Lambda-CDM theory - Woo or not?

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Ziggurat said:
Boy, that takes me back. It was hilarious seeing Michael try to define pressure in terms of the ideal gas law.
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Yep. Of course, I'm sure MM would be only too happy to repeat that argument for another 30 pages rather than (say) trying to propose an actual alternative cosmology model and compare it to data.

Michael? Here's a suggestion---a temporary, practical suggestion. There's a long, long list of undergrad-physics-concepts that you think we all have wrong. Let's call them Mozconceptions. The Casimir effect, and its relationship to generalized pressure and quantum vacuum energies, is just one of the Mozconceptions.

I think there are two categories of Mozconceptions. First, there are things that you think are slam-dunk "errors" in standard cosmology. You think that Lambda-CDM is trivially false because, in the entire history of modern cosmology, nobody thought about "negative pressure" long enough to notice that it has the opposite sign of ideal gas pressure. Similarly, you think that nobody ever counted the free parameters in Lambda-CDM so the fits are erroneous; that nobody ever looked at the continuity of B-field lines before dealing with reconnection; etc. So you think "if I can just win ONE of these arguments then LCDM is dead". Let's call these Type A Mozconceptions.

Then, there are Freshman-level concepts that you think do not work against EU/PC. You think there's something wrong with mainstream descriptions of heat conduction, ionization, blackbodies, E&M forces and the equivalence principle, the neutrality of the solar wind, etc. If you don't win ALL of these arguments, your model needs to be substantially revised, at the very least. Let's call these Type B Mozconceptions.

Here's a suggestion, MM. If you want to argue about one of the Type A Mozconceptions, there is an enormous body of literature which will explain these effects to you. You are welcome to read that literature and try to poke holes in it. You can do this on your own; you'll find well-typeset equations and diagrams; and you will not waste everyone's time.

If you want to argue about the Type B Mozconceptions, that's an iota more promising. If you want to talk about the EU/PC model, stand up and defend the Type B Mozconceptions. Tell us why the textbook-standard thermodynamics laws don't heat up your iron sun; tell us why the textbook-standard EM equations yield forces 10^30 times too small to have cosmological effects. Remember, these are things that no one except you has any interest in defending, and no one except us is willing to waste time discussing. That's worth wasting thread space on.

Does that make sense? If we're discussing a Type B Mozconception, like (say) "MM thinks that Coulomb repulsion makes galaxies accelerate", don't abort the discussion by switching back to rehashes of the Type A Mozconceptions. If you do, the EU/PC model goes nowhere; I continue thinking what I was thinking before ("In the absence of evidence to the contrary, EU/PC is proven wrong by X,Y, and Z"); and you get to have standard physics textbook material spoon-fed to you over and over. That's a waste of electrons. If you can stay focused on your own model, maybe we get somewhere.

(For example: you actually learned something, I think, when we forced you to defend your interpretation of the SDO images---a type-B Mozconception---in the "aether batteries" thread. And for 20 or 30 pages the thread did something other than rehash the same arguments. Then you switched from "defending your interpretation" to "generic griping about dark energy"---lots of Type As---with the usual effect that the last 30 pages of the thread look like they were cut-and-pasted from the last 30 pages of any other thread you've ever been in. Next time, stick to Type B.)
 
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Does Michael Mozina believe that stars exist

Other posters have pointed out Michael Mozina's problems with science and logic. So I may as well have a go :) !

Does Michael Mozina believe that stars exist?

According to his definiton of science, only things that can be tested in experiments in labs exist. We have never had a star in a lab and so according to MM they cannot exist!

Maybe that is too strict an interpretation of his personal definition of science. He may deduce that stars exist despite not being detected in labs because
  • We observe bright lights in the sky.
  • Our knowledge of physics tells us that the cause of these bright lights is some form of light emitting objects.
  • We call the cause "stars".
But of course the same logic tells scientists dark energy exists despite not being detected in labs because
  • They observe that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing.
  • Our knowledge of physics tells us that the cause of this increase is some form of energy.
  • They call the cause "dark energy" (because "energy" is already taken).
So if MM states that dark energy does not exist because some kind of a logic error then he is also stating that stars do not exist.

