The Big Bang - Woo or not?

Tubbythin: By-the-by, I'm still interested to know what all this BBT based nuclear fusion power is all about.

Oh I think it's pretty straight-forward; the logic goes like this:

Lerner is a big fan of PC, and an even bigger nay-sayer re LCDM cosmology models.

Lerner is one step closer to developing an interesting fusion device that may produce a net, positive, output of usable energy.

Ergo, plasma powers the universe.

Of course, an unbiased reader would have many questions, such as:
* is Lerner's fusion device expected to produce neutrinos?
* what would be the ultimate source of the net output energy? specifically, what part would nuclear binding energy play?
* over a reasonable timeframe, would hydrogen be consumed in such a device? would helium be produced?

In other words, does Lerner's device work, in generating energy, by converting H to He (in some net sense)? If so, then I'm sure it has an indirect connection with cosmology, but not one I'd've expected Z to be happy about, namely that either we live in a very special part of the universe (so explicitly breaking the Copernican principle) or that it cannot possibly be infinitely old (otherwise all the H would be gone).
 
Z: We're not in the 1950's, many, many completely different methods for fusion have now been established, it doesn't have to be the usual straight nuclear fusion hypothesised in the sun and stars. Z-pinch fusion, Magnetic confinement fusion, IEC fusion, Focus fusion, Dense plasma focus fusion, Perodically Oscillating Plasma Sphere fusion (POPS), Polywell concept fusion, all of which produce neutrinos, and plenty of them.

All of which may be so, and may also (or otherwise) be interesting.

However, what any of it has to do with how fusion powers the Sun is beyond me ... and nothing in any of the great quantities of material you have posted, in this thread and others, even hints at how any of these fusion mechanisms could - might - work in the Sun, to produce the observed output of neutrinos (and photons) ... aside from the crackpot webpages, of course, which make wild claims and contain indigestible word salads.

So perhaps you'd be kind enough, Z, and take a few minutes to write down some back-of-the-envelope calculations that show that even one of these mechanisms might come close to explaining both the observed neutrino output of the Sun and its energy output in photons (you can assume no significant energy outside the 100 nm to 10 micron part of the spectrum). And for good measure, indicate how any of these mechanisms would be stable enough for the observed integrated (photon) output to be constant, to within 0.1% over decades, and 1% over millions of years.
 
[mdma]

DeiRenDopa said:
Assuming that Z has decided to view posts by DRD ...

Z, your stuff about the Sun and electric currents is, no doubt, interesting.
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Well, that was easy. Judging from this post, DRD has been removed from my Ignore list. Lets hope this continues. :)

And i'll try to be a bit less, how can I put this, accepting of critisism of theories. They are only theories after all.

However, what it has to do with any electric currents 'powering' the Sun is not at all obvious, from what you have posted.
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I didn't say that it powers the sun. Ohmic disspiation inside the sun from the current systems that are hidden from us however could in my mind have an effect on the power output of the sun. But I dont have a source for this, just my opinion. The suns a pretty energetic object.

I really only brought up the heliospheric current circuit to show that the fuel the sun uses could indeed not be all it can use, but it could in essense be connected to the galaxy and recieveing the particles that fuel it in nuclear reactions (wherever you believe these reactions are occuring) externally. So it may not need to burn itself out over its lifetime, as current understanding goes.

Further, it's pretty hard to see how any could be such a cause, if only because they all are quite clear that the currents vary substantially over quite short timescales ... yet the Sun's energy output does not (again, with the caveat of the crackpot website source).
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Very true. Infact the constant output of the sun is quite amazingly constant. Which implies that if a percentage of its power is derived from the currents inside it, the E-field system producing those currents would be relatively constant and thus give rise to a constant current component.

Specifically, give a simple, back-of-the-envelope calculation showing that the observed currents (per the published papers) can produce energy outputs that match the observed power of the Sun?
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I need to give this a bit more thought. But i dont think that current alone can likely account for the energy output, its likely a combination of fusions and resistive (current) heating. But I still dont think that the evidence for how gravity works inside large mass bodies is very conclusive, rendering the nuclear core model of sun highly precarious in my mind. We've only collected data of gravity at depths in our own earth down to two miles (about 0.1%), we've still got another 2500 to go! And even even with these measurements there were various gravitational anomalies.

[/mdma]
 
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DeiRenDopa said:
So perhaps you'd be kind enough, Z, and take a few minutes to write down some back-of-the-envelope calculations that show that even one of these mechanisms might come close to explaining both the observed neutrino output of the Sun and its energy output in photons (you can assume no significant energy outside the 100 nm to 10 micron part of the spectrum). And for good measure, indicate how any of these mechanisms would be stable enough for the observed integrated (photon) output to be constant, to within 0.1% over decades, and 1% over millions of years.
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Give me a while, really busy at the mo with going back to uni stuff, but i'm sure I can come up with something.

