I still like Carl Sagan’s description: the universe [is] finite but unbounded.
I embrace a simple model. The Big Bang – the Universe – is the current iteration. Eventually, billions of years from now, the universe will collapse upon itself and there will be another big bang. The universe is cyclic.
The universe can be cyclical only if there is sufficient mass to cause the Big Crunch. That is dependent on the addition of unverifiable (at this time) dark energy and dark matter. Otherwise the universe is headed for the Big Chill (entropic destruction). But that begs the question of how the universe began.
albertalad says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:50 am
This paper appears to be deeply flawed. Moreover, BICP2 provided the first direct evidence of gravitational waves rippling through the earliest space-time indicating the very early universe underwent a period of faster then light expansion now known as inflation. Inflation by it’s very nature is indeed an expanding universe.
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The BICEP2 result needs to be confirmed. The signal was much, much larger than expected and might be due to dust scattered by supernova explosions in our own galaxy. IMHO it’s to early to be a believer.
In reply to Luboš Motl
William:
The point of the paper is that observations do not support the big bang theory. There are piles of unexplained astronomical anomalies which support that assertion. For example: Large scale alignment type anomalies in the ‘cosmic ray background’ (CMB) radiation (confirmed by two different satellite sets of data and two independent team analysis) provide support for the assertion that the 2.7 Kelvin thermal radiation was not produced by a big bang. The big bang did not occur as the universe is eternal.
CMB Large Scale’ Structural’ Anomalies -Violation of the Cosmological Principal?
It is assumed that the 2.7 k thermal radiation that is observed in the sky is radiation left over from the ‘Big Bang’ of cosmology. One of the fundamental logical pillars to support the assertion that the 2.7 k thermal radiation is from the hypothesized ‘Big Bang’ is that the thermal radiation in question should be by appropriately isotropic.
For unexplained reasons the more detailed 2.7k thermal radiation data analysis (WMAP 2.7k thermal radiation analysis) showed the thermal radiation in question to be highly anisotropic with unequivocal observational evidence of multiple very, very large scale ‘structural ‘ anomalies. The recent and more accurate Planck 2.7k thermal radiation analysis has confirmed that the multiple very, very large scale ‘structure’ anisotropic anomalies are real and has in fact increased the structural anomalies in question.
Structural Anomaly
A structural anomaly is an obvious non random pattern in the observational data that cannot be explained by statistical variance or by the underlying fundamental theory. A very large, very clear smiley face that appears when a set of data that is uniform in other regions is displayed is an example of a structural anomaly which likely would indicate a prankster had modified the data.
Structural anomalies forces either the introduction of multiple theory complicating new mechanisms or indicates that the fundamental theory may be incorrect. An example of structural anomalies are the observational anomalies created by Claudius Ptolemy ‘s earth centered model of the solar system. The solar system structural observational anomalies disappear when the theory is changed to a sun based solar system. The solution to removing Ptolemy’s structural anomalies is not to introduce new mechanisms but rather to look for a new fundamental theory or to re-examine the observations with an old discarded fundamental theory.
Picture of Planck structural thermal anomalies
http://profmattstrassler.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/planck_anomalies.jpg
http://profmattstrassler.com/2013/03/21/the-universe-according-to-planck-the-satellite/
http://es.arxiv.org/abs/0704.3736v2
Alignment and signed-intensity anomalies in WMAP data
Firstly, an alignment analysis identifies two mean preferred planes in the sky, both with normal axes close to the CMB dipole axis. The first plane is defined by the directions toward which local CMB features are anomalously aligned. A mean preferred axis is also identified in this plane, located very close to the ecliptic poles axis. The second plane is defined by the directions anomalously avoided by local CMB features. This alignment anomaly provides further insight on recent results (Wiaux et al. 2006a). Secondly, a signed intensity analysis identifies three mean preferred directions in the southern galactic hemisphere with anomalously high or low temperature of local CMB features: a cold spot essentially identified with a known cold spot (Vielva et al. 2004), a second cold spot lying very close to the southern end of the CMB dipole axis, and a hot spot lying close to the southern end of the ecliptic poles axis. In both analyses, the anomalies are observed at wavelet scales corresponding to angular sizes around 10◦ on the celestial sphere, with global significance levels around 1%. Further investigation reveals that the alignment and signed-intensity anomalies are only very partially related. Instrumental noise, foreground emissions, as well as some form of other systematics, are strongly rejected as possible origins of the detections. An explanation might still be envisaged in terms of a global violation of the isotropy of the Universe, inducing an intrinsic statistical anisotropy of the CMB.
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.3831.pdf
Lack of large-angle TT correlations persists in WMAP and Planck
The lack of large-angle correlations in the observed microwave background temperature fluctuations persists in the final-year maps from WMAP and the first cosmological data release from Planck. We find a statistically robust and significant result: p-values for the missing correlations lying below 0:24 per cent (i.e. evidence at more than 3 σ) for foreground cleaned maps, in complete agreement with previous analyses based upon earlier WMAP data. A cut sky analysis of the Planck HFI 100 GHz frequency band, the ‘cleanest CMB channel’, returns a p-value as small as 0:03 per cent, based on the conservative mask defined by WMAP. These findings are in stark contrast to expectations from the inflationary Lambda cold dark matter model and still lack a convincing explanation. If this lack of large-angle correlations is a true feature of our Universe, and not just a statistical fluke, then the cosmological dipole must be considerably smaller than that predicted in the best-fitting model.
Centerless expansion necessarily assumes that space is 4-dimensional. Well, is it? It would be possible to prove this by a simple exercise in geometry, but we need interstellar travel in order to accomplish the observations. Just another example of how the Big Bang is understandable only if you entertain unvalidated assumptions.
Just for fun I made an attempt to find if redshift could be caused by the fundamental constant changing with time. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IR5VAI
The speed of light is determined by the permeability of the medium it moves through, so light moves through water much slower than a vacuum. It is assumed in these theories that the permeability of a vacuum is constant throughout all time. If we assume free space is truly empty ( einsteinian view) then this would seem to be unassailable, however this was not Maxwells view, and modern Quantum mechanics does support the Maxwellian idea of a quantum flux, an aether A foaming sea of particle/antiparticle pairs being brought into existance and destroyed on average at the same rate. The so-called zero point field. So if free space permeability is defined by the local density of the zero point field then the permeability of free space is alterable, and the velocity of light in free space is no longer a constant. This idea has huge ramifications, for example if we could invent a field, that suppresses the formation of the zero point field locally then we could reduce permeability and increase the speed of light locally, let’s say, in the immediate vicinity of a space craft, the space craft could then advance a distace at above light speed, establish a new zero point dampening field and repeat.
The variability of the speed of light is a very intriguing subject to me, we treat it as a constant but we KNOW for a fact that it is is a varisble. This constrains thinking in much the same way that the TOTALLY UNWARRANTED assumption that climate sensitivity is constant does. Climate sensitivity is not a constant, it is an inverse function of temperature and other unknown factors, yet the climate high priests treat it as a dimensionless number… hmm perhaps it’s 42
The universe expands due to global warming, thats quit obvious and easy to explain. Think about all the gas planetes, the big gas clouds, even the sun like all the other stars are gas objects. And what does gas if you warm it up? Right, it expands. Hubble discovered, that all these gas objects move away from our planet with increasing speed. And there you are, the ultimate proof planet earth is heating up dramatically.
please cite one experiment that shows that space is four dimensional
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quantum entanglement very much suggests our view of space-time as x,y,z,t is incomplete.
Gamecock: Eventually, billions of years from now, the universe will collapse upon itself and there will be another big bang. The universe is cyclic.
Not a very scientific idea since it contravenes the principle of the 2nd Law of thermodynamics.
So why is any hydrogen left? Wouldn’t stars burn it all in an infinite time?
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free neutron decay into hydrogen in about 15 minutes.
The universe doesn’t have to be infinite. If it is big enough, everything in it will begin to be replicated, even our entire observable universe.
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agreed. making time travel to the past possible, by traveling into the future to an identical observable universe to this one.
Gerry says:
May 25, 2014 at 1:22 pm
“I reckon that scientists should always keep the possibility that, based on history at least, all current theories about anything could be wrong..”
Gerry, perhaps this is a little metaphysical, but if everything we’ve ‘discovered’ should prove to be totally wrong, then there is a good case for discontinuing all such scientific inquiry forever. Landing on the moon and coming back, rovers on Mars… even bridges over a river must be based on some degree of confidence in theories.
I have been an avid follower of cosmology theories for over 50 years. I have seen the rise and fall of a number of theories in that time. (Steady-state vs Big Bang was the last). Like many I followed the mob and adopted the big bang theory as the best paradigm. Then one day I ran across a site called thunderbolts.org. At first I thought that this was just another nutters’ site – but the fact that they got a number of predictions right made me go back and keep reading. This lead to other related sites – on plasma cosmology and the electric universe.
These groups point out that the observable universe is made up of ~98% plasma. To understand the universe you need to understand the physics of plasma. Now you have two groups – astrophysicists who deny electric fields in space (they never use the word electricity even they they talk about magnetic effete all the time, why?) and plasma physicist who say its all due to the properties of plasma.
One group has had most of the research money and so has a very well developed theory and lots of papers. The other group has a less well developed theory with fewer papers. Basically both groups theories describe the observations. However one group requires a “start” (the big bang), resorts to invisible, undetectable matter/energy and the “consensus” view. The other group points to plasma and observations in the lab to explain it all. I now believe in the plasma universe, not the big bang universe.
In terms of some of the evidence commonly used by big bangers to shore up there theory try the following.
1. Google intrinsic redshift and see what papers come up.
2. Look at Arp’s concordance of anomalous redshift galaxies
3. Google CMB caused by water on earth?
4. Read the progress Lerner has been having with fusion (hottest plasma 1.5 billion degrees) and his plans to achieve more energy out than in with 18 months at llp.org
Remember that the big bang or electric universe are both theories. Occams’ razor says the simplest (not most mathematical) theory should be chosen.
Luboš Motl. Isn’t that the guy with the web-site designed by a pre-pubescent Japanese girl?
Regarding the universe, we have no idea.
It starts with Einstein in 1905 and special relativity. Special Relativity has been experimentally confirmed many many times. Einstein then added gravity to the equations to give us General Relativity. This has again been confirmed by observation. Most notably by Eddington in the 1930s. One of Eddington’s post doc students Fr. Georges Lemaitre (yes he was an ordained priest) showed that an implication of General Relativity was that the Universe had started from a single point ( the term Big Bang was a term of abuse coined by Sir Fred Hoyle who hated the theory). Lemaitre also calculated what we now know as Hubble’s Constant and predicted CMB. Now while there are large gaps in the Theory, any alternative explanation of the Universe has to overcome over a century of mathematically derived precise theory and confirming observation. Big Bang Theory is based on so much more than Hubble’s observation of red shift.
Gary Pearse says:
May 25, 2014 at 4:56 pm
Gerry says:
May 25, 2014 at 1:22 pm
I can help here. All scientific theory is open to revision occasioned by discovery of new predictions that prove false. Revision does not mean junking the whole theory. Needed revisions might vary from few and small to many and large. In the latter extreme, you might junk the theory.
Steve B,
That’s interesting about redshift. Back in the late 1970s I was friends with an astronomer who had done his doc and postdoc with Bach (of Bach Globule fame) at UC Berkeley. He told me about a major study of the Coma Cluster that was raising a lot of hackles. Apparently, they were finding that the redshifts within the cluster came in statistical waves that could not hold together under a random gravitational field of sufficient duration. As you mention, there was something distinctly quantum about their distribution, and the statistical analysis was upheld by the best mathematicians around.
The clear inference of the study was that something else was causing at least some significant part of the redshift other than recession, and doing so in a quantum jump at regular intervals over time (in relation to distance of each galaxy of the cluster as calculated by redshift). One of the only obvious explanations for this was that the basic constants of physics might well be changing over time, in quantum steps, but no one was willing to come out and say that. Bach himself was highly guarded about the study, which had never intended to come up with such a finding. He protected my friend and other post-docs from any blowback from working on the study. My friend soon left to take a position at another university, and I never learned what became of the study, if it was even published. I’ve always been curious as to how that issue was resolved, if ever, but it’s not my field, so I never found out.
Still, I’ve always wondered just how reliable redshift theory is as a barometer of recession, or if new theories have come into play. I’m sure a lot has changed since the 1970s. Any ideas on that?
“Secondly nobody can convince me that the mass of even what is known of The Universe could come out of a pea size body more or less exactly 13.7 (or whatever it is) billion years ago. ”
Relative to what? The size of the universe at any stage is not measurable in a way that “the size of a pea” can have meaning.
Yes, even “settled” science isn’t settled. I am amazed at the incredible reaction to this, really, in that there IS NO such thing as “settled science.” The big bang theory is exactly that – a theory. So much of what we see “out there” can be explained by different points of view, and the big bang theory belongs in the black hole that also is a theory. Oddly enough, a theory is strengthened by research that shows information that can validate it, yet, as Einstein stated, one piece of information that disproves it falsifies it. So much money has been spent on ways to “prove” the validity of the big bang, but along comes something that tends to disprove it and it is attacked – sort of like manmade CO2 causes catastrophic global warming, tons of money are spent trying to validate it, and everyone attacks anyone that has the audacity to offer information that tends to disprove it. Love the flip flop of this crowd.
So my frequent galaxy miles are still good!
