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Quantized redshift anomaly
19 years 8 months ago #12401
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
References
Van Flandern, Tom (2002), “The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang,” Apeiron, 9[2]:72-90, April.
"The amount of radiation emitted by distant galaxies falls with increasing wavelengths, as expected if the longer wavelengths are scattered by the intergalactic medium. For example, the brightness ratio of radio galaxies at infrared and radio wavelengths changes with distance in a way which implies absorption. Basically, this means that the longer wavelengths are more easily absorbed by material between the galaxies. But then the microwave radiation (between the two wavelengths) should be absorbed by that medium too, and has no chance to reach us from such great distances, or to remain perfectly uniform while doing so. It must instead result from the radiation of microwaves from the intergalactic medium. This argument alone implies that the microwaves could not be coming directly to us from a distance beyond all the galaxies, and therefore that the Big Bang theory cannot be correct.
None of the predictions of the background temperature based on the Big Bang was close enough to qualify as successes, the worst being Gamow’s upward-revised estimate of 50 K made in 1961, just two years before the actual discovery. Clearly, without a realistic quantitative prediction, the Big Bang’s hypothetical “fireball” becomes indistinguishable from the natural minimum temperature of all cold matter in space (2002, 9:73-74, parenthetical item in orig., emp. added).
McGaugh, Stacy S. (2000), “Boomerang Data Suggest a Purely Baryonic Universe,” Astrophysics Journal, 541:L33-L36.
[C]osmic microwave background is very smooth. Structure cannot grow gravitationally to the rich extent seen today unless there is a non-baryonic component that can already be significantly clumped at the time of recombination without leaving indiscriminately large fingerprints on the microwave background (2000, 541:L33, emp. added).
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Hartnett, John G. (2001), “Recent Cosmic Microwave Background Data Supports Creational Cosmologies.” TJ [Technical Journal], 15[1]:8-12.
“the large fingerprints are just not observed” (Hartnett, 2001, 15[1]:10).
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Musser, George (2000), “Boomerang Effect,” Scientific American, 283[1]:14-15, July.
[W]hen measurements by the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA telescopes came in...scientists were elated.... And then the dust settled, revealing that two pillars of big bang theory [the current status of the microwave background radiation and the necessity of a flat Universe—BT/BH/BM] were squarely in conflict.... That roar in the heavens may have been laughter at our cosmic confusion (283[1]:14,15).
Why is the Universe laughing at evolutionary cosmologists? What is this “confusion” all about? As Musser went on to explain, the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA telescopes
...made the most precise maps yet of the glow on scales finer than about one degree, which corresponds to the size of the observable universe at the time the radiation is thought to have been released (about 300,000 years after the bang). On this scale and smaller, gravity and other forces would have had enough time to sculpt matter.
For those first 300,000 years, the photons of the background radiation were bound up in a broiling plasma. Because of random fluctuations generated by cosmic inflation in the first split second, some regions happened to be denser. Their gravity sucked in material, whereupon the pressure imparted by the photons pushed that material apart again. The ensuing battle between pressure and inertia caused the plasma to oscillate between compression and rarefaction—vibrations characteristic of sound waves. As the universe aged, coherent oscillations developed on ever larger scales, filling the heavens with a deepening roar. But when the plasma cooled and condensed into hydrogen gas, the photons went their separate ways, and the universe abruptly went silent. The fine detail in the background radiation is a snapshot of the sound waves at this instant (283[1]:14, parenthetical items in orig., emp. added).
Musser continued:
On either a Fourier analysis or a histogram of spot sizes, this distribution would show up as a series of peaks, each of which corresponds to the spots of a given size. The height of the peaks represents the maximum amount of compression (odd-numbered peaks) or of rarefaction (even-numbered peaks) in initially dense regions. Lo and behold, both telescopes saw the first peak [representing compression—BT/BH/BM]—which not only confirms that sounds reverberated through the early universe, as the big bang theory predicts, but also shows that the sounds were generated from preexisting fluctuations, as only inflation can produce (283[1]:14).
Musser commented on the implication of this when he wrote:
According to Max Tegmark of the University of Pennsylvania and Matias Zaldarriaga of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Boomerang results imply that subatomic particles account for 50 percent more mass than standard big bang theory predicts—a difference 23 times larger than the error bars of the theory (283[1]:15, emp. added).
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Whitfield, John (2003), “Sharp Images Blur Universal Picture,” Nature, [On-line], “Science Update,” URL: www.nature.com/nsu/030324/030324-13.html , March 31.
physicists’ notions of the Universe could be in trouble. New measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope hint that space is smooth, not grainy. Without graininess, our current theories predict that the Big Bang was infinitely hot and dense—tough to explain, to say the least (2003).
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DePree, Christopher and Alan Axelrod (2001), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astronomy (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha), second edition.
Hubble made two very important discoveries in his studies of galaxy types and distributions. He found that the universe appeared to be both isotropic (the same in all directions), and homogeneous (one volume of space is much like any other volume of space). Together, the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe make up what we call the cosmological principle: a cornerstone assumption in modern cosmology. If we could not make this assumption (based on observation), then our cosmology might only apply to a very local part of the universe. But the cosmological principle allows us to extrapolate our conclusions drawn from our local viewpoint to the whole universe (2001, p. 363, parenthetical items and italics in orig., emp. added).
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Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
In describing matter on a cosmic scale, cosmologists strip the stars and planets, the great galaxies and the bright bursting supernovae, of their uniqueness as places and things and replace them with an imaginary distribution: the matter of the universe is depicted as a great but uniform and homogeneous cloud covering the cosmos equitably in all its secret places. Cosmologists make this assumption because they must. There is no way to deal with the universe object by object; the equations would be inscrutable, impossible to solve.
Having simplified the contents of the universe, the cosmologist must take care as well, and for the same reason, to strip from the matter that remains any suggestion of particularity or preference in place. The universe, he must assume, is isotropic. It has no center whatsoever, no place toward which things tend, and no special direction or axis of coordination. The thing looks much the same wherever it is observed.
The twin assumptions that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic are not ancillary but indispensable to the hypothesis of an expanding universe; without them, no conclusion can mathematically be forthcoming (1998, pp. 34-35, emp. added).
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Linde, Andrei (1994), “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 271[5]:48-55, November.
Fifth, there is the question about the distribution of matter in the universe. On the very large scale, matter has spread out with remarkable uniformity. Across more than 10 billion light-years, its distribution departs from perfect homogeneity by less than one part in 10,000. For a long time, nobody had any idea why the universe was so homogeneous. But those who do not have ideas sometimes have principles. One of the cornerstones of the standard cosmology was the “cosmological principle,” which asserts that the universe must be homogeneous. This assumption, however, does not help much, because the universe incorporates important deviations from homogeneity, namely, stars, galaxies, and other agglomerations of matter. Hence, we must explain why the universe is so uniform on large scales and at the same time suggest some mechanism that produces galaxies (1994, 271:49, emp. added).
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Cline, David B. (2003), “The Search for Dark Matter,” Scientific American, 288[3]:50-59, March.
The terms we use to describe its components, “dark matter” and “dark energy,” serve mainly as an expression of our ignorance.... Essentially, all we know is that dark matter clumps together, providing a gravitational anchor for galaxies and larger structures such as galaxy clusters.... To detect dark matter, scientists need to know how it interacts with normal matter. Astronomers assume that it interacts only by means of gravitation, the weakest of all the known forces of nature. If that really is the case, physicists have no hope of ever detecting it (288[3]:52,54, emp. added).
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Brumfiel, Geoff (2003), “Cosmology Gets Real,” Nature, 422:108-110, March 13.