The other thing that MM does is flip-flop by saying that dark energy does exists but it is anything except what the observations show it to be
It is known to be very homogeneous, not very dense and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity.
...
Independently from its actual nature, dark energy would need to have a strong negative pressure (i.e. effects, acting repulsively) in order to explain the observed acceleration in the expansion rate of the universe.
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For example he has come up with "EM fields" and been debunked (they are not dark, i.e. cause very visible and easily detected effects).
 
DeiRenDopa said:
There is no such thing! :p

This "metaphysical entity" has never been shown to be real, by "empirical, controlled experiments in the lab"!! :p :p
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You really don't understand how the empirical game is played, do you? Birkeland's model is purely empirical. It works in the lab. You and I are both allowed to "scale' anything that is "empirically demonstrated" in the lab to whatever size might be necessary to explain what we see in space. As long as neither one of us proposes anything that that fails to show up on the Earth on any scale, it's fine. Anything that doesn't show up on Earth on any scale is a horse of a different color (non empirical color). Get the idea yet?

You guys are so hung up on the Casimir effect that you never bothered to even ask yourselves what the "cause" is. It has nothing to do with "negative pressures in a vacuum" and everything to do with the "extra energy" you keep ignoring!

The whole concept of "dark energy" is a myth. There is no such thing. The energy that exists in the "positive pressure vacuum" is all pervasive, and all encompassing and directly related to the carrier particles of the EM field and neutrinos. There's no possible way to ever achieve even a "zero" pressure energy state in space because it's literally full of energy, from neutrinos, to photons of every flavor, and flying electrons and flying electric ions galore. The EM field that exists in nature prevents us from EVER getting to a zero pressure state, let alone a "negative" one.

There is no real mainstream theory DRD. The whole thing is completely devoid of empirical support. It's a mathematical mythology involving three unseen entities.

You folks want to talk about lambda, yet complete ignore the 'cause/effect" relationships that are related to that feature. Likewise you stuff your theory full of exotic forms of matter and ignore the lab experiments that falsify the theory. The whole thing is based on "ignore the cause of the lambda", and "ignore anything that falsifies the concept of exotic matter". In short, the whole thing is a mathematical mythos, propped up by pure denial.

The thing is you can't give up your attachment to 'mathematical perfection' and "simplicity''. It's a lot like the Chapman/Birkeland debate over energy flows to the Earth. In the end Birkeland's theories won the debate, but it took you folks 70 years to accept it. Since you seek 'mathematical perfection' at any cost, even at the cost of empirical science, you'll never give up your invisible friends. It really doesn't matter if your theories fail in the lab. The only thing that matters is making your math fit that power curve and by damn, empirical physics better stay out of the way! :)

In the end DRD, not a single one of the mainstream unseen entities enjoys any empirical lab support. Even Ben's suggested "test" doesn't actually have a "control mechanism' per se, nor does it address any "cause/effect" relationships related to that lambda.

About all I can say here is you've got a pretty religion, all dressed up in red mathematical lipstick. It's still a metaphysical religion that is utterly and completely devoid of empirical support in terms of "cause/effect" relationships.

Guth's inflation lipstick came directly from Guth's human imagination. There was no precedent for the idea. It was simply an ad hoc postdiction that got "popular", probably because of that pretty red mathematical lipstick.

Somewhere in the last 30 years the term "dark matter" morphed into metaphysics based on SUSY theory. It wasn't always like that.

"Dark energy" is simply the latest attempt to ignore empirical physics entirely, and that whole link to the Casimir effect is relevant, although it has absolutely, positively, *NOTHING* to do with "negative pressure in a vacuum". You evidently can't tell the difference between "relative" and "absolute" pressure even after months of explaining it to you. Sheesh.

The basic problem is simple. You *refuse* to consider the one force of nature that is known to be 39 OOM more powerful than gravity. You refuse to give up your love of metaphysics, and you absolutely refuse to accept *ANY* sort of EU theory. It's really a very calculated and willful sort of ignorance.
 
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Michael Mozina said:
You really don't understand [...]
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Michael clearly applies meanings different than the common usage for the words and phrases he puts in quote marks. Below is an ongoing list of words and phrases which he uses but is unable or unwilling to define. Until he does define these terms, all of his arguments using any of them is unintelligible blathering.