It is said that as you look out into space you are looking back in time.That means that if you could see far enough out or back in time you would be looking at a baby universe, much smaller than it is today. Theoretically if you could see far enough away and back in time you would see the origin of the universe, the “Big Bang”. This is what the background microwave radiation is all about. We are told the universe emerged from a point. So the instant the point became a dot, time and space began. The universe was tiny. Here is my point. We look out far enough and we see the dot. The irony is we see the dot in all directions. Therefore I conclude we are are the center of the universe, and what is even more amazing is that no matter where we are we would be at the center. All places in the present are unique.
I gather that the authors are claiming that Euclidean geometry works at large scale, without explicitly challenging curved spacetime. This reminds me of the soft version of Copernicanism, in which earth was assumed to move for ease of astronomical calculations, without necessarily arguing for its actual, objective movements (Copernicus himself maintained hard reality & was unhappy with the publisher’s forward supporting hypothetical calculation). In fact geocentrism wasn’t much easier, since Copernicus’ original hypothesis included perfectly circular orbits, as in Aristotle & Ptolemy, rather than the ellipses later found by Kepler, based upon Tycho’s naked eye observations of Mars.
Lubos also said:
“So these three men – and a few others – who are struggling to “liberate” physics from the curved spacetime geometry have to reject simpler parts of modern physics – special relativity as well – and they have to make indefensible or manifestly wrong claims about “mysterious new sources of changing frequency”. The only result of these problematic steps is that they “explain” one function of distance (or redshift) by another function of distance (or redshift) that they freely invented – it means that they don’t explain anything at all. The paper is spectacularly free of correct or meaningful claims or insights.”
I’d prefer to leave this matter to the physicists. Let’s not weaken the case against CAGW by relating it to unrelated (possibly crackpot) theories by analogy. At least that’s my mindset as an engineer.
Dire Wolf says:
May 25, 2014 at 5:53 pm
I’m OK with a finite local universe among an infinite number of other universes, each with its own physical laws. Some of those other universes might also share our own laws, but be in different states of evolution according to them. A lot of these multiverses wouldn’t last long, disappearing like bubbles of sea foam (to use a typical analogy), while others persisted on the cosmic beach, in a sort of cosmological natural selection. If our bubble be massive enough, maybe it will not contract or pop but keep growing (whether at an accelerating pace or not) until simply fading away on the receding spacetime tide, as more energetic universes invade its wispy space. Such collisions could result in new bubble formations, aka Big Bangs.
Of course, the problem is that theorizing other universes beyond ours with physics that doesn’t match ours is, by definition, unverifiable in any specific way. I am all for religion, as long as we label it as such. This certainly falls into that camp.
anna v says: “…You sound horrified , like the church, who could not accept the heliocentric system, which was the most economic mathematical mode of those times…”
Actually, the Copernican system had more epicycles than the Ptolemaic.
greytide says: “Just come back from a cruise & we almost fell off the edge of the Earth. I always knew it was flat but no one would believe me.”
Did you see any sign of Columbus’s fourth ship? It’s out there somewhere.
“””””…..DMA says:
May 25, 2014 at 11:20 am
I have been watching this group of scientists (http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/) for several years and have been very impressed with their advances in fusion that have real promise to provide cheap , clean power in the near future. Dr. Lerner seems well informed and grounded in sound science……”””””
Well you can probably keep on watching them for quite a few more years. Well they have quite a gig going, and we are paying for their fun. They will probably keep at it till they are ready to retire, then they will pass it off to a new generation of taxpayer’s leeches, to keep on fleecing the gullible.
Edward Teller gave us the first not so cheap, and not so clean fusion energy, but unfortunately he couldn’t throttle it back to a useful power level, and it went knida pear shaped.
Mother nature, already provides us with somewhat clean but also somewhat inaccessible energy; but it has the opposite problem. It is spread out like butter on the carpet, and it’s a bit tricky to scrape it off, an collect it in useful quantities.
But at least, she put it a safe distance away from us; unlike Edward Teller.
Gravity sucks, which is how mother nature does it. But electromagnetism, doesn’t suck; it pushes, and there isn’t anything fixed to push against.
So nyet on that clean green cheap thing. Like Carl Sagan, these guys will go to their graves, having accomplished nothing, but come up with a good gig for themselves.
ferdberple says:
May 25, 2014 at 4:49 pm
So why is any hydrogen left? Wouldn’t stars burn it all in an infinite time?
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free neutron decay into hydrogen in about 15 minutes.
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And where did all those neutrons come from? They aren’t evident at present.
Not the first paper to suggest this with actual measured data. Another has been done on the lack of colour shift with distant exploding or super bright stars.
Unhappy with Einstein I’m what people call a flat earther. I simply do not believe there is “dark matter and “dark energy” out there because it is not here. These are inventions (whitewash) to cover the problems of Einsteinian theories not working out on paper.
Fred Hoyle made the best theory. After all, the wavelength of a splash in water is not a constant because speed increases with distance as the wavelength becomes longer. The trouble with measuring velocity of light is problematic due to local gravity distorting time. The velocity of light at ~300km/s is a constant, here! V=d/t
What is unity. Nobody has empirically proved time can go faster than unity between massive objects or in the centre of one.
“””””…..from Anna V.
Now we think we have evidence from the first 10^-34 seconds from the beginning, to 10^-32 seconds where the model expects gravitational waves to dominate. …..””””
Gosh Anna, is the number really 10^-34 seconds ??
And here all these years, I had thought that “Archeo-physics” covered just the first 10^-43 seconds, after the BB (bottom end of the 1/f noise spectrum), where all the really interesting physics happened. Now you tell me that it didn’t end till eons later; a billion times longer than I thought.
Looks like I am going to have my work cut out for me, trying to catch up on all that stuff I missed
g
Ron Balsys:
“Read the progress Lerner has been having with fusion (hottest plasma 1.5 billion degrees) and his plans to achieve more energy out than in with 18 months at llp.org
Remember that the big bang or electric universe are both theories.”
That *.org link up there redirects to a fairly dubious looking site.
And I’ll throw a big fat CHEMTRAILS into this post to make sure a moderator sees it. 🙂
John Peter (May 25, 2014 at 9:25 am) says “[..] The Universe is expanding. If Mother Earth is not the centre then surely everything would not be moving away from us.“.
Mike Jonas says:
All distances between objects would be increasing, so all objects, viewed from Earth, would appear to be moving away.
So, assuming the speed of light is a constant then we ought to know what part of the red shift we stand in.
We cannot. so cannot verify this paper is incorrect.
safeprayer says:
May 25, 2014 at 4:49 pm
Not a very scientific idea since it contravenes the principle of the 2nd Law of thermodynamics.
===================
Gravity overrules your 2nd Law.
I’m comfortable with an expanding universe. The expansion had to start sometime. A Big Bang covers that nicely. What was there before Big Bang? It seems to me the universe was there.
I believe there is sufficient mass to cause a Big Crunch cum Big Bang, the beginning of the next cycle. Since this is billions of years out, I’m not concerned that we can’t identify that mass yet.
Dire Wolf says:
May 25, 2014 at 6:26 pm
I consider such speculation metaphysics rather than religion. But the present cosmological models also embody metaphysical assumptions.
The multiverse hypothesis makes testable predictions, hence is theoretically falsifiable. Thus it is science rather than religion.
String theory, in its advanced M forms, actually derives multiverses, so the hypothesis is not pure speculation, but a testable hypothesis. It might not presently be testable, although at least on astrophysicist thinks she has found evidence in its support, a purportedly observed Cold Spot in the CMB radiation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Mersini-Houghton
Thank you for the references, though they do not provide the information needed to verify the falifiability of the theory. I would be intrigued to hear what sorts of falsifiable predictions it has made — and tested — which would exclude a universe. Just because a theory of multiverse can match data does not mean that it has matched data that a universe theory cannot match. If it does no more than cover the same ground, then Occam’s Razor comes into play.
If the cosmos is infinite in time and space, then it’s paradox to suggest that something unbounded (infinite) can expand on itself, and even if it were expanding, it would have to be expanding into something (Hey presto , expanding into more infinite universe).
As for the beginning of time: Can on conceive of a moment that did not precede another moment?
Andyj says:
May 25, 2014 at 6:39 pm
Before rejecting an hypothesis, I’d suggest your studying it.
There are at least two kinds of dark matter. One is ordinary matter (baryonic) that is or has been until recently simply too dim to be detected. Science finds more of this matter all the time, such as “rogue planets”, ie free floating bodies of planetary size orbiting the center of mass of their galaxies rather than a star, which previously were not even known to exist. They may well contain more mass than planets orbiting stars.
Non-baryonic matter is more conjectural, but observations of gravity lenses suggests it too exists.
It’s still a theory you have there. The odd straw floating downstream does not mean it is autumn but contributed by? Yes.
The fact we can look out in any direction to see the beginnings of time suggest the universe is expanding to the speed of light yet the red shift does not add up. And if it is equidistant and no shift in the speed of light in all directions suggest we are not flying fast on a wavefront and measuring light speed is relative to ones location.
This is what we know which encourages this paper.
Well, we don’t have much comprehension as to relativity of perspective, for we might claim to see things moving away from us, thus asssuming we’re the centre of the universe, whilst if we were 3 billion light years away from where we are, we might be seeing things differently, and then utter a conclusion, like a tablet of stone thrown from heaven, that something else was the universal truth.
To me the Big Bang theory appears irrational and my mind rejects it on principle as an explanation for the universe’s existence. I don’t have a problem with the idea of the galaxies moving apart from one another in Euclidean 3-dimensional space, but that is not the idea of the Big Bang theory. There the idea is that space and time are expanding too! But the idea of the expansion of time and space implies that they are expanding relative to an absolute frame of reference that is not expanding but is invariant in scale. The idea of space and time expanding relative to themselves would be meaningless and absurd. Yet precisely this absurd idea is central to the Big Bang theory.
In spite of this essential absurdity though, Big Bang cosmologists claim to be able to plot the course of universal expansion backwards to an absolute starting point of the universe some 13.6(?) billion years ago in absolute time – a miraculous, uncaused event that occurred at a moment in no time and no space wherein all time, space and energy exploded into existence from absolute nothing. Something coming from absolute nothing is a miracle, no matter how it may be disguised in esoteric cosmologists’ technobabble as a “singularity” and miracles are the stuff of religion, not science. The reason for their being eschewed by science is not that they can’t happen, but that they don’t explain anything and the purpose of a scientific theory is to explain something. “Explaining” that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing is no explanation at all really and therefore the Big Bang “theory” is a false theory from the get-go in my view.
Whenever I contemplate the Big Bang theory I somehow get the feeling that I am being asked to believe at least five impossible things before breakfast.
Magic Turtle says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:19 pm
Before rejecting the well-supported theory, it might be a good idea to make the slightest effort to try to understand it first, which it appears you haven’t & don’t.
The Big Bang Theory does not posit that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing, for starters.
Don’t worry about the big bang. It was obviously taken straight from Genesis as a method of giving origin to things.
See a broken window pane. Assume the cause was a stone. Or was it a bullet? Or was it an earth tremor?
It is difficult to trace the cause of even recent unobserved events, as there is little that binds a cause to an effect as such. There is no contiguity between a cause and an effect as such.
Think how much more preposterous it is to infer the universe from what we see from our perspective in th e21st century
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:24 pm
No, it wasn’t. Dunno if you’re kidding or not. Hard to tell sometimes.
The Big Bang is about as well supported by observational evidence, coherent theory, confirmational predictions & every other sort of test that make up the scientific method as almost any other theory you might name.
That is not to say that it won’t be improved, but that applies to the theories of geocentrism, gravitation, oxygen combustion, atomic matter, geological superposition, disease germs, evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics, DNA genetics & any other well established scientific theory you might name. For instance that the expansion of the universe might be accelerating came as something of a shocker to me. I’m still not totally convinced.
yes. A conjecture supported by even more conjecture, so to quote Butler “Their notions fitted facts so well, that which was which they could not tell”
Andyj says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:29 pm
IMO the paper doesn’t directly question the Big Bang. It just says that you can use Euclidean geometry at intergalactic scales.
“Theory” in science doesn’t mean the same thing as in common parlance. The Multiverse Theory only recently was elevated to that exalted status from an hypothesis because of advances in its mathematical explanation & some (admittedly questionable) observations. It’s hard to look back before the Big Bang & beyond our own universe. But not impossible.
You said:
IMO the paper doesn’t directly question the Big Bang. It just says that you can use Euclidean geometry at intergalactic scales.
On dark & black stuff. You should of read the bit where I stated:-
“It’s still a theory you have there. The odd straw floating downstream does not mean it is autumn but contributed by? Yes.”
I did not question the paper on that. I question the big bang theory that was equated from Einstein’s theory into the bible. The crazier theories you postulate .. Guesses upon guesses for those holes in that theory the worse it gets. Do you believe in global warming or something?
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:22 pm
“The Big Bang Theory does not posit that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing, for starters.”
Then how, and from what does the Big Bang theory propose that the universe did arise, O superior comprehending one?
we can go around in circles and see how the steady state theory is correct, and use supporting evidence to show how it holds.. Making facts fit the notion is the chief aim of cosmology..
We know almost nothing of the universe to form even a conjecture
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:31 pm
Again, please study the Big Bang Theory before presuming to comment on it out of total ignorance.
It’s not a conjecture supported by more conjecture, but originally an hypothesis supported by an ever increasing number of observations until it became a theory, which has yet to be shown false. It’s also an unavoidable consequence of other well-supported physical theories, such as relativity.
If you have a better hypothesis or theory, please offer evidence in its support, or better yet, provide some observation which shows the BBT false. Please start with your alternative explanation for the cosmic microwave background radiation. Thanks.
