Science is not a religion, but some scientists ARE religous about their science
- Thread starter Zeuzzz
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Please explain why it is clearly absurd.
So is there any point in me reading it? After all you seem to have concluded already that I will give a biased interpretation when I reply.
This is so much fun. Marshall Douglas Smith links to an interesting site: someone who thinks Einstein's SR wasn't properly peer reviewed because...
This is surprising what with Einstein not winning the Nobel prize till 1922, some 17 years after said publication was published.
There is also Mosheh Thezion of The Empirical Church who informs us:
Oh, and then there is Charles Creager Jr of the Creationist Research Society. Which is highly ironic given Zeuzzz's earlier rantings about creationism. He seems to have that old problem with the theory of evolution and the second law of thermodynamics.
Michael Mozina
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It's been a really busy day at work but I wanted to address a few quick points:
Oh. That is also true of the solar wind. There are however many heavier elements to be found in interstellar/intergallactic space and lots of heavier elements in cosmic rays to consider.
Huh? You just made *lots* of assumptions. You *assumed* for instance that stellar nurseries (not just interstellar space) contains mostly hydrogen. You just assumed that hydrogen formed first and/or more abundantly than any other element. A quick look at our moon that can't hang onto a lick of hydrogen after billions of years demonstrates the problem with that logic.
You assume a star is mostly hydrogen. You assumed a lot of stuff.
So why not call it "Lambda-nothing else required" theory, drop the invisible "dark" stuff from publication and let Guth's mythical inflation theory die an natural empirical death?
I guess that's the difference between us in the final analysis. I like to know how things work, why they work, take them apart and put them back together. I've just always been like that. I don't have to "have faith" in electrical engineering. I can see the empirical fruits that have sprung from that field of science. I've never seen anything useful that works on inflation, dark energy or any sort of exotic matter. I have no need to believe they exist, therefor I lack belief they have anything to with expansion, acceleration and "missing mass". Like all impotent gods, those three metaphysical bad boys are entirely incapable of having an empirical effect on anything in any controlled experiment. To believe there is even a cause/effect link between inflation and expansion is an "act of faith" on the part of the believer because there is no empirical link between them in the lab.
Yes. We knew where they probably came from before we went looking for them in the lab. Are you claiming all "dark matter" is found in neutrinos? If not, where does your exotic matter even come from? Where do I get some?
Oh. That is also true of the solar wind. There are however many heavier elements to be found in interstellar/intergallactic space and lots of heavier elements in cosmic rays to consider.
Huh? You just made *lots* of assumptions. You *assumed* for instance that stellar nurseries (not just interstellar space) contains mostly hydrogen. You just assumed that hydrogen formed first and/or more abundantly than any other element. A quick look at our moon that can't hang onto a lick of hydrogen after billions of years demonstrates the problem with that logic.
You assume a star is mostly hydrogen. You assumed a lot of stuff.
So why not call it "Lambda-nothing else required" theory, drop the invisible "dark" stuff from publication and let Guth's mythical inflation theory die an natural empirical death?
I guess that's the difference between us in the final analysis. I like to know how things work, why they work, take them apart and put them back together. I've just always been like that. I don't have to "have faith" in electrical engineering. I can see the empirical fruits that have sprung from that field of science. I've never seen anything useful that works on inflation, dark energy or any sort of exotic matter. I have no need to believe they exist, therefor I lack belief they have anything to with expansion, acceleration and "missing mass". Like all impotent gods, those three metaphysical bad boys are entirely incapable of having an empirical effect on anything in any controlled experiment. To believe there is even a cause/effect link between inflation and expansion is an "act of faith" on the part of the believer because there is no empirical link between them in the lab.
Yes. We knew where they probably came from before we went looking for them in the lab. Are you claiming all "dark matter" is found in neutrinos? If not, where does your exotic matter even come from? Where do I get some?
Michael Mozina
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I'm not sure which context you meant that, so I could be barking up the wrong tree, but...
