questioning Big Bang theory
6 Sep 2006 16:48:51 UTC
Topic 191800
(moderation:
i have come across the following site
I find it very compelling to answer the doubts expressed there.
Is Big Bang theory just a scientific attempt to safe the face of religious explanation of "God created everything" ?
questioning Big Bang theory
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The universe is expanding so if you run the clock backwards there was some time in the past when everything exploded from one point.
RE: The universe is
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The universe is also accelerating, so if you run everything back there was some time in the past when everything stopped, etc, etc. Your argument is making a fundamental and almost universal mistake; you are assuming that the past was the same as now. Obviously within the big bang model, your assumption makes sense. However, the fact that the universe is expanding now does not prove that it was expanding in the past.
Of course, doppler analysis does a lot to prove that the galaxy used to to expand back billions of years, but that really has nothing to do with your flawed argument.
There's many things that are
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There's many things that are cited as evidence to the big bang. The cosmic microwave backround radiation (say that five times fast) is one.
RE: i have come across the
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There are, IIRC, several reputable internet discussion fora which debunk this list, point by point.
Would you be interested to see a debunking?
Or, perhaps, you could choose the three which you find most compelling, and we could debunk them here?
(For avoidance of doubt, that website is a well-known crackpot one)
Okay, what about point 2?
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Okay, what about point 2? about cmb
RE: Okay, what about point
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There are actually many different points under 2, so a thorough debunking would require tackling them all.
Starting with the Eddington "temperature of space": The spectral energy distribution (SED) of the CMB is that of a blackbody (of temperature 2.73 K), with a dipole (of temperature ~mK), and much smaller fluctuations (~μK). This SED is nothing like the SED of starlight!
How, in this 'alternative' view of the CMB, did the energy of the starlight photons get redistributed, reshuffled, transformed, or whatever from the optical waveband (plus UV plus IR) into the microwave one?
Unless a plausible mechanism is offered, this aspect of point 2 is nothing more than "the numbers match, it can't be just a coincidence".
Further, the CMB was hotter in the past. In the 'alternative' view, the "temperature of space" would be universal, and constant.
Finally (for now), as deep Hubble images show, starlight isn't scattered more than few milliarcseconds (mas - the resolution limit of the Hubble), even for the most distant galaxies seen so far (except for gravitational lensing). In the alternative view, it would have become a featureless fog within a few Mpc (megaparsecs; 1 Mpc is ~3 million light years).
(to be continued)
(continued) "the otherwise
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(continued)
"the otherwise troublesome ratio of infrared to radio intensities of radio galaxies" (from the big bad 30 list) has one citation, a 1990 paper by Lerner.
What has happened in the 15 years since the Lerner paper? What happened before?
The story is a rich and interesting one; suffice it to say that the big bad 30 writeup has but a coincidental relationship to the detailed astronomical results (and that's being charitable).
For example, from a very recent paper (selected at random): "Three explanations have been put forward in the literature to justify the trend for HzRGs to have steeper spectral indices; the so-called z − α correlation": a k-correction, an intrinsic steepening due to enhances inverse Compton losses, and "indirect, reflecting an intrinsic correlation between radio luminosity and spectral index coupled to a Malmquist bias".
(translations of this tech-speak available upon request)
But the knockout blow to the explanation on the big bad 30 webpage is the detection of radio galaxies with z > 3 ("at least 30 [...] found to date") - if there were intergalactic absorption, no such source could be detected.
Oh, and the unambiguous detection of the SZE from high-z clusters also shows the big bad 30 'alternative view' to be wrong.
I dont understand anything
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I dont understand anything you just said. Maybe im too drunk, but its probably over my head. the reason i doubt what most people believe is because the reasoning to modern theory is way over my head. i dont understand it. so when someone comes along and offers an alternative that is not as technical, i can buy into it easier because it is not as technical, and it makes sense to me. this is the case with dark matter. it seems like someone developed a theory that would simply make an adjustment to current theory. However, when a problem that seems to debunk modern theory, like the dark matter problem, it seems more logical that current theory is wrong, rather that more parameters are needed. Parameters seem like they are in place to keep old theories current.
RE: I dont understand
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Do you mind if I ask what it was about point 2 (the CMB), in the big bad 30 list, that made particular sense to you?
i tend to agree with
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i tend to agree with hockeyguy that modern science has become so complex that ordinary (who did not invest much time into it) people buy in easily into all the pseudo-science crap especially if it is wraped nicely into scientific terminology (all those astrologists talking about all those X-energy multi dimensional fields etc etc)
However even respectful scientists cannot be allowed to be trusted by us without scientific prove. Science, hockeyguy, is about not taking anything for granted not believing into what others say (no matter who they are) but it is about asking nature for answers and checking and proving everything. This path can get really difficult so be prepared to invest alot of time and effort into understanding it