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more big bang nonsense
Now, I'm not saying that the Big Bang theory is wrong. I just don't -- never did -- like it. It just seems too much like that thing we always do.
What annoys me most about the Big Bang theory is the way it has become unquestioned dogma. I hate it when people treat science as a religion. People swallow the absurdities of the Big Bang without a hiccup, and when some piece of evidence comes up that flies in the face of the Big Bang, theoreticians alter the theory to suit the new facts rather than calling into question the theory. That is what religious people do.
And how about this oddity in 11th Oct 2003 New Scientist where they reported some work by New York mathematician Jeffrey Weeks. He took recent observations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in measuring the microwave background radiation and came up with the conclusion that the universe might be just 70 billion light years across. They also report that David Spergel of Princeton University seems to have contradicted it by looking for some of the predictions made by Weeks' model and not finding them. From those results it looks like the universe may be infinitely large. During this article there was casual mention of the Big Bang and that the cosmic microwave radiation is the remnant of that fireball. But it ignores the fact that both Weeks' and Spergel's work make the standard Big Bang look like a joke. Last I heard the Big Bang was dated at being about 15 billion years ago (though they are always revising that number upward as we embarrassingly see further and further into the past). A 15 billion year old universe must be less than 30 billion light years across, but here is Weeks drawing conclusions from new observations that put the size of the universe at 70 billion light years diameter. Even worse is Spergel's rebuttal which effectively eliminates the Big Bang by showing that the universe is probably infinite after all. *sigh*
I still like the Steady State theory. Hoyle and Gold fixed major objections to that many years ago.
Europe is the center of the universe.You would never realise it by reading the popular science press these days (or even the technical science press) but there are actually still a number of highly respected astrophysicists who don't go along with the Big Bang theory.
Oops, it turns out the Earth is round.
Ok, the Earth is the center of the universe.
Excuse me, but it travels around the sun.
Humph! The sun is the center of the universe.
Oh dear, all those little dots up there in the sky, they are suns, many of them like our own, and we are on the rim of our galaxy -- the Milky Way.
Well our galaxy is the center of the universe!
Sorry, not all those dots out there are stars -- countless numbers of them are other galaxies.
Then we all started from this single point in a Big Bang and that was the center of the universe.
Ummm...
What annoys me most about the Big Bang theory is the way it has become unquestioned dogma. I hate it when people treat science as a religion. People swallow the absurdities of the Big Bang without a hiccup, and when some piece of evidence comes up that flies in the face of the Big Bang, theoreticians alter the theory to suit the new facts rather than calling into question the theory. That is what religious people do.
And how about this oddity in 11th Oct 2003 New Scientist where they reported some work by New York mathematician Jeffrey Weeks. He took recent observations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) in measuring the microwave background radiation and came up with the conclusion that the universe might be just 70 billion light years across. They also report that David Spergel of Princeton University seems to have contradicted it by looking for some of the predictions made by Weeks' model and not finding them. From those results it looks like the universe may be infinitely large. During this article there was casual mention of the Big Bang and that the cosmic microwave radiation is the remnant of that fireball. But it ignores the fact that both Weeks' and Spergel's work make the standard Big Bang look like a joke. Last I heard the Big Bang was dated at being about 15 billion years ago (though they are always revising that number upward as we embarrassingly see further and further into the past). A 15 billion year old universe must be less than 30 billion light years across, but here is Weeks drawing conclusions from new observations that put the size of the universe at 70 billion light years diameter. Even worse is Spergel's rebuttal which effectively eliminates the Big Bang by showing that the universe is probably infinite after all. *sigh*
I still like the Steady State theory. Hoyle and Gold fixed major objections to that many years ago.
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Sorry if I gush a bit sometimes. I tend to get a little carried away on this subject in particular. I'm quite scared that science will suffer a similar fate that has befallen the US constitution and the teachings of that all-time good guy Jesus. It is way too easy for people to mistake the symbols for the things they represent. And when they do... things go tragically wrong.
I checked your LJ info page by the way, and I am impressed. To meet one so young who is so wise uplifts my (generally optimistic) view of the human race. Best wishes to you.
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And thanks for the compliments *blush*....but wise? Hardly. Totally clueless most of the time and trying to muddle along as best I can is more of an accurate description :-).