Big Bang was chosen over Steady State as it was so much like how the bible gave a neat and tidy origin to the universe. Humans like everything to fit into a “categorical imperative” that they contrive in their minds.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:33 pm
That’s simply not true. We have plenty of observations of the universe, the burden of which, if not in fact all of which, support the BBT. Again, please show the observations which you imagine falsify the BBT or confirm an alternative hypothesis, such as the Steady State. Thanks.
Dire Wolf says:
May 25, 2014 at 5:49 pm
“Time is relative only to the present. It is absolute to the past. The paradox remains.”
Time is relative on all possible frames of reference, including scale. at the scale and reference frame we are preceptive of, the speed of light governs mass and energy.
“The universe can be cyclical only if there is sufficient mass to cause the Big Crunch. That is dependent on the addition of unverifiable (at this time) dark energy and dark matter. Otherwise the universe is headed for the Big Chill (entropic destruction). “
The Universe is not a place in time and space without reference, and our perception of the universe is not a mutual two-way communication. The reality of the universe being observed overrules any paradox.
“But that begs the question of how the universe began.”
The universe began the exact moment the observer was born into a universe of infinite possibilities.
D Johnson said :
“I’d prefer to leave this matter to the physicists. Let’s not weaken the case against CAGW by relating it to unrelated (possibly crackpot) theories by analogy. At least that’s my mindset as an engineer.”
Bingo.
It is redshifted photons that has no traceable source, and to assume that gives evidence of the origin of the universe is like saying that the world began when you were born
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:36 pm
That is a complete & total lie. The BBT was formulated based upon observations by scientists of a wide variety of religious backgrounds & none.
Why would you assert such a blatant falsehood?
ok.. If the universe is not infinite, and is expanding then it has to be expanding into something, so those who say the universe is expanding must know where the state borders are – the frontier, so to speak. Yet there is not border that is known, other than the arbitrary observable universe that cosmologists declare. What do they or we know what is beyond the observables universe?
Regarding the beginning of time: As a mind experiment – try and conceive of a moment that DID NOT precede another moment
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:38 pm
The “source” is traceable both experimentally & theoretically, based upon the well supported physics of Einstein.
Please suggest a better explanation for the observed red shift. Thanks.
@Pete
“Until such time as either can fully explain the conditions immediately preceding the event that supposedly “began” it all, both are conjectural.”
The standard story is that there is no “before” the BB. One version is that that time was somehow wrapped up and then stretched out as the bang started.
Unfortunately, I cannot grasp the idea of a moment of time which does not have a preceding moment.
Nor can I grasp the idea of infinite time, whether past or future. It simply does not fit into my mind.
I can grasp the idea of circular time (which is totally crazy) but I can’t see it just throwing out a tangent to infinity.
But, alas, there does not seem to be a law of nature that the universe should be comprehensible to RoHa. Or vice versa.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:41 pm
That we can at present only dimly if at all view beyond the event horizon doesn’t mean that the event horizon or whatever might lie beyond it doesn’t exist. The language of science is math & the math for M String Theory works.
Just saying that we don’t “know” something doesn’t mean it does not or cannot exist. We have to go with evidence & theory not yet falsified. Baseless conjecture is at present all that opponents of the BBT have.
That we measure time since the BB doesn’t mean that time in general began then. Why are these concepts so hard to grasp?
P. Wilson. I like your reasoning. Go to the edge of the universe to see the beginning of the big bang before it “exploded”. So, it the universe expanding or are we contracting?
Andyj says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:45 pm
Can you really not understand that dark matter includes both ordinary matter that we previously could not detect & other forms of matter which physics predicts but are hard to detect?
You are making no sense & apparently trying to ignore all the actual science I’m trying to teach you.
Not that it’s relevant, but no, my considered opinion is that catastrophic anthropogenic climate alarmism is at best unjustified. How can you possibly imagine that my viewing the BBT as a well supported theory in any way would predict my opinion on catastrophic man-made global warming, which I consider not just unscientific but actively anti-scientific?
it also means that there might not have been a sudden big bang that saw the beginning of the universe, and that the smoking gun of Big Bang – background cosmic microwave radiation, was an ever present factor. It could be that our part of the universe experienced some major even, but preceded by a deflation in our part of the universe billions of light years earlier, whilst elsewhere in the universe, other things could have been happening
WE simply don’t know
Milo.. So, you have an object of infinite mass. How much faster than light does it need to explode because time will be essentially static. The BB does not make any sense.
It’s a self propagating Oxymoron.
Andyj says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:48 pm
I assert that it is infinite in time and space, and has no centre of dimension therefore. If it is infinite in space that it had no origin and was simply always there
RoHa says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:46 pm
It’s not true that there is no “before” the Big Bang. That state is difficult to study or even theorize about, but quantum physics proceeds where relativity dares not to tread.
milo you cannot teach me what you have no comprehension of. I wish you stop parroting those daft theories and just enjoy the thought processes.
Milo. What rate of time for an near infinite mass? Answer:
Infinitely slow. So time is speeding up now.
and if time is speeding up, what happens to “old” light?
What I’d give to make this be the case. Just to watch those who are “in the know” do back flips to make the new scientific reality fit their ideology; so they can go back to being smug and mock those who don’t accept it.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:51 pm
WE simply didn’t “know” a lot of things before science started looking for explanations.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:53 pm
Please offer your evidence for this faith-based belief. All the actual evidence observed in nature says you’re wrong.
Now it could be that the existence of spacetime itself is eternal & infinite, but that too would be entirely conjectural at this point. The bits & pieces thereof which we can actually observe however do seem to begin in an expansion. Your “explanation” explains none of these observations or their coincidence with the equations of relativity & quantum mechanics.
Modern physics is math gone mad. There is no sense, only logic. When logic fails, then it is both a wave and a particle, existing an infinite states, that disappears when you open the box.
For those with problems understanding the expansion, I’m pretty sure Carl Sagan’s old balloon analogy is the simplest way to look at it. It might be an overly simplistic model, but it helps to conceptualize things. Picture a closed two-dimensional universe as a balloon, where the surface of the balloon is “space” and the radius of the balloon is time. As the balloon inflates, it expands in the direction of time. Expansion of our universe would be identical, but with one additional dimension. As the universe expands, it isn’t expanding into some previously unoccupied “space” – the expansion is time.
Andyj says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:54 pm
What you call daft theories are actually the best explanation for observations of the actual universe. IMO daft is rejecting the evidence. Not daft would be trying to come up with a better explanation, which you can’t.
Why would you suppose that I have not thought about the observations made by scientists? Agreeing with the best explanations isn’t parroting but participating in the conversation by which understanding is advanced.
You OTOH have nothing but blind faith easily shown false by observations of reality.
You are parroting and peddling other peoples theories. Little on the theories of the BB make any sense when scrutinised. Each time they come across a problem with the existing theory they invent another theory to leap over the hurdles of reality. It’s getting daft and boring. Like this thread.
One lad here has put this in a nutshell. I’ll modify it a little:-
My religion is holier than thou.
P.Wilson. I’ve little (nothing) to say against what you say here.
here we go calling scepticism faith, when I’ve already pointed out that the consensus creates notions and theories to support it’s conjectures.
we do not know that CMR infers big bang. we use it to do so. It could be that the infinite universe has this infinite uniform heat, for an infinite period of time, (in our observable universe) and always has way before any such biblical origin as a Big Bang.
that’s the point. Cosmologists are making “best guesses” for the observable universe, based, as you say, n current *evidence* and making them into some sort of truth. Instead of the universe being 6000 years old, it is 13.6 billion instead.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:06 pm
Apparently you’ve not studied classical physics or observed the world around you. “We” know what the CMB implies because of the laws of thermodynamics, not because of a desire to go all biblical. Are you really this ignorant of the most elementary physics?
Not that the Big Bang “confirms” the creation myths of any religion or belief system. None of them comes close to describing with any specificity what actually happened in the early universe, including the two creation myths in Genesis.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:10 pm
They’re not making best guesses, but deriving the time since the Big Bang from observations. I suppose you could call that educated guesswork, but it’s based upon increasingly improved observations & derived from laws of physics which are known to operate on the appropriate time frames.
You really ought to study the topics upon which you presume to comment.
No i’m not ignorant of physics, but you might as well say that places (including manmade that record temperatures of 3000K apart from CMR, including acetylene torches are therefore as old as the universe too
Andyj says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:10 pm
You have already seen that I’m peddling nothing but my own take on what has been observed. I told you that I was surprised to discover evidence that expansion is accelerating, & am still not convinced that that observation is valid. But it could be.
You OTOH are rejecting out of pure ignorance all the evidence accumulated since 1929 & the results of theoretical calculations based upon both Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity & quantum mechanics of subsequent decades. It take a lot of faith on your part to set your own unsupported belief system against the weight of those evidences & successful predictions.
As with all well supported scientific theories, improvements can & will be made. The BBT might even be overturned & replaced some day, but nothing you have said offers support for that outcome. Quite the opposite.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:14 pm
So you posit now a Cosmic Blowtorcher out there in the intergalactic dark heating up areas of the universe?
Interesting.
Where did I write that the Big Bang theory was used to confirm the bible? I said that it was borrowed from the human desire to have a neat any tidy origin as genesis does. Only on different timeframes with different conjectures.
In truth, we simply don’t know or probably ever will
no. Current cosmology infers a cosmic blowtorch, aka, the Big Bang
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:18 pm
No, it doesn’t. Far from it.
It implies nothing of the sort. It is based upon the laws of thermodynamics. Do you reject all aspects of physics?
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:18 pm
You’re off by 180 degrees. If science wanted something simple, neat & tidy, it would go with steady state, unchanging always been there, as you chose to do, contrary to all evidence.
It is observation of nature that has driven development of the BBT at every point in its history, not a desire to have a story with a beginning. Since at least Hutton, atheistic or at least naturalistic science has wanted a story with a beginning or an end. Nature has said otherwise.
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:22 pm
that’s right. The great Cosmic Blowtorcher of a Big Bang, based on thermodynamics, that gets more and more convincing as each year goes by…. as it changes so much, and as each observation reveals ever new evidence to support the original assertation of Big Bang.
now that’s enough of Dante for one evening.
Well far be it from me to say that the universe doesn’t change. The one thing that in fact doesn’t change is theit’s infinity, and that infinity can’t expand on itself
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:29 pm
What changes go you imagine have been observed to support your view? The CMB has indeed been found to vary slightly in different directions, but it should hardly be surprising that residual energy is not uniformly distributed throughout spacetime, since neither is matter, ie we have stars & galaxies rather than a uniform soup of hydrogen atoms.
Perhaps it has escaped your notice that objects hotter than their surroundings tend to become cooler & cooler objects warmer. This observation by attentive observers explains the inferences drawn by physicists & cosmologists as to the CMB & the BBT. Hence my reference to the laws of thermodynamics. Since you apparently have a problem with these observations & laws, I’m not surprised that you have decided to retire into the night from whence you came with references to late Medieval poetry.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:30 pm
A lot of cosmologists would disgree with me, but IMO our universe isn’t infinite, but the universe of universes is. So much for your baseless slur that I’m parroting someone else’s thoughts.
Donot you guys know. It is just a glitch in the Matrix… Once it is realised that the observed untiverse is not making sense, then the machine will reset and we will have forgotten about this. Get ready to all experience dejavu because that is what happens when,….
Do you guys know. Its just an glitch in the observations. Once it is realised…….
[Isn’t dejavu just reheated coffee? .mod]
the 2nd law of thermodynamics is what you are referring to there
oops. I didn’t realise you were a troll. Goodnight
[Who are you addressing? 8<) (We have to keep track of the money received at the troll gates on each shift, you know.) .mod]
Late to the thread as usual. Glad someone finally looked at galaxies in brightness and size. From their data, one can now establish the time lost constant to the red shift. I don’t buy the big bang as it isn’t logical in what we see. We see well defined galaxies out to the 12 billion light year sphere, no matter which way we look when the age of the universe is suppose to be 12.8 billion years. For stars to coalesce into galactic structures would take longer than .8 billion years. I believe light or electromagnetic radiation decays in relationship to time, that 4th dimension). From their data, they may be able to work out what the decay factor is. As part of equation, the level of energy must also have a relationship to the decay. May I also suggest that all electromagnetic radiation decays until it hits around the 12.8 billion year mark when it decays into another form of energy. Could the background radiation we see be light after that transformation? I think the universe is far bigger than we think but we are limited in viewing it due to the life span of light itself.
DirkH says:
Ok, then please cite one experiment that shows that space is four dimensional.
All those high energy experimental physics papers in the journals are validations of the four dimensional space and time. Of course reactors and the atomic bomb are an application. And even GPS would not work correctly if the theory were not taken into account :
Because an observer on the ground sees the satellites in motion relative to them, Special Relativity predicts that we should see their clocks ticking more slowly (see the Special Relativity lecture). Special Relativity predicts that the on-board atomic clocks on the satellites should fall behind clocks on the ground by about 7 microseconds per day because of the slower ticking rate due to the time dilation effect of their relative motion.
This is being corrected so that the system can work.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:38 pm
I’m glad that you recognized to which of the laws of thermodynamics I referred in that case. Do you now see how that particular law combined with the observation of the CMB confirms the BBT?
I hope so. Had you connected those dots earlier, many comments could have been saved.
P Wilson says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:39 pm
I assume that by “troll”, you mean advocate of the scientific method.
Theo Goodwin says:
May 25, 2014 at 1:58 pm
> I haven’t seen your posts in years..
Well, not in years, but it is true I am not posting here as before. I have become bored with the AGW , Climate Change, Climate Disruption saga . One can not always be arguing the same arguments against bad physics. I have also discovered a site of physics questions and answers that keeps my little grey ( white?) cells occupied in answering questions . 🙂
I do check the new posts every morning though.