With the addition of the latest data on the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation—BT/BH/BM], courtesy of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, our picture of the universe is now clearer than ever. CMB studies have confirmed that the Universe is indeed flat. The Wilkinson probe has now set ratios for the composition of the cosmos: 23% dark matter and 73% dark energy, leaving only 4% for the galaxies, stars and people (422:109, emp. added).
Many suggestions have been made concerning the nature of the missing dark matter. Before embarking on flights of fancy, the reader should bear in mind that the astronomical evidence for a universe dominated by exotic forms of matter is slim, and the laboratory evidence for the various proposed candidates is equally slim. Effective inflation, unless finely tuned, mandates the missing matter, yet we do not know what form it takes and so far have no evidence that it actually exists (Harrison, 2000, p. 468, emp. added).
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Fox, Karen (2002), The Big Bang Theory—What It Is, Where It Came from, and Why It Works (New York: John Wiley & Sons).
The fact is that the dark matter problem is reaching something of a crisis, although few astronomers have been willing to admit this yet. Forget not finding any ideal dark matter candidates. The problem isn’t that no one can find the missing matter (although they can’t) but that even if theorists stomp their feet and shake their heads, observations haven’t even shown that the universe is at the critical density (2002, pp. 122-123, parenthetical item in orig.).
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DeYoung, Don B. (2000), “Dark Matter,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, 36:177-194, March.
Dark matter is also involved in the popular inflationary big bang model which predicts that the curvature of the universe must be flat. This means that the density of matter is exactly balanced between a universe which eventually collapses (a closed, finite universe), and one which expands forever (an open, infinite universe). The required critical density for a flat universe is about 10-26 g/cm3. This corresponds to approximately 10 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter of space. Observed density estimates, although crude, lead to a value 10-100 times smaller than the critical density. Therefore, a great amount of dark matter is needed to result in a flat, closed universe with zero curvature (2000, 36:180, parenthetical items in orig.).
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Major, Trevor J. (1991), “The Big Bang in Crisis,” Reason & Revelation, 11:21-24, June.
So, cold dark matter is an unknown, unseen substance that is, nonetheless, essential to the process of self-creation.... Unfortunately, 90-99% of this matter is missing from the Universe. At this point, the Big Bang starts to bear striking similarities to the fable of the emperor’s invisible new clothes (Major, 1991, 11:23).
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Hellemans, Alexander (1997), “Galactic Disk Contains No Dark Matter,” Science, 278:1230, November 14.
By studying the movement of stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, two teams of French astronomers have concluded that what you see is what you get: The mass of the visible stars appears to account for all the material in the galactic disk. These findings, derived from data gathered by the European astrometric satellite Hipparcos, imply that the main body of our galaxy contains no “dark matter”—invisible material that astronomers believe accounts for up to 90% of the mass of the universe (1997, 278:1230, emp. added).
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Brumfiel, Geoff (2003), “Cosmology Gets Real,” Nature, 422:108-110, March 13.
The key to understanding it lies in its effects on stars and galaxies. According to general relativity, all mass distorts the space around it. When light from distant objects passes close to dark matter, it should be bent—a process called gravitational lensing.... Cosmologists also know a little about how dark matter interacts with other matter. The faster a particle moves, the more energy it transfers to any particles that it collides with. If, during the early Universe, dark matter was moving at close to the speed of light, it would have left its mark on the process by which matter clumped together to form stars and galaxies. But astronomers can watch star and galaxy formation occurring in very distant parts of the Universe, and so far they have not seen any evidence of the influence of fast-moving dark matter (2003, 422:109-110, emp. added).
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Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Pantheon).
the value of lambda
is bizarre: roughly 10-120—that is, 1 divided by 10 followed by 119 zeros! This is the smallest number ever encountered in science. Why is it not zero? How can the minimum level be tuned so precisely? If it were 10 followed by just 117 zeros, then the galaxies could not form. Extraordinary fine-tuning is needed to explain such extreme numbers.... Why is its final state so close to the zero line? How does it “know” where to end up when the scalar field starts rolling downhill in its landscape? Nobody knows the answers to these questions. They are the greatest unsolved problems in gravitation physics and astronomy.... The only consolation is that, if these observations are correct, there is now a very special value of lambda to try to explain (pp. 259,260-261, emp. added).
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Efstathiou, G., W.J. Sutherland, and S.J. Maddox, (1990), “The Cosmological Constant and Cold Dark matter,” Nature, 348:705-707, December 20.
The cosmological term is a potential correction to the gravitational interaction. If present at all, the cosmological term is incredibly small: Its cumulative effects would show up only at the very largest length scales. However, there is no compelling understanding of why the term is small (1990, 348:705-707, emp. and italics added).
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Brumfiel, Geoff (2003), “Cosmology Gets Real,” Nature, 422:108-110, March 13.
Dark energy is a more vexing problem, but the solution could lie in the nature of empty space. According to quantum theory, particles and their antiparticle equivalents are continually being created and annihilated, even in a vacuum. Some researchers have speculated that this vacuum energy could be what is accelerating the Universe’s expansion. But theoretical predictions for vacuum energy are up to 120 orders of magnitude greater than the strength of dark energy seen today (2003, 422:110, emp. added).
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Fox, Karen (2002), The Big Bang Theory—What It Is, Where It Came from, and Why It Works (New York: John Wiley & Sons).
For one thing, when the math was done to find what the cosmological constant should be via theory, it was 10120 (that’s a 1 followed by 120 zeros) times bigger than what we actually witness. A cosmological constant that large would mean that everything in the universe should be expanding so quickly that you would not be able to see beyond the end of your nose (p. 143, parenthetical item in orig., emp.
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Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
Notwithstanding the investment made by the scientific community and the general public in contemporary cosmology, a suspicion lingers that matters do not sum up as they should. Cosmologists write as if they are quite certain of the Big Bang, yet, within the last decade, they have found it necessary to augment the standard view by means of various new theories. These schemes are meant to solve problems that cosmologists were never at pains to acknowledge, so that today they are somewhat in the position of a physician reporting both that his patient has not been ill and that he has been successfully revived (1998, p. 30).
Scientists are desperately searching for an answer that will allow them to continue to defend at least some form of the Big Bang Model.
Almost all cosmologists have a favored scheme; when not advancing their own, they occupy themselves enumerating the deficiencies of the others.... Having constructed an elaborate scientific orthodoxy, cosmologists have acquired a vested interest in its defense.... Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Big Bang cosmology has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory has been promoted to a secular myth (pp. 31-32,33,38, emp. added).
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Guth, Alan and Paul Steinhardt (1984), “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 250:116-128, May.
From a historical point of view probably the most revolutionary aspect of the inflationary model is the notion that all the matter and energy in the observable universe may have emerged from almost nothing.... The inflationary model of the universe provides a possible mechanism by which the observed universe could have evolved from an infinitesimal region. It is then tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing (1984, 250:128, emp. added).
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Stenger, Victor J. (1987), “Was the Universe Created?,” Free Inquiry, 7[3]:26-30, Summer.
...the universe is probably the result of a random quantum fluctuation in a spaceless, timeless void.... So what had to happen to start the universe was the formation of an empty bubble of highly curved space-time. How did this bubble form? What caused it? Not everything requires a cause. It could have just happened spontaneously as one of the many linear combinations of universes that has the quantum numbers of the void.... Much is still in the speculative stage, and I must admit that there are yet no empirical or observational tests that can be used to test the idea of an accidental origin (1987, 7[3]:26-30, italics in orig., emp. added.).
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Estling, Ralph (1994), “The Scalp-Tinglin’, Mind-Blowin’, Eye-Poppin’, Heart-Wrenchin’, Stomach-Churnin’, Foot-Stumpin’, Great Big Doodley Science Show!!!,” Skeptical Inquirer, 18[4]:428-430, Summer.