In my experience, particle physicists tend to be more "open minded" to criticisms and more open minded to new ideas, but less apt to assign "properties" to hypothetical entities than say cosmologists.
Frankly it's hard to take those MACHO limits seriously seeing as how Pluto was recently demoted. The primary impetus of the demotion from planet status was because we found an even larger object sitting in our own solar system that was bigger than Pluto which was only recently 'discovered". We're note even sure how much stuff sits in our own solar system but you expect me to believe we already can be sure our "missing mass" isn't ordinary matter. Come on. The limits of MACHO matter are purely imagined. All you can be sure of is that we may have some "missing mass" to account for and it's not easy to explain it yet. The "leap of faith" into exotic matter is just that, a leap of faith in the unseen (in the lab).
Michael Mozina
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FYI, I don't have any problem with an expanding universe devoid of inflation and metaphysical dark stuff. What exactly do we disagree about then? Do you support Lambda-CDM theory, and if so why? If there's no need for these things (like CDM), why believe in them at all?
Cosmic rays are mostly protons and make up an insignificant fraction of the mass of anything.
Huh indeed? What makes you assume this was an assumption rather than something that can be easily seen from the spectroscopic lines?
No I didn't. I know that from observation of the spectral lines most of the interstellar gas is hydrogen and helium. No assumption is involved.
That's because the gravitational potential energy of the moon is less than the escape speed of hydrogen atoms at the the appropriate temperature. I can do the calculation for you if you like. With collapsing gas clouds that isn't the case (otherwise they wouldn't collapse).
No, I quite clearly didn't assume it. The gas we see collapsing to form stars is dominated by hydrogen and helium lines. This is not an assumption it is an experimental fact.
This is getting very tiresome.
No, that is unlikely. It was just the fact that you stated "CDM can pass through walls and ordinary matter without working up a sweat" as if that was remarkable. Obviously this is not remarkable in the slightest when neutrinos can pass through light years of lead without undergoing interactions.
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Ah, you'd miss it if it was gone.
Michael Mozina
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I get the impression that tubbythin may be finally actually reading the PC literature that hes been arguing against all these years
It's very interesting you should say that. I've gotten that same impressions from a lot of the most vocal PC/EU critics. The loudest critics seem to the be the ones that are least familiar with the literature on this topic.
Michael Mozina
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Oh no, the mainstream ruled them out too. They aren't "cold" enough. More importantly we know where *that* kind of mass comes from and how to detect it so it's definitely not the exotic super-duper invisible dark matter god we're looking for.
The context was the claim by Lerner that the attitudes of the cosmologists wouldn't happen anywhere else in science was trivially false as demonstrated by particle physics and one of the most important and newsworthy discoveries of the 1990's (so its not like this could possibly have slipped him by).
As for not assigning properties to hypothetical entities...
You're kidding right, all the significant properties of the top quark except its mass had been assigned to it prior to its discovery. Even it's mass had limits. The same goes for pluto.
Frankly its hard for me to take you seriously when you come up with such a stupid argument. The mass of the extra bodies we observe pales in to insignifcance compared to our own Sun, let alone our own galaxy.
We can set limits on it because of gravitational lensing. You believe the Sun has a solid iron surface. I don't expect you to believe anything rational.
Come on, you're going to have to do better than that. Otherwise I'll have to entertain myself with some more crank websites from the cosmology statement.
Well there's very much a need for CDM with or without the BBT. Like the rotation curves of galaxies (something I've "seen" for myself as an undergrad). What I said was that the frequency spectrum of the CMBR was independent of the existence or otherwise of DE/DM/an inflationary epoch. Other things point towards their existence like the above mentioned rotation curves (for DM).
Oh no, the mainstream ruled them out too. They aren't "cold" enough. More importantly we know where *that* kind of mass comes from and how to detect it so it's definitely not the exotic super-duper invisible dark matter god we're looking for.
Like I said, you seemed amazed that someone dare think that dark matter could go through walls. I fail to see why anyone would be amazed by such a thing.
I suppose so, but I still resent it.