  • absolute
  • acceleration
  • act of faith
  • ad hoc
  • background
  • ballpark
  • bang
  • believer
  • best
  • better
  • caught on
  • cause
  • cause/effect
  • control mechanism
  • correct
  • creativity
  • dark energy
  • dark energy of the gaps
  • dark matter
  • dead
  • decent
  • discovery
  • emotional
  • empirically
  • empirically demonstrated
  • extra energy
  • flavors
  • hairy inflation
  • ignore anything that falsifies the concept of exotic matter
  • ignore the cause of the lambda
  • in the ballpark
  • inflation
  • invented
  • lab tested
  • logically impossible
  • mathematical perfection
  • measurable
  • metaphysical baggage
  • narrow the range
  • negative
  • negative pressure
  • negative pressures in a vacuum
  • no show
  • observed acceleration
  • physics in general
  • popular
  • positive pressure vacuum
  • postdicted
  • postdicting a fit
  • predicted
  • pretend
  • pretend entities
  • properties
  • put faith
  • relative
  • religion
  • ruled in
  • scale
  • science
  • sciences
  • simplicity
  • superiority
  • test
  • throw it out
  • tweak
  • tweaked
  • tweaked to fit
  • unseen
  • unusual
  • verification
  • verify
  • woo
  • zero
 
Michael Mozina said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_birds
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As usual, Michael is willing to take any long chain of scientific inferences---and the bird/dinosaur connection is indeed a long chain, just like the speck-of-light/star connection and the redshift/distance connection and the muon-pairs-seen-in-ee-collider/decaying-Z-boson connection---and arbitrarily decide whether he likes the answer. Things he likes get labeled MM-empirical and things he doesn't don't.

That's the only pattern I can discern. I can't see any regularity whatsoever in MM's "empirical" decrees except this one.
 
Michael Mozina said:
Where do I get some form of modern day "inflation" to play with in a lab. I showed you where I would go to find a modern day version of a dinosaur.
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I outlined the whole experiment for you. Go launch those satellites and you've got it.

What's the matter? Can't afford it? That's not the Universe's problem. Unless---you've refused to answer so far---you think the Universe is forbidden from including expensive-to-test-in-a-lab phenomena. I look forward to your quoting the Universe's minimum price for allowable phenomena.

ETA: I misread MM's post. My answer refers to dark energy, not inflation.
 
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Michael Mozina said:
Where do I get some form of modern day "inflation" to play with in a lab. I showed you where I would go to find a modern day version of a dinosaur.
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At a particle accelerator. Unlike dinosaurs, inflatons can be created in sufficiently powerful collisions, as can their lower energy cousins (the particles of the standard model). In fact inflation itself could be restarted in a lab given enough energy (although for the health of the experimenter I do not recommend it).

And just as we have dinosaur fossils, the remnants of inflation are scattered across the night sky for all to see.
 
And as Ben has been emphasizing, the universe is undergoing inflation right now (its expansion rate is accelerating), and there are multiple independent ways to test that - several of which have already been carried out.
 
sol invictus said:
And as Ben has been emphasizing, the universe is undergoing inflation right now (its expansion rate is accelerating), and there are multiple independent ways to test that - several of which have already been carried out.
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So lambda is related to "inflation", not "dark energy"?
 
ben m said:
As usual, Michael is willing to take any long chain of scientific inferences---and the bird/dinosaur connection is indeed a long chain, just like the speck-of-light/star connection and the redshift/distance connection and the muon-pairs-seen-in-ee-collider/decaying-Z-boson connection---and arbitrarily decide whether he likes the answer. Things he likes get labeled MM-empirical and things he doesn't don't.

That's the only pattern I can discern. I can't see any regularity whatsoever in MM's "empirical" decrees except this one.
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I can't say I've found a fully consistent pattern, but I have found some patterns.

For example:

* the more abstract the concept, or connection, the less likely MM is to understand it, and hence the more likely he is to label it 'magic', or 'ad hoc', or 'lacking an empirical basis', or some such

* there's an approximate ordering of acceptability of things, starting with macroscopic objects with well-defined shapes and which are visually obvious, to things which can be represented visually in forms similar to macroscopic objects, through to things which can be said to result in visually strong phenomena (the more visually striking, and familiar, the better; the linking logic is only weakly relevant), to concepts which can be expressed well as metaphors with macroscopic objects - beyond this everything is unacceptable

* as Zig noted, in another thread, a rather strong math-phobia

* logical consistency has close to zero value, or relevance

* highly idiosyncratic use of key terms and phrases, together with an intense dislike of having to explain them.