And i would be patient with Peratt, Scott, Thronhill, etc, I highly expect that over the next year or so some interesting alternative models of the sun are going to be published so we can see what all this electric sun business is all about. The first was thornhills, somewhat unorthodox, publication in the IEEE transactions on plasma science in 2007. And this is no doubt because Peratt can see this fitting in with his model of galaxy formation in some way, or something related.

Scott seems to have backed away from the extravagent claims on his website now, even though its still up and running. His last publication at the IEEE was far more tepid than the personal opinions portrayed on his website. http://members.cox.net/dascott3/SDLIEEE.pdf
 
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Zeuzzz said:
In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded. - Terry Pratchett.

So. Woo or not?

MODERN COSMOLOGY: SCIENCE OR FOLK TALE?




This thread should be about all the points raised in the above quoted article on the Big Bang and modern cosmology. If you cant be bothered to read it and contemplate what is being said, then please don’t post anything. It makes some very pertinent points.
Click to expand...
It makes no pertinent point that I can spot.

The creation of time, space and matter from a sudden "explosion" is indeed weird and something which needs to be explained. Hence, we will and should try to explain it. And we are (see the LHC).

But the fact that the Universe we exist in was created at a given point, and that it's creation resulted in the existence of time, space and matter as we see it, is beyond doubt.
 
This thread is interesting. I am not schooled in physics or comsology, so will not debate any experts here. But maybe someone can help me with a question I have always had:

Does not the big bang violate the first law of thermodynamics?

Also, Steve Hawkins, one of the geniuses who came up with the Big Bang, for years told us that matter sucked into black wholes simply disapeared into nothing...then he was shown to be wrong. His reptuation tarnished.

Point...you can't create something from nothing, and you can't turn something into nothing.
 
reverebison said:
This thread is interesting. I am not schooled in physics or comsology, so will not debate any experts here. But maybe someone can help me with a question I have always had:

Does not the big bang violate the first law of thermodynamics?

Also, Steve Hawkins, one of the geniuses who came up with the Big Bang, for years told us that matter sucked into black wholes simply disapeared into nothing...then he was shown to be wrong. His reptuation tarnished.

Point...you can't create something from nothing, and you can't turn something into nothing.
Click to expand...
No, the Big Bang does not violate any natural law we know of, including the First law of Thermodynamics.

The reason it doesn't violate the 1st law of thermodynamics is that the energy of the explosion of time, matter and energy is supposedly ballanced by the gravitational potential energy of the energy (equivalent to matter via E = mc(squared)) mentioned.
 
reverebison said:
This thread is interesting. I am not schooled in physics or comsology, so will not debate any experts here. But maybe someone can help me with a question I have always had:

Does not the big bang violate the first law of thermodynamics?

Also, Steve Hawkins, one of the geniuses who came up with the Big Bang, for years told us that matter sucked into black wholes simply disapeared into nothing...then he was shown to be wrong. His reptuation tarnished.
Click to expand...
I’m not sure you have the story right , the theory was around before he started to study physics and it is called hawking radiation.


Also a black hole is NOT nothing. Nothing can not have mass.
Point...you can't create something from nothing, and you can't turn something into nothing.
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Hiya RB,
That is because of semantic misapplication of nothing to the BBE (big bang event) remember that is label was applied by a detractor of the theory, it might also just be called 'the expanding universe theory'.

From observations that Hubble and an assistant made it was found that there was a relationship between the luminosity of Cepheid variables and the 'red shift' of galaxies, in that in general the dimmer the Cepheid variable the greater the redshift. Cepheid were used because there is a relationship believed to exist between the period of the variable and it's absolute luminosity IE you can tell how bright it is at it's peak from how long it's period is.

Now while there are some other ideas about where redshift comes from it is commonly accepted theory that it comes from the expansion of the universe. It is not as though a giant firecracker went off, it is more that space time itself is expanding (the cosmological constant that Einstein found , rejected and hated), think of an expanding balloon, that isn't a two dimensional surface.

So here you are with this thing, it looks as though (and may be) that the farther an object is the faster it is moving away from us. this is the main point of the theory called Hubble law. Now someone at some point asked a question, if we know it is expanding, what happens if we look at time? Well if we reverse time then everything is getting closer. And there is a place where it converges in to a very small area.

Now this is where Hoyle's appellation becomes misleading: "big bang". That is not really part of the theory. it looks as though the universe is expanding, so a conjecture is made that at some time it was very small. But and it is the Big Butt of the theory, it is not an explosion, it is not a fire ball, it is not a big bang.

It is a rapid expansion of a very small, very hot, very dense universe. It does not go bang, or whoomf or sproing even. Because here is the deal, we are in a universe that we most likely can not see out of, or leave or get information in and out of. we are closed into our universe and can not do any more than speculate about what is 'outside' of it. All we know is that it is expanding and it looks as though we can make theories that match it having expanded from a very small universe to a very large one.