Tim Thompson
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Dark Matter and Science III
Dark matter, as we now use the term, did not exist in the scientists lexicon until it was brought forth and into the light by the famous astronomer Fritz Zwicky. He was observing clusters of galaxies, back in the early days of our modern understanding of galaxies as stellar systems. By interpreting the redshift of galaxy spectra as a Doppler shift indicating relative motion, he derived the radial velocities of the individual galaxies in the cluster (that's the velocity along the line of sight to the galaxy). At the same time, he derived an estimate of the masses of the individual galaxies by virtue of their luminosity and his knowledge of the mass-luminosity relationship for stars. His conclusion was that the galaxies were moving so fast that the clusters would have flown apart already, unless there were about ten times more mass than he could see. Thus was dark matter born, although he called it by a more appropriate term for the time: "missing mass". It was Edwin Hubble who proved that galaxies are stellar systems, by using the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory, which was the largest in the world at the time, and the first large enough to resolve stars that far away (Hubble, 1925, Hubble, 1926, Hubble, 1929). It was only a few years later that Zwicky published his determination of the "missing mass problem", as it came to be called (Zwicky, 1933, Zwicky, 1937).
Of course, Zwicky and his contemporaries and those who followed knew quite well that there could be any number of massive things that they would not expect to see; dim low mass stars, dark clouds of gas & dust in the interstellar medium, planets & etc., in the galaxies, or spread out in the space between them. So naturally, they did not think of looking for any exotic kind of matter. They simply made the natural assumption that there was mass floating around out there that escaped the limited vision of their technology. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning.
In the intervening years, it became evident that a similar problem was visible in the rotation curves of spiral galaxies (e.g., Volders, 1959, Rubin & Ford, 1970; a problem actually anticipated in Oort, 1932).
Until fairly recently, astronomers had continued along the same course as set by Zwicky. They went looking for the missing mass as ordinary matter that has simply escaped their view. But there has been a huge advance in astronomical technology since Zwicky's time, and "simply" has become "not so simply". Infrared astronomers today can see the dust & gas in galaxies that was invisible to Zwicky and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. Infrared & optical astronomers today can see the low mass stars that Zwicky could not see and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. X-ray astronomers today can see the gas between galaxies that was invisible to Zwicky and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. In fact, we now know that all of the mass we can see is still about a factor of 10 too small to make up the missing mass. Our own Milky Way halo has been searched far & wide for low mass red dwarf stars with the Hubble Space Telescope, and searched far & wide for any compact objects, made of either ordinary or exotic matter, and in all cases the missing mass is simply not there (e.g., HST, 1994, Bahcall, et al., 1994, Alcock, et al., 2001, Yoo, Chanamé & Gould, 2004). After decades of exhaustive searches for ordinary matter objects as a source of the missing mass, it is time to face the possibly uncomfortable truth: The missing mass is not missing "simply" because we don't have the technology to see it, but even more "simply" because it simply is not there. What, exactly, does Mozina propose that we should look for, that we have not already looked for exhaustively, without finding?
Meanwhile, parallel to all this, we have finally built the technology required to see the small variations in temperature across the sky in the cosmic microwave background (the COBE & WMAP missions). Those small temperature differences, which we call anisotropies, when interpreted in the context of big bang cosmology, allow a determination of a difference between normal baryonic dark matter and exotic, non baryonic dark matter. The CMB interpretation agreed with the observational results from the conventional astronomers, that the bulk of dark matter must be an exotic, non baryonic form of matter (see Hu, 2001 and Wayne Hu's webpages, particularly the CMB pages).
Now, Mozina ignores all of this, and chooses instead to speak derisively of dark matter "morphing" itself from one thing to another. The attentive reader should note that this is very common; given the choice between discussion real science, and demonstrating real knowledge, Mozina commonly (and almost exclusively) chooses to appeal to derision & insult instead, belittling the long careers of others as if they never existed, and demanding that his own purely religious bias should always triumph over knowledge. So, exactly how is one excepted to argue with such a person, and remain a "gentleman"?
