![big-bang-8[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/big-bang-81.jpg?quality=83)
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.
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Lars P. said @ur momisugly May 27, 2014 at 12:12 pm
Thanks for that Lars. I was particularly taken by these paragraphs:
palindrom said @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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.”
@ur momisugly 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 @ur momisugly 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.