We can not leave sense or see beyond the space or time of our universe. It did not come from nothing, it came from "We don't know, we can't know." There are many possible somethings that our universe could have come from yet all of them are hidden from us and can't be known at this time.

So as I said earlier, the universe came from something something we are ignorant of and that is hidden from us. It could be 'nothing' as in a quantum fluctuation creating universe, anti-universe pairs, it could be recursive inflationary bubbles of space time, it could be branes intersecting in 11 dimensional space, and it could be the Great Burrito eaten by the Great Fox and A Mighty Fart Was Loosed. We don't know.

Now some bright person will find a way to perhaps judge the consequences of the different theories.

But the BBE does not violate the 2nd law of thermo dynamics. as far as we know it came from 'something' or 'nothing we can know'.

But I think there is a clue, space is empty right? Like take space between galaxy clusters and find an area that has no matter for a huge area, like a couple square meters. What is that space, there are no particles in it, and there is no energy (like photons) in it. there is no something as we think or stuff in it, but there is this thing called the ‘vacuum energy' there, even in empty space. Or so the story goes.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
 
Dancing:

thanks for that great explanation.....so the BBe theory does say that the universe may be infinitely old...but also says that matter and energy is finite. Is that correct?
 
Dancing David said:
Hiya RB,
That is because of semantic misapplication of nothing to the BBE (big bang event) remember that is label was applied by a detractor of the theory, it might also just be called 'the expanding universe theory'.

From observations that Hubble and an assistant made it was found that there was a relationship between the luminosity of Cepheid variables and the 'red shift' of galaxies, in that in general the dimmer the Cepheid variable the greater the redshift. Cepheid were used because there is a relationship believed to exist between the period of the variable and it's absolute luminosity IE you can tell how bright it is at it's peak from how long it's period is.

Now while there are some other ideas about where redshift comes from it is commonly accepted theory that it comes from the expansion of the universe. It is not as though a giant firecracker went off, it is more that space time itself is expanding (the cosmological constant that Einstein found , rejected and hated), think of an expanding balloon, that isn't a two dimensional surface.

So here you are with this thing, it looks as though (and may be) that the farther an object is the faster it is moving away from us. this is the main point of the theory called Hubble law. Now someone at some point asked a question, if we know it is expanding, what happens if we look at time? Well if we reverse time then everything is getting closer. And there is a place where it converges in to a very small area.

Now this is where Hoyle's appellation becomes misleading: "big bang". That is not really part of the theory. it looks as though the universe is expanding, so a conjecture is made that at some time it was very small. But and it is the Big Butt of the theory, it is not an explosion, it is not a fire ball, it is not a big bang.

It is a rapid expansion of a very small, very hot, very dense universe. It does not go bang, or whoomf or sproing even. Because here is the deal, we are in a universe that we most likely can not see out of, or leave or get information in and out of. we are closed into our universe and can not do any more than speculate about what is 'outside' of it. All we know is that it is expanding and it looks as though we can make theories that match it having expanded from a very small universe to a very large one.

We can not leave sense or see beyond the space or time of our universe. It did not come from nothing, it came from "We don't know, we can't know." There are many possible somethings that our universe could have come from yet all of them are hidden from us and can't be known at this time.

So as I said earlier, the universe came from something something we are ignorant of and that is hidden from us. It could be 'nothing' as in a quantum fluctuation creating universe, anti-universe pairs, it could be recursive inflationary bubbles of space time, it could be branes intersecting in 11 dimensional space, and it could be the Great Burrito eaten by the Great Fox and A Mighty Fart Was Loosed. We don't know.

Now some bright person will find a way to perhaps judge the consequences of the different theories.

But the BBE does not violate the 2nd law of thermo dynamics. as far as we know it came from 'something' or 'nothing we can know'.

But I think there is a clue, space is empty right? Like take space between galaxy clusters and find an area that has no matter for a huge area, like a couple square meters. What is that space, there are no particles in it, and there is no energy (like photons) in it. there is no something as we think or stuff in it, but there is this thing called the ‘vacuum energy' there, even in empty space. Or so the story goes.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_energy
Click to expand...



A fine summary :thumbsup:

However I still think that on philosophical grounds it is legitimate to question this approach. Hoyles critisisms of BBT were philosphical in nature, thus why he developed the steady state theories. But even these didn't really escape a big bang either, or the big question. Where did this come from? How was it brought into being? Something out of nothing? Issues.

Of course, you can solve these problems by assuming infinity. And when you do this infinity starts cropping up everywhere in your models of the universe, and it all becomes a bit confusing, and overwhelming for thoses not confortable with the concept of infinity. People want to ask, where did infinity come from? but thats a misnomer. The nature of infinity explicity answers that question.

