Sal Cordova and Aging Galaxies

Thanks to PdotdQ I googled around and found this July 19, 2019 arxiv paper that has a buzzilion co-authors! A lot of money was spent obviously on this:

I passed the paper onto Russ Humphreys, Danny Falkner, PW Dennis, Tichomir Tenev, etc.

My best reading of the paper is the supposed detection of CMB lensing was based on the assumption of CMB.

In contrast to other cluster observables (optical richness, SZ flux, and X-ray flux), gravitational lensing of galaxies or the CMB offers an unbiased mass measurement since lensing exactly traces the underlying matter distribution.

My first reading is that this looks like circular reasoning. We’ll ignore what we actually see (cluster observables) in terms of starlight and trust a lensing happened because something has to be there since the CMB source is collectively “behind” the cluster. In anycase, this is a good journal club material.

Since the CMB is lensed it means it has to be coming from behind the area with mass. That’s how light works.

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Thank you for my comment, but to attempt to clarify my point, there is circularity in the reasoning here regarding the CMB. If we have an observed cluster of galaxies where we actually see starlight, such as in the paper cited earlier, and it shows no lensing, that should take priority over supposed lensing events that don’t show any starlight at all. For all we know, this could be statistical phantom based on circular reasoning.

That said, I have seen pictures of lensing effects where the source of the lens was unseen or not very clear such as:

g_lensing

But in the paper above, we have a known lensing souce, and it didn’t bend the CMB.

In any case, your comment raises the issue of what data points take priority. Does actual starlight inidicating the presence of matter not count for anything anymore? We’ll disregard it and favor looking for evidence of CMB in stars we cannot see or have any evidence of existing outside of the assumption of CMB in the first place?

At least in the picture above, the light source is pretty much above reproach so we can rightly infer a lensing event.

Please take a look at the latest Planck result: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.06210.pdf

I have not read the SPTpol result that you linked. Where in the paper did they do this?:

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Hi PdotdQ,

I probably caused some confusion in what paper I was referring to regarding known clusters. It was this one.

Please take a look at the latest Planck result: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.06210.pdf

Will do, and I’ll pass it onto PW Dennis, Danny Faulkner and friends.

A million thanks for weighing in.

I want to give a balanced view, pro and con, on the issues in my Creation/ID course and the Creation Forum at my church. I have my biases, but it would bother my conscience if I omitted data points and objections by specialists with opposing viewpoints.

Again, that is an outdated result, using the WMAP satellite from ~15 years ago instead of e.g. Planck or newer ground-based observatories such as POLARBEAR. WMAP does not have the sensitivity to detect CMB gravitational lensing.

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Again, that is an outdated result, using the WMAP satellite from ~15 years ago instead of e.g. Planck or newer ground-based observatories such as POLARBEAR. WMAP does not have the sensitivity to detect CMB gravitational lensing.

Thank you for the information. I’ll pass it on. Your comment was valuable.

That said, it would be reassuring if there are lensing determined by observable clusters. The 15 year old study would suggest, the cluster was of sufficient size that a lensing event ought to have detected the lensing even with the less accurate WMAP data. Afterall, einstein’s GR was confirmed by lensing that was detected by far less sophisticated methods about a hundred years ago than we have today. So, I’m sorry to be skeptical for now. But in fairness, I will report your comment as is and will highlight these more recent surveys.

WMAP does not have the sensitivity to detect CMB gravitational lensing.

About 100 years ago we were able to see lensing with photographic plates, Sensitivity means we can just detect noise a lot better, not necessarily quality signal.

A valid comparison is seeing how well the new detections compare with actual observable objects vs. possible phantoms. If the phantoms are returning signals about as strong as observable objects, I would find that suspect.

PdotdQ,

If I may ask, has Planck and POLARBEAR removed the axis of evil phenomenon?

From wiki on the axis of evil:

Data from the Planck Telescope published in 2013 has since found stronger evidence for the anisotropy.[17] “For a long time, part of the community was hoping that this would go away, but it hasn’t,” says Dominik Schwarz of the University of Bielefeld in Germany.[18]

This just strikes me as a localized noise. This strikes me like a really sensitive microphone picking up noise. For that reason, anything with “improved sensitivity” just looks suspect.

The lensing phenomenon you mentioned that is detected 100 years ago is a strong lensing phenomenon. The lensing phenomena in the CMB are weak lensing phenomena, they are in completely different regimes.

Similarly, you need to differentiate between strong lensing and weak lensing. I advise you to read up on the differences between strong and weak lensing detection techniques before continuing this discussion.