As I noted in another thread, I think there are striking similarities with religious belief.
 
Michael Mozina said:
So lambda is related to "inflation", not "dark energy"?
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It's related to both, of course. As someone that has spent uncounted hours deriding inflation and dark energy as nonsense, you really should know that.

One of your problems, Michael, is that you never take the time to learn the basics of these topics, and when people explain them to you you ignore the explanations (which is why I'm not expounding on my comment).
 
Michael Mozina said:
You really don't understand how the empirical game is played, do you? Birkeland's model is purely empirical.
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He certainly did some experiments in his lab.

But they were not experiments to do with your solar "model".

Nor was his model a "cathode solar model" (or a ""cathode" solar model").

Birkeland studied aurorae, and associated phenomena.

It works in the lab. You and I are both allowed to "scale' anything that is "empirically demonstrated" in the lab to whatever size might be necessary to explain what we see in space.
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And here's one problem: how do you, or I, determine what ""scaling'" is OK?

For example, Birkeland had a hollow metal sphere, connected to the rest of his apparatus by a metal rod; how do you scale this?

As long as neither one of us proposes anything that that fails to show up on the Earth on any scale, it's fine. Anything that doesn't show up on Earth on any scale is a horse of a different color (non empirical color). Get the idea yet?
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So tell us all how this works, with specific reference to Mozplasma, Mozeparation, Mozode, Mozwind, Mozcharge, and Moztronium.

You guys are so hung up on the Casimir effect that you never bothered to even ask yourselves what the "cause" is. It has nothing to do with "negative pressures in a vacuum" and everything to do with the "extra energy" you keep ignoring!
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Actually the Casimir effect is a near-perfect example of the difference between trying to do physics with Aristotelian glasses and Newtonian glasses.

Try this: using the (Mozconcept) of ""extra energy"" show us how to work out how strong this effect is, in terms of the numbers that will show on the dials of some idealised instrument, the separation between two plates, etc.

The whole concept of "dark energy" is a myth. There is no such thing. The energy that exists in the "positive pressure vacuum" is all pervasive, and all encompassing and directly related to the carrier particles of the EM field and neutrinos. There's no possible way to ever achieve even a "zero" pressure energy state in space because it's literally full of energy, from neutrinos, to photons of every flavor, and flying electrons and flying electric ions galore. The EM field that exists in nature prevents us from EVER getting to a zero pressure state, let alone a "negative" one.
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Interesting (Moz-)concept.

So why is the Casimir effect observable when the equipment is enclosed in a big Faraday cage (which, by definition, excludes EM fields)?

And can you quantify the relationship between the observed - empirical - Casimir effect and neutrinos?
 
Michael Mozina said:
So lambda is related to "inflation", not "dark energy"?
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Both inflation and dark energy show up in GR as constant-curvature terms; both could be produced by any ordinary particle physics that yields a vacuum energy density. Inflation would have been a large value of this curvature (and/or a large value of the energy density), the ongoing dark energy is obviously a small curvature and/or small energy density.

Since you're denying both as a-priori impossible, I don't see why you could possibly care. You don't care, of course, you're just puttering around waiting for something to trigger a Type A Mozconception discussion. A rehashed discussion consisting entirely of stuff you've heard before---or of stuff you could read in any cosmology textbook whatsoever---is just as good as new stuff.
 
Michael Mozina said:
The basic problem is simple. You *refuse* to consider the one force of nature that is known to be 39 OOM more powerful than gravity. You refuse to give up your love of metaphysics, and you absolutely refuse to accept *ANY* sort of EU theory. It's really a very calculated and willful sort of ignorance.
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Unlike, say, a certain MM?

So why are you wasting precious time and effort posting here?

