Crisis In Cosmology, Big Bang Attacked

[Guest1]

Crisis In Cosmology (http://www.marxist.com/crisis-in-cosmology241105.htm)

By Harry Nielsen
Thursday, 24 November 2005

An uncomfortable parallel can be drawn between the Big Bang story and the Christian myth of creation. At the root of the whole theory is faith, faith in things which cannot be seen or detected physically, such as an invisible form of matter and energy that is supposed to pervade the universe, or on a definite moment in time in which all matter as we know it came into being. The emphasis in theoretical physics and in mainstream cosmology is on pure thought and logic. Plasma cosmology on the other hand makes no assumption about the age of the universe; it places no limitations on the time available for large scale structures to form. The explanation for things that have occurred in the past lies in the processes that we see now, which in many cases we can explore in laboratory experiments. There is no effect without cause ‑ an infinite chain of cause and effect leads from now to the past.

continued... (http://www.marxist.com/crisis-in-cosmology241105.htm)

[PRC-UTE]

Thank you, that's very interesting. I've never heard that before that the big bang is more of a metaphysical idea. I've got a friend who's a math student and I'm going to talk to him more about this.

[ComradeRed]

I suddenly feel obligated to defend the "orthodoxy" outlook in cosmology, although I must confess to disagree with their outlook for mathematical reasons.


Originally posted by "Crisis in Cosmology"
What is immediately striking about them are the patterns of motion, patterns that are surprisingly similar to those that we see on earth, but on a cosmic scale. Huge swirling clouds of gas and dust roll through the space between the stars and the galaxies. Coils of hot gas explode from the remnants of a star. In every part of the universe, from our own Solar System to the most distant galaxies, we see evidence of change and motion. What is happening here? What is causing this? Dr. Roger Penrose actually proposed a fascinating explanation of this phenomena over thirty years ago. Let me see if I can explain his theory in layperson's terms.

Well, particles have an intrinsic spin. This can be represented as a strange vector called a spinor (if you don't know what one of these is, it's essentially three phasors (http://www.jhu.edu/~signals/phasorapplet2/phasorappletindex.htm) representing the spin on the x-y axes, x-z axes, and y-z axes combined into a "double").

What Penrose did was he took spinors and explained space and time with them. The result was twistor theory (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/twistor+theory).

The "change" and "motion" is something that any elementary physicist (or even chemist) would understand. Twistors explain it on the cosmological level.

This, of course, is the result of the "vulgar" idea of causality (Minkowski diagrams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minkowski+diagrams)); the thought that based on what happens in the past affects what happens in the future.

Minkowski diagrams are with a classical spacetime as opposed to a quantum one. Twistor theory applied to it results in the explanation of this "dialectical" phenomena. For Dr. Penrose's (rather lengthy and somewhat technical) explanation, read The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe.


All the evidence that has emerged since then, and in particular the most recent observations, confirm their analysis – that the idea of the Big Bang is flawed, is inconsistent with a materialist and a dialectical view of the universe, and that ultimately its supporters will be forced to accept that it has failed to explain the known facts. Only in a dialectician's dreams!

I have actually bothered to look up this crackpot's arguments and so I will refer to them as the crux of the critique of cosmology.

No room for dark matter
While the Big bang theory requires that there is far more dark matter than ordinary matter, discoveries of white dwarfs(dead stars) in the halo of our galaxy and of warm plasma clouds in the local group of galaxies show that there is enough ordinary matter to account for the gravitational effects observed, so there is no room for extra dark matter.

Actually, if you use Einstein's theory of gravity you don't need dark matter! Dark matter came about because of the Newtonian gravitation equation, which implies the need of an "Luminiferous aether (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous+aether)". Or, in the case of cosmology, dark matter.

This has been mistakenly explained as part of the cosmological constant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cosmological+constant) and caused nothing but problems for physicists until recently.

Basically dark matter is a Newtonian myth!