As is claimed in this paper, the authors of the paper you cited did not take into account the scale dependence and magnification correlation properly. Regardless, this single paper with ~10ish citation holds no water to the 40\sigma lensing detection of Planck.

Statistical phantoms don’t show up at 40\sigma.

The status of the axis of evil is unclear. Different analysis of the data disagree on whether the axis of evil is statistically significant or not. Regardless, even if they are real, there are mundane explanations for both the axis of evil and the quadrupole/octupole anomaly in general.

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As is claimed in this paper , the authors of the paper you cited did not take into account the scale dependence and magnification correlation properly.

Thank you again for your reply. I spent an hour looking at the paper you provided and I can see that it would take me 5 years of study to work through it.

Despite my prejudice against Dark Matter (which was in the model) and CMB, this is an outstanding example of the mathematics of physics.

Thank you again for your patience and forebearance with me.

Regards.

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I have to put the following on the table. And it does lead to TESTABLE hypotheses at least in principle.

Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven was skeptical of the Big Bang, he had a student Bibhas De who may look like he went off the deep end, but Dr. De has the right skill sets of antenna engineering to critique the original Wilson-Penzias microwave detection, COBE, WMAP, PLANCK. He points out what he believes are fraudulent reports of the black body curve. It would have been easy to dismiss Dr. De as a crank, but whether he is or is not is ultimately irrelevant. Testable hypotheses count, and if Dark Matter can be pursued so vigorously and yet yield no direct results, I think anything goes, personally if it can be tested experimentally.

Dr. De brought up the experiments of Paris Herouni

which is at variance with the Black Body radiation curve claimed to be validated by Nobel Prize winner John Mather to 1 part in 55 million.

In contrast, this is Dr. Herouni’s paper (translated somewhat clumsily in English):
http://rnas.asj-oa.am/2542/1/73.pdf

If it is right, then our measured noises near Zenith had to be 2,6 + 2,7 = 5,3K. But they are absent. It is also impossible that our 2,6 K is 2,7 K of Relict. Because it will be only in case, if our Antenna is ideal and its Self Noises are equal 0 K. But it is impossible on Earth. So there is only one explanation, that Relict radiation is absent in Universe, and it is that there never was any Big Bang [3, 4, 5] in Universe.

Dr. De unfortunately has apparently given up on putting any semblance of being scholarly anymore. But it was through his website I learned of Dr. Herouni’s antenna.

Dr. De critiques the major experiments and space probes from the perspective of an antenna engineer. His claims are in principle testable.

Anyway in this link he covers the problems with

COBE FIRAS, COBE-DMR, WMAP, PLANCK satelite experiments:

But no matter how badly Dr. De comes across, at the base level, the experiments in principle are re-doable the right way. That is not practical at this time. In lieu of that, there are qualified antenna engineers who can evaluate Dr. De’s claims.

I would totally dismiss Dr. De if it weren’t for Professor Herouni’s work, and Herouni is a respected radio astronomer.

Unfortunately someone with a bad reputation made the only video I know of regarding Herouni’s work. I distance myself from many of PM Robitaile’s claims in the following video except regarding his reporting of Herouni’s work:

I will leave Dr. De’s book alone - I don’t have time to engage with clearly crakpotic books - as you say, he went off the deep end.

Now for Herouni’s paper:

The claim is that he has an antennae with a self-noise temperature of ~2.7K (the number he cited is between 2.6-2.8K) due to the 275K temperature of the antennae. Even if Herouni’s claim is true,

Firstly: this does not give evidence that Planck, WMAP, POLARBEAR, etc are fradulent, as modern cooling technology allowed contemporary telescopes to get much lower temperature than 275K. The difference is not small. Liquid-helium cooling, for example, allows temperature to reach 4K, which is ~200K lower than Herouni’s temperature.This leads to a noise that is MUCH smaller than the 2.7K self-noise temp of Herouni. Not only that, Planck, WMAP, and COBE are in space, where the noise characteristic is much better than from the ground. Now you want a hypothesis test with modern equipment? This is the hypothesis test that you are looking for. It has been done, and the CMB persists.

Secondly: You might say that Herouni’s claim, if true, means that the original Penzias-Wilson detection is fradulent. Not so, because the signal-to-noise of an antennae is

\text{SNR} = \frac{T_{source}}{T_{sys}} \sqrt{\tau \Delta \nu} \; ,

where T_{source} is the source temperature, here ~2.7K for the CMB, T_{sys} is the noise contribution, which is ~2.7K for Herouni’s antenna, \tau the