Why, if you have "seen the light", have you not spent the past five years or so becoming familiar with electromagnetism? why have you not even started to develop a cosmological model based on "*ANY* sort of EU theory"?

ben m said:
If you were serious about this at all, you'd log off this (and all other) discussion boards, and we wouldn't hear a peep from you until you put a paper up on the ArXiV containing the PC/EU equations that allow you to fit the Hubble curve, the CMB temperature/blackbody spectrum, and the CMB angular anisotropy spectrum. Go do it; stop promising that it'll be perfect when it's done; just do it.
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I don't think you responded to ben, did you?
 
Michael Mozina said:
The basic problem is simple. You *refuse* to consider the one force of nature that is known to be 39 OOM more powerful than gravity.
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We consider it just fine. EM is a force that acts on charges. It does not act on neutral objects; does not obey the weak equivalence principle; does not lead to time dilation; does not cause light to bend or "lens" around massive objects; etc.

What happened to the dozens of pages of JREF posts containing actual applications of EM force laws to astronomical objects? Did you never read them? Did you ignore them? Did you forget them? Did you find algebra errors making every single mainstream EM calculation wrong by 20 orders of magnitude? Hello? Hellooooo?

Now you want us to go through it again? Why, so you can ignore it again in the next thread?
 
Oh dear, are we back at the 39 OOM difference between the coulomb force and the gravitational force between 2 electrons 1 meter apart? And what use it that? Sheesh, close the thread, let's go back 5 or more years and start over this whole rubbish.
 
tusenfem said:
Oh dear, are we back at the 39 OOM difference between the coulomb force and the gravitational force between 2 electrons 1 meter apart? And what use it that? Sheesh, close the thread, let's go back 5 or more years and start over this whole rubbish.
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Invariance under time-like translations is one of the properties that distinguish willful ignorance from other forms.
 
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W.D.Clinger said:
Invariance under time-like translations is one of the properties that distinguishes willful ignorance from other forms.
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Aha! That explains it. So Ignorance is the Noether charge of Mozina's time-translation symmetry.

Excitations of the Ignorance field are "Errors". Errors interact with one another, allowing a quasi-stable bound state of several Errors called a "Howler". They clearly obey asymptotic freedom, since any attempt to pry a Howler apart simply results in more Errors.
 
sol invictus said:
It's related to both, of course.
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So this earlier quote by ben wasn't accurate!

ben_m said:
You are confused, Michael, as usual. The "lambda" in Lambda-CDM is an extra, constant term in the curvature of spacetime. It is NOT " ... and the curvature comes from a Higgs-like scalar field" or "... and the curvature comes from an extra inflaton" or "... and the curvature is just how the Universe happens to be". The Lambda-CDM hypothesis is that there's a constant curvature there, period.
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So in fact you are claiming a "cause/effect" relationship between lambda and both "inflation" and 'dark energy"! You guys really shouldn't blame folks for being "confused" when you send out so many mixed messages.

What none of you did, what all of you *epically failed to do* is provide any empirical link between "lamba" and "dark energy" and "inflation". You simply "assumed" such a cause/effect relationship. Care you demonstrate *BOTH* of these claims for us in a controlled empirical test of concept? I'll be happy to let you "scale" things, but I'd like to see you demonstrate those two cause/effect relationships for me.
 
tusenfem said:
Oh dear, are we back at the 39 OOM difference between the coulomb force and the gravitational force between 2 electrons 1 meter apart? And what use it that? Sheesh, close the thread, let's go back 5 or more years and start over this whole rubbish.
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How did your reading go? Did Birkeland predict only negatively charged particles would come from the sun?
 
Michael Mozina said:
What none of you did, what all of you *epically failed to do* is provide any empirical link between "lamba" and "dark energy" and "inflation". You simply "assumed" such a cause/effect relationship. Care you demonstrate *BOTH* of these claims for us in a controlled empirical test of concept? I'll be happy to let you "scale" things, but I'd like to see you demonstrate those two cause/effect relationships for me.
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Why don't you reread this page, where you asked for explanations and I gave them to you. Did you read them? Why not? Why don't you comment on them in detail rather than exactly repeating what you said just before.

Reread this whole page, Michael. You are still confused about a point both Sol and I explicitly clarified at your request.
 
ben m said:
Why don't you reread this page, where you asked for explanations and I gave them to you. Did you read them? Why not? Why don't you comment on them in detail rather than exactly repeating what you said just before.