*******************
jorgekafkazar says:
May 25, 2014 at 6:14 pm
anna v says: “…You sound horrified , like the church, who could not accept the heliocentric system, which was the most economic mathematical mode of those times…”
Actually, the Copernican system had more epicycles than the Ptolemaic.
The number of parameters are the same, it is the economy of describing the same system in a generalized manner , with clear postulates and mathematics that separates the two systems that allowed for an expansion of thought about gravity..
********************
george e. smith
HI George,
I had a rude surprise also, not having payed attention since the last course I had in cosmology in 1977. The inflation period has been introduced, with its inflaton to churn this time interval into homogeneity, which was unexplainable otherwise. . The recent results from BICEP2 two pertain to imprinted gravitational wave effects from the inflation period, which is a slice from 10^-34 to 10^-32. seconds.
In the fullness of time, I would expect both theories big bang and steady state to be proved wrong.
If the universe has been designed properly it would be a continuos process of creation of matter and recycling, ever growing, youthful and full of infinite possibilities.
Nothing that science has discovered prohibits the possibility that what I say may be closer to the truth. The contradictions in the big bang theory with their imaginary fixes is starting to make their heads hurt. The static universe would not see so many new suns being born from clouds of hydrogen. Continuos creation would not need the missing middle of our universe, just a seething energy in the vacuum, the missing aether.
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:22 pm
The Big Bang Theory does not posit that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing, for starters.
————————————————–
Who knew? From what did the big bang arise?
bones says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:19 pm
Dunno how you missed the BICEP results. They were in all the papers.
http://news.sciencemag.org/physics/2014/04/scientists-find-imprint-universe-existed-big-bang
But even before this experimental result, subject of course to further confirmation, there was the theoretical basis, derived from working backwards from observations of the universe.
I always have to wonder what part of “hot, dense state”, people don’t understand. It should be intuitively obvious that mass & energy predate the Big Bang. At least it is to me.
Nor do I know how anyone seriously interested in the topic could have missed the hypotheses seeking to explain what occurred before the Big Bang, even without benefit of the BICEP finding, such as this popular hypothesis:
http://discovermagazine.com/2013/september/13-starting-point
Maybe if people actually studied the BBT before commenting on it, a lot of misunderstanding could be cleared up.
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:32 pm
. . . Dunno how you missed the BICEP results. They were in all the papers.
—————————————-
OK, it seems that you are wanting to separate the hot big bang AFTER inflation so that you can claim that something came before the big bang. Yet, the BICEP2 result that you refer to supposedly offers proof of a preceding superluminal inflationary period. Leaving aside the fact that this has not been confirmed, please state what existed before about 10^-43 sec.
bones says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:40 pm
I don’t know why this is so hard to grasp. BICEP2 observed gravity waves in the early universe, not what came before the BBT. This finding has implications for what might have come before the BBT, but really is only dispositive for hypotheses about the evolution of our universe soon after the BBT.
infinity can’t expand on itself
============
why not? 2 x infinity = infinity
lol i can’t believe how harsh some of the comments are on this topic. It seems that challenging the settled science is volatile no matter which “settled” theory it is. Instead of staunchly supporting current theory perhaps you could open your mind to the simple possibility that from our little rock on the edge of the our galaxy, somewhere in time, in this vast universe that we do not have enough information to actually date or decide how the entire Universe came about:P
So perhaps we should keep our minds open to the infinite possibilities instead of pigeon holing any information that refuses to conform to a rigid theory that keeps getting shot full of holes. There are any number of theories that can incorporate or expand on current physics, but not if you put blinders on to the increasing issues with the current popular theory. Einstein and more recently Hawkins have trouble getting the math to work right without the introduction of huge leaps of, for lack of a better term… faith. The recent unintended observation of the Higgs boson in accelerator experiments is just one example of such possibilities. Do we discard it, even though it has been observed, and yet to accept it would mean that current theory would have to evolve:) .
pkatt says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:54 pm
Recent Higgs Boson observations were not unintended. They were very much intended, the results of concerted, expensive searches.
The open nature of this blog means that its support of CACA skepticism gets tarred with the brush of loons commenting here who correctly challenge catastrophic man-made climate change, but also question the facts of evolution & the second law of thermodynamics.
It’s a loon on here who assumes unverifiable theories are reality.
No laws of thermodynamics allow the “big bang” hence another theory of unfounded, undiscovered and unlikely energy “dark energy”.
Then we can try and assess the other theory; gravity being stronger than it really should be. Hence “dark matter” should be 7x greater than the observations show so they invent parallel universes, Higgs Bogus particles and all sorts of daft never to be proved assertions.
So milo, I would like you to play the good scientist. Doubt everything. Keep an open mind and take no stance. Doing otherwise is lowering yourself to the level of a climate scientist.
Myself and Mr. Wilson postulated fun facts and observations over the theories which give the BB an impossible time. Quoting present day daft theories do not fix the questions.
Neurones have a body (soma) and an axon. The axon looks white because it is surrounded by layers of myelin, a fatty substance. Fats are white, unless they get oxidized and they turn yellowish. The gray matter refers to parts of the nervous system where there is an accumulation of neuronal bodies, whereas accumulations of axons look white and they are called white matter.
Try this. Sit down on a box or stool for several hours and watch an ant nest. After this, close your eyes and think about the possibility that there may just be a mind behind all this star stuff, as far above ours as ours is above ants. Hint. Unless you disturb the ant nest, the ants will go about their business seemingly oblivious to your presence. In a nutshell I don’t humans can ever know what the true big picture is because of the smallness of our existence. Make any sense?
Magic Turtle says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:33 pm
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:22 pm
“The Big Bang Theory does not posit that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing, for starters.”
Then how, and from what does the Big Bang theory propose that the universe did arise, O superior comprehending one?
=====================
The Big Bang Theory does not need to address how the universe arose. What led up to the Big Bang is a different subject. Not knowing what happened before the Big Bang does not falsify the Big Bang.
Your answer is the worst defence. From nothing comes everything? That is in direct contravention of all laws of physics. A disturbance from nothing by nothing?
At Least Fred Hoyle had a sane presupposition about the transfer of matter and energy.
For everyone who has their panties in a twist over the concept of an infinite universe see: http://io9.com/new-survey-supports-theory-of-infinite-universe-1503361325 Note that The Big Bang might still exist, even in an infinite universe but it may have been only a ‘local event’. ‘Local’, in an infinite universe, could cover some significant area. The impact between our ‘brane’ and another has been postulated for the observed microwave background. As one post indicated, there are too many ‘bandaide’ answers to existing theory which are considered accepted science and used to explain inconsistencies between observation and theory ( dark matter and dark energy). Don’t know if this Sci-News.com article has any legs but it is great to see folks questioning existing dogma considering out of the box answers. Just as Newtonian physics needed the Einsteinian tweek, general relativity may need some adjustments for which we presently lack the technology to measure what they might be.
the talk of “multiverses” to me requires we change what words mean…….IF there is a universe that alone precludes there being any multiverses, since the universe would be all that exists, how does one find something outside of ALL?……..any other “verses” would still be part of this singular universe……….and time travel makes no sense on any level, the ONLY “time” that exists is NOW, to travel either forwards or backwards in a physical way is NOT possible, because the whole universe would have to make physical changes……the past no longer exists and the future does not yet exist, you CANT travel to places that do NOT exist.
ZombieSymmetry says (May 25, 2014 at 8:01 pm):
For those with problems understanding the expansion, I’m pretty sure Carl Sagan’s old balloon analogy is the simplest way to look at it. It might be an overly simplistic model, but it helps to conceptualize things.…
It was Carl Sagan’s analogy? I should have guessed. “overly simplistic” seems a kind description of it to me. “misleading” would be nearer to my mark.
…Picture a closed two-dimensional universe as a balloon, where the surface of the balloon is “space” and the radius of the balloon is time. As the balloon inflates, it expands in the direction of time. Expansion of our universe would be identical, but with one additional dimension. As the universe expands, it isn’t expanding into some previously unoccupied “space” – the expansion is time.
It doesn’t matter how many dimensions we give the universe, the balloon-analogy is still treating time as another dimension of space (and an absolute one at that!). The balloon definitely is expanding into some previously unoccupied 3-D space and likewise, by analogy, the posited hyper-spherical universe is expanding into some previously unoccupied hyper-space, one of whose dimensions happens to be time. To suggest that it isn’t expanding in space because it’s actually expanding in time is simply wrong because the Big Bang theory maintains that expanding in space is precisely what the red shift of the galaxies implies the universe is doing.
Sagan’s balloon analogy seems to confuse more than it clarifies to me.
***
REPLY: Well what’s funny is that his website (Luboš) crashed my Firefox browser when I visited it this morning. – Anth*ny
***
Yeah, that’s one of the only sites that can crash my Firefox. I have to use his “simplified” site:
http://motls.blogspot.com/?m=1
With alot of manipulating of NoScript and Ghostery there, I can get to his comments, but it’s just too painful…
But of course the Universe is finite. So too are my last 100 Skyrim game save files.
Gamecock says:
May 26, 2014 at 4:25 am
The Big Bang Theory does not need to address how the universe arose. What led up to the Big Bang is a different subject. Not knowing what happened before the Big Bang does not falsify the Big Bang.
This argument merely sidesteps the issue. When the Big Bang theory was initially proposed by Georges Lemaitre, a Vatican priest, in 1927 it was proposed as an explanation for the origin of the universe including time and space. However, it did not explain what caused the Big Bang (except to “explain” it as an original, creative act of God – as a miracle, in other words). Nor did it explain what the time and space that he imagined expanding out of the dimensionless point in which all time and space were originally contained were supposedly expanding in relation to. An expansion into no-time and no-space is not merely unimaginable: it is logically absurd, tantamount to saying that the universe grows with respect to itself. Nor does the theory address the absurdity of proposing that time itself had no existence before a specific point in time! Such double-talk is inherently meaningless.
Subsequent Big Bang theorising appears never to have answered these fundamental questions either. Rather, it appears to have ignored them, restricting its scope to moments in time after the universe has already come into hypothetical existence as a dimensionless point of infinite density and temperature. In this way it has downgraded the Big Bang theory from being the proposed explanation for the origin of the universe that it originally was to something less grand and less explanatory. No doubt some would regard this as scientific progress. But the fundamental questions that arose with Lemaitre’s original proposition remain unanswered and even unaddressed.
” In addition, the light is stretched as the Universe expanded, further dimming the light.”
…
Stretching the light alters it’s frequency, not it’s amplitude.
I cannot find the original article but the initial test that revealed the Higgs Boson was a test to see if they could create a black hole or prove the existence of dark matter. After about 40 years of total denial, it is now an accepted portion of the equation and may even provide insight to some of the problems that are continuing to occur with the current theory. According to Einstein and Hawkins it should not exist, and yet apparently it does. Science must be flexible to work. We dont know it all.
Andyj says:
May 26, 2014 at 3:15 am
Science is not only doubt. Skepticism is part of the method, the goal of which is understanding nature.
Of course I doubt hypotheses, but that’s just the first step. Next you test them against reality to see how well they hold up. The Steady State Theory has been falsified, while the Big Bang has been confirmed by observation. No theory is ever totally perfected. There remains much to learn.
But saying that the CMB was born red-shifted is precisely like creationists’ saying that light was created by God en route from distant stars, so that they only appear billions of years old.
Equating the methods of astrophysicists & cosmologists with those of “climate scientists” is a preposterous, scurrilous lie.
bones says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:19 pm
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 7:22 pm
The Big Bang Theory does not posit that the universe arose spontaneously out of nothing, for starters.
————————————————–
Who knew? From what did the big bang arise?
According to superstring theory, all 11 dimensions of the universe were originally internal so that the universe was the size of the Plank length, 10e-33mm (nothing can be smaller than this). Then at the big bang three of the eleven dimensions leaked out and becme spatially extended. So ab initio wasn’t ex nihilo. The universe just needed some elbow-room.
Pardon me, but that is just elegant gibberish that exactly repeats the original comment: The universe started from nothing, if nothing can be smaller be smaller than a Plank’s length. Now, where was ‘everything” before it became “nothing” at 10-34 seconds? If they were “internal” then what were they “internal” of? Because the “11 invisible (invincible ?) dimensions of invisible mathematics” say so is no more valid than “Because the Priest/Warlocks/Inquisition says so”
And less convincing actually than “Let there be light.”
Milo
Steady state theory has been falsified on a strawman basis. Not good enough.
Someone else said ” the Big Bang theory was initially proposed by Georges Lemaitre, a Vatican priest, in 1927.
I could predate that with a Jules Verne(?) short story about a man who had an accident on his bicycle and died. Eons later the universe collapsed back on itself and BOOM! Reformed in a big bang. The stars and galaxies reformed. On one tiny insignificant planet there was his man, (same name) who had an aversion to bicycles but simply didn’t know why.
Anyone know this story?
@Stephen Wilde: “One possibility is that light travelling through the universe loses some of its speed via interaction with the medium through which it passes.”
Yes! I’m glad someone said it. I don’t feel so alone now. We know that light gets bent when passing by galactic clusters, so there’s some sort of deformation of the path of the photon happening here. Would not that sap some energy? And I’ve long suspected that G is not a constant and is actually larger in intergalactic space – or anyplace far enough away from stars. If photons are bent by galactic clusters, then the molasses of >>G intergalactic space might have an effect on them too.
Magic Turtle says:
May 26, 2014 at 10:23 am
This argument merely sidesteps the issue.