The problem emerges in science when scientists leave the realm of science and enter that of philosophy and metaphysics, too often grandiose names for mere personal opinion, untrammeled by empirical evidence or logical analysis, and wearing the mask of deep wisdom.
And so they conjure us an entire Cosmos, or myriads of cosmoses, suddenly, inexplicably, causelessly leaping into being out of—out of Nothing Whatsoever, for no reason at all, and there-after expanding faster than light into more Nothing Whatsoever. And so cosmologists have given us Creation ex nihilo.... And at the instant of this Creation, they inform us, almost parenthetically, the universe possessed the interesting attributes of Infinite Temperature, Infinite Density, and Infinitesimal Volume, a rather gripping state of affairs, as well as something of a sudden and dramatic change from Nothing Whatsoever. They then intone equations and other ritual mathematical formulae and look upon it and pronounce it good.
I do not think that what these cosmologists, these quantum theorists, these universe-makers, are doing is science. I can’t help feeling that universes are notoriously disinclined to spring into being, ready-made, out of nothing, even if Edward Tryon (ah, a name at last!) has written that “our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time....” Perhaps, although we have the word of many famous scientists for it, our universe is not simply one of those things that happen from time to time (18[4]:430, parenthetical item in orig., emp. added).
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Estling, Ralph (1995), “Letter to the Editor,” Skeptical Inquirer, 19[1]:69-70, January/February.
All things begin with speculation, science not excluded. But if no empirical evidence is eventually forthcoming, or can be forthcoming, all speculation is barren.... There is no evidence, so far, that the entire universe, observable and unobservable, emerged from a state of absolute Nothingness. Quantum cosmologists insist both on this absolute Nothingness and on endowing it with various qualities and characteristics: this particular Nothingness possesses virtual quanta seething in a false vacuum. Quanta, virtual or actual, false or true, are not Nothing, they are definitely Something, although we may argue over what exactly. For one thing, quanta are entities having energy, a vacuum has energy and moreover, extension, i.e., it is something into which other things, such as universes, can be put, i.e., we cannot have our absolute Nothingness and eat it too. If we have quanta and a vacuum as given, we in fact have a pre-existent state of existence that either pre-existed timelessly or brought itself into existence from absolute Nothingness (no quanta, no vacuum, no pre-existing initial conditions) at some precise moment in time; it creates this time, along with the space, matter, and energy, which we call the universe.... I’ve had correspondence with Paul Davies [a British astronomer who has championed the idea that the Universe created itself from nothing—BT/BH/BM] on cosmological theory, in the course of which, I asked him what he meant by “Nothing.” He wrote back that he had asked Alexander Vilenkin what he meant by it and that Vilenkin had replied, “By Nothing I mean Nothing,” which seemed pretty straightforward at the time, but these quantum cosmologists go on from there to tell us what their particular breed of Nothing consists of. I pointed this out to Davies, who replied that these things are very complicated. I’m willing to admit the truth of that statement, but I think it does not solve the problem (1995, 19[1]:69-70, emp. added).
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Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
Hot Big Bang cosmology appears to be in violation of the first law of thermodynamics. The global energy needed to run the universe has come from nowhere, and to nowhere it apparently goes as the universe loses energy by cooling itself.
This contravention of thermodynamics expresses, in physical form, a general philosophical anxiety. Having brought space and time into existence, along with everything else, the Big Bang itself remains outside any causal scheme (1998, p. 37).
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Linde, Andrei (1994), “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 271[5]:48-55, November.
In its standard form, the big bang theory maintains that the universe was born about 15 billion years ago from a cosmological singularity—a state in which the temperature and density are infinitely high. Of course, one cannot really speak in physical terms about these quantities as being infinite. One usually assumes that the current laws of physics did not apply then (1994, 271[5]:48).
Astronomer Joseph Silk wrote:
The universe began at time zero in a state of infinite density. Of course, the phrase “a state of infinite density” is completely unacceptable as a physical description of the universe.... An infinitely dense universe [is] where the laws of physics, and even space and time, break down (as quoted in Berlinski, 1998, p. 36).
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Pratchett, Terry (1994), Lords and Ladies (New York: HarperPrism).
“The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded” (1994, p. 7).
Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
The creation of the universe remains unexplained by any force, field, power, potency, influence, or instrumentality known to physics—or to man. The whole vast imposing structure organizes itself from absolutely nothing. This is not simply difficult to grasp. It is incomprehensible.
Physicists, no less than anyone else, are uneasy with the idea that the universe simply popped into existence, with space and time “suddenly switching themselves on.” The image of a light switch comes from Paul Davies, who uses it to express a miracle without quite recognizing that it embodies a contradiction. A universe that has suddenly switched itself on has accomplished something within time; and yet the Big Bang is supposed to have brought space and time into existence.
Having entered a dark logical defile, physicists often find it difficult to withdraw. Thus, Alan Guth writes in pleased astonishment that the universe really did arise from “essentially...nothing at all”: “as it happens, a false vacuum patch” “[10-26] centimeters in diameter” and “[10-32] solar masses.” It would appear, then, that “essentially nothing” has both spatial extension and mass. While these facts may strike Guth as inconspicuous, others may suspect that nothingness, like death, is not a matter that admits of degrees (p. 37, emp. added).
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Hawking, Stephen W. (1988), A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam).
The new inflationary model was a good attempt to explain why the universe is the way it is.... In my personal opinion, the new inflationary model is now dead as a scientific theory, although a lot of people do not seem to have heard of its demise and are still writing papers on it as if it were viable (1988, p. 132, emp. added).
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Heeren, Fred (1995), Show Me God (Wheeling, IL: Searchlight Publications).
Alan Guth conceded: First of all, I will say that at the purely technical level, inflation itself does not explain how the universe arose from nothing.... Inflation itself takes a very small universe and produces from it a very big universe. But inflation by itself does not explain where that very small universe came from (as quoted in Heeren, 1995, p. 148).
After the chaotic inflationary model, came the eternal inflationary model, which was set forth by Linde in 1986. As Barrow summarized it in The Book of Nothing:
Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Pantheon).
The spectacular effect of this is to make inflation self-reproducing. Every inflating region gives rise to other sub-regions which inflate and then in turn do the same. The process appears unstoppable—eternal. No reason has been found why it should ever end. Nor is it known if it needs to have a beginning. As with the process of chaotic inflation, every bout of inflation can produce a large region with very different properties. Some regions may inflate a lot, some only a little; some may have many large dimensions of space, some only three; some may contain four forces of Nature that we see, others may have fewer. The overall effect is to provide a physical mechanism by which to realize all, or at least almost all, possibilities somewhere within a single universe.
These speculative possibilities show some of the unending richness of the physicists’ conception of the vacuum. It is the basis of our most successful theory of the Universe and why it has the properties that it does. Vacuums can change; vacuums can fluctuate; vacuums can have strange symmetries, strange geographies, strange histories. More and more of the remarkable features of the Universe we observe seem to be reflections of the properties of the vacuum (2000, pp. 256,271).
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Murray, Michael J. (1999), Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
According to the vacuum fluctuation models, our universe, along with these other universes, were generated by quantum fluctuations in a preexisting superspace. Imaginatively, one can think of this preexisting superspace as an infinitely extending ocean of soap, and each universe generated out of this superspace as a soap bubble which spontaneously forms on the ocean (1999, pp. 59-60).
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Cramer, John G. (1999), “Before the Big Bang,” Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine, [On-line], URL: www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw94.html - March.
The problem with all of this is that the inflation scenario seems rather contrived and raises many unresolved questions. Why is the universe created with the inflaton field displaced from equilibrium? Why is the displacement the same everywhere? What are the initial conditions that produce inflation? How can the inflationary phase be made to last long enough to produce our universe? Thus, the inflation scenario which was invented to eliminate the contrived initial conditions of the Big Bang model apparently needs contrived initial conditions of its own (1999, emp. added).