The assumption that dark matter is non-baryonic is not the huge leap of faith that Mozina tries to claim it is (primarily to hide his own huge leaps of faith, which really are just that). It is in fact no more exotic than assuming there is more of the same class of matter which we already have in hand, but is known to be elusive and hard to detect. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning.
There is the difference between the reasoned and scientific approach vs. the religious approach. My approach, and that of the mainstream is reasoned and scientific. This does not mean that it is inerrant, or even necessarily correct. It means only what it says, reasoned & scientific. The Mozina approach, on the other hand, is based on a foundation of bias that comes from the purely religious view, which values ignorance over knowledge and prejudice over reason.
This is an excellent example of the heavy bias that makes the purely religious and totally unscientific nature of Mozina's rambling's painfully obvious. Clearly Mozina worships ignorance above all other things, and hopes that the reader will share his disdain for actual knowledge. Personally, I prefer to actually know real things about the real universe, and let it be what it is, rather then go Mozina's route of forcing the universe, very much against its will, to conform with my own strange prejudice. Let us consider the argument from knowledge for a moment, rather than the argument from ignorance.
Dark matter, as we now use the term, did not exist in the scientists lexicon until it was brought forth and into the light by the famous astronomer Fritz Zwicky. He was observing clusters of galaxies, back in the early days of our modern understanding of galaxies as stellar systems. By interpreting the redshift of galaxy spectra as a Doppler shift indicating relative motion, he derived the radial velocities of the individual galaxies in the cluster (that's the velocity along the line of sight to the galaxy). At the same time, he derived an estimate of the masses of the individual galaxies by virtue of their luminosity and his knowledge of the mass-luminosity relationship for stars. His conclusion was that the galaxies were moving so fast that the clusters would have flown apart already, unless there were about ten times more mass than he could see. Thus was dark matter born, although he called it by a more appropriate term for the time: "missing mass". It was Edwin Hubble who proved that galaxies are stellar systems, by using the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mt. Wilson Observatory, which was the largest in the world at the time, and the first large enough to resolve stars that far away (Hubble, 1925, Hubble, 1926, Hubble, 1929). It was only a few years later that Zwicky published his determination of the "missing mass problem", as it came to be called (Zwicky, 1933, Zwicky, 1937).
Of course, Zwicky and his contemporaries and those who followed knew quite well that there could be any number of massive things that they would not expect to see; dim low mass stars, dark clouds of gas & dust in the interstellar medium, planets & etc., in the galaxies, or spread out in the space between them. So naturally, they did not think of looking for any exotic kind of matter. They simply made the natural assumption that there was mass floating around out there that escaped the limited vision of their technology. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning.
In the intervening years, it became evident that a similar problem was visible in the rotation curves of spiral galaxies (e.g., Volders, 1959, Rubin & Ford, 1970; a problem actually anticipated in Oort, 1932).
Until fairly recently, astronomers had continued along the same course as set by Zwicky. They went looking for the missing mass as ordinary matter that has simply escaped their view. But there has been a huge advance in astronomical technology since Zwicky's time, and "simply" has become "not so simply". Infrared astronomers today can see the dust & gas in galaxies that was invisible to Zwicky and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. Infrared & optical astronomers today can see the low mass stars that Zwicky could not see and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. X-ray astronomers today can see the gas between galaxies that was invisible to Zwicky and we now know that there is not enough to make up the missing mass. In fact, we now know that all of the mass we can see is still about a factor of 10 too small to make up the missing mass. Our own Milky Way halo has been searched far & wide for low mass red dwarf stars with the Hubble Space Telescope, and searched far & wide for any compact objects, made of either ordinary or exotic matter, and in all cases the missing mass is simply not there (e.g., HST, 1994, Bahcall, et al., 1994, Alcock, et al., 2001, Yoo, Chanamé & Gould, 2004). After decades of exhaustive searches for ordinary matter objects as a source of the missing mass, it is time to face the possibly uncomfortable truth: The missing mass is not missing "simply" because we don't have the technology to see it, but even more "simply" because it simply is not there. What, exactly, does Mozina propose that we should look for, that we have not already looked for exhaustively, without finding?