Reread this whole page, Michael. You are still confused about a point both Sol and I explicitly clarified at your request.
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What neither of you did is demonstrate any cause/effect relationships between what you've been calling lambda and what sol claims is related to both inflation and dark energy. That is an *epic* fail in terms of empirical physics! I'm sure you'd love to just gloss over that little problem, or blame me for your lack of "qualification", but like any religious belief based on faith "it's not my fault" you can't produce the lab work to support your faith in "unseen entities". The whole thing is "religion" ben, not "empirical science". Until you *physically* demonstrate a "cause/effect" relationship, you have no business mucking up a perfectly empirical GR theory with that metaphysical nonsense!
 
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Michael Mozina said:
So this earlier quote by ben wasn't accurate!
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In his place I might have given a different slant on the same thing, but Ben's quote is accurate.

So in fact you are claiming a "cause/effect" relationship between lambda and both "inflation" and 'dark energy"! You guys really shouldn't blame folks for being "confused" when you send out so many mixed messages.
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I blame "folks" for spending years and years arguing with experts over something without ever learning the most simple, basic aspects of it.
 
Michael Mozina said:
How did your reading go? Did Birkeland predict only negatively charged particles would come from the sun?
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I had no time to read, being at a very intense science meeting for a new Jupiter mission. I wrote in the other thread that I was going to look at it this weekend. But if you have already read it, why not give your view of his writings too?

Then again, this has nothing to do with the rubbish about 39 OOM difference.
 
tusenfem said:
I had no time to read, being at a very intense science meeting for a new Jupiter mission. I wrote in the other thread that I was going to look at it this weekend. But if you have already read it, why not give your view of his writings too?

Then again, this has nothing to do with the rubbish about 39 OOM difference.
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It would probably be best to keep these topics in separate threads. I do however look forward to your opinions on his theories about solar wind particles.
 
Michael Mozina said:
What neither of you did is demonstrate any cause/effect relationships between what you've been calling lambda and what sol claims is related to both inflation and dark energy. That is an *epic* fail in terms of empirical physics! I'm sure you'd love to just gloss over that little problem, or blame me for your lack of "qualification", but like any religious belief based on faith "it's not my fault" you can't produce the lab work to support your faith in "unseen entities". The whole thing is "religion" ben, not "empirical science". Until you *physically* demonstrate a "cause/effect" relationship, you have no business mucking up a perfectly empirical GR theory with that metaphysical nonsense!
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Thank you for the nice cut-and-paste job, I have read this block of text fifteen times. Did I say something, perhaps, about there being a distinction between evidence-for-curvature and the interpretation of that curvature? I think I did. In English, even. Read it again. Did you want to comment on that particular point?

ETA:
Let me make it easy for you. Ready? Fill in the blanks. I said astronomers have direct, observational evidence for [pick one: a constant curvature OR vacuum energy]. Therefore, I said, astronomers all believe in ____________. The simplest hypothesis for the source of the ________________ is that the vacuum has _____________, but nobody claims to have anything conclusive information about the [pick one: former OR latter].

FILL IN THE BLANKS.
 
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ben m said:
Thank you for the nice cut-and-paste job, I have read this block of text fifteen times. Did I say something, perhaps, about there being a distinction between evidence-for-curvature and the interpretation of that curvature? I think I did. In English, even. Read it again. Did you want to comment on that particular point?
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Ya, and I had to *DRAG* it out of you. :)

The problem is simple ben. You folks failed to demonstrate any cause/effect relationships between lambda and any of your invisible friends. To simply ignore this point is pure denial on your part. To call it anything other than an "act of faith" on the part of the "believer" is simply "spin". There is *no* physical qualification behind your math. It's a mathematical religion based on three unseen entities and a boat load of unqualified math.
 
What is "Empirical" Science? V

Emphasis mine:
Michael Mozina said:
Anything that doesn't show up on Earth on any scale is a horse of a different color (non empirical color).
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There you have it, about as explicit as anything gets. As far as Mozina is concerned, if it does not show up in a controlled laboratory experiment here on Earth then it is not empirical. According to Mozina astronomy is neither empirical nor science. Mozina must be the only person in the entire world who thinks that is what the word empirical means. See my previous post Dark Energy and Empirical Science and other posts cited therein.