I think that Hoyles critisisms are still pertinent to this day. And as i'm sure people here are aware, I endorse an infinite universe. For many reasons. And due to this i remain skeptical of BBT.

I happened to stumble across the page about this issue on the 'null physics' (whatever that is, haven't really explored this yet) website. Which makes for very interesting reading, its essentially getting at the same epistemic arguments often made by PC proponents against the big bang. Both approaches are valid from a scientific perspective, they are just so amazinlgy different its impossible to say which one is correct and the other is wrong.

heres that site that peaked my interest: http://www.nullphysics.com/sampchap1.pdf

UNIVERSAL CONSERVATION

The conservation of energy is the cornerstone of modern physics, yet is blatantly violated by a universal origin from nothing - ex nihilo. There are four ways to address this problem: [.....]

Eternal energy, periodic universal renewal. Here the energy of which the universe is composed is eternal, and the Big Bang is just the latest cosmic renovation. This satisfies energy conservation but fails to explain why the universe exists instead of nothingness. Philosophers attack this issue with the disingenuous counter argument that “somethingness” could well be the universe’s natural state, and we have no way of knowing otherwise. The last time this line of reasoning was used to mask a general ignorance of a phenomenon was when Archimedes explained gravitational attraction as an object’s innate tendency to return to its natural place. This was over 2200 years ago! We ought to be able to do better by now. Speculation about exceptions to fundamental physical laws is entertaining, but the universe exists now, there is a reason why this is the case, and no violation of energy has ever been observed. [......]

TIME BEFORE TIME

The idea that the universe came into being in the distant past is as perplexing as how it emerged from nothingness in the first place. If it began at some particular moment, what transpired prior to this? If no events preceded the Big Bang, how could time be reckoned at all? This is the time before time problem. If time predates the universe, energy emerged at some time t0 in what will be called the post-time model:

SPACE-TIME → t0 → SPACE-TIME-ENERGY

This doesn’t really make the time before time problem any easier. When was primordial space-time born in this model? Does it even need an origin? Either primordial space-time has been around forever or it had an origin itself. If the latter is true, space-time begins at t0 and energy follows at t1, yielding the two-stage model:
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Unfortunately, I think you have to buy the book to read the rest. Which hasn't exactly raised my hopes for this 'null physics' theory. If it was so good then they should publish it in a journal or upload it to arxiv.
 
Good explanation I think DD, except for this bit:

Dancing David said:
Now while there are some other ideas about where redshift comes from it is commonly accepted theory that it comes from the expansion of the universe. It is not as though a giant firecracker went off, it is more that space time itself is expanding (the cosmological constant that Einstein found , rejected and hated), think of an expanding balloon, that isn't a two dimensional surface.
Click to expand...

The Universe is not expanding because of the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant was added because Einstein erroneously thought the Universe was stationary. However, acting on an expanding Universe, it can cause an acceleration. Hence it could be the solution to "dark energy".
 
Zeuzzz said:
I happened to stumble across the page about this issue on the 'null physics' (whatever that is, haven't really explored this yet) website. Which makes for very interesting reading, its essentially getting at the same epistemic arguments often made by PC proponents against the big bang. Both approaches are valid from a scientific perspective, they are just so amazinlgy different its impossible to say which one is correct and the other is wrong.
Click to expand...
I take it you missed the 17 page thread on here:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=94861
Its quite easy to say which is wrong.

Unfortunately, I think you have to buy the book to read the rest. Which hasn't exactly raised my hopes for this 'null physics' theory. If it was so good then they should publish it in a journal or upload it to arxiv.
Click to expand...
Indeed.
 
Tubbythin said:
The Universe is not expanding because of the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant was added because Einstein erroneously thought the Universe was stationary. However, acting on an expanding Universe, it can cause an acceleration. Hence it could be the solution to "dark energy".
Click to expand...

Well, just to explain that a little more - universes full of ordinary matter and radiation have an expansion history that gradually slows with time. At some point it may stop and turn around, leading eventually to a "big crunch", or the expansion may continue forever, but gradually slowing.

The presence of dark energy allows the rate of expansion to increase with time, which is what we observe in the recent stages of the universe.
 
Zeuzzz said:
[mdma]

I didn't say that it powers the sun. Ohmic disspiation inside the sun from the current systems that are hidden from us however could in my mind have an effect on the power output of the sun. But I dont have a source for this, just my opinion. The suns a pretty energetic object.
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Indeed. And we know the rate that energy is produced. And we can measure the neutrinos from the Sun and independently measure the neutrino mixing angles. And guess what, the neutrino flux is consistent with the SSM. No need for any ohmic dissipation. Who was it who was talking about parsimony?

I really only brought up the heliospheric current circuit to show that the fuel the sun uses could indeed not be all it can use, but it could in essense be connected to the galaxy and recieveing the particles that fuel it in nuclear reactions (wherever you believe these reactions are occuring) externally. So it may not need to burn itself out over its lifetime, as current understanding goes.
Click to expand...
And these come from where?