Meanwhile, parallel to all this, we have finally built the technology required to see the small variations in temperature across the sky in the cosmic microwave background (the COBE & WMAP missions). Those small temperature differences, which we call anisotropies, when interpreted in the context of big bang cosmology, allow a determination of a difference between normal baryonic dark matter and exotic, non baryonic dark matter. The CMB interpretation agreed with the observational results from the conventional astronomers, that the bulk of dark matter must be an exotic, non baryonic form of matter (see Hu, 2001 and Wayne Hu's webpages, particularly the CMB pages).
Now, Mozina ignores all of this, and chooses instead to speak derisively of dark matter "morphing" itself from one thing to another. The attentive reader should note that this is very common; given the choice between discussion real science, and demonstrating real knowledge, Mozina commonly (and almost exclusively) chooses to appeal to derision & insult instead, belittling the long careers of others as if they never existed, and demanding that his own purely religious bias should always triumph over knowledge. So, exactly how is one excepted to argue with such a person, and remain a "gentleman"?
It is true that we have ruled out neutrinos specifically as the primary object of non--baryonic dark matter. However, look back to my comments above about Zwicky and his contemporaries: "They simply made the natural assumption that there was mass floating around out there that escaped the limited vision of their technology. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning." That line of reasoning applies to non-baryonic dark matter with equal fidelity. While neutrinos may not be the non-baryonic dark matter, there is absolutely no doubt that they are a non-baryonic dark matter. So we find ourselves in much the same position as Zwicky, just in a different context of science & technology. We already have non-baryonic dark matter in hand: Neutrinos. So we simply assume that there is another form of non-baryonic dark matter out there that we simply have not yet detected.Oh no, the mainstream ruled them out too. They aren't "cold" enough. More importantly we know where *that* kind of mass comes from and how to detect it so it's definitely not the exotic super-duper invisible dark matter god we're looking for.
The assumption that dark matter is non-baryonic is not the huge leap of faith that Mozina tries to claim it is (primarily to hide his own huge leaps of faith, which really are just that). It is in fact no more exotic than assuming there is more of the same class of matter which we already have in hand, but is known to be elusive and hard to detect. I fail to see anything spectacularly wrong with that line of reasoning.
There is the difference between the reasoned and scientific approach vs. the religious approach. My approach, and that of the mainstream is reasoned and scientific. This does not mean that it is inerrant, or even necessarily correct. It means only what it says, reasoned & scientific. The Mozina approach, on the other hand, is based on a foundation of bias that comes from the purely religious view, which values ignorance over knowledge and prejudice over reason.
Tim Thompson
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Religious Scientists III
But you are seriously mistaken about what is really going on here. You treat "Ph.D." as if they are some meaningless collection of letters ("The mere questioning of why someone needs to have a Phd to debate a scientific topic results in accusations of arrogance on my part."). The fact that you make such a statement at all is empirical evidence of the arrogance you speak of. One does not simply walk through the doors of a legitimate institution, say "gimme a Ph.D.", and walk out thus decorated. Rather, one goes into a program of study for several years (sometimes many years) in which a great deal of learning & experience are acquired. In most (but of course not all) cases, the person with the Ph.D. has a great deal more knowledge & experience than the person who does not have the Ph.D. Of course there are notable exceptions. I think it is not arrogant to say that after an M.S. degree and 28 years of experience, I know my craft better than someone with a Ph.D. awarded yesterday and no experience. But most people, like science itself, are "moving targets"; they live & learn & change & acquire experience, so what is true today maybe false tomorrow. When you disdain the degree, it is not the letters that suffer your insult, it is the acquisition of knowledge & experience that the letters symbolically represent. And that is where your arrogant dismissal of education & knowledge, as if they are impediments rather than accomplishments, shows itself most plainly & obviously.
It is not necessary for other people to accuse you of anything, your own words are the strongest accusation revealing your own state of mind.