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A better illustration of this is how I feel about people who believe in evolution. I am quite certain evolution is an excellent and pretty accurate description of how generations of life have grown to become this vast web of interdependent and competing ecologies over the last 600 million years or so. However it irks me when people treat it as religion -- when they believe in it. Then it gives rise to such obscenities as eugenics. It enables them to see mankind as the pinnacle of evolution, when we are just another branch. More fitted than us are the cockroaches, the ants, many of the single-celled animals and plants -- each of these has such a brilliant design that it survived everything thrown at them over hundreds of millions of years. Of course that doesn't stop me understanding that we humans have an amazing place in the scheme of things -- through us the universe becomes self-consciously knowing and able to manipulate and understand complex symbols, but whether we last... only time will tell.
When people misuse and misunderstand science and make it a religion it bugs me.
OK, I'll hop down off this soapbox now. :)
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There is only one minor problem with that whole picture. They have been monitoring the expansion of the universe long enough now to clearly determine that the rate of expansion is not decelerating. In fact it is accelerating. (This in turn proves the existence of a sixth force, the weak gravitational force, not yet identified in particle acceleration labs, a discovery I have been predicting for the past 30 years).
So the big bang theory is based on the idea, "It must have been an explosion, and explosions would act a certain way, so it must be acting that way, so we can calculate all kinds of data from that". But now we find it isn't acting that way at all but in fact just the opposite. Back to the cosmic drawing board.
But then what do I know...I'm just an eighth grade drop out :oP
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What I worry about is that they don't take the idea of tired light properly into account. The red shift is supposed to indicate doppler shift due to movement away from us. But three possibilities immediately spring to mind to explain this (there may be others I haven't thought of):
- everything is streaming away from us and we are the center of the universe (yeah, right)
- all the universe is expanding apart
- the red shift is due to light losing energy in traveling over those vast distances
I've never understood why people have discounted that third possibility out of hand when it always seemed so likely to me. The intervening space is not empty; it is filled with dust, gas, electromagnetic and gravity fields, and any other, as-yet undiscovered forces. It seems pretty clear to me that light would lose energy over distances, and as quanta of light can't lose energy in the volume of a wave the way sound can, it has to lose it by, you guessed it, red shift. I'm not saying that tired light accounts for all the red shift, just noting that it never seems to get accounted for.The local part of the universe may be expanding... or even all of it. I don't know. But I have severe doubts about the limited vision of a single Big Bang giving rise to everything. It sounds too much like god: gee, lets believe this impossible thing. And the Steady State theory can account for any expansion without resorting to a singularity creating the entire universe in an instant.
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Well, that is basically saying the same thing. What it doesn't disprove is the theory of the universe beginning from a central point. That is still a possibility. However, it does disprove the idea that it started with a bang. In fact the most recent research seems to indicate that it started with a low hum.
You are right about light loss over distance, of course. Light is made of particles. Those particles will obviously encounter other particles in space. No big mystery there. I am not sure if that would cause red shift, but it seems possible.
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The easiest way to understand how light losing energy would undergo a red shift is to think of it as waves rather than particles. Quantum rules prevent the waves changing height by more than a whole unit, or quantum (which is where Quantum physics gets its name from). The only way for light waves to lose energy then, is to drop in frequency. You can think of it as vibrating less quickly.
Hence red shift.
I have often wondered if the cosmic microwave background radiation -- that much vaunted relic of the Big Bang -- is not perhaps just tired light.
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So you are saying that light acts like waves rippling out from a stone dropped in water…the further they get from the center, the further apart the waves are?
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How true!
like waves rippling out from a stone dropped in water…the further they get from the center, the further apart the waves are
A nicely evocative comparison, however I have a feeling ripples on water get closer together as they spread and slow. I must try this next time I'm near a pond to check my intuition on this.
It would seem that in order for light wavelengths to lengthen the waves would have to spread further apart, but pressing the water wave analogy this way would appear to mean the waves in front speed up, which is nuts. I think the key to understanding this apparent paradox is to view each photon as a single little wave instead of a system of waves. If each photon spreads then its wavelength gets longer while maintaining its speed.
(Please remember that I am no great authority on any of this so could easily be barking up some very wrong trees. I am fairly well-read though and I try to keep up-to-date. I think I have this right.)
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