=================
Your “issue” is invented. Unless you wish to argue there is no universe.
@ Gamecock
“Your “issue” is invented. Unless you wish to argue there is no universe.”
———————————————–
What an absurd little comment. If I posited that an unknowable miracle happened at Lourdes, and scientist worth his salt would question it. And yet, you wish to simply dismiss the cosmological question (an unknowable miracle of origin) as a non-question simply because the Universe exists. Questioning the rationality of the miracle in question is eminently scientific. And if science fails to come up with a decent rational answer, then science needs to be silent and quit say silly things like “the universe just needed more elbow room”.
Fred Hoyle DIDN”T deny that the universe is expanding. He thought more matter was spontaneously created as the universe expanded, to maintain constant density.
Simple Newtonian physics leads to a expanding universe. Either it’s expanding, thanks to a previous explosion, or gravity is going to act on all that static matter, pulling it all together in a big crunch.
Of course Hoyle did not deny the expanding universe. But this premise causes problems that cannot be adequately answered as set out before.
Seems the speed of light is not a constant in free space. Light speed may only be seen as a constant at the point it is tested.
Remember, velocity=time over distance. Time alters under gravity because it is gravity. The only way it can be unity is if distance warps accordingly.
I know they’ve measured the speed of light on the surface of the earth, but has anyone measured the speed of light in space (within the heliosphere)? Just curious.
The Big Bang Theory as it was originally proposed by Lemaitre and developed by Einstein, Hawking and others purported to explain the origin of the universe including all time and space. However, that theory contained certain logical absurdities which I have already described and which constitute the “issue” to which I was referring. I have not invented it; it is present in the original theory.
Your argument that the Big Bang Theory does not have to explain the origin of the universe including all time and space may be true but it narrows the scope of the theory arbitrarily to the time after the universe has already come into existence. Thereby it sidesteps the “issue” without addressing it.
I do not wish to argue that there is no universe and I cannot see any reason for your suggesting that I might.
PS: My previous post was a reply to Gamecock
milodonharlani said @ May 25, 2014 at 7:43 pm
I was told by a BBT cosmologist that the only explanation for red shift was expansion of the universe. If that is so, then I don’t see how BBT can be “based upon the well supported physics of Einstein”. Gravitational red-shift identified in the spectral lines of Sirius B by Adams in 1925 and definitively verified by the experiments of Pound, Rebka and Snider between 1959 and 1965 (usually taken to be confirmation of GR) can not then be a part of the BBT. Thus BBT is inconsistent with GR.
The Pompous Git says:
May 26, 2014 at 4:49 pm
You’re right that the only explanation that makes sense for the red shift is expansion.
The BBT is consistent with GR, indeed derivable from it. A problem however arises with accelerating expansion. Like John Kerry, Einstein was for accelerating expansion before he was against it. Remains to be seen if he were right the first time, IMO.
http://www.space.com/9593-einstein-biggest-blunder-turns.html
milodonharlani said @ May 26, 2014 at 5:11 pm
As an empiricist, I was rather more impressed by Adams observations and Pound, Rebka and Snider’s experiments. Not to mention Vessot et al’s later even more accurate corroboration of gravitational redshift:
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1980PhRvL..45.2081V
The worst kind: a big bang denier. I could hardly bare to read it.
Magic Turtle says:
May 26, 2014 at 4:20 pm
Your argument that the Big Bang Theory does not have to explain the origin of the universe including all time and space may be true but it narrows the scope of the theory arbitrarily to the time after the universe has already come into existence. Thereby it sidesteps the “issue” without addressing it.
I do not wish to argue that there is no universe and I cannot see any reason for your suggesting that I might.
===============
There is a universe. It appears to be expanding. A Big Bang explains the universe as we see it.
“it narrows the scope of the theory arbitrarily to the time after the universe has already come into existence.”
There’s nothing arbitrary about it! That’s what the Big Bang Theory does! As I said, it has no need to explain anything other than what it explains. Do you demand that it also explain gingivitis?
The Pompous Git says:
May 26, 2014 at 5:33 pm
I’m impressed, too. Please draw these results to the attention of commenters here who “deny” the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics upon which the BBT-supporting interpretation of the CMB rests, ie the only possible plausible interpretation, unless, as I commented, you assume that the three K background just happened to be born that way.
It would be good if some of you checked out the actual observational evidence against expansion. For a scientist, that weighs a lot more than theory. Visit us at http://www.lppfusion.com, especially the page on “The growing case against the Big Bang”. That has lots of references–to the observations. I’m one of the authors of the paper that started this thread. You can read the paper itself there too.
V. Uil says:
May 26, 2014 at 5:39 pm
There appear to be quite a few BBT d*n**rs on this blog. Which I guess is OK, as it’s a platform for skeptics of all stripes. My only concern is that, as with the creationists who comment here, CACA advocates can use our host’s toleration as a brush with which to tar all CACA skeptics as anti-science kooks.
Which they have no shame in doing, trying to equate opposition to CACA with opposition to evolution.
Gamecock says:
May 26, 2014 at 5:41 pm
This is akin to opponents of evolution who expect scientific explanations for the origin of species to explain the origin of life as well.
elernerigc says:
May 26, 2014 at 6:15 pm
Please, by all means, present here your evidence against an expanding universe. If you can show false the hypothesis that the universe is expanding, I’m all eyes. Thanks.
Just follow the link, friend. I can’t present the evidence in sound bites–but it is all there if you read it–just a click away.
@Patrick Guinness Frank May 25, 2014 at 9:41 am:
“Sorry to say, but Luboš’ comments, at least those posted here, are shallow substance-free disparagements. Maybe the paper is wrong, maybe it’s right. Maybe the data are inaccurate somehow, or mean something different than what the authors describe. But it looks like an honest effort.”
Good comment. We sometimes need to be reminded that science is NOT the accumulation of data and evidence, but it is rather the INTERPRETATION of those pieces of evidence, in the collective effort to understand the overall meaning of the evidence.
Specific to your comment:
Astronomer Halton Arp has been saying since the 1960s that the Red Shift has nothing to do with the Doppler effect. He has asserted from the beginning of that interpretation for Red Shift that “the data mean something different than what the authors” of the Big Bang “describe.”
It all hinged greatly on quasars back then, because their Red Shifts indicated great distance, while the energy that was reaching Earth was X amount. The interpretation of Red Shift as Doppler effect meant that a quasar galaxy these size of “ONLY” the Solar system was putting out the energy of an entire galaxy of billions of stars.
The alternate interpretation was that the Red Shift was NOT Doppler and that the quasars were actually much, much closer and putting out normal amounts of energy. The astronomers chose Doppler. Arp disagreed, and he has been persona non grata ever since. He was THE expert on unusual objects in the universe – but actually lost his position because he didn’t go along with the consensus.
Arp, in effect, was one of the original “deniers.”
And he is STILL at it.
“””””…..policycritic says:
May 26, 2014 at 4:20 pm
I know they’ve measured the speed of light on the surface of the earth, but has anyone measured the speed of light in space (within the heliosphere)? Just curious……”””””
Yes; in fact one of the earliest estimations was space based. The exact details, I don’t have at my fingertips, but you can find it in various physics texts.
Try gurgling the name Roemer, and see, what you can come up with.
elernerigc says:
May 26, 2014 at 6:33 pm
My view is that if you can’t make a simple declarative statement, then either support it in your own brief words or at least link to that specific point, then it’s not worth my wading through the swamps & thickets without at least a sign post.
Please at least finish this sentence: “I am convinced that the hypothesis of an expanding universe is false because….” Then if need be link to sources supporting each of your reasons for believing this, if you can’t state the reasons in simple declarative sentences yourself.
I could complete the sentence, “I am convinced that the hypothesis of an expanding universe is valid because….” without too much trouble.
Sure” ..because all its predictions are contradicted by observation.” If you want your physics in sound bites–there you are. But if you actually are not too lazy to learn something, just click the link. If you need help finding something in front of your nose, this is on the home page: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/new-evidence-that-the-universe-is-not-expanding/
elernerigc says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:23 pm
What I find lazy or cowardly is not being able to state your case in a single, simple declarative sentence. Or two or three.
I click on your links, but all I find is drivel. Why are you afraid to state here the basis of your belief instead of falling back on links each of which is easily shown false or at best questionable?
Make your own case, or kindly STFU.
Well I invite others to read what you are indeed too lazy to read. If science consisted of sound bites, what need for published peer-reviewed papers and data to back them up? Did you even read the summary at the start of this thread or was that too long for you?
RACookPE1978 on May 26, 2014 at 1:09 pm
phlogiston says:May 26, 2014 at 12:21 pm
According to superstring theory, all 11 dimensions of the universe were originally internal so that the universe was the size of the Plank length, 10e-33mm (nothing can be smaller than this). Then at the big bang three of the eleven dimensions leaked out and becme spatially extended. So ab initio wasn’t ex nihilo. The universe just needed some elbow-room.
Pardon me, but that is just elegant gibberish that exactly repeats the original comment: The universe started from nothing, if nothing can be smaller be smaller than a Plank’s length. Now, where was ‘everything” before it became “nothing” at 10-34 seconds? If they were “internal” then what were they “internal” of? Because the “11 invisible (invincible ?) dimensions of invisible mathematics” say so is no more valid than “Because the Priest/Warlocks/Inquisition says so”
And less convincing actually than “Let there be light.”
Superstring theory is not intended to solve the metaphysical problem of existence. It’s really just a thought experiment that shows that some of the thorniest problems of physics become dramatically more solvable when you bring in multi-dimensional geometry. Reconciling gravity and quantum mechanics for starters.
“Internal” in string theory means only becoming manifest at around the Plank length. Plenty of things can be internal in that sense when you admit Calabi-Yau multi dimensional manifolds, not to mention the new “non commutative geometry” which does not even require any space.
elernerigc says:
May 26, 2014 at 7:42 pm
I did. My take away was, as I commented, that the hypothesis of Euclidean geometry being useful at both large & ordinary scales didn’t mean that curved spacetime wasn’t valid. I guess I was wrong & that you at least among other authors actually believe that spacetime is indeed Euclidean at all scales.
Now would you kindly state in simple declarative sentences why you think that the universe is not expanding? I have learned from trying to teach that if you can’t do this, then you either don’t understand your subject or don’t really believe what you’re professing.
If you even read the summary you would know that this paper showed that observed surface brightness is constant, as is predicted in a non-expanding universe. In an expanding universe, surface brightness declines sharply with redshift. But that is only one of MANY, MANY contradictions between Big Bang theory and observations. The idea that all science can be reduced to a single sentence is so absurd as to be mind-blowing. Put the evidence for Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism into a single simple declarative sentence.
elernerigc says:
May 26, 2014 at 8:17 pm
The least likely explanation for your observation is that the theory of the expanding universe is false. A series of sentences would be OK. Doesn’t have to be just one. Please state as many as you feel are necessary to show the hypothesis of an expanding universe false. Not to be able to do so is not just lazy but indicates a weak counter-hypothesis.
But Maxwell is easy in one sentence, because JCM did so himself:
“We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consists in the transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena.”
“The agreement of the results seems to show that light and magnetism are affections of the same substance, and that light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.”
He also summarized his results on a postcard to a colleague.
You can read a series of sentences at this link that I already posted http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cosmic-connection/plasma-cosmology/the-growing-case-against-the-big-bang/ I understand you may be unfamiliar with this technology, but the link leads to the sentences you are asking for—it just take up less room in this message. People who think that learning can be reduced to sound bites never learn anything. Maxwell’s equations describe a great deal more than the sentences you quoted and he described his discovery and the evidence for it in a many-page publication. But it would take you too long for you to read it, I know. So better rely on a quote form wiki and think you have learned something.
What, by the way, are the “more likely“ explanations that you have arrived at for the observation that surface brightness is constant, as predicted by the non-expanding model?
milodonharlani said: May 26, 2014 at 8:26 pm
Bugger! You beat me to it 🙂
I spent most of the morning noodling around the Interwebs trying to refind a dispassionate overview of various cosmological theories that was a segment of a series of physics lectures. With no success. However, the thrust of the comparison was that no single theory explains all the phenomena. Each theory has shortcomings. Indeed, there is no single BBT, but a series of them, each designed to overcome the shortcomings of the previous theory.
Example: Copernican theory was no better at predicting future states of the solar system than Ptolemaic. It needed the addition of Kepler’s discovery to make it useful. Similarly, BBT has fallen well short until quite recently, but additional ad hoc explanations for such phenomena as large-scale structure, the Great Attractor and CMB Cold Spot appear to save the appearances.
The Git can remember when the CMB was predicted by George Gamow to be 50K rather than the 3K predicted by Sir Arthur Eddington from his measurements of starlight.
elernerigc said @ May 26, 2014 at 9:05 pm
I did, albeit with some difficulty. Not as bad as Luboš Motl’s dogs’ breakfast, but far from easy for tired old eyes to read. However, it appears to be a list of problems with BBT rather than a summary of your own theory which is what milodonharlani is asking for and some of us would like to read.
And while I’m at it, milodonharlani has yet to explain how gravitational redshift either doesn’t exist in interplanetary space, although it has been detected both in stars and here on Earth, or if it does exist, how does one distinguish between that and the Doppler redshift caused by expansion?
What’s next?
An iron-rich star having a high redshift?
Redshift is not linear. Well, it is up to a certain distance then it starts to curve. Another tough one for BBT and Einsteinian enthusiasts to get over.