I need to give this a bit more thought. But i dont think that current alone can likely account for the energy output, its likely a combination of fusions and resistive (current) heating.
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Of course it can't. Neutrinos remember!


But I still dont think that the evidence for how gravity works inside large mass bodies is very conclusive, rendering the nuclear core model of sun highly precarious in my mind. We've only collected data of gravity at depths in our own earth down to two miles (about 0.1%), we've still got another 2500 to go! And even even with these measurements there were various gravitational anomalies.
Click to expand...
So I guess you think we can't rule out there being a neutron star in the centre of the Earth or something.
 
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Zeuzzz said:
I happened to stumble across the page about this issue on the 'null physics' (whatever that is, haven't really explored this yet) website. Which makes for very interesting reading, its essentially getting at the same epistemic arguments often made by PC proponents against the big bang. Both approaches are valid from a scientific perspective, they are just so amazinlgy different its impossible to say which one is correct and the other is wrong.

heres that site that peaked my interest: http://www.nullphysics.com/sampchap1.pdf

Unfortunately, I think you have to buy the book to read the rest. Which hasn't exactly raised my hopes for this 'null physics' theory. If it was so good then they should publish it in a journal or upload it to arxiv.
Click to expand...
Null Physics is just another of the many crackpot theories on the web. Here is a review of it from a working physicist. If you like the concept of infinity then the mathematics in it will appall you. Terence Witt throws away 200 years of understanding of infinity by replacing it with his own definition. He makes it into a numeric length that has "magnitude" just so that he can treat infinity as a number.
The rest of his physics is similar crackpot-ism. His philosophy does not like quantum mechanics and its "illusory probability cloud known as orbitals" so he tries to replace the atomic model with a classical model by fixing Rutherford's model with a new physical law so that a ground state exists. The problems are many, e.g. the very first equation he starts with is from quantum mechanics!
He defines neutrons as a bound state of a proton and electron. There is no such bound state and we rarely see electrons as a result of neutron-neutron collisions.
His cosmology demands that stars are recycled back into hydrogen and so the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy is a "galactic core" (a massive body that happens to be just bigger then the event horizon). A galactic core was predicted to have a temperature of 280,000K to disassociate hydrogen and allow it to escape from the core (red-shifted to infrared temperatures). He is actually just retracted that prediction after someone pointed out to him that the galactic core is well observed including in the infrared band.
 
Reality Check said:
He defines neutrons as a bound state of a proton and electron. There is no such bound state and we rarely see electrons as a result of neutron-neutron collisions.
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Not to mention being entirely inconsistent with about 70 years of particle physics data.

His cosmology demands that stars are recycled back into hydrogen and so the super-massive black hole in the center of our galaxy is a "galactic core" (a massive body that happens to be just bigger then the event horizon). A galactic core was predicted to have a temperature of 280,000K to disassociate hydrogen and allow it to escape from the core (red-shifted to infrared temperatures). He is actually just retracted that prediction after someone pointed out to him that the galactic core is well observed including in the infrared band.
Click to expand...
Doesn't care much for the second law of thermodynamics either, does he?
 
Zeuzzz said:
Its more to do with funding and god damn money than anything else, and thus why hundreds of scientists have signed the document calling for more money to be put into alternative cosmology ideas now (see:http://www.cosmologystatement.org/).
Click to expand...

I was bored. So I looked at some of the links on that list. Quite interesting. Apparently, atoms have feelings, special relativity was a hoax, and the Earth is just approaching its 6011th birthday.

By the way, ever heard of project Steve, Zeuzzz?
 
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Z: I really only brought up the heliospheric current circuit to show that the fuel the sun uses could indeed not be all it can use, but it could in essense be connected to the galaxy and recieveing the particles that fuel it in nuclear reactions (wherever you believe these reactions are occuring) externally. So it may not need to burn itself out over its lifetime, as current understanding goes.

That leads to another request for a back of the envelope calculation: what is the estimated flow of mass into the Sun, consistent with the sources you cited (excluding the crackpot one)?

Space probes have been doing in situ observations of the solar wind for several decades now, and have found that it is (net) outward, away from the Sun. In other words, the Sun is losing mass to interstellar space, not gaining mass from it. It will be interesting to see how the results of your calculation compare with the estimates of mass loss due to the solar wind.
 
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But why are we discussing the solar wind anyway?

With Z's admission that the BBT is not woo, isn't this thread done?
 
reverebison said:
Dancing:

thanks for that great explanation.....so the BBe theory does say that the universe may be infinitely old...but also says that matter and energy is finite. Is that correct?
Click to expand...