Therein lies the essential difference. Real scientists are willing to change the way they think about the universe, in response to what they learn about it. As they gain knowledge they change their mind or go off in entirely new directions. For instance, astronomers did not decide on a whim that dark matter must be some exotic non-baryonic matter. Rather, they came to this conclusion only after decades of looking for, and not finding, baryonic dark matter, and knowing that they had achieved technology which would see it. Empiricism is what drove the conclusion that dark matter is non-baryonic and empiricism is what drove the rather sudden invention of dark energy as an explanation for surprising observations. On the other hand, pseudoscientists adopt a rigid doctrine of faith which cannot ever be challenged or questioned. In your case, there are several rigid doctrine's of faith upon which you base your pseudoscience. One is the rigid doctrine of a rigid iron surface of the sun. It is a doctrine known to be physically impossible, but since it cannot be challenged, you deny physics specifically, and empirical science in general, in order to defend the faith from question. On this there is no question or doubt in my mind at all, you are a pseudoscientist involved in the active defence of your own rigid doctrine of faith. Whether or not it seems equally obvious to anyone else is their own affair.
Once again, you ignore the relevant point.
Modern cosmology is dominated by empirical physics, with the speculative aspects probably at an all time low. You are the one who personally denies the validity of empirical physics. You are the one who personally does not adhere to the principles of empirical physics. This fact is documented in the posts linked above, which you always ignore. So when you say that other people don't like the constraints of empirical physics, just look in the mirror, because you are them.
You react by jerk of the knee, but would do better to think first and then post. Of course, I did say "Most of the people watching discussions like this (we call them lurkers) ... Most of them ... know little or nothing about science". You have already acknowledged my use of the word "most", but that really is not the point. Rather, the point is this: "Most of them ... know little or nothing about science." Indeed I claim it is true that most lurkers are probably incapable of discerning a good scientific argument from a bad one, because they lack both the knowledge and the experience one would expect to use in doing the discerning. Furthermore, I will also claim that most of those lurkers are well aware of this. Indeed, most people are aware of their own limitations, even if they are not willing to discuss them publicly. That's why they look towards credentials as an indicator, a hint, a guide as to whom they should trust.
But you are seriously mistaken about what is really going on here. You treat "Ph.D." as if they are some meaningless collection of letters ("The mere questioning of why someone needs to have a Phd to debate a scientific topic results in accusations of arrogance on my part."). The fact that you make such a statement at all is empirical evidence of the arrogance you speak of. One does not simply walk through the doors of a legitimate institution, say "gimme a Ph.D.", and walk out thus decorated. Rather, one goes into a program of study for several years (sometimes many years) in which a great deal of learning & experience are acquired. In most (but of course not all) cases, the person with the Ph.D. has a great deal more knowledge & experience than the person who does not have the Ph.D. Of course there are notable exceptions. I think it is not arrogant to say that after an M.S. degree and 28 years of experience, I know my craft better than someone with a Ph.D. awarded yesterday and no experience. But most people, like science itself, are "moving targets"; they live & learn & change & acquire experience, so what is true today maybe false tomorrow. When you disdain the degree, it is not the letters that suffer your insult, it is the acquisition of knowledge & experience that the letters symbolically represent. And that is where your arrogant dismissal of education & knowledge, as if they are impediments rather than accomplishments, shows itself most plainly & obviously.
It is not necessary for other people to accuse you of anything, your own words are the strongest accusation revealing your own state of mind.
Again you choose the way of religious bias over reason & knowledge. It's not a contest between Alfven and me, it's a contest between Alfven and the rest of the world. More to the point, it is a contest between Alfven as a static concept in time versus the dynamic advance of science and the unavoidable fact that learning takes place. You are frozen in the past worshipping your invented God of Alfven, immune to ever learning anything, lest it challenge your rigid doctrine of faith. The collective world of physicists and their physics has moved on from Alfven, into his future, and learned what he did not or could not learn. Empirical science has revealed that what Alfven might have called "pseudoscience" is in fact valid science. I trust not one person versus Alfven, but rather the physics of today versus the Alfven of yesterday. You choose a rigid doctrine of faith, while I choose to trust empirical science; the difference between us is stark & obvious.