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Livio, Mario (2000), The Accelerating Universe (New York: John Wiley).
If eternal inflation really describes the evolution of the universe, then the beginning may be entirely inaccessible to observational tests. The point is that even the original inflationary model, with a single inflation event, already had the property of erasing evidence from the preinflation epoch. Eternal inflation appears to make any efforts to obtain information about the beginning, via observations in our own pocket universe, absolutely hopeless (2000, pp. 180-181, emp. added).
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Morrison, Philip and Phylis (2001), “The Big Bang: Wit or Wisdom?,” Scientific American, 284[2]:93,95, February.
We simply do not know our cosmic origins; intriguing alternatives abound, but none yet compels. We do not know the details of inflation, nor what came before, nor the nature of the dark, unseen material, nor the nature of the repulsive forces that dilute gravity. The book of the cosmos is still open. Note carefully: we no longer see a big bang as a direct solution. Inflation erases evidence of past space, time and matter. The beginning—if any—is still unread (284[2]:95, emp. added).
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Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Pantheon).
As the implications of the quantum picture of matter were explored more fully, a further radically new consequence appears that was to impinge upon the concept of the vacuum. Werner Heisenberg showed that there were complementary pairs of attributes of things which could not be measured simultaneously with arbitrary precision, even with perfect instruments. This restriction on measurement became known as the Uncertainty Principle. One pair of complementary attributes limited by the Uncertainty Principle is the combination of position and momentum. Thus we cannot know at once where something is and how it is moving with arbitrary precision....
The Uncertainty Principle and the quantum theory revolutionised our conception of the vacuum. We can no longer sustain the simple idea that a vacuum is just an empty box. If we could say that there were no particles in a box, that it was completely empty of all mass and energy, then we would have to violate the Uncertainty Principle because we would require perfect information about motion at every point and about the energy of the system at a given instant of time....
This discovery at the heart of the quantum description of matter means that the concept of a vacuum must be somewhat realigned. It is no longer to be associated with the idea of the void and of nothingness or empty space. Rather, it is merely the emptiest possible state in the sense of the state that possesses the lowest possible energy; the state from which no further energy can be removed (2000, pp. 204,205, first emp. in orig.; last emp. added).
added).
Van Flandern, Tom (2002), “The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang,” Apeiron, 9[2]:72-90, April.
"The amount of radiation emitted by distant galaxies falls with increasing wavelengths, as expected if the longer wavelengths are scattered by the intergalactic medium. For example, the brightness ratio of radio galaxies at infrared and radio wavelengths changes with distance in a way which implies absorption. Basically, this means that the longer wavelengths are more easily absorbed by material between the galaxies. But then the microwave radiation (between the two wavelengths) should be absorbed by that medium too, and has no chance to reach us from such great distances, or to remain perfectly uniform while doing so. It must instead result from the radiation of microwaves from the intergalactic medium. This argument alone implies that the microwaves could not be coming directly to us from a distance beyond all the galaxies, and therefore that the Big Bang theory cannot be correct.
None of the predictions of the background temperature based on the Big Bang was close enough to qualify as successes, the worst being Gamow’s upward-revised estimate of 50 K made in 1961, just two years before the actual discovery. Clearly, without a realistic quantitative prediction, the Big Bang’s hypothetical “fireball” becomes indistinguishable from the natural minimum temperature of all cold matter in space (2002, 9:73-74, parenthetical item in orig., emp. added).
McGaugh, Stacy S. (2000), “Boomerang Data Suggest a Purely Baryonic Universe,” Astrophysics Journal, 541:L33-L36.
[C]osmic microwave background is very smooth. Structure cannot grow gravitationally to the rich extent seen today unless there is a non-baryonic component that can already be significantly clumped at the time of recombination without leaving indiscriminately large fingerprints on the microwave background (2000, 541:L33, emp. added).
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Hartnett, John G. (2001), “Recent Cosmic Microwave Background Data Supports Creational Cosmologies.” TJ [Technical Journal], 15[1]:8-12.
“the large fingerprints are just not observed” (Hartnett, 2001, 15[1]:10).
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Musser, George (2000), “Boomerang Effect,” Scientific American, 283[1]:14-15, July.
[W]hen measurements by the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA telescopes came in...scientists were elated.... And then the dust settled, revealing that two pillars of big bang theory [the current status of the microwave background radiation and the necessity of a flat Universe—BT/BH/BM] were squarely in conflict.... That roar in the heavens may have been laughter at our cosmic confusion (283[1]:14,15).
Why is the Universe laughing at evolutionary cosmologists? What is this “confusion” all about? As Musser went on to explain, the BOOMERANG and MAXIMA telescopes
...made the most precise maps yet of the glow on scales finer than about one degree, which corresponds to the size of the observable universe at the time the radiation is thought to have been released (about 300,000 years after the bang). On this scale and smaller, gravity and other forces would have had enough time to sculpt matter.
For those first 300,000 years, the photons of the background radiation were bound up in a broiling plasma. Because of random fluctuations generated by cosmic inflation in the first split second, some regions happened to be denser. Their gravity sucked in material, whereupon the pressure imparted by the photons pushed that material apart again. The ensuing battle between pressure and inertia caused the plasma to oscillate between compression and rarefaction—vibrations characteristic of sound waves. As the universe aged, coherent oscillations developed on ever larger scales, filling the heavens with a deepening roar. But when the plasma cooled and condensed into hydrogen gas, the photons went their separate ways, and the universe abruptly went silent. The fine detail in the background radiation is a snapshot of the sound waves at this instant (283[1]:14, parenthetical items in orig., emp. added).
Musser continued:
On either a Fourier analysis or a histogram of spot sizes, this distribution would show up as a series of peaks, each of which corresponds to the spots of a given size. The height of the peaks represents the maximum amount of compression (odd-numbered peaks) or of rarefaction (even-numbered peaks) in initially dense regions. Lo and behold, both telescopes saw the first peak [representing compression—BT/BH/BM]—which not only confirms that sounds reverberated through the early universe, as the big bang theory predicts, but also shows that the sounds were generated from preexisting fluctuations, as only inflation can produce (283[1]:14).
Musser commented on the implication of this when he wrote:
According to Max Tegmark of the University of Pennsylvania and Matias Zaldarriaga of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Boomerang results imply that subatomic particles account for 50 percent more mass than standard big bang theory predicts—a difference 23 times larger than the error bars of the theory (283[1]:15, emp. added).
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Whitfield, John (2003), “Sharp Images Blur Universal Picture,” Nature, [On-line], “Science Update,” URL: www.nature.com/nsu/030324/030324-13.html , March 31.
physicists’ notions of the Universe could be in trouble. New measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope hint that space is smooth, not grainy. Without graininess, our current theories predict that the Big Bang was infinitely hot and dense—tough to explain, to say the least (2003).
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DePree, Christopher and Alan Axelrod (2001), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astronomy (Indianapolis, IN: Alpha), second edition.
Hubble made two very important discoveries in his studies of galaxy types and distributions. He found that the universe appeared to be both isotropic (the same in all directions), and homogeneous (one volume of space is much like any other volume of space). Together, the homogeneity and isotropy of the universe make up what we call the cosmological principle: a cornerstone assumption in modern cosmology. If we could not make this assumption (based on observation), then our cosmology might only apply to a very local part of the universe. But the cosmological principle allows us to extrapolate our conclusions drawn from our local viewpoint to the whole universe (2001, p. 363, parenthetical items and italics in orig., emp. added).