Not as I understand it, the 'universe' is bounded by space/time, we do not knwo what is outside of it. If we run the expansion backwards we get a time-zero of 13-15billion years. There is not universe we can observe prior to that point, we can not see past or beyond the universe.

we can not know what was before the universe or next to the universe. we can only know the universe.
 
Zeuzzz said:
A fine summary :thumbsup:

However I still think that on philosophical grounds it is legitimate to question this approach. Hoyles critisisms of BBT were philosphical in nature, thus why he developed the steady state theories. But even these didn't really escape a big bang either, or the big question. Where did this come from? How was it brought into being? Something out of nothing? Issues.
Click to expand...
Questions without answers.
Of course, you can solve these problems by assuming infinity. And when you do this infinity starts cropping up everywhere in your models of the universe, and it all becomes a bit confusing, and overwhelming for thoses not confortable with the concept of infinity. People want to ask, where did infinity come from? but thats a misnomer. The nature of infinity explicity answers that question.
Click to expand...
it is already there. especialy in particle physics and the DeHooft reconciliations.
I think that Hoyles critisisms are still pertinent to this day. And as i'm sure people here are aware, I endorse an infinite universe. For many reasons. And due to this i remain skeptical of BBT.
Click to expand...
Sorry all philosophy is specualative.
I happened to stumble across the page about this issue on the 'null physics' (whatever that is, haven't really explored this yet) website. Which makes for very interesting reading, its essentially getting at the same epistemic arguments often made by PC proponents against the big bang. Both approaches are valid from a scientific perspective, they are just so amazinlgy different its impossible to say which one is correct and the other is wrong.

heres that site that peaked my interest: http://www.nullphysics.com/sampchap1.pdf






Unfortunately, I think you have to buy the book to read the rest. Which hasn't exactly raised my hopes for this 'null physics' theory. If it was so good then they should publish it in a journal or upload it to arxiv.
Click to expand...


Some questions have no answers.
 
Tubbythin said:
Good explanation I think DD, except for this bit:



The Universe is not expanding because of the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant was added because Einstein erroneously thought the Universe was stationary. However, acting on an expanding Universe, it can cause an acceleration. Hence it could be the solution to "dark energy".
Click to expand...


Thanks, I am a lay person and may present the wrong notions.

:)
 
Zeuzzz said:
However I still think that on philosophical grounds it is legitimate to question this approach. Hoyles critisisms of BBT were philosphical in nature, thus why he developed the steady state theories. But even these didn't really escape a big bang either, or the big question. Where did this come from? How was it brought into being? Something out of nothing? Issues.
Click to expand...

Since you're being more reasonable for the moment (mdma?) I'll address this. The evidence is overwhelming that the universe is expanding. Independently of that we also have very strong evidence that general relativity is correct, and one of the predictions of GR is that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. So theory and observation match nicely, and we can then use the theory to "predict" what the universe looked like in the past. The answer is that it was smaller, denser, and expanding more quickly. Eventually as we go back we come to a time (around 13.7 billion years ago) when the universe was so extremely hot and dense that our theories break down. We simply do not know what happened before that. Anyone that says this means that "something came from nothing" misunderstands the basics.

Of course this raises any number of interesting and profound questions about what came before. But you cannot just discard the theory because of those questions, or because it disturbs you for some "philosophical" or religious reason. That would be deeply unscientific - science is an evidence-based discipline. No one is really capable of imagining quantum mechanics, and yet it is correct. "Proof by lack of imagination" is not valid - the universe has no reason to conform to our ideas.

As with many other phenomena in the history of science, the discovery of the expansion of the universe and its consequences for its origin or early stages came as a deep shock to all concerned. There was very strong resistance for many years, but the accumulated evidence is simply overwhelming, and the objections and alternatives one by one dropped away over the years. Eventually you just have to accept what your measurements and well-tested theories tell you, even if you don't like it. That process often takes a generation or so, but as the old guard dies, so do their discredited ideas. That happened years ago with steady-state theories.
 
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reverebison said:
Does not the big bang violate the first law of thermodynamics?
Click to expand...

First of all, total energy is conserved by the expansion of the universe. For example if the expansion slows (so the kinetic energy decreases), the gravitational potential energy increases just as as to compensate, much like a ball rolling up an incline and slowing down. So as we go back into the past towards the moment of the big bang, the energy remains constant.

But, you may object, couldn't conservation of energy (which is the first law of thermo) be violated right at the big bang itself, at t=0?

In order for that to be true, we'd have to

1) know what came before the big bang
2) find a formulation of energy conservation that apples to that, and
3) check that whatever it was, its energy was different than that of the universe that resulted from the bang.

We cannot do any of those things - we simply do not know what happened before a certain instant which is a little after t=0. So while questions can be asked, there is no contradiction or problem within the part of the theory we are sure of. Moreover I can give you many theoretical ideas which make a prediction for what came before, and which answer 1,2, and 3 in various different ways, all of which are consistent.