Andyj said @ May 26, 2014 at 10:28 pm
You might be better off reading some cosmology before making such a silly comment:
http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/282/3/767.full.pdf
lol@pompous. Prof. Brian Cox on Cosmology showed the world, this famous graph on telly the other week. You can quote any OLD (1996) paper that has no idea what it’s talking about then but we now have empirical data that has now come to light proves otherwise.
Thanks. Roemer did it from earth in the 1600s. Has anyone done it out in actual space without the earth’s atmosphere? (I know the measurements are relative when used from the position of earth). I was just wondering if anyone has done the measurements using satellites to determine the speed of light within the atmosphere of the heliosphere (and beyond) without earth’s gravity or atmosphere affecting it.
policycritic said @ May 26, 2014 at 11:51 pm
In 1983 the international standard for the meter was redefined in terms of the definition of the second and a defined value for the speed of light. The defined value was chosen to be as consistent as possible with the earlier metrological definitions of the meter and the second. Since then it is not possible to measure the speed of light using the current metrological standards, but one can still measure any anisotropy in its speed, or use an earlier definition of the meter if necessary. So the short answer to your question is “No”.
Andyj said @ May 27, 2014 at 12:28 am
Well, you can get your “science” from the telly and I’ll get mine from the journals. I suspect that means we don’t have very much to communicate to each other…
Hmm, this brings on a rather unique thought. Redshift could be explained if time were curved, since space is apparently curved, why is it we assume that time is not?
@bones
” Leaving aside the fact that this has not been confirmed, please state what existed before about 10^-43 sec.”
According to my calculations, before BICEP2 at 10^-43 sec, there was BICEP1. And before that, BICEP0. Before that, BICEP(-1).
IOW, BICEPs all the way down!
@wayne Job
This sounds a lot like Dr. Paul LaViolette’s Sub Quantum Kinetics that involves continual creation of matter, but biased towards where matter has already accumulated. His theory, which makes quantitative predictions, has a number of claimed verifications. (I would discount the so-far unreproduced – AFAIK – “verification” ala Podkletnov).
Oh, yeah. Sub Quantum Kinetics PREDICTS a cosmological red shift!
“Verification (1979 – 1986): Dr. LaViolette checks this photon redshifting prediction by comparing the tired-light non-expanding universe model and the expanding universe model (standard Freidman cosmology) to observational data on four different cosmology tests. He demonstrates that the tired-light model consistently makes a closer fit to observational data on all tests. His findings, which were published in the Astrophysical Journal (1986), confirm the subquantum kinetics tired light prediction and the notion that the universe is cosmologically stationary. These findings undermine a key support of the big bang theory. An update of this evidence is presented in Chapter 7 of Subquantum Kinetics.”
See “Subquantum Kinetics Predictions and their Subsequent Verification”
http://etheric.com/predictions-part-ii-physics-and-astronomy/
Eric Lerner is a long-time critic of the Big Bang, who wrote a book called “The Big Bang Never Happened”. To anyone who has studied the subject in depth, and who understands the evidence, the book is laughable. He is a crank. The evidence for the big bang is, in reality, overwhelming — in particular, the microwave background spectrum and fine-scale anisotropy is naturally explained by a big bang, and impossible to explain in any other way without resorting to extraordinary contortions. One can go on — the redshift (evidence for the cosmological origins of the redshift has become even more compelling from large surveys such as SDSS), the light element abundance, the baryon acoustic oscillation, the ages of the oldest stars … there’s no reasonable doubt that something like the big bang occurred.
Posting a link to Lerner’s screed to prove that “Science Is Never Settled!” is, I’m afraid, not going to be persuasive to anyone who actually knows the subject. Then again, the whole point of this site is to sow doubt on actual hard-won expertise among people who don’t know any better, so perhaps it’ll serve.
One more thought.
It is interesting to try to reconcile cosmology with quantum physics. I think the continuous creation idea has merit, the big bang is not mutually exclusive to this idea, if the rate of creation is dependant on time or distance. The big bang could be amcomponent of continuous creation running at a much faster rate.
Now the Quantum mechanics.
Let me say from the start that the idea of creation from nothing doesn’t trouble me Qantum physics postulates that particle / antiparticle pairs are being created all the time but the antiparticle rapidly annihilate with a particle such that nett mass doesn’t change. If a particle and antiparticle exist then the nett of that is nothing. Now let’s speculate. What puzzles me is why there is a matter -antimatter imbalance, if the big bang created the universe out of nothing then there should be equal quantities of matter and antimatter, the answer to me is obvious. The big bang created ( at least ) 2 universes a matter and an antimatter universe, in my hypothetical paired universe when an matter/antimatter particle is born to this universe, there are several plausible endings.
1. The antimatter particle annihilate with a matter particle becoming nothing again
2. The antimatter particle tunnels to the antimatter universe and is trapped there, leaving a matter particle in our universe and an antimatter particle in the antiuniverse.
3. Both The antimatter and matter particle remain in our universe at least until scenario 1 happens.
In my hypothetical case the mass expansion rate of both universes is dependant on the statistical probability and the residence time of antimatter before it tunnels to the antiuniverse, which might be affected by say the existence of a nearby singularity. If the vast majority of pairs recombine, then our universe would appear to have nearly constant mass, except where tunneling can occur, that is – in singularities such as black holes AND the big bang. What we see axially streaming from black holes may be matter particles tunneling from the antiuniverse.
Mind you perhaps not so silly, seeing we have missing heat that can tunnel to the bottom of the ocean
On closer reading, it looks like this whole kerfluffle is due to a misinterpretation of what Lerner et al. actually claim. From their abstract:
So, they’re not claiming in this paper to have shown that the redshift is non-cosmological. They are instead claiming that the Tolman surface-brightness test — which is arguably the weakest argument for cosmological redshifts — is consistent with a static universe.
This is very weak sauce indeed, and basically does nothing to falsify the big bang theory.
bobl says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:10 am
Spacetime curves.
The Pompous Git says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:38 pm
Gravitational redshift does exist, IMO. Expansion can be detected by various means besides red shifts, such as energy density.
I know how God works. He works in averages. If it was very hot in the beginning, it will be very cold at the end. It has been warm here for 16,000 years, it will get colder. If it has been dry, it will get wet and vice versa. If the universe is infinite and eternal ( and the BB merely a local event), I am not sure how to work and average on infinity, but I am confident that it does average out.
elernerigc says:
May 26, 2014 at 9:05 pm
I asked for your own statement of your position. Why is that hard to do?
It’s not in your paper, as Palindrom reminds us & as I observed above, so please state it rather than linking to statements which might or might not be relevant. I’ve found that people who are reluctant to state their case & support their statements directly tend to feel their case is weak.
Jim G says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:00 am
You’re right about climate. Its swings regress to the mean, which I guess is another way of saying that earth is homeostatic.
milodonharlani says:
May 27, 2014 at 6:53 am
bobl says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:10 am
“Spacetime curves.”
Some have postulated that possibly only space is curved at very high energy levels where time might be independent. But it is evident at present energy levels that there is no ‘gravity’, in the Newtonian sense, and are no orbits, everything travels in a straight line in curved space unless acted upon by an external force. Time slows down in the presence of mass, but possibly does not, again, at very high energy levels where all mass is still just energy or quarks. Need larger colliders.
milodonharlani
Unzipping time from space at very high energy levels also takes the speed limit off of C and eliminates length contraction and obviates the need for ‘inflation’.
milodonharlani says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:03 am
Jim G says:
May 27, 2014 at 7:00 am
“You’re right about climate. Its swings regress to the mean, which I guess is another way of saying that earth is homeostatic.”
Or as Willis would say, ‘self regulating’.
I find it difficult if not impossible to determine which horse to back, so to speak. Unless one knows the pedegree, form and function of those doing the theory, experiment and calculations (and thus be as knowledgable and able as they), one cannot really add to the actual debate. One can only way up intuitively the ideas, the seemingly supporting evidence against that seemingly unsupportive or contradictory/falsifying. At the end of the day it seems to come down to what Gell-Mann described as beauty, something simple, elegant and fitting. Once a theory starts to have anomolies that have to be adjusted for it gets uglier. I get the feeling that some heavy weights exist on both sides and wonder to what degree the evidence is able, in its own right, to support either. Or put another way, the evidence, at this level of enquiry, is limited in its supportive/falsifying role. It even requires the assessment of our own minds as to what logic really works. Our mind have trouble with the questions…what is beyond the furthest point (more of the same yeah but what is beyond that and that and that); what existed first and what before that, as in regard of time and of matter; where did it all come from – if something was there where did it come from and what was there before and before and before that…. These seem valid questions, but will never have a final answer because whatever someone tries to answer is still open to the same question, ad infinitum. Like the question of what is infinity – even infinity can’t be infinity because you can add 1 to it. That anything exists is a mystery and what it exists in is another.
Sheldrake, in his banned TED talk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKHUaNAxsTg) at about 10.50mins talks about the speed of light…..
Oh no big deal, the BB theory is full of “patches”, meaning wild arm-waiving explanations needed to explain away the inconsistencies of the theory with observations.
Sheldrake makes an interesting point – that the speed of light has been fixed and that the metre is defined in terms of the speed of light. Is this true? Wouldn’t this make changes in the speed of light undetectable?
I did some calculations a while ago on electric charge. A Feynman lecture/comment alerted me to this so I did the calcs. It goes something like this. If you gathered 1 gram of electrons on the head of a pin say, and positioned it at point A. Then gather the equal and opposite charge on the head of another pin 10 meters distant, the force between them is billions of billions of metric tonnes or x9.81 Newtons. If you take one gathering of charge to the sun, the force is still about 10000N ! between 1g of electrons, say on earth, and an equal but opposite charge on the sun!!!???
Imagine if this was possible – to gather electrons together as said and then have them on a space ship. Sheild it somehow and somehow choose the direct the force to a distant body of positive charge….
flatearthers
milodonharlani said @ May 27, 2014 at 6:59 am
Yet you agreed with the BBT cosmologist I referred to who said that the only explanation for red shift was expansion of the universe. This would appear to be contradiction.
neillusion said @ May 27, 2014 at 8:54 am
A point I also made above:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/meter.html
The Pompous Git says:
May 27, 2014 at 9:43 am
The only explanation taking all other factors into account as well.
palindrom said @ May 27, 2014 at 4:59 am
So, you know better than, oh, let’s say physicist Robert G Brown of Duke, who is not just a member of Faculty Row, but a SuperProfessor and regularly posts here. Care to provide evidence of your expertise Mr Anonymous?
The Pompous Git says:
May 27, 2014 at 10:04 am
Not to mention Drs. Shore & Svalgaard, et al, as well as credentialed academic skeptics. IMO this award-winning site pretty much lives up to its purpose stated above.
Why yes, I do know better than Robert G. Brown.
I’m also a professor, at a comparable institution. My training is much closer to cosmology than his — I’m an astronomer, and he’s a condensed-matter theorist. Astronomy shares much more science base with climatology than condensed-matter theory. I have also published far more papers than he has in total, and — tellingly — did not stop publishing in 2006.
I am also anonymous, so you will of course not believe me. But it’s true.
REPLY: The writer does have a xxxxxxxxx.edu address, so his claim of being “a professor, at a comparable institution” is true. As for the rest of his claims…perhaps an ego-check might be in order. – Anthony
Pompous Git et al — The redshift of an individual object is the sum of parts due to the cosmological expansion, the peculiar motion relative to the local comoving frame, and the gravitational redshift intrinsic to the object itself. None of these is magic, and they are not mutually exclusive.
milodonharlani said @ May 27, 2014 at 10:14 am
On that we are in complete agreement 🙂
Anthony — That address was not for you to share. I should have known better than to trust that you would not.
REPLY: You are overreacting.
I did not publish your email address, nor your name. Your fake phantom identity is intact.
I only verified for the reader that your claim of being a professor was valid. My view is that if you don’t have the integrity to stand up for your own words, then your opinion probably should be ignored. See the policy page: http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/policy/
Robert G. Brown has the integrity to publish and comment here under his own name. Why not you, especially when you are criticizing him? – Anthony
Anthony – Overreacting? It would be incredibly easy for anyone who cared to figure out who I am, given the huge hint you provided. And being anonmyous does not mean lacking integrity — there are enough crazies out there who think that scientists are The Enemy that I’d really prefer to be anonymous. Could I ask you to please nuke the reference to the institution?
REPLY: Fine I’ll nuke it, but you also have to withdraw your criticism of Dr. Brown where you cite your qualifications but are too timid to put your name to them. To me, that’s just unfair and just bogus puffed up ego. Please advise. – Anthony
P.S. most of the “crazies” seem to be on the AGW side, for example this guy
I don’t think you have anything to worry about.
The Pompous Git says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:05 am
Andyj said @ May 27, 2014 at 12:28 am
Prof. Brian Cox on Cosmology showed the world, this famous graph on telly the other week.
“Well, you can get your “science” from the telly and I’ll get mine from the journals. I suspect that means we don’t have very much to communicate to each other…”
No we certainly do not. One is a Well renowned Professor, an Astrophysicist. The other is you.
If you could zoom a camera out far enough and speed up the playback rate fast enough, you would see a repititous bang, expand, contract, bang, expand, contract, repeated forever, going backwards and forewards. This is a super-easy concept to understand. Anti matter, different goemetry, leaky forces, parallel universes, etc, etc, etc. All typical nonsense of asstrologits. Almost every paper I read about astrophysics is utterly, almost chilishly inane, floundering about idiocy of grant/rent seeking “scientists”. Every so often, there is a valuable nugget of real information… I live for those.
Anthony — If that’s your condition, nuke the comment.
My criticisms of Dr. Brown — basically that he’s in an unrelated field and appears to have given up publishing even in his own field — stand on their merits, so I won’t say I didn’t mean it.