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Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
In describing matter on a cosmic scale, cosmologists strip the stars and planets, the great galaxies and the bright bursting supernovae, of their uniqueness as places and things and replace them with an imaginary distribution: the matter of the universe is depicted as a great but uniform and homogeneous cloud covering the cosmos equitably in all its secret places. Cosmologists make this assumption because they must. There is no way to deal with the universe object by object; the equations would be inscrutable, impossible to solve.
Having simplified the contents of the universe, the cosmologist must take care as well, and for the same reason, to strip from the matter that remains any suggestion of particularity or preference in place. The universe, he must assume, is isotropic. It has no center whatsoever, no place toward which things tend, and no special direction or axis of coordination. The thing looks much the same wherever it is observed.
The twin assumptions that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic are not ancillary but indispensable to the hypothesis of an expanding universe; without them, no conclusion can mathematically be forthcoming (1998, pp. 34-35, emp. added).
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Linde, Andrei (1994), “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 271[5]:48-55, November.
Fifth, there is the question about the distribution of matter in the universe. On the very large scale, matter has spread out with remarkable uniformity. Across more than 10 billion light-years, its distribution departs from perfect homogeneity by less than one part in 10,000. For a long time, nobody had any idea why the universe was so homogeneous. But those who do not have ideas sometimes have principles. One of the cornerstones of the standard cosmology was the “cosmological principle,” which asserts that the universe must be homogeneous. This assumption, however, does not help much, because the universe incorporates important deviations from homogeneity, namely, stars, galaxies, and other agglomerations of matter. Hence, we must explain why the universe is so uniform on large scales and at the same time suggest some mechanism that produces galaxies (1994, 271:49, emp. added).
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Cline, David B. (2003), “The Search for Dark Matter,” Scientific American, 288[3]:50-59, March.
The terms we use to describe its components, “dark matter” and “dark energy,” serve mainly as an expression of our ignorance.... Essentially, all we know is that dark matter clumps together, providing a gravitational anchor for galaxies and larger structures such as galaxy clusters.... To detect dark matter, scientists need to know how it interacts with normal matter. Astronomers assume that it interacts only by means of gravitation, the weakest of all the known forces of nature. If that really is the case, physicists have no hope of ever detecting it (288[3]:52,54, emp. added).
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Brumfiel, Geoff (2003), “Cosmology Gets Real,” Nature, 422:108-110, March 13.
With the addition of the latest data on the CMB [cosmic microwave background radiation—BT/BH/BM], courtesy of NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, our picture of the universe is now clearer than ever. CMB studies have confirmed that the Universe is indeed flat. The Wilkinson probe has now set ratios for the composition of the cosmos: 23% dark matter and 73% dark energy, leaving only 4% for the galaxies, stars and people (422:109, emp. added).
Many suggestions have been made concerning the nature of the missing dark matter. Before embarking on flights of fancy, the reader should bear in mind that the astronomical evidence for a universe dominated by exotic forms of matter is slim, and the laboratory evidence for the various proposed candidates is equally slim. Effective inflation, unless finely tuned, mandates the missing matter, yet we do not know what form it takes and so far have no evidence that it actually exists (Harrison, 2000, p. 468, emp. added).
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Fox, Karen (2002), The Big Bang Theory—What It Is, Where It Came from, and Why It Works (New York: John Wiley & Sons).
The fact is that the dark matter problem is reaching something of a crisis, although few astronomers have been willing to admit this yet. Forget not finding any ideal dark matter candidates. The problem isn’t that no one can find the missing matter (although they can’t) but that even if theorists stomp their feet and shake their heads, observations haven’t even shown that the universe is at the critical density (2002, pp. 122-123, parenthetical item in orig.).
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DeYoung, Don B. (2000), “Dark Matter,” Creation Research Society Quarterly, 36:177-194, March.
Dark matter is also involved in the popular inflationary big bang model which predicts that the curvature of the universe must be flat. This means that the density of matter is exactly balanced between a universe which eventually collapses (a closed, finite universe), and one which expands forever (an open, infinite universe). The required critical density for a flat universe is about 10-26 g/cm3. This corresponds to approximately 10 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter of space. Observed density estimates, although crude, lead to a value 10-100 times smaller than the critical density. Therefore, a great amount of dark matter is needed to result in a flat, closed universe with zero curvature (2000, 36:180, parenthetical items in orig.).
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Major, Trevor J. (1991), “The Big Bang in Crisis,” Reason & Revelation, 11:21-24, June.
So, cold dark matter is an unknown, unseen substance that is, nonetheless, essential to the process of self-creation.... Unfortunately, 90-99% of this matter is missing from the Universe. At this point, the Big Bang starts to bear striking similarities to the fable of the emperor’s invisible new clothes (Major, 1991, 11:23).
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Hellemans, Alexander (1997), “Galactic Disk Contains No Dark Matter,” Science, 278:1230, November 14.
By studying the movement of stars in the disk of our Milky Way galaxy, two teams of French astronomers have concluded that what you see is what you get: The mass of the visible stars appears to account for all the material in the galactic disk. These findings, derived from data gathered by the European astrometric satellite Hipparcos, imply that the main body of our galaxy contains no “dark matter”—invisible material that astronomers believe accounts for up to 90% of the mass of the universe (1997, 278:1230, emp. added).
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Brumfiel, Geoff (2003), “Cosmology Gets Real,” Nature, 422:108-110, March 13.
The key to understanding it lies in its effects on stars and galaxies. According to general relativity, all mass distorts the space around it. When light from distant objects passes close to dark matter, it should be bent—a process called gravitational lensing.... Cosmologists also know a little about how dark matter interacts with other matter. The faster a particle moves, the more energy it transfers to any particles that it collides with. If, during the early Universe, dark matter was moving at close to the speed of light, it would have left its mark on the process by which matter clumped together to form stars and galaxies. But astronomers can watch star and galaxy formation occurring in very distant parts of the Universe, and so far they have not seen any evidence of the influence of fast-moving dark matter (2003, 422:109-110, emp. added).
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Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Pantheon).
the value of lambda
is bizarre: roughly 10-120—that is, 1 divided by 10 followed by 119 zeros! This is the smallest number ever encountered in science. Why is it not zero? How can the minimum level be tuned so precisely? If it were 10 followed by just 117 zeros, then the galaxies could not form. Extraordinary fine-tuning is needed to explain such extreme numbers.... Why is its final state so close to the zero line? How does it “know” where to end up when the scalar field starts rolling downhill in its landscape? Nobody knows the answers to these questions. They are the greatest unsolved problems in gravitation physics and astronomy.... The only consolation is that, if these observations are correct, there is now a very special value of lambda to try to explain (pp. 259,260-261, emp. added).
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Efstathiou, G., W.J. Sutherland, and S.J. Maddox, (1990), “The Cosmological Constant and Cold Dark matter,” Nature, 348:705-707, December 20.
The cosmological term is a potential correction to the gravitational interaction. If present at all, the cosmological term is incredibly small: Its cumulative effects would show up only at the very largest length scales. However, there is no compelling understanding of why the term is small (1990, 348:705-707, emp. and italics added).
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Brumfiel, Geoff (2003), “Cosmology Gets Real,” Nature, 422:108-110, March 13.
Dark energy is a more vexing problem, but the solution could lie in the nature of empty space. According to quantum theory, particles and their antiparticle equivalents are continually being created and annihilated, even in a vacuum. Some researchers have speculated that this vacuum energy could be what is accelerating the Universe’s expansion. But theoretical predictions for vacuum energy are up to 120 orders of magnitude greater than the strength of dark energy seen today (2003, 422:110, emp. added).
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Fox, Karen (2002), The Big Bang Theory—What It Is, Where It Came from, and Why It Works (New York: John Wiley & Sons).
For one thing, when the math was done to find what the cosmological constant should be via theory, it was 10120 (that’s a 1 followed by 120 zeros) times bigger than what we actually witness. A cosmological constant that large would mean that everything in the universe should be expanding so quickly that you would not be able to see beyond the end of your nose (p. 143, parenthetical item in orig., emp.