So the answer is, we don't know, but there's no inconsistency or paradox that needs resolution - just a set of intriguing questions.
 
reverebison said:
Dancing:

thanks for that great explanation.....so the BBe theory does say that the universe may be infinitely old...but also says that matter and energy is finite. Is that correct?
Click to expand...

The universe might be infinitely old, it might not be. The BB alone does not tell us which is correct. It is natural, however, if you believe that the universe is only a finite age, to consider that point at which the universe was it's smallest, hottest, and densest to be the point where it began. Also, IIRC, certain solutions of General Relativity had time itself beginning then, which would account for the finite age.
 
Zeuzzz said:
Guilt by association with a picture.
Click to expand...

No I didn't. You clearly do not understand what the fallacy of Guilt By Association is.


Guilt By Association goes as follows:

Person P accepts idea I.
Therefore, I must be wrong.

I never committed such a fallacy. It is reasonable of me to question your underlying motives with an avatar such as yours and creating a ridiculous thread such as this.
 
sol invictus said:
Since you're being more reasonable for the moment (mdma?) I'll address this. The evidence is overwhelming that the universe is expanding.
Click to expand...



I agree that the evidence the universe is expanding is quite high. But, i still dont think that its set in stone. I will get back to this when the abstracts from the CCC2 conference are available online, as they rigourously put expansion under scrutiny, and from what i've seen they dont think that expansion is as completely conclusive as it is often portrayed. Which is what should happen for a theory that so many models are predicated on. Guess we'll just have to wait and see what points they come up with.

You can see some preliminary stuff about the conference here, starting with panel 1 which looks at the evidnce for and against expansion:

http://www.cosmology.info/2008conference/panel-1.htm
Panel 1 - Reality of Cosmic Expansion
Panel 2 - Origin of Microwave Radiation
Panel 3 - Quasi-Stellar Objects
Panel 4 - Large Scale Structure
Panel 5 - Methods for Selecting Alternative Cosmologies
Panel 6 - General Alternative Cosmologies
Panel 7 - Hubble Relationship Alternatives
Panel 8 - Dark Matter and Dark Energy Alternatives
Click to expand...



Independently of that we also have very strong evidence that general relativity is correct, and one of the predictions of GR is that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. So theory and observation match nicely, and we can then use the theory to "predict" what the universe looked like in the past. The answer is that it was smaller, denser, and expanding more quickly. Eventually as we go back we come to a time (around 13.7 billion years ago) when the universe was so extremely hot and dense that our theories break down. We simply do not know what happened before that. Anyone that says this means that "something came from nothing" misunderstands the basics.

Of course this raises any number of interesting and profound questions about what came before. But you cannot just discard the theory because of those questions, or because it disturbs you for some "philosophical" or religious reason. That would be deeply unscientific - science is an evidence-based discipline. No one is really capable of imagining quantum mechanics, and yet it is correct. "Proof by lack of imagination" is not valid - the universe has no reason to conform to our ideas.

As with many other phenomena in the history of science, the discovery of the expansion of the universe and its consequences for its origin or early stages came as a deep shock to all concerned. There was very strong resistance for many years, but the accumulated evidence is simply overwhelming, and the objections and alternatives one by one dropped away over the years. Eventually you just have to accept what your measurements and well-tested theories tell you, even if you don't like it. That process often takes a generation or so, but as the old guard dies, so do their discredited ideas. That happened years ago with steady-state theories.
Click to expand...



I do kinda agree with all of this. But, as i say, all scientific theories are falliable, and alternatives should not be mocked just because some people think they have already found the truth of the matter.

And I think this especially true in astronomy/cosmology, where it is very hard to know what is going on exactly so far away and with such limited data (only EM spectra), whereas other areas of science can be much more definitive.

to quote disney's fine publication pointing this out again:

The Case Against Cosmology - M.J. Disney

PARTICULAR DIFFICULTIES FOR COSMOLOGY AS A SCIENCE
1. Only one Universe.
2. Universe opaque for 56/60 decades since Planck era.
3. Need to extrapolate physics over huge distances.
4. Need to work with what we can currently detect. [But . . . ]
5. Local background very bright.
6. Distances very hard to determine (standard candles).
7. Observational Selection insidious.
8. Distant galaxies hard to measure and interpret unambiguously.
9. Luminosity Functions unreliable.
10. Geometry, astrophysics and evolution often entangled.
11. Physics of early Universe unknown (and unknowable?)
12. Human time-frame so short compared to cosmic.
13. Origin of inertia.
14. The singularity.
Click to expand...
 
anticonspiracy911 said:
What is your underlying motive for such an absurd thread? Do you hate science? Do you want there to be something that makes you feel special? Do tell please.
Click to expand...


Not even going to lower myself to this level.

You've cast your line, but you aint gonna catch a bite.
 