REPLY: Well then, the comment stands. There’s nothing wrong with devotion to teaching. – Anthony
I find it difficult to understand why they should get a different result on the expansion of the universe then the standard model of cosmology. A type 1a supernova is a standard candle so we were told in the explanation and so far as I understand it time is only used to measure the rate of increase of the distance of the supernova from us in space. I cannot see the point in saying that space-time is expanding but space is not expanding because the expansion of space is what the big bang is about .
don – – If you read their abstract, they don’t actually get a different result. All they show is that the Tolman test, one of several classic cosmological tests, is consistent with a non-expanding universe. They ignore all the other evidence for an expanding universe. Somehow this was misinterpreted as a claim that they showed the universe isn’t actually expanding.
anna v says:
May 25, 2014 at 8:47 pm
All those high energy experimental physics papers in the journals are validations of the four dimensional space and time. Of course reactors and the atomic bomb are an application. And even GPS would not work correctly if the theory were not taken into account …
Well maybe still there is a different explanation for that.
http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/gps-relativity.asp
Tom van Flanders was very much convinced that Lorentzian relativity was a better fit.
OK he had a lot of fringe theories too…
I am not so good in judging who is right, it is much above my skill level.
There are some facts I know which still make me wonder who has the right answer.
We say the universe is 13.4 billion years old (actually we know that number at 4 digits or so). However the Earth is 4.5 billion old. Even from this first comparison the universe seems very young.
And in this very young years it got to a size of visible universe of 46 billion light-years, however we understand it is about 250 times bigger then that, so more then 10000 billion years big.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/422579/cosmos-at-least-250x-bigger-than-visible-universe-say-cosmologists/
So looking at this size and at the relative young age I do not feel very comfortable we have the right answer for the age.
Also the universe appears to be flat not curved:
http://www.space.com/24207-dark-energy-galaxy-map-aas223.html
http://www.wired.com/2013/10/lux-dark-matter/
And all that dark matter and dark energy that we cannot measure making up 96% of the universe? I wonder if we do not make things up and there is a different explanation? That we (as many times before) do not see the forest because of the trees?
This is why I am happy to look at other “fringe” theories which may point us to the right direction after all:
Gravitation appears to act faster then light, the Earth moves towards where we will see the sun in 8 minutes and is not attracted by the sun as we see it.
http://www.ldolphin.org/vanFlandern/gravityspeed.html
Maybe some more studies in our own solar system can lead us to better understand the oh so fringe electricity?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetosphere_of_Jupiter#Jupiter_as_a_pulsar
We do not yet know well how Earth magnetic field is generated, but we are so sure we know perfectly the answer how the universe came to “light”?
I completely agree that there’s nothing wrong with a devotion to teaching. I also think that there’s no contradiction between teaching well and remaining intellectually alive by contributing actively to one’s field. Indeed, one feeds on the other. I have never met a prospective student who didn’t ask whether there were research opportunities for undergraduates.
That is the mobile version of his website that Blogger creates by default if you access it from a mobile browser.
I accessed Lubos’s website with Chrome v35.0.1916.114 and Firefox v29.0.1 with extensions enabled and naked, no crashes.
Gamecock says (May 26, 2014 at 5:41 pm):
There is a universe. It appears to be expanding. A Big Bang explains the universe as we see it.
I agree that there is a universe. It may appear to be expanding to you but it does not to me. For me the universe is fundamentally incapable of increasing or decreasing its overall size simply because there can be no ulterior frame of reference outside or beyond the universe in which its absolute size could be measured. As Einstein showed there can be no absolute measures of size or distance inside the universe but all are relative. Ultimately then it seems to me that the universe has no absolute size and the notion of its size has no meaning for me. Therefore the notion of its expansion is also ultimately meaningless to me too.
“it narrows the scope of the theory arbitrarily to the time after the universe has already come into existence.”
There’s nothing arbitrary about it! That’s what the Big Bang Theory does! As I said, it has no need to explain anything other than what it explains. Do you demand that it also explain gingivitis?
It is arbitrary because the theorists were not compelled to do it but did it as an act of free will. However, the original Big Bang theory was proposed as an explanation for the absolute origin of the universe including time and space. It was not proposed just as an explanation for the imagined expansion of the universe as it is now. And I am not demanding anything at all of Big Bang theorists, as I have already said. I have accepted that the scope of the theory has been reduced to consideration of events after the alleged creation and that this new, restricted theory is what goes by the name of the “Big Bang Theory” these days.
Soledad, I think you have a valid point.
REPLY: He/she might have had, but they blew the chance of ever commenting here again by using not just fake screen names, but multiple screen names. See list below. While dissenting opinion is welcome, sockpuppetry isn’t tolerated here. So, those comments have been removed.
I find it telling that this person who rails against my discussion with “palindrom” about ethics, has none to speak of by the demonstration of multiple identity fakery on display.
Tough noogies if anyone is upset by this.
– Anthony
SNIP
SOCKPUPPETRY – YOU ARE BANNED PER OUR WUWT POLICY PAGE
“A.E. Soledad”. also goes by these screen names here, same sort of angry rants in all cases.
Norman Woods
James Rollins, Jr.
James Rollins
Bill from Nevada
Bill Wright
Steven R. Vada
Aaron C.
S.R.V.
Richard Vada
-Anthony
Earl says:
May 25, 2014 at 9:35 am
The “Red Shift” must have turned into another color!
——
It was absorbed by the CO2. ;^)
milodonharlani says:
May 26, 2014 at 5:55 pm
Gamecock says:
May 26, 2014 at 5:41 pm
This is akin to opponents of evolution who expect scientific explanations for the origin of species to explain the origin of life as well.
==================
Ha ha ha ha. I’ve been sitting on that knowledge, which I have posted here and elsewhere before.
Life preceding evolution by 2,500,000,000 years doesn’t sway their demand that evolution explain the origin of life.
Magic Turtle did say that he can accept a restricted definition of what the Big Bang Theory covers, so there is no longer a problem. In fact, Magic Turtle was rather gracious.
palindrom said @ May 27, 2014 at 10:51 am
Nowhere have I indicated that I believe that these are magic, or that the two causes of redshift are mutually exclusive. What I have questioned is the concept that one aspect of GR plays no role in current cosmology.
My problems with BBT are philosophical. Basically BBT cosmologists claim that their theory embodies the cosmological principle. The principle includes the laws of physics being applicable at every time and place in the universes. In BBT, I am told there is a time and place where the laws of physics have yet to come into being. I am told that the laws of physics that do come into being shortly after the BB are contingent; i.e. there was no necessity that they be what I have come to know and hold in considerable affection – awe even. This smells awful like a supernatural cause to me and that means what many philosophers refer to as god.
NB I have no particular aversion to god; rather I prefer material explanations for events in the material world. I am also a hard determinist; I cannot find any reason to believe in uncaused events.
So, Anthony, you decided that my request to erase my domain would not be honored. I said “nuke the whole comment”, but I also said I still believed what I wrote, so you refused. Does that about sum it up? Does erasing the statement not count as a retraction? Do I have to say that I actually don’t believe what I wrote in order to for you to erase it?
How about “I’m deeply sorry that I wrote what I did. I guess I don’t believe it any more, because the host told me I couldn’t. All hail free thought!”
REPLY: How about you just suck it up and move on? I don’t take well to whining from people that should have the professionalism and ethics to use their own name when they criticize other university professionals. – Anthony
palindrom said @ May 27, 2014 at 11:26 am
palindrom, you might care to contact Robert and ask him how many death threats he has received. I suspect that the number is extremely close to zero. If my experience of Big School is anything to go by, your most immediate threats are from fellow members of faculty 😉
I am glad that our esteemed host deleted the reference to your place of work since it enabled me to guess who you are with a reasonable degree of certainty. Don’t worry; you are safe. I’m not about to leap on a plane and come and get you. Rather I am still recovering from pneumonia caught from a fellow passenger on my way to New Zealand and contemplating the wisdom of ever flying again.
Lars P. said @ May 27, 2014 at 12:12 pm
Thanks for that Lars. I was particularly taken by these paragraphs:
palindrom said @ May 27, 2014 at 11:45 am
Not only is this comment demeaning to yourself, it is entirely irrelevant. What counts here is what you have to contribute to the discussion. There is no requirement that one be working in the field of astrophysics to comment. I am quite sure that if the topic of beowulf clustering ever came up here that RGB would be more than happy to deal with your comments providing they were relevant to the discussion at hand.
And so we see why we must guard our identities online.
[? .mod]
It’s documented on the page where you put your name that it’s never made public. It doesn’t say all of it, it says the address is never made public.
That’s a pretty incredible breach of journalistic integrity in a field where Academics were seen directly causing other academics, to lose their jobs because of a scientific opinion.
Anthony — thanks very much — really! — for eliminating the reference to the institution.
P.G. — I’m not concerned about death threats, but there are other forms of harrasment that fall well short of that and still can be pretty nasty.
You’ll note that I did contribute the discussion of the cosmology, by pointing out that the authors’ own claims are not as represented by the Sci-News site (nor as repeated here). The empirical case for a hot big bang and an expanding universe is extremely strong and multifaceted, no matter how odd it may seem to many.
I am now going to take Anthony’s advice and “suck it up and move on”. Cheers, everyone!
Whether I believe your responses or not. For one I’d be the first to protect you for your findings and beliefs.
Like any palindrom we should read equally both ways to either influence or add to the debate.
It’s a right to disagree but not a right to hurt another whether it is by threat or action.
Peace 🙂
palindrom said @ May 27, 2014 at 7:14 pm
Yes, The Git was targetted as The Enemy by the Greens some decades ago and that culminated in my then 6 year-old son receiving an obscene phone call intended for me. However, neither my son, nor myself appear to have sustained any lasting damage.
Yes, your early contribution was taken on board. Bear in mind though the comment by a colleague of mine when questioned about his attendance at a “lunatic fringe” conference. He responded that every accepted scientific idea began with someone in the lunatic fringe. Therefore he was going to the most likely place to discover the next great scientific idea.
The microwave background radiation could be redshifted light from ordinary stars, at a distance corresponding to z~1000, for example.
jonesingforozone said @ May 27, 2014 at 11:08 pm
The cosmic background temperature was predicted to be 3.2 K by Sir Arthur Eddington in 1926 based on his measurements of starlight. Le Maitre didn’t publish his BBT (actually Cosmic Egg) until the following year. George Gamow predicted that it would turn out to be 50 K based on BBT in 1946. Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson measured the actual temperature to be ~3 K. Robert Dicke, P. J. E. Peebles, P. G. Roll and D. T. Wilkinson subsequently interpreted this radiation as the signature of the Big Bang.
So no, BBT is not necessary to explain the background temperature of the cosmos.
An explanation for the red shift is that the observable universe is spinning slightly now faster than it was in our past. Our slight acceleration, multiplied by billions of years, makes galaxies appear to be flying apart. GR applies to distance objects from our past, so that their velocities from us may be superluminal.
A microwave spectograph in space would settle any disputes, though, a more economical method may prevail. For example, a GRB, though we would actually have to consider a burst originating at z=1000 for us to find one.
jonesingforozone said @ May 28, 2014 at 12:00 am
Spinning relative to what exactly? If the universe is Everything There Is (by definition) then it cannot be spinning.
jonesingforozone said @ May 28, 2014 at 12:26 am
I somehow doubt that 🙂
mod
Sanders
And so we see why we must guard our identities online.
[? .mod]
I think he is referring to your revealing palindrom’s workplace which made it easy to find out who he actually was.
Soledad did have a point, as acknowledged and rectified – I was glad to find that this morning, all reference to palindrom#s place of work had been removed. I was concerned on the point of principle at what happened to palindrom.
I understand why soledad has now been banned, but he did make a point and stick up for it – that principle of the right not to have personal details or info that makes easy determination of same, revealed on WUWT.
One can sense palindrom’s relief at the rectification.
Long live WUWT and principles
I’ve been listening to the Electric Universe arguement. This seems to be the strongest effort to bring together the growing large number of failures of the BB theory. You can only fudge something so much, it can only get so ugly before people, and these are very intelligent, studious and knowledgable persons, say enough is enough, it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. I wonder at Gell Mann’s talks on the nature of beauty of theories and knowledge – if he wasn’t, in a guarded and gentle manner, encouraging those in the field, to reconsider the validity of the BB. Perhaps there is a parallel with the AGW scenario. There are a lot of similar motivations, egos and funding issues at stake.
I will step back in here briefly on purely cosmological issues.
The Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) did fly a microwave spectrograph in space, namely FIRAS. This showed that the CMB spectrum is a perfect Planck function to within astonishingly tiny error bars, work for which John Mather won the Nobel Prize. The extraordinary match between pure thermal-equilibrium radiation, and also the very large amount of energy remaining in the CMB (it’s comparable in energy density to starlight despite having been greatly attenuated by the explansion) both rule out any interpretation in which the CMB is old starlight.
An overall rotation of the cosmos would lead to an anisotropy of the microwave background that is not observed. Upper limits on any overall rotation are extremely tiny.
What I find most illuminating about COBE is:-
“FIRAS has shown that the cosmic microwave background spectrum matches that of a blackbody of temperature 2.726K with a precision of 0.03% of the peak intensity over a wavelength range 0.1 to 5 mm. Longer wavelength measurements, though not nearly as precise, conducted by Smoot’s group at LBL and collaborators and by other groups, show that the CMB spectrum is well-described by a single temperature blackbody. See figure [attach Intensity and Temperature plots] of spectrum measurements. These measurements limit possible alternative models to the Big Bang extremely strongly and limit potential energy releases in the early Universe, typically to less than 0.1% to 0.01%.”