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Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
Notwithstanding the investment made by the scientific community and the general public in contemporary cosmology, a suspicion lingers that matters do not sum up as they should. Cosmologists write as if they are quite certain of the Big Bang, yet, within the last decade, they have found it necessary to augment the standard view by means of various new theories. These schemes are meant to solve problems that cosmologists were never at pains to acknowledge, so that today they are somewhat in the position of a physician reporting both that his patient has not been ill and that he has been successfully revived (1998, p. 30).
Scientists are desperately searching for an answer that will allow them to continue to defend at least some form of the Big Bang Model.
Almost all cosmologists have a favored scheme; when not advancing their own, they occupy themselves enumerating the deficiencies of the others.... Having constructed an elaborate scientific orthodoxy, cosmologists have acquired a vested interest in its defense.... Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, Big Bang cosmology has undergone that curious social process in which a scientific theory has been promoted to a secular myth (pp. 31-32,33,38, emp. added).
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Guth, Alan and Paul Steinhardt (1984), “The Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 250:116-128, May.
From a historical point of view probably the most revolutionary aspect of the inflationary model is the notion that all the matter and energy in the observable universe may have emerged from almost nothing.... The inflationary model of the universe provides a possible mechanism by which the observed universe could have evolved from an infinitesimal region. It is then tempting to go one step further and speculate that the entire universe evolved from literally nothing (1984, 250:128, emp. added).
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Stenger, Victor J. (1987), “Was the Universe Created?,” Free Inquiry, 7[3]:26-30, Summer.
...the universe is probably the result of a random quantum fluctuation in a spaceless, timeless void.... So what had to happen to start the universe was the formation of an empty bubble of highly curved space-time. How did this bubble form? What caused it? Not everything requires a cause. It could have just happened spontaneously as one of the many linear combinations of universes that has the quantum numbers of the void.... Much is still in the speculative stage, and I must admit that there are yet no empirical or observational tests that can be used to test the idea of an accidental origin (1987, 7[3]:26-30, italics in orig., emp. added.).
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Estling, Ralph (1994), “The Scalp-Tinglin’, Mind-Blowin’, Eye-Poppin’, Heart-Wrenchin’, Stomach-Churnin’, Foot-Stumpin’, Great Big Doodley Science Show!!!,” Skeptical Inquirer, 18[4]:428-430, Summer.
The problem emerges in science when scientists leave the realm of science and enter that of philosophy and metaphysics, too often grandiose names for mere personal opinion, untrammeled by empirical evidence or logical analysis, and wearing the mask of deep wisdom.
And so they conjure us an entire Cosmos, or myriads of cosmoses, suddenly, inexplicably, causelessly leaping into being out of—out of Nothing Whatsoever, for no reason at all, and there-after expanding faster than light into more Nothing Whatsoever. And so cosmologists have given us Creation ex nihilo.... And at the instant of this Creation, they inform us, almost parenthetically, the universe possessed the interesting attributes of Infinite Temperature, Infinite Density, and Infinitesimal Volume, a rather gripping state of affairs, as well as something of a sudden and dramatic change from Nothing Whatsoever. They then intone equations and other ritual mathematical formulae and look upon it and pronounce it good.
I do not think that what these cosmologists, these quantum theorists, these universe-makers, are doing is science. I can’t help feeling that universes are notoriously disinclined to spring into being, ready-made, out of nothing, even if Edward Tryon (ah, a name at last!) has written that “our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time....” Perhaps, although we have the word of many famous scientists for it, our universe is not simply one of those things that happen from time to time (18[4]:430, parenthetical item in orig., emp. added).
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Estling, Ralph (1995), “Letter to the Editor,” Skeptical Inquirer, 19[1]:69-70, January/February.
All things begin with speculation, science not excluded. But if no empirical evidence is eventually forthcoming, or can be forthcoming, all speculation is barren.... There is no evidence, so far, that the entire universe, observable and unobservable, emerged from a state of absolute Nothingness. Quantum cosmologists insist both on this absolute Nothingness and on endowing it with various qualities and characteristics: this particular Nothingness possesses virtual quanta seething in a false vacuum. Quanta, virtual or actual, false or true, are not Nothing, they are definitely Something, although we may argue over what exactly. For one thing, quanta are entities having energy, a vacuum has energy and moreover, extension, i.e., it is something into which other things, such as universes, can be put, i.e., we cannot have our absolute Nothingness and eat it too. If we have quanta and a vacuum as given, we in fact have a pre-existent state of existence that either pre-existed timelessly or brought itself into existence from absolute Nothingness (no quanta, no vacuum, no pre-existing initial conditions) at some precise moment in time; it creates this time, along with the space, matter, and energy, which we call the universe.... I’ve had correspondence with Paul Davies [a British astronomer who has championed the idea that the Universe created itself from nothing—BT/BH/BM] on cosmological theory, in the course of which, I asked him what he meant by “Nothing.” He wrote back that he had asked Alexander Vilenkin what he meant by it and that Vilenkin had replied, “By Nothing I mean Nothing,” which seemed pretty straightforward at the time, but these quantum cosmologists go on from there to tell us what their particular breed of Nothing consists of. I pointed this out to Davies, who replied that these things are very complicated. I’m willing to admit the truth of that statement, but I think it does not solve the problem (1995, 19[1]:69-70, emp. added).
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Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
Hot Big Bang cosmology appears to be in violation of the first law of thermodynamics. The global energy needed to run the universe has come from nowhere, and to nowhere it apparently goes as the universe loses energy by cooling itself.
This contravention of thermodynamics expresses, in physical form, a general philosophical anxiety. Having brought space and time into existence, along with everything else, the Big Bang itself remains outside any causal scheme (1998, p. 37).
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Linde, Andrei (1994), “The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe,” Scientific American, 271[5]:48-55, November.
In its standard form, the big bang theory maintains that the universe was born about 15 billion years ago from a cosmological singularity—a state in which the temperature and density are infinitely high. Of course, one cannot really speak in physical terms about these quantities as being infinite. One usually assumes that the current laws of physics did not apply then (1994, 271[5]:48).
Astronomer Joseph Silk wrote:
The universe began at time zero in a state of infinite density. Of course, the phrase “a state of infinite density” is completely unacceptable as a physical description of the universe.... An infinitely dense universe [is] where the laws of physics, and even space and time, break down (as quoted in Berlinski, 1998, p. 36).
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Pratchett, Terry (1994), Lords and Ladies (New York: HarperPrism).
“The current state of knowledge can be summarized thus: In the beginning, there was nothing, which exploded” (1994, p. 7).
Berlinski, David (1998), “Was There a Big Bang?,” Commentary, pp. 28-38, February.
The creation of the universe remains unexplained by any force, field, power, potency, influence, or instrumentality known to physics—or to man. The whole vast imposing structure organizes itself from absolutely nothing. This is not simply difficult to grasp. It is incomprehensible.
Physicists, no less than anyone else, are uneasy with the idea that the universe simply popped into existence, with space and time “suddenly switching themselves on.” The image of a light switch comes from Paul Davies, who uses it to express a miracle without quite recognizing that it embodies a contradiction. A universe that has suddenly switched itself on has accomplished something within time; and yet the Big Bang is supposed to have brought space and time into existence.
Having entered a dark logical defile, physicists often find it difficult to withdraw. Thus, Alan Guth writes in pleased astonishment that the universe really did arise from “essentially...nothing at all”: “as it happens, a false vacuum patch” “[10-26] centimeters in diameter” and “[10-32] solar masses.” It would appear, then, that “essentially nothing” has both spatial extension and mass. While these facts may strike Guth as inconspicuous, others may suspect that nothingness, like death, is not a matter that admits of degrees (p. 37, emp. added).