Large-scale Voids are too old
The Big bang theory predicts that no object in the universe can be older than the Big Bang. Yet the large-scale voids observed in the distortion of galaxies cannot have been formed in the time since the Big Bang, without resulting in velocities of present-day galaxies far in excess of those observed. Given the observed velocities, these voids must have taken at least 70 billion years to form, five times as long as the theorized time since the Big Bang.

This explanation is fairly technical, so I'm sorry if it's incomprehensible.

Space is not continuous. THere are discrete "space atoms" that are 10^-33 centimeters in any dimension.

Because of this discrete spacetime, space atoms are not necessarily positioned overlapping each other or even touching each other. This "void" is caused by the gravitational field of galaxies, which attract the space towards the galaxies creating said "void" between the stars.


Hey, I've got a great idea as an alternative, we could just throw out physics totally and claim it's wrong. Why bother mending such a terribly flawed concept such as general relativity?


Further support for this point of view [note: the point of view was not given any evidence but merely stated as fact] was presented in a paper by Thomas Andrews. He looked at distance estimates derived from the relative brightness of two different classes of objects: supernovae and the brightest galaxies in clusters of galaxies. He showed that the estimates from the supernovae contradicted those from the galaxies if the universe was assumed to be expanding. But when distances were computed assuming that the universe is not expanding the discrepancy between the two sets of distance estimates disappeared. A supernova creates a black hole, that's elementary cosmology. Anyone in the field worth his salt should know that.

A black hole "have no hair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_hair_theorem)". How can you therefore argue that the universe doesn't expand because a black hole doesn't move? It makes no sense, as if to say there is traffic because my car won't start.

The rest of the page I couldn't take seriously, it was too religious. Speak of "Reason in revolt"! :lol:

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I notice that article on marxist.com uses the same tactics as those of the creationists - misrepresentation of the theory (The Big Bang was not a chemical or nuclear explosion, it was a rapid expansion of spacetime that is still ocurring today) and it offers no hypothesis of it's own, merely picking holes in what it disagrees with.

And how anyone can compare Big Bang theory to any sort of creation myth is a big stretch of the imagination right there.

[Guest1]

What the hell are you on about?

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 27 2005, 10:25 PM
What the hell are you on about?
You suffering from reading incomprehension? If you criticise a theory you must at least have a theory of your own to "replace" it. What theory on the origin of the universe do the dialecticians have?

And the Big Bang has a barely microscopic resemblance to Genesis.

[Severian]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 24 2005, 07:54 PM
Crisis In Cosmology (http://www.marxist.com/crisis-in-cosmology241105.htm)

By Harry Nielsen
Thursday, 24 November 2005

An uncomfortable parallel can be drawn between the Big Bang story and the Christian myth of creation. At the root of the whole theory is faith, faith in things which cannot be seen or detected physically, such as an invisible form of matter and energy that is supposed to pervade the universe, or on a definite moment in time in which all matter as we know it came into being.
I think Noxion is on to something with the comparison to creationism.

Creationists also make this argument about the historical sciences, and such questions as the origin of species and the age of the earth. Creationist say that since these things occurred in the past and cannot be directly observed or experimented on, that it is unscientific to theorize about them.

On the contrary, it is possible to make and test theories about the past based on present data; whole sciences like geology and paleontology are built on it.

The Big Bang theory may be wrong for all I know; I don't understand cosmology or higher-level physics all that well. And I know there are many disputes and contending theories among those who do understand it.

But I know this argument is wrong; at the root of these theories is not faith, but contending interpretations of the evidence.


But Big Bang theorists have at several times in the history of the theory been forced to adjust their ideas when they have conflicted with new evidence.

Also a standard creationist argument: evolutionary biologists have been forced to adjust their ideas when they have conflicted with new evidence. Well, yeah, that's what makes it science. It's not evidence of weakness, but of vitality.

And just being a "dialectical materialist" does not make any amateur a better judge of that evidence than those who have studied them in the greatest detail. Dialectical materialism is a method of analyzing facts, not a substitute for learning them.

