[helene_t]

Sorry but I can't find any serious web pages questioning the BB theory. This redshift issue had been discussed before and a lot can be said about it but in any case it does not invalidate BB.

But this Electrical Cosmos thing raises a maybe important issue:

Quote

Scientists tend to resist interdisciplinary inquiries into their own territor

At dinner speeches, the application of methods from other research areas is often celebrated, but in practice it can be a quite frustrating process to get such research accepted in peer-reviewed journals. I once read an article written by two physicists who applied a thermodynamic model to the "diffusion" of agriculture into Europe during the stone age. They complained about all the troubles they had getting stubborn reviewers of archaelogical journals to accept their paper. Eventually their paper found its way to a physics journal where I read it.

One of my own papers had a similar fate. I came up with an (apparently) controversial view on co-regulation of genes. When I presented it on conferences, the reactions were always very divided. My (possibly biased) generalization is that researchers who had not themselves done research in the same area were positive while those who had were hostile. The published version of the paper is not something I am very proud of - I had to water it down to little more than a footnote to the established theory to get it published.

This could very well be my own fault. My work has rightly been criticized for wrong use of terminology and all the other elementary mistakes a non-biologist (especially someone as sluggish as I) is bound to make when writing a biological paper. But I cannot help being a little bitter. Reviewers are always recruited among those who have published about the same topic themselves. Obviously they are not interested in debunking of the paradigms they relied on themselves. This makes the process more conservative than it should (ideally) be.

There may not be much to do about it. If professional journals opened up for all the weirdoes who invented the perpetuum mobile, solved the circle's quadrature etc then they would lose their function. But maybe better use of information technology (google scholar comes to mind) may pave the way for better knowledge assesment in the future.

[Winstonm]

Well, thanks. That is one of the problems with the internet, that unless you are well-versed in a subject it is difficult to know if information is or is not accurate.

[matmat]

Winstonm, on Jun 8 2008, 08:31 PM, said:

Well, thanks. That is one of the problems with the internet, that unless you are well-versed in a subject it is difficult to know if information is or is not accurate.

i suppose, though lack of references to sources is usually a dead giveaway.

[Al_U_Card]

Kind of like the Delphi principle, if you get the position of enough people on a situation, the consensus tends toward reality. This, as opposed to mob mentality....so each individual must not be apprised of the tendency of the others...

[DrTodd13]

First, we observed that everything seemed to be flying apart. Fine. We surmised that if you run things backward in time that things get closer together. Fine. Run things back enough and you get a single point? Starting to get a little fuzzy but probably ok. Realize that parts of the universe farther apart than the age of the universe have uniform properties. Now we have a problem. This theoretically shouldn't happen unless these parts of the universe were once within range whereby they could affect one another. Do we toss our theory out the window because it doesn't fit observation? Nope....we surmise there was an "inflationary" phase immediately after the BB whereby prior to this phase everything was in contact (hence the uniformity of the cosmic microwave background) and afterwards space itself has expanded many orders of magnitude. Currently accepted theory would claim that this inflationary period must have happened yet the proof is nothing more than "we can't think of another way it could have happened." Nobody knows what caused the inflationary phase to start or to end. This widely accepted theory has a massive question mark right in the middle that everyone is clueless about. It is fine if you want to call this theory a hypothesis but how can something be elevated to "theory" when there's a huge important chunk that no one can explain.

[mike777]

Yes not only did we have Inflation right after the big bang but now it seems we have dark energy or anti gravity making some supernovas appear to be too far away and accelerating even more away from us than the math says they should be. This leads to a prediction of a Universe in Winter Death.

[helene_t]

Winstonm, on Jun 9 2008, 02:31 AM, said:

That is one of the problems with the internet, that unless you are well-versed in a subject it is difficult to know if information is or is not accurate.

I would say it has become easier thanks to internet. If I read an article in a newspaper in the pre-internet era and I was suspicious that it might be feces tauri, it was a lot of work to get it verified. Today it's just checking up on google, wikipedia, yahoo answers (and of course bbo forum).