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Hawking, Stephen W. (1988), A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam).
The new inflationary model was a good attempt to explain why the universe is the way it is.... In my personal opinion, the new inflationary model is now dead as a scientific theory, although a lot of people do not seem to have heard of its demise and are still writing papers on it as if it were viable (1988, p. 132, emp. added).
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Heeren, Fred (1995), Show Me God (Wheeling, IL: Searchlight Publications).
Alan Guth conceded: First of all, I will say that at the purely technical level, inflation itself does not explain how the universe arose from nothing.... Inflation itself takes a very small universe and produces from it a very big universe. But inflation by itself does not explain where that very small universe came from (as quoted in Heeren, 1995, p. 148).
After the chaotic inflationary model, came the eternal inflationary model, which was set forth by Linde in 1986. As Barrow summarized it in The Book of Nothing:
Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Pantheon).
The spectacular effect of this is to make inflation self-reproducing. Every inflating region gives rise to other sub-regions which inflate and then in turn do the same. The process appears unstoppable—eternal. No reason has been found why it should ever end. Nor is it known if it needs to have a beginning. As with the process of chaotic inflation, every bout of inflation can produce a large region with very different properties. Some regions may inflate a lot, some only a little; some may have many large dimensions of space, some only three; some may contain four forces of Nature that we see, others may have fewer. The overall effect is to provide a physical mechanism by which to realize all, or at least almost all, possibilities somewhere within a single universe.
These speculative possibilities show some of the unending richness of the physicists’ conception of the vacuum. It is the basis of our most successful theory of the Universe and why it has the properties that it does. Vacuums can change; vacuums can fluctuate; vacuums can have strange symmetries, strange geographies, strange histories. More and more of the remarkable features of the Universe we observe seem to be reflections of the properties of the vacuum (2000, pp. 256,271).
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Murray, Michael J. (1999), Reason for the Hope Within (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans).
According to the vacuum fluctuation models, our universe, along with these other universes, were generated by quantum fluctuations in a preexisting superspace. Imaginatively, one can think of this preexisting superspace as an infinitely extending ocean of soap, and each universe generated out of this superspace as a soap bubble which spontaneously forms on the ocean (1999, pp. 59-60).
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Cramer, John G. (1999), “Before the Big Bang,” Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine, [On-line], URL: www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw94.html - March.
The problem with all of this is that the inflation scenario seems rather contrived and raises many unresolved questions. Why is the universe created with the inflaton field displaced from equilibrium? Why is the displacement the same everywhere? What are the initial conditions that produce inflation? How can the inflationary phase be made to last long enough to produce our universe? Thus, the inflation scenario which was invented to eliminate the contrived initial conditions of the Big Bang model apparently needs contrived initial conditions of its own (1999, emp. added).
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Livio, Mario (2000), The Accelerating Universe (New York: John Wiley).
If eternal inflation really describes the evolution of the universe, then the beginning may be entirely inaccessible to observational tests. The point is that even the original inflationary model, with a single inflation event, already had the property of erasing evidence from the preinflation epoch. Eternal inflation appears to make any efforts to obtain information about the beginning, via observations in our own pocket universe, absolutely hopeless (2000, pp. 180-181, emp. added).
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Morrison, Philip and Phylis (2001), “The Big Bang: Wit or Wisdom?,” Scientific American, 284[2]:93,95, February.
We simply do not know our cosmic origins; intriguing alternatives abound, but none yet compels. We do not know the details of inflation, nor what came before, nor the nature of the dark, unseen material, nor the nature of the repulsive forces that dilute gravity. The book of the cosmos is still open. Note carefully: we no longer see a big bang as a direct solution. Inflation erases evidence of past space, time and matter. The beginning—if any—is still unread (284[2]:95, emp. added).
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Barrow, John D. (2000), The Book of Nothing: Vacuums, Voids, and the Latest Ideas about the Origins of the Universe (New York: Pantheon).
As the implications of the quantum picture of matter were explored more fully, a further radically new consequence appears that was to impinge upon the concept of the vacuum. Werner Heisenberg showed that there were complementary pairs of attributes of things which could not be measured simultaneously with arbitrary precision, even with perfect instruments. This restriction on measurement became known as the Uncertainty Principle. One pair of complementary attributes limited by the Uncertainty Principle is the combination of position and momentum. Thus we cannot know at once where something is and how it is moving with arbitrary precision....
The Uncertainty Principle and the quantum theory revolutionised our conception of the vacuum. We can no longer sustain the simple idea that a vacuum is just an empty box. If we could say that there were no particles in a box, that it was completely empty of all mass and energy, then we would have to violate the Uncertainty Principle because we would require perfect information about motion at every point and about the energy of the system at a given instant of time....
This discovery at the heart of the quantum description of matter means that the concept of a vacuum must be somewhat realigned. It is no longer to be associated with the idea of the void and of nothingness or empty space. Rather, it is merely the emptiest possible state in the sense of the state that possesses the lowest possible energy; the state from which no further energy can be removed (2000, pp. 204,205, first emp. in orig.; last emp. added).
added).
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19 years 8 months ago #12361
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/study/sci/.../internal/steady.htm
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The steady-state theory is now no longer accepted by most cosmologists, particularly after the discovery of microwave background radiation in 1965, for which steady state has no explanation.
The Hubble Deep Field photograph taken in 1996 by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the most distant view known. It was expected to show the birth of galaxies, but instead shows galaxies looking remarkably like present day ones, perhaps there is life in the steady state yet. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Now I know why it has been said that a new idea takes about thirty years to be accepted - that's how long it takes for the scientists to retire and get out of the way...
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The steady-state theory is now no longer accepted by most cosmologists, particularly after the discovery of microwave background radiation in 1965, for which steady state has no explanation.
The Hubble Deep Field photograph taken in 1996 by the Hubble Space Telescope shows the most distant view known. It was expected to show the birth of galaxies, but instead shows galaxies looking remarkably like present day ones, perhaps there is life in the steady state yet. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Now I know why it has been said that a new idea takes about thirty years to be accepted - that's how long it takes for the scientists to retire and get out of the way...
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19 years 8 months ago #12362
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
<center><font size="3"><b>History of 2.7 K Temperature Prior to Penzias and Wilson(1)</center></b></font id="size3"><center>[André Koch Torres Assis* & Marcos Cesar Danhoni Neves** </center>
<center>Instituto de Física "Gleb Wataghin", Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 13083-970, Campinas-SP, Brasil, e-mail: assis@ifi.unicamp.br
** Departamento de Física, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Av. Colombo, 5790, 87020-900, Maringá-PR, Brasil, e-mail: macedane@yahoo.com
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We present the history of estimates of the temperature of intergalactic space. We begin with the works of Guillaume and Eddington on the temperature of interstellar space due to starlight belonging to our Milky Way galaxy. Then we discuss works relating to cosmic radiation, concentrating on Regener and Nernst. We also discuss Finlay-Freundlich’s and Max Born’s important research on this topic. Finally, we present the work of Gamow and collaborators. We show that the models based on an Universe in dynamical equilibrium without expansion predicted the 2.7 K temperature prior to and better than models based on the Big Bang.
PACS: 98.70.Vc Background radiations
98.80.-k Cosmology
98.80Bp Origin and formation of the Universe
Key Words: Cosmic background radiation, temperature of intergalactic space, blackblody radiation
Introduction
In 1965 Penzias and Wilson discovered the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) utilizing a horn reflector antenna built to study radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson 1965). They found a temperature of 3.5± 1.0 K observing background radiation at 7.3 cm wavelength. This was soon interpreted as a relic of the hot Big Bang with a blackbody spectrum (Dicke et al. 1965). The finding was considered a proof of the standard cosmological model of the Universe based on the expansion on the Universe (the Big Bang), which had predicted this temperature with the works of Gamow and collaborators.