Therein lies the essential difference. Real scientists are willing to change the way they think about the universe, in response to what they learn about it. As they gain knowledge they change their mind or go off in entirely new directions. For instance, astronomers did not decide on a whim that dark matter must be some exotic non-baryonic matter. Rather, they came to this conclusion only after decades of looking for, and not finding, baryonic dark matter, and knowing that they had achieved technology which would see it. Empiricism is what drove the conclusion that dark matter is non-baryonic and empiricism is what drove the rather sudden invention of dark energy as an explanation for surprising observations. On the other hand, pseudoscientists adopt a rigid doctrine of faith which cannot ever be challenged or questioned. In your case, there are several rigid doctrine's of faith upon which you base your pseudoscience. One is the rigid doctrine of a rigid iron surface of the sun. It is a doctrine known to be physically impossible, but since it cannot be challenged, you deny physics specifically, and empirical science in general, in order to defend the faith from question. On this there is no question or doubt in my mind at all, you are a pseudoscientist involved in the active defence of your own rigid doctrine of faith. Whether or not it seems equally obvious to anyone else is their own affair.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
No one assumes that the universe does not exist. Its existence today does not mean that it did or did not come into existence.
Zeuzzz, please learn Big Bang theory before you start to critize it. That is the truly scientific method. One more time: The Big Bang theory states nothing about the creation of the universe.
Scientists in general look at the evidence and hopefully ignore their personal prejudices. There are some who do not.
Scientists are not scared by an infinite universe because many think that the universe is infinite in volume.
Now you are getting it: The CMB shows the properties of being condensed in the past. Thus the universe was once in a hot dense state. This is the Big Bang theory
! (with additional evidence from the Hubble law, etc.)And then you spoil it
.It does not mean that the universe was "created then". Photons did not exist until 10 seconds after the Big Bang. N.B. The Big Bang was not when the universe was created.
There are "a lot more independently verifiable streams of data to back up" the scientific theory that the universe was once in a hot dense state.
Then you are stating there are many different wrong versions and interpretations of PC and ignoring all of the posts in the PC thread.
But lets rehash some of the old stuff for your short memories sake:
1) Plasma is quasi-nautral. This means that its effects are limited to short ranges. Read up about the Debye length sometime and the fact that intergalactic medium has a debye length of 100,000 kilometres - not light years.
The fact is that 4% of the universe is measured to be visible matter. So there 3.9999% of matter is plasma. Not that means anything. The PC proponents are obsessed about 99.9999% meaning something. It deos not since plasma is quasi-nautral.
2) That is one of the most truly unscientific points of PC proponents. Science forms and rejects theories according to the evidence. It never rejects theories that are supported by the evidence. It does not reject theories because of any philosphical argments like your "causality arguments" and "ex nihilo".
3) The universe evolves - that is the Big Bang theory! The rest basically sounds like point 2 - PC proponents do not like it so they reject it.
See above about your ignorance of the Big Bang theory.
That is your opinion.
The science is that there is more evidence than CMB and Hubbles law for the Big Bang theory and this evidence has been scientifically tested. We do see such states in the universe - we create them in particle accelerators.
If you mean naturally occurring hot dense universes inside our universe then: Duh of course we don't see them.
Wrong - try learning what the Big Bang theory actually is.
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Zeuzzz, do you actually know anything about the Big Bang? Because the fact that you think the CMBR originates from the time of creation of the Universe suggests you know almost nothing whatsoever.
Energy is a property that is conserved in the Universe due to the temporal invariance of the laws of physics. Now, nobody really knows whether time began at the Big Bang. So suppose it did. Then before it there was no time. So the idea that energy conservation has been broken is nonsense. There is no sense of "before now" if "now" is the beginning of time. And if something preceeded the Big Bang? Well then there is no reason to assume energy conservation has been violated at all.
Certainly not as you make out above. But energy conservation is pretty complex in GR in general.