Remember these quotes from my earlier post What is "Empirical" Science III ...

Tim Thompson said:
Question 2
The standard definition of the word "empirical" does not require a controlled experiment, or for that matter, any kind of experiment at all. Why do you feel justified in changing the definition of a word (any word, but in particular this one), and then complaining when the rest of the world does not use it your way?
For standard usage of the word "empirical", see for instance the definition from the online Merriam-Webster dictionary.
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As far as I know, Mozina never answered this question.

Tim Thompson said:
Case in point
I quote from the book An Introduction to Scientific Research by E. Bright Wilson, Jr.; McGraw-Hill, 1952 (Dover reprint, 1990); page 27-28, section 3.7 "The Testing of Hypotheses"; emphasis from the original.

"In many cases hypotheses are so simple and their consequences so obvious that it becomes possible to test them directly. New observations on selected aspects of nature may be made, or more often an experiment can be performed for the test. There is no clear cut distinction between an experiment and a simple observation, but ordinarily in an experiment the observer interferes to some extent with nature and creates conditions or events favorable to his purpose."
​
Wilson says "There is no clear cut distinction between an experiment and a simple observation," and that is the way the entire scientific community currently operates. Are you now telling us that the entire scientific community is using a flawed concept of empiricism?
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As far as I know, Mozina never answered this question either.

It is clear by now that when Mozina uses the word "empirical" he means something that nobody else in the entire world would believe. Call it "mozpirical" or "mozpiricism". But one thing that stands out clearly is that, in order to retain his firm belief in thoroughly discredited ideas, Mozina has completely abandoned the logic of science and the logic of empiricism and struck out on his own in some strange world of religious fantasy where the sun can have "rigid" iron despite it being significantly hotter than the melting temperature, or where astronomical observations are no longer empirical (in direct contradiction to E. Bright Wilson quoted above). It is a magical world where the laws of physics as we know them do not apply, and where anything that Mozina can imagine must certainly be true.

Lurkers and other interested readers need to understand, if they don't already, that this serious departure from logical standards is the primary reason that Mozina stands alone with all of his ideas in astronomy, physics & cosmology. It is not some vague fear or bias on the part of mainstream scientists that brings out the opposition to his ideas, but rather his own decision to abandon reason for madness.
 
W.D.Clinger said:
Invariance under time-like translations is one of the properties that distinguish willful ignorance from other forms.
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ben m said:
Aha! That explains it. So Ignorance is the Noether charge of Mozina's time-translation symmetry.

Excitations of the Ignorance field are "Errors". Errors interact with one another, allowing a quasi-stable bound state of several Errors called a "Howler". They clearly obey asymptotic freedom, since any attempt to pry a Howler apart simply results in more Errors.
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:D
 
Michael Mozina said:
Ya, and I had to *DRAG* it out of you. :)
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I recall this point being made repeatedly over the past few years. Did you finally stoop to reading my answer? If so, I'm honored; I'm sure Sol or Edd's answers over the past two years were as clear or clearer, too bad you ignored them. Did you really read it? Did you understand it? FILL IN THE BLANKS.

(BTW, if you're absolutely determined NEVER to answer this question, you're welcome to say so now and save me the trouble of requesting answers over and over again.)
 
ben m said:
I recall this point being made repeatedly over the past few years.
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And the one point that you've consistently all refused to deal with is the fact that you (collectively) never "qualified" your ideas! All three of your invisible friends are purely ad hoc creations that are all devoid of empirical support. Guth's magic inflation was completely without precedent. It came right from his postdicted imagination.

Blame me all you like ben, but your failure to provide any physical cause/effect demonstrations of inflation, DE and DM is really not my fault. No amount of fictitious math is going make up for that epic fail in term of qualification of your beliefs. Your religion is based on a trilogy of unseen entities, all of which lack any sort of empirical qualification.
 
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Michael Mozina said:
And the one point that you've consistently all refused to deal with is the fact that you (collectively) never "qualified" your ideas! All three of your invisible friends are purely ad hoc creations that are all devoid of empirical support. Guth's magic inflation was completely without precedent. It came right from his postdicted imagination.