In this paper we show that other models of a Universe in dynamical equilibrium without expansion had predicted this temperature prior to Gamow. Moreover, we show that Gamow’s own predictions were worse than these previous ones.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Comments: How can the Big Bang theorists say today that their theory predicted 2.7* K, when their first try was wrong?
Dull paper at www.dfi.uem.br/~macedane/history_of_2.7k.html
<center>Instituto de Física "Gleb Wataghin", Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 13083-970, Campinas-SP, Brasil, e-mail: assis@ifi.unicamp.br
** Departamento de Física, Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Av. Colombo, 5790, 87020-900, Maringá-PR, Brasil, e-mail: macedane@yahoo.com
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">
We present the history of estimates of the temperature of intergalactic space. We begin with the works of Guillaume and Eddington on the temperature of interstellar space due to starlight belonging to our Milky Way galaxy. Then we discuss works relating to cosmic radiation, concentrating on Regener and Nernst. We also discuss Finlay-Freundlich’s and Max Born’s important research on this topic. Finally, we present the work of Gamow and collaborators. We show that the models based on an Universe in dynamical equilibrium without expansion predicted the 2.7 K temperature prior to and better than models based on the Big Bang.
PACS: 98.70.Vc Background radiations
98.80.-k Cosmology
98.80Bp Origin and formation of the Universe
Key Words: Cosmic background radiation, temperature of intergalactic space, blackblody radiation
Introduction
In 1965 Penzias and Wilson discovered the Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) utilizing a horn reflector antenna built to study radio astronomy (Penzias and Wilson 1965). They found a temperature of 3.5± 1.0 K observing background radiation at 7.3 cm wavelength. This was soon interpreted as a relic of the hot Big Bang with a blackbody spectrum (Dicke et al. 1965). The finding was considered a proof of the standard cosmological model of the Universe based on the expansion on the Universe (the Big Bang), which had predicted this temperature with the works of Gamow and collaborators.
In this paper we show that other models of a Universe in dynamical equilibrium without expansion had predicted this temperature prior to Gamow. Moreover, we show that Gamow’s own predictions were worse than these previous ones.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Comments: How can the Big Bang theorists say today that their theory predicted 2.7* K, when their first try was wrong?
Dull paper at www.dfi.uem.br/~macedane/history_of_2.7k.html
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19 years 8 months ago #12365
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
<center>RESEARCH COMMUNICATION
Published in 21st CENTURY Science & Technology, Spring 2000, Pages 5 - 7
<b>Discovery of H2, in Space
Explains Dark Matter and Redshift </b>
by Paul Marmet </center>
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">In papers published about a decade ago, the author and colleagues predicted the widespread presence of hydrogen in the molecular (H2) form in space (Marmet and Reber 1989; Marmet 1990a,b). Although hydrogen in the atomic form is easily detected through radioastronomy, the molecular form is difficult to detect. We showed that the presence of this missing mass would explain the anomalous rotational motion observed in galaxies, which is otherwise explained by exotic hypotheses, such as swarms of invisible brown or white dwarfs, or weird atomic particles called WIMPs or axions, and "quark nuggets."
We also showed that the presence of large amounts of the hard-to-detect molecular hydrogen in interstellar space could provide an alternative explanation to the Big Bang theory, by explaining the observed redshift as a result of the delayed propagation of light through space, caused by the collision of photons with interstellar matter.
The more commonly held view explains the observed shift in frequency of the spectral lines detected from distant galaxies as arising from a Doppler shift (a shift in the frequency of a wave caused by the relative motion of the emitting object and the observer). The downshift in the frequency, toward the red end of the spectrum, is taken to mean that distant galaxies are receding from us, thus implying an expanding universe.
Our prediction, based on a critique of many of the commonly held assumptions of cosmology, was the result of a serious study of the molecular structure of hydrogen and of the astronomical observation of atomic hydrogen in space. However, the astrophysicists preferred to ignore H2, and instead to hypothesize the existence of weird objects. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
Published in 21st CENTURY Science & Technology, Spring 2000, Pages 5 - 7
<b>Discovery of H2, in Space
Explains Dark Matter and Redshift </b>
by Paul Marmet </center>
<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">In papers published about a decade ago, the author and colleagues predicted the widespread presence of hydrogen in the molecular (H2) form in space (Marmet and Reber 1989; Marmet 1990a,b). Although hydrogen in the atomic form is easily detected through radioastronomy, the molecular form is difficult to detect. We showed that the presence of this missing mass would explain the anomalous rotational motion observed in galaxies, which is otherwise explained by exotic hypotheses, such as swarms of invisible brown or white dwarfs, or weird atomic particles called WIMPs or axions, and "quark nuggets."
We also showed that the presence of large amounts of the hard-to-detect molecular hydrogen in interstellar space could provide an alternative explanation to the Big Bang theory, by explaining the observed redshift as a result of the delayed propagation of light through space, caused by the collision of photons with interstellar matter.
The more commonly held view explains the observed shift in frequency of the spectral lines detected from distant galaxies as arising from a Doppler shift (a shift in the frequency of a wave caused by the relative motion of the emitting object and the observer). The downshift in the frequency, toward the red end of the spectrum, is taken to mean that distant galaxies are receding from us, thus implying an expanding universe.
Our prediction, based on a critique of many of the commonly held assumptions of cosmology, was the result of a serious study of the molecular structure of hydrogen and of the astronomical observation of atomic hydrogen in space. However, the astrophysicists preferred to ignore H2, and instead to hypothesize the existence of weird objects. <hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">
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19 years 8 months ago #12366
by Tommy
Replied by Tommy on topic Reply from Thomas Mandel
Apeiron, No. 11, Autumn 1991 7
© 1991 C
redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/Pre2001/V00N11PDF/V0N11SHL.pdf
<center><b>Conservation of Energy in a Static Universe</b>
Alexey Shlenov
Budapeshskaya 66-1-77
192286 Leningrad
USSR</center>.
An analysis of contradictions in the theory of universal
expansion leads to the conclusion that the universe is
stationary and Euclidean, and that the cosmic redshift is not
expansion-related. As an alternative explanation for the
redshift, an exponential redshift-distance relation based on
conservation of energy is considered.
Introduction
It is a well known fact that a change in the wavelength, l, or the
frequency, n, of transverse photons may be caused by different
mechanisms:
· displacement of the source of emission relative to the observer
(Doppler Effect);
· effects due to an inhomogeneous gravitational field;
· an interaction of photons with other matter or with radiation.
© 1991 C
redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/Pre2001/V00N11PDF/V0N11SHL.pdf
<center><b>Conservation of Energy in a Static Universe</b>
Alexey Shlenov
Budapeshskaya 66-1-77
192286 Leningrad
USSR</center>.
An analysis of contradictions in the theory of universal
expansion leads to the conclusion that the universe is
stationary and Euclidean, and that the cosmic redshift is not
expansion-related. As an alternative explanation for the
redshift, an exponential redshift-distance relation based on
conservation of energy is considered.
Introduction
It is a well known fact that a change in the wavelength, l, or the
frequency, n, of transverse photons may be caused by different
mechanisms:
· displacement of the source of emission relative to the observer
(Doppler Effect);
· effects due to an inhomogeneous gravitational field;
· an interaction of photons with other matter or with radiation.
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19 years 8 months ago #13137
by north
Tommy
after all these quotes, what i'm more interested in is, what is YOUR conclusion? NO quotes, just what YOU THINK for a change.
Replied by north on topic Reply from
Tommy
after all these quotes, what i'm more interested in is, what is YOUR conclusion? NO quotes, just what YOU THINK for a change.
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