more big bang nonsense
Tuesday, 11 November 2003 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eNow, 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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Date: 2003-11-11 07:59 pm (UTC)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. :)