Blame me all you like ben, but your failure to provide any physical cause/effect demonstrations of inflation, DE and DM is really not my fault. No amount of fictitious math is going make up for that epic fail in term of qualification of your beliefs. Your religion is based on a trilogy of unseen entities, all of which lack any sort of empirical qualification.
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Same as before. Michael, if you just wanted to cut and paste that statement over and over, you didn't NEED to ask for explanations that you weren't planning on reading or processing. How does the above statement incorporate what you've learned from the curvature/energy distinction you "dragged out of me"? Did you read it? Why can't you fill in the blanks---are they too complicated for you?
 
There's an important clue here, I think, to mozpiricism.

DeiRenDopa said:
Michael Mozina said:
It works in the lab. You and I are both allowed to "scale' anything that is "empirically demonstrated" in the lab to whatever size might be necessary to explain what we see in space.
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And here's one problem: how do you, or I, determine what ""scaling'" is OK?

For example, Birkeland had a hollow metal sphere, connected to the rest of his apparatus by a metal rod; how do you scale this?
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Scaling, of course, involves numbers, quantities, and even math.

But there is a great deal of empirical evidence consistent with the hypothesis that MM has great difficulty with math.

So how can you - in an objective and independently verifiable way - scale something "that is "empirically demonstrated" in the lab", without using any math?

Enter Mozcaling.

A key feature of Mozcaling is that its success is determined largely (solely?) by the degree to which images of astronomical objects or phenomena resemble images (photographs, etc) taken in the lab ... irrespective of the details (such as intensities, wavelengths, wavebands, and so on).

A second feature is that the parameters you choose to scale are arbitrary - you can scale physical size, for example, and ignore temperature.

A third feature is that the laws of physics derived from things that have been ""empirically demonstrated" in the lab" do not need to be 'scaled' in accordance with those laws (or scaled at all); for example, the formation and stability of a thin-shelled sphere, in zero-g, can be scaled to a ~sol-mass and ~sol-sized object without considering gravity.
 
Michael Mozina said:
The problem is simple ben. You folks failed to demonstrate any cause/effect relationships between lambda and any of your invisible friends. To simply ignore this point is pure denial on your part. To call it anything other than an "act of faith" on the part of the "believer" is simply "spin". There is *no* physical qualification behind your math. It's a mathematical religion based on three unseen entities and a boat load of unqualified math.
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No, that's completely wrong. You continue to ignore the Einstein field equationsWP that lie at the heart of this thread, and continue to deny both the empirical evidence for those equations and their consequences for dark energyWP and inflation.

As for lambda and friends being a "mathematical religion" or a "boat load of unqualified math", the story I told earlier about the mathematician and the waitress says something important about Hermann Weyl's exposition of those field equations in Space, Time, Matter, which is an English translation of the fourth edition of Raum, Zeit, Materie, published in 1921. Weyl doesn't even mention the Λ-term in §28 (Einstein's Fundamental Law of Gravitation), and omits that term from equations (29) and (30). He corrects himself in §34:
In deriving the gravitational equations in §28, however, we committed a sin of omission. R is not the only invariant dependent on the gik's and their first and second differential co-efficients, and which is linear in the latter; for the most general invariant of this description has the form αR+β, in which α and β are numerical constants. Consequently we may generalize the laws of gravitation by replacing R by R+λ (and G by G+½λ√g), in which λ denotes a universal constant.
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Weyl concludes §34 as follows:
In the latter case we have a static world that cannot exist without a mass-horizon; this assumption...is favoured by Einstein.
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If you really wish to entertain us by arguing that, in 1915 and in 1921, Albert Einstein and Hermann Weyl were motivated to add the Λ-term by some kind of "mathematical religion" or in anticipation of what would later be called dark energyWP or inflation, then by all means carry on as you have been doing.

ben_m suggested a far more productive course of action:
ben m said:
Let me make it easy for you. Ready? Fill in the blanks. I said astronomers have direct, observational evidence for [pick one: a constant curvature OR vacuum energy]. Therefore, I said, astronomers all believe in ____________. The simplest hypothesis for the source of the ________________ is that the vacuum has _____________, but nobody claims to have anything conclusive information about the [pick one: former OR latter].

FILL IN THE BLANKS.
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