CompleteIy agree. The microwave background is certainly not red shifted starlight from the outer reaches of the supposed BB. Far, far too deep.
However, I’m compelled to question statements that I do not understand like the last sentence in the statement here. Why does it limit alternative models to BB? Yet says it limits potential energy releases in the early universe to such low levels.
http://aether.lbl.gov/www/projects/cobe/
Obliged for a response 🙂
Anonymity breeds frank, honest declaration of ideas, beliefs and understanding of individuals. That has huge implications for the success and discussion of interesting topics as is greatly demonstrated by WUWT. Institutions straight-jacket the institutionalised to conform a great deal and that holds back progress in many cases. Those institutionalised value opportunity to speak freely and add to the debate, to give of what they know and think and feel without looking over their shoulder for the approach of the men in white coats. We have seen how institutions treat people, UQ, etc of late.
Palindrom was right to ask you to nuke reference to his work place and so pleased that you did.
I think WUWT has lost a good contributer.
The doppler redshift anomolies for galaxies and quasars essentially at the same distance from the UK but with orders of magnitude differences of redshift km/s as well as the quantised nature of same, recently revealed, make it difficult to go with the big bang, for me. There’s a lot more that doesn’t make sense, much mentioned here. But I do smell a rat – I know heavy -weight persons in the field are incredibly gifted, but I also know human nature and have read and listened to so many stories of incredulous, astonishing twists and turns in the validity, promotion and destruction of theories.
Again, I’ll jump back in on Andyj’s request.
The thermal spectrum of the CMB shows that the radiation was in thermal equilibrium with the matter in the universe at some point. This happens naturally in a hot BB model, but is extremely difficult to arrange in other models — people tried very hard to do this a while back, but have basically given up. When they speak of energy release in the early U, they mean such things as a decay of particles that might occur after the radiation decoupled from the matter, which would leave a relic that was not thermalized.
In the 1970s the Berkeley-Nagoya rocket experiment obtained a spurious result showing a large departure from blackbody, which stimulated a great deal of theoretical work on how the CMB could deviate from a thermal spectrum, so the topic is pretty well-explored. But as I noted, it proved to be spurious — apparently some dust came up with the rocket, and ruined the experiment.
The interpretation of the CMB was confirmed even more strongly by the WMAP and Planck satellite measurements of the fine-scale anisotropy. This is an astonishing result, precisely as expected for a hot BB with a scale-free initial perturbation spectrum, and essentially impossible to explain any other way.
neillusion — a couple of words of caution. There is a pretty sizeable presence of amateur cosmologists on the web — the electric U folks, and so on. Essentially none of these folks understand the relevant astronomical evidence, which is extremely voluminous and incredibly detailed; when challenged with actual evidence, they don’t argue but simply insist that their challenger has been brainwashed by too much education. The random-redshift folks (as a professor of mine used to call them) like Arp and Tifft are viewed as godlike figures by many amateurs, but their work has long, long since been superseded by vast data sets such as SDSS, which firmly supports the “conventional” interpretation of redshift.
I’m sorry. After reading the first paragraph I simply cannot make your POV gel with me.
Sure thermal radiation was in equilibrium as would be expected in any model of such distances over the U. Especially with Hoyles beliefs. Made worse in the next paragraph.
In fact I’d of doubted strongly any explosion of energy and matter to carry on being uniform. It would naturally clump up as we see on all older explosions in space.
But as they say, to see into the past we have to look outwards as it radiates inwards. The radiation from the BB would be as far out from us as at least as much as in. One side would radiate back a lot less. We are not seeing this. Like sitting in a cloud. This 3K is a constant that exists in free space and completely envelopes us in a cloud. So further would hide any clumping.
The radiation decay “after de-coupling from matter”.. Basically 3 Kelvin of space noise. Umm, I’m wary of the electric universe theory on many counts but sounds like it to me.
I’ll eat into the other links and try to visualise your POV. I thank you…
Can’t help feeling we’re still all a bunch of blind guys shouting with varying loudness, all in a room each trying to explain the colour of that big four, maybe five, maybe six (if it gets excited) legged thing stood amongst them.
There are large scale ‘cold’ spots in the cmb map that should not be there. That, the need for faster than light travel (accepted in BB but denied at every other level of physics) in inflation, the inflaton?!?!, the need for dark matter, which then required dark energy, none of which we can see/detect/imagine undermine a BB theory, along with a lot of other stuff out there. Why do thesse theories only involve gravity? Especially when the electric force in nature is ~10ttp42 larger than gravity?
You might want to read Dogmatism in Science and Medicine: How Dominant Theories Monopolize Research and Stifle the Search for Truth by Henry Bauer. We discussed it here on WUWT several moons ago. During the last fifty or so years we have seen the emergence of what Bauer calls “knowledge monopolies”: widely held beliefs, things everybody knows to be true. Their chief characteristic is that the general public does not know of the existence of a substantial body of well-qualified dissenters to the common view. These dissenters disagree on the basis of good evidence, but this contrary evidence is simply ignored. Bauer’s examples are from climate change, medicine and cosmology.
Somewhat oddly, the Git worked in a field where the prevailing knowledge monopoly was broken. When I first began farming, organic technologies were declared anti-scientific “muck and mystery”. Today, the use of these technologies is widespread and the role of soil biota well-accepted rather than dismissed. Of course we had the advantage that farming is a business and those who were supposed to be generating ever so much more money from “scientific” farming were not. And those who were supposed to be farming “unscientifically” were not going broke; rather the reverse was happening.
The Pompous Git says:
May 28, 2014 at 11:12 am
Knowledge monopolies are nothing new to the last 50 years. It was only about 50 years ago that the immoveable continent monopoly was broken by plate tectonics, & that overwhelming evidence for catastrophic megafloods broke the only-uniformitarian monopoly on geology. Since at least 1543, science has advanced by breaking such monopolies.
I take back what I said about the cold spots in the cmb map. After watching Pierre-Marie Robitaille demolish them, comprehensively, I return to my previous thoughts. The cmb has not been mapped at all. AT ALL. Its like watching AGW – get demolished. Knowledge monopolies indeed, as I said above, “I know heavy -weight persons in the field are incredibly gifted, but I also know human nature and have read and listened to so many stories of incredulous, astonishing twists and turns in the validity, promotion and destruction of theories.”
@ milodonharlani
The big difference is that ever so much science is now conducted on a grand scale involving many millions of dollars provided by governments and determined by committees. No individual can afford to build a LHC, or put satellites into space. The experiments conducted by myself and my colleagues cost trivial amounts of money so we had similar freedom to that exercised by my hero, Charles Darwin, when he spent the best part of a decade dissecting barnacles.
neillusion said @ May 28, 2014 at 11:39 am
Ah yes, the dude who believes that the oceans cause the CMB. Glad I’d finished my coffee when I read that 🙂
The Pompous Git says:
May 28, 2014 at 12:01 pm
Government & even business funding certainly have had an often baleful effect on the practice or malpractice of science. However even Darwin benefited from the Royal Navy, & was free to follow his naturalist desires by being a Wedgwood heir, along with his cousin heiress wife.
Oceans cause cmb? when the detectors were earth based, they could not and cannot distinguish the thermal energy level from supposed cmb from that absorbed/reradiated from the molecules in water – vapour…oh you’re just teasing! You can’t really think that – if you do then I think you missed the points he made – looks worse than the graph fudging in agw.
“New evidence, based on detailed measurements of the size and brightness of hundreds of galaxies, using The Tolman test for surface brightness, indicates that the Universe is not expanding after all. I’m betting that somewhere, some activist is trying to figure out an angle to blame climate change. (h/t to Roy Spencer)”
Twas a shame to start this conversation in that manner, with a misrepresentation of the claims of the paper, and a cheap shot on people from the “other team”
Anthony Said:
“How about you just suck it up and move on? I don’t take well to whining from people that should have the professionalism and ethics to use their own name when they criticize other university professionals. – Anthony”
Steven Goddard? Who is he? Why do you allow him to not just comment, but post articles criticizing other university professionals, under a fake name?
REPLY: He doesn’t post articles here any more, I showed him the door, and you’ll notice he’s not even in the blog roll. Being anonymous with a fake name “drumphil” certainly seemed fine for your purposes until recently. But I expect university professors to adhere to higher standards, especially when they are criticizing another University professor.
Tough noogies if that bothers you. – Anthony
P.S. Goddard says he’ll out himself at the Heartland conference in July
[asked and answered – not going to discuss it further – Anthony]
[snip]
[snip – see previous response]
[snip – Mr. Schaeffer (if that really is your name) asked and answered – End of story. Move along or find yourself put in the permanent troll bin]
[snip – troll bin for you then sir]
If nothing else, as I saved the entire exchange, I have a great example for anyone who says you wouldn’t use your mod powers to manipulate things to your advantage. I’ll make sure that people can see exactly what sort of questions you would hide and ban someone for asking. Seeyas later.
[Our shop, our perogative. We owe you nothing. Commenting here is a privilege, not a right. But this sort of continuous rapid fire disruptive off-topic harassment was your entire point from the beginning, you aren’t interested in answers, or truth, only denigration, as has been your entire M.O. here with your fake names and now your supposedly real one. No further comments will be published from you. Good day sir.]
Here’s a presentation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0q_pG8FnxQ at the Oxford University Space and Astronomy Society on the “The Evidence that the Universe is NOT Expanding”. In addition to the surface brightness work, it goes over four other sets of evidence. 1)Lithium—decreasing lithium with increasingly old stars contradict BB, but was predicted by theories that explain Li, D and He production from stars and cosmic rays in galaxies. 2)Evidence against dark matter; 3) Large scale structure too big to be formed since the BB, but were predicted with non-BB model from plasma physics and gravitation; 4) Asymmetries that contradict inflation. It also points to Mike Disney’s work which shows that BB theory has more free parameters (over 20 now) than independent predictions. In contrast, non-expanding theories have used either ONE free parameter—the Hubble constant—or two (also MOND gravitational acceleration constant). If Occam’s razor still works, it should certainly cut off Big Bang theory. We are really dealing with two approaches—one, the BB, with unlimited free parameters and “new physics”, and the other that uses laboratory-tested physics and minimizes free parameters.
This “spin” would be relative to the center of the universe and due to its own gravity. If the universe is large enough, any rotational acceleration would appear as linear acceleration.
For the first part of the (local) universe’s presumed existance, the favored cosmological model predicts that the universe decelerated after the “big bang,” then, mysteriously, the universe began to accelerate. ΛCDM cosmologists calls this ever-increasing loss of energy “dark energy,” which presumably acts to pull matter apart.
If our universe is accelerating in terms of radians, rather than in meters/sec², the universe must be quite large for us to not have noticed.
The spin would accelerate, for example, if the central gravity increased or if our orbit decayed.
Then, I propose an incremental approach using novel methodologies such as the one described in A Metal-rich Molecular Cloud Surrounds GRB 050904 at Redshift 6.3
milodonharlani says:
May 25, 2014 at 10:04 pm
I don’t know why this is so hard to grasp. BICEP2 observed gravity waves in the early universe, not what came before the BBT. This finding has implications for what might have come before the BBT, but really is only dispositive for hypotheses about the evolution of our universe soon after the BBT.
As bones said above
bones says:
May 25, 2014 at 3:37 pm
The BICEP2 result needs to be confirmed.
———————-
on the contrary BICEP2 result may be just another misinterpretation of dust in the Milky Way – more of a wishful thinking then solid science:
“However two independent analyses now suggest that those twisting patterns in the CMB polarization could just as easily be accounted for by dust in the Milky Way Galaxy”
http://www.nature.com/news/no-evidence-for-or-against-gravitational-waves-1.15322
Magic Turtle says:
May 27, 2014 at 1:27 pm
“It is arbitrary because the theorists were not compelled to do it but did it as an act of free will. However, the original Big Bang theory was proposed as an explanation for the absolute origin of the universe including time and space. It was not proposed just as an explanation for the imagined expansion of the universe as it is now. And I am not demanding anything at all of Big Bang theorists, as I have already said. I have accepted that the scope of the theory has been reduced to consideration of events after the alleged creation and that this new, restricted theory is what goes by the name of the “Big Bang Theory” these days.”
Exactly! you are bang on… /groan 🙂
A theory of a rotating Gödel universe, updated with the knowledge that this (local) universe has evolved, can be found in the paper, Tommy Gold Revisited: Why Does Not The Universe Rotate?, by George Chapline, Physics and Advanced Technologies Directorate, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and by Pawel O. Mazur, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of South Carolina.
The paper also addresses event horizons, and, therefore, may require further update by Stephen Hawking’s latest theory of black holes, Information Preservation and Weather Forecasting for Black Holes.
Thomas Gold was an astrophysicist at Cornell University.
This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73 and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NautilusCutawayLogarithmicSpiral.jpg under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license.
Read some descriptions of Gödel universes online, though, not one of them exhibited the near linearity that we observe at the 10 giga parsec level.
Version 1.0 of my conception of the present rotating universe with GR, is analogous to a nautilus, except that the universe has many open “chamber tails”, similar to the spiral tails of galaxies.
Just like the spirals of galaxies, these “chamber tails” show distinct, though not complete, separation of clusters of galaxies. A cosmological event horizon would approximately be as wide as an analogous chamber, about 14 giga parsecs for our own horizon. Galaxies may spend an eternity traveling from one adjacent chamber tail to the next, similar to how galactic spirals travel like waves among the stars. Given our present rotational acceleration (rectilinear inflation), casualty anomalies would not propagate since light, much less matter, would not get very far.