[NickRW]

helene_t, on Jun 10 2008, 12:01 PM, said:

I would say it has become easier thanks to internet. If I read an article in a newspaper in the-internet era and I was suspicious that it might be feces tauri...

Wow. You learn something everyday. I've never heard BS called FT before

Nick

[barmar]

In general, for a hypothesis to become an accepted theory, and ultimately a law of nature, it's not enough that it fail to be disproved. In addition, it has to make predictions about experiments that haven't been done yet, and then when you do them they should match the predictions.

This is why Einstein's relativity theories were so successful. They not only explained phenomena that had already been observed, but they made a number of predictions, and all of them turned out to be true, to an incredible level of precision. While it's possible that this was just a bunch of lucky coincidences, it's much more likely that Einstein actually understood how the universe works and his theories are true.

This is one of the problems with some current theories about cosmology and quantum mechanics. String theory, multiverses, etc. try to explain what we've seen, but they don't make any testable predictions. There's a book about the problem with string theory called "Not Even Wrong" -- the idea being that there's no way to tell if the theory is right or wrong, so it's useless and lots of money is being wasted researching it.

The Big Bang theory not only explained the observed red shifts, but it also made some predictions. The most well known is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the ambient heat of the universe left over from the big bang explosion. When this radiation was detected (in the 60's I think), it matched the prediction from the BB theory very closely. This is the type of thing that lends credence to a theory. An alternate theory would not only have to explain all the things that BB explains, but it would have to make new predictions that differ from those of BB, and then someone will have to do experiments to see which one turns out to be right.

There may be something wrong with a scientific process that presumes that the prevailing theory is the "true" one, and a new one has to go to extra lengths to overturn it and become accepted. But I think this just reflects practicality. If scientists had to accept all theories that match the known phenomena, it becomes extremely difficult to get any work done, because you can't use them all. So we generally stick with the first theory that shows success, until something better comes along.

[luke warm]

helene_t, on Jun 8 2008, 04:41 PM, said:

Sorry but I can't find any serious web pages questioning the BB theory. This redshift issue had been discussed before and a lot can be said about it but in any case it does not invalidate BB.

i think most problems with BB are caused by the questions left unanswered, helene... and before you say that might not matter, some great physicists would disagree with you... the very concept of a singularity, if you think about it, makes very little sense... why, if it contained all that now is, was it not a black hole? what caused it to explode or expand or whatever it did?

you are better able than i to judge whether any of these are "serious" issues

http://redshift.vif....DF/V09N2tvf.PDF

[Al_U_Card]

The appearance of or similarity to a black hole does not mean that the state of singularity was indeed a black hole nor that there was a big bang. Science seeks to know what the reality was and their conjectures are all attempts at approaching that description.

[blackshoe]

In space, there is no sound. Therefore, there was no Big Bang. :-)

[Al_U_Card]

Actually, in the void, with a particle density of roughly one hydrogen atom per cubic deciliter, sound waves do travel but the sound would be so quiet in that rarified and tenuous atmosphere that only, well Jimmy, who's ear could hear it?

[helene_t]

luke warm, on Jun 15 2008, 02:36 AM, said:

i think most problems with BB are caused by the questions left unanswered, helene... and before you say that might not matter, some great physicists would disagree with you... the very concept of a singularity, if you think about it, makes very little sense... why, if it contained all that now is, was it not a black hole? what caused it to explode or expand or whatever it did?

you are better able than i to judge whether any of these are "serious" issues

http://redshift.vif....DF/V09N2tvf.PDF

Thanks. That journal looks ok. (Except that it is published in Texas, lol).

As for the issues raised in the article, I have no qualified opinion about it. Obviously, if it was so simple that one could reject the BB just by "thinking about it" the theory would have been long gone. I could think of a dozen of answers to the questions of what caused the singularity to expand etc. but since I don't understand cosmology anyway it is not very interesting what I could think of.