Big Bang Disputed

The following may be of interest to some:


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http://www.cosmologystatement.org/
An Open Letter to the Scientific Community
cosmologystatement.org

(Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004)

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that "science is the culture of doubt", in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.

Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.

Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method -- the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible. To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.

Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang's validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe.

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If you go to the website, you can see the names of those who have signed this statement. It's an interesting list!

 

Gina, I'm passing your stuff on to Barry to dictate an answer to me as soon as he is finished painting the fence!

 

AAAGGGHHHH!!! Bite your tongue, young lady! The neighbor loaned us his sprayer and so I just finished weeding their entire yard!!!! (Two people on a paint sprayer would be interesting, though!)

 

OK Gina, I'm typing and Barry is talking...

First of all, the site that you referenced gives very standard answers to the problems. The actual problem is that the proposal of dark matter itself is totally unsubstantiated. Astronomers have been searching for at least twenty years now and have not been able to find any, no matter where they look. But because they insist on a cosmos billions of years old, they NEED the dark matter to explain what we see.

What is 'dark matter?' No one knows for sure! Here is the problem they are trying to solve with it:

When you have clusters of galaxies, the galaxies on the outer part of the cluster appear to be moving too fast for the cluster to hold its shape. Gravity from the matter that we can see (stars, gas clouds, etc.) is not sufficient to hold the cluster together. If the cluster had been there for billions of years, they should have disrupted/disintegrated by now, and the individual galaxies wander off on their own. What is being proposed is that there must be some sort of matter that we cannot see with telescopes and have been unable to detect by other means that is present in the clusters to provide the gravitational field to hold them together.

Because the light-emitting (or reflecting) matter that we see is not sufficient to exert the gravitational pull necessary, it is presumed that the 'missing matter' must be dark. Otherwise we would see it.

The other side of the coin is that the universe is not old at all, in which case there is no need for the clusters to have disrupted yet and therefore no need for that elusive 'dark matter' to exist.

There is another aspect to this problem. The velocities of the galaxies in the outer part of the clusters that we measure as being so high as to disrupt the cluster in a certain amount of time is merely INFERRED from red shift measurements! If the red shift is not due to velocity at all, then the problem is also solved. In other words, we don't really know how fast these heavenly bodies are moving except by a very possibly wrong inference. If they are slower, there is no need to disrupt.

Redshift measurements should be 'smeared' across all possible measurements and fractions thereof if redshift is due to velocity. But we don't see this 'smearing.' What we see when we measure the redshifts are groups of measurements and then a jump to another group of measurements. This essentially denies the idea of redshift being due to velocity, as it would be very difficult for any moving body to shift speed so suddenly that it jumps from one speed to another without hitting the speeds in between. This discovery about redshift measurements has come to be known as 'quantized redshifts.'

This quantized redshift effectively proves that the redshifts of galaxies in the outer part of a cluster are not due to velocity at all, and so the cluster may not be under any physical pressure to disrupt in any amount of time! In fact, as Halton Arp and others have pointed out, the quantized red shift actually makes for very quiet galaxy clusters.

That's one problem that they have.

There is another.

As we look at individual galaxies, and the stars within them, it had been expected that those stars would orbit around the center of the galaxy in a mathematically predictable way. It turns out that they are not behaving exactly as predicted. One way of accounting for the discrepancy is to have a large amount of unseen matter associated with a galaxy at some distance from the core. In other words, a sort of halo of unseen matter completely surrounding the galaxy would be exerting its gravitational force on the stars which are not behaving as scientists think they should. This has also been taken as 'proof' that dark matter must exist. However, there are a number of other possibilities. One has been proposed by the Israeli scientist Milgrom, who has pointed out a very slight modification of the law of gravitation could account for this discrepancy without the need of 'dark matter.' Another avenue which I am exploring at the moment is the behavior of one of the key equations having to do with the redshift and the Doppler effect when the speed of light is changing. This also holds the possibility of providing a solution. However, again, if the galaxies have not been there for fourteen billion years, the motion of the stars within the galaxies would not have had enough time to cause disruption. In fact, the data suggest that this motion could well account for the spiral arms in these galaxies, and the number of turns of the spirals indicates ages of galaxies much less than fourteen billion years.

Astronomers have also had to account for the maintenance of the spiral structures themselves over this period of time, and a number of mechanisms have been proposed to do this. Dark matter is not one of the explanations here, though.