The opposite approach is what led Marx to famously say "I am not a Marxist."

[url=http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1890/letters/90_08_05.htmAs Engels wrote:[/url]

In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. Up to now but little has been done here because only a few people have got down to it seriously. In this field we can utilize heaps of help, it is immensely big, anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge — for economic history is still and its swaddling clothes! — constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous.

Strikes me that the authors of "Reason in Revolt" are doing the same thing with their "relatively scanty" cosmological "knowledge"...scanty relative to the professionals, anyway, they may know more than I do.

[Guest1]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2005, 06:44 PM
You suffering from reading incomprehension? If you criticise a theory you must at least have a theory of your own to "replace" it. What theory on the origin of the universe do the dialecticians have?
This is exactly why I say "what the hell are you on about?". They have no theory on the origin of the universe, because they don't believe there is evidence that there ever was an origin!

Clearly, you didn't read the article with any degree of seriousness.


And the Big Bang has a barely microscopic resemblance to Genesis.
Not really, a time before time, when all the laws of science did not exist, and anything could go. Poof! And then there was the universe. Then there's the large body of evidence pointing away from the theory, and the almost religious attempts to make it fit anyways.


Creationists also make this argument about the historical sciences, and such questions as the origin of species and the age of the earth. Creationist say that since these things occurred in the past and cannot be directly observed or experimented on, that it is unscientific to theorize about them.

On the contrary, it is possible to make and test theories about the past based on present data; whole sciences like geology and paleontology are built on it.
The difference is that those can be extrapolated from a body of evidence that exists now, be it comparison of similar processes, or working backwards from today's developments to find what occurred in the past.

Whereas the big bang begins from the hypothetical "beginning" and works forward attempting to fill the gaps. This is a fundamentally flawed approach which reeks of intelligent design-style attempts to give scientific flair to religious crap.


Also a standard creationist argument: evolutionary biologists have been forced to adjust their ideas when they have conflicted with new evidence. Well, yeah, that's what makes it science. It's not evidence of weakness, but of vitality.
Not quite. Evolutionary biologists don't "believe" in evolution and then try to make it fit the facts. They work backwards, again, from material reality and base themselves on hundreds of years of evidence which points towards evolution. Faced with an issue, of course they modify the theory accordingly, but they maintain the core of that theory because it has been applied and proven again and again.

The big bang on the other hand, is an idea imposed on the facts, the core of which has been disproven and redefined time and time again. In otherwords, the theory is not finetuned, it is recast stubbornly despite the evidence, rather than abandoned or replace with a new theory based upon the evidence. Of that evidence, none has maintained the idea of a beginning of time. In fact, the evidence points elsewhere, that not only was there no big bang, but the universe is infinite, and has always existed and always will.

[LSD]

Not really, a time before time, when all the laws of science did not exist, and anything could go.

No one claims that the laws of physics "did not exist", merely that our current understanding of those laws breaks down, mostly due to the conflict between theoretical physics and quantum mechanics.

Put simply, the problem is that when the very big (the universe) and the very small (sub-sub-atomic) meet (the Big Bang singularity), the conflicts between general relativity and uncertainty come to the forefront.

This does not mean that there were "no rules", it just means that we are presently unable to decipher those rules. It's one of the most unfortunate problems of the theoretical physics / quantum mechanics discrepencies.

Once we finally develop a unified field theory, it will almost certainly be resolved (although, of course, there are always other problems).


and the almost religious attempts to make it fit anyways.

"almost religious"?

What exactly makes them "almost religious"? In fact, in this context, what does "religious" mean anyways?

Is it that they're perserverent, or is it that the theory reminds you too much of genesis?

I'll grant you, it would make a much finer argumentative tool if science told us that the universe didn't have a beginning. It would certainly make it easier to debunk Christian mythology.

But it is just as dangerous to abuse science to disprove religion as it is to abuse it prove it.

Current theoretical physicical data indicates that the universe exploded several billion years ago. Whether this was truly the "beginning" or not, we can't know, but that the universe has been expanding from a central point over billions of years and that radiation from an enormous central explosion is still detectable ...these are facts.

How does your "constant universe" theory account for CMB? How does it explain Penzias' and Wilson's discovery?

Your desire to throw out the entire Big Bang theory because it is not perfect and does not explain all the facts is disturbingly similar to the Creationistss claim that evolution must be bunked because it is not perfect and does not explain all the facts.

Neither, of course, are valid.


Whereas the big bang begins from the hypothetical "beginning" and works forward attempting to fill the gaps.

Where did you get that from? :huh:

Theoretical physics works backwards, just like any other study of the past. It analyzes present data and extrapolates the conditions nescessary to create them. It most certainly does not "theorize" about the "beginning" and then "fill in the gaps"!

The big bang theory originated because of the evidence of an expanding universe. The perfect example of "working backwards".


The big bang on the other hand, is an idea imposed on the facts, the core of which has been disproven and redefined time and time again.

You seem to confused on the history of theoretical physics. The Big Bang theory has hardly been "unchallanged".

A theory rather similar to what you seem to be advocating developed in the mid 1940s, it was called Steady State. And it was, for a time, the dominant theory on the universe.

Not any more.

Why? Because it was disproven. Because Hawking and Penrose and many others demonstrated through mathematical and topological analysis that the universe simply cannot be "steady".

If all the evidence were truly, as you claim, against the Big Bang, why didn't Hoyle, in his desperate attempts, especially near the end, to discredit the Big Bang theory, ever present this evidence?

The man, a knighted, well-respected, world-reknowned physicist, went to his grave believing that the Big Bang was wrong, but being unable to convince anyone.

Doesn't that tell you something?


Then there's the large body of evidence pointing away from the theory

n fact, the evidence points elsewhere, that not only was there no big bang, but the universe is infinite, and has always existed and always will.

And why has all this "evidence" been "ignored"?

What possible motive could the entire field of theoretical physics have for deliberately misreading their data?

Frankly, your hypothesis makes no sense.

Look, Fehr, I am not a physicist, neither are you. I happen to know a couple of physicists however, and, actually, I just attended a lecture by noted theoretical physicist Brian Greene just the other night, so I've discussed and considered these subjects quite a bit, but, in the end, my knowledge on the subject is rudimentary at best.

What I do know, however, is people. I've been studying history long enough to know that "conspiracies" like this, even "indirect" ones, simply don't exist.

If there were truly all this "evidence" that the big bang was "religion", someone would have pointed it out, you know, someone who would know.

There are simply too many nonreligious and nondogmatic scientists working around the world for a "lie" of this magnitute to be perpetrated. Science is a harsh discipline. If a theory is proven wrong, even potentially wrong, it is abandoned faster than you can say "luminiferous aether".

The reason that the Big Bang theory has been accepted for over 35 years, virtually unchallanged, is because, for the most part, it fits the available data.

Is it perfect? Of course not, that's why it's called theoretical physics, but it is the best hypothesis we have at present.

And I mean, really, what's the alternative? That Stephen Hawking's been "bought off" by the "religious right"? :lol:

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Originally posted by Che y Marijuana+Nov 28 2005, 04:14 AM--> (Che y Marijuana @ Nov 28 2005, 04:14 AM)
[email protected] 27 2005, 06:44 PM
You suffering from reading incomprehension? If you criticise a theory you must at least have a theory of your own to "replace" it. What theory on the origin of the universe do the dialecticians have?
This is exactly why I say "what the hell are you on about?". They have no theory on the origin of the universe, because they don't believe there is evidence that there ever was an origin! [/b]
So you're an advocate of steady state theory?

[Severian]

Originally posted by Che y [email protected] 27 2005, 10:14 PM

The difference is that those can be extrapolated from a body of evidence that exists now, be it comparison of similar processes, or working backwards from today's developments to find what occurred in the past.

Whereas the big bang begins from the hypothetical "beginning" and works forward attempting to fill the gaps. This is a fundamentally flawed approach which reeks of intelligent design-style attempts to give scientific flair to religious crap.
On the contrary. It is extrapolated back from current observations, just as the history of life on earth is. Including, for example, the observation that the universe is expanding.

One of the "plasma physicists" quoted in the article you linked tries to explain away this evidence by saying....the observed redshift must be caused by 'something else.' Maybe some unknown "property of light itself." This is not remotely serious.


Not quite. Evolutionary biologists don't "believe" in evolution and then try to make it fit the facts. They work backwards, again, from material reality and base themselves on hundreds of years of evidence which points towards evolution. Faced with an issue, of course they modify the theory accordingly, but they maintain the core of that theory because it has been applied and proven again and again.

Yes, and that's exactly the case with the expanding universe.


The big bang on the other hand, is an idea imposed on the facts, the core of which has been disproven and redefined time and time again. In otherwords, the theory is not finetuned, it is recast stubbornly despite the evidence, rather than abandoned or replace with a new theory based upon the evidence. Of that evidence, none has maintained the idea of a beginning of time.

Which is precisely what creationists say against evolution. They claim that the evidence supports "creation science" but the vast majority of biologists stubbornly deny and falsify it. Various minor contradictions in the theory and evidence, which can be resolved by modifying the theory, are used to argue the whole theory is contrary to the evidence.

LSD correctly points out scientists are unlikely to carry out such a vast conspiracy to suppress evidence. Individual scientists can stubbornly hold to a theory, in fact often do...that's why sometimes "science advances, funeral by funeral." But it does eventually advance.

Maybe you, Nielson, Grant, and Woods are the ones with a religious agenda? Their interpretation of dialectical materialism for some reason requires an eternal universe (funny, I thought dialectics was supposed to say nothing was eternal) so you dogmatically insist on it regardless of the observed expansion, the consensus of the great majority of physicists,and everything else.

That would certainly explain the persistent similarity between their arguments and creationists'. If you don't see that similarity...how familiar are you with the whole evolution-creation debate?

[redstar2000]

I would much prefer some version of "steady state" theory to be true.

I would be delighted if the "plasma cosmologists" could come up with a sufficiently robust challenge to "big bang" theory as to utterly discredit it.

And, who knows, maybe someday they will.

Or, as our instruments improve, we may discover a whole series of phenomena that "big bang" theory ought to be able to explain but can't.

Alas, the evidence that we have accumulated thus far makes "big bang" theory look like a fairly accurate summary of what must have happened to give us the universe that we now observe.

We can't, speaking scientifically, reject the whole idea "out of hand" simply because "we don't like it".

Much less because it's "undialectical". :lol:

Skepticism about "big bang" theory is all well and good...I'm skeptical myself. But the evidence in its favor seems to be "piling up" and I'm not as skeptical as I used to be.

Astronomy in general and cosmology in particular is "instrument driven"...every significant improvement in our instruments always results in fresh discoveries. New telescopes "on the drawing boards" today promise a massive increase of data about the "early" universe.

So we'll see how things play out when we know a lot more than we do now.

That's how science works. :)

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Originally posted by [email protected] 9 2005, 04:49 PM
I would much prefer some version of "steady state" theory to be true.
Out of curiosity, why is this?

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by NoXion+Dec 9 2005, 12:30 PM--> (NoXion @ Dec 9 2005, 12:30 PM)
[email protected] 9 2005, 04:49 PM
I would much prefer some version of "steady state" theory to be true.
Out of curiosity, why is this? [/b]
If the universe has always existed and will always exist, that makes the human species potentially immortal.

As things look now (if "big bang" theory is indisputably confirmed) then no matter what we do, the last stars in our "local group" of galaxies will burn out in 130 billion years or so...and all other galaxies will have retreated from us to the point that even their light will no longer be visible.

A grim scenario. :(

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[Morpheus]

Given 130 billion years we may be able to come up with a way to survive. That's a lot of time. I'm more concerned about the sun becoming a Red Giant.