I have to agree that Alex Grey is awesome, and that you shouldn't judge someone by their avatar or screen name necessarily. My screen name could be taken to be rather woo-ish.

I think this thread is enough evidence to judge Z on, no need to reference his avatar.
 
Z: alternatives should not be mocked just because some people think they have already found the truth of the matter.

Just so that I do not misunderstand ... may a reader infer from this that you think
a) alternatives have been mocked?
b) the sole basis for attacking alternatives is (blind?) belief in mainstream models?

Z: And I think this especially true in astronomy/cosmology, where it is very hard to know what is going on exactly so far away and with such limited data (only EM spectra), whereas other areas of science can be much more definitive.

For astronomy, we have considerably more than "only EM spectra"!

Historically, astronomy concerned not only the stars and galaxies, but also the planets, comets, and even the Moon; today, something called planetary sciences has taken over, with astronomy now having a relatively secondary role.

And for objects beyond the solar system, we have the universe coming to us in the form of cosmic rays, neutrinos (e.g. SN1987A), some 'stardust' (interstellar dust grains), a modest about of neutral He (also from the ISM), and - possibly very soon - gravitational waves.

And that's a nice segue into the broader question: in the Z view of astronomy (and cosmology), as a science, what are the criteria for assessing theories and models?

Oh, and please, spare us the editorial about Disney's document ... if calling Scott's book garbage (for example) makes your blood boil, you should try hard to not make others' blood boil (Disney's document is anything but "fine").
 
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Zeuzzz said:
Not even going to lower myself to this level.

You've cast your line, but you aint gonna catch a bite.
Click to expand...

You're not going to tell us why you started such an absurd thread? Because I guarantee you if you did any honest research on the Big Bang Theory you wouldn't have so many misconceptions about it, and you wouldn't have started such an absurd thread.
 
Third Eye Open said:
I have to agree that Alex Grey is awesome, and that you shouldn't judge someone by their avatar or screen name necessarily. My screen name could be taken to be rather woo-ish.

I think this thread is enough evidence to judge Z on, no need to reference his avatar.
Click to expand...

Except I wasn't judging him solely on his avatar. When I see someone with an Alex Grey avatar slandering a pretty well established scientific theory, and becoming so absurd as to question whether it's woo or not, you make the connections and have your suspicions on the underlying motivations.
 
anticonspiracy911 said:
You're not going to tell us why you started such an absurd thread? Because I guarantee you if you did any honest research on the Big Bang Theory you wouldn't have so many misconceptions about it, and you wouldn't have started such an absurd thread.
Click to expand...


I started the thread because I have an opinion, and I want to discuss that opinion with people to see if its justifiable.

While my op may not have been the best way to start a civilzed debate, it certainly seems to have worked. You dont have to participate if you dont want to.
 
Zeuzzz said:
I started the thread because I have an opinion, and I want to discuss that opinion with people to see if its justifiable.

While my op may not have been the best way to start a civilzed debate, it certainly seems to have worked. You dont have to participate if you dont want to.
Click to expand...

Except opinions don't matter in science. What matters is the evidence. Judging by your posts in this thread, like so many other people, you have several misconceptions about the Big Bang Theory which smarter people than me have already addressed. Maybe you should of honestly researched the theory before you made a thread entitled "The Big Bang - Woo or not?" You know, it really isn't all that productive to talk about something to which you know nothing about.
 
DeiRenDopa said:
Z: alternatives should not be mocked just because some people think they have already found the truth of the matter.

Just so that I do not misunderstand ... may a reader infer from this that you think
a) alternatives have been mocked?
b) the sole basis for attacking alternatives is (blind?) belief in mainstream models?
Click to expand...



Yes. Well, not really mocked, but just dismissed without consideration. Like raman scattering (or CREIL) I posted on the first page. Sol dismissed it without even seeing what it was, he just declared it as crackpot without stating a valid reason why it is wrong.

And I do think that some people put blind faith in mainstream models. They just spend all their time learning about it as if its proven fact, and the possibility that what they learnt could be wrong to some extent never enters their mind. This is when people get defensive of theories and dismiss others with no valid reason. Which some are more guilty of than others.

I think that you've got quite a good overview of the alternative theories floating about on the net DRD, and you often give scientific reasoning to dismiss them, but this is not true with many, many, other people.

And that's a nice segue into the broader question: in the Z view of astronomy (and cosmology), as a science, what are the criteria for assessing theories and models?
Click to expand...



Very simple. The least complex theory with the fewest free parameters that explains all the relevant data is the more successful theory.


Oh, and please, spare us the editorial about Disney's document ... if calling Scott's book garbage (for example) makes your blood boil, you should try hard to not make others' blood boil (Disney's document is anything but "fine").
Click to expand...


But its cetainly an interesting perspective.
 
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Is robinson banned? :eek:

hmph. This forum is missing somnething without him.

Anyone know the length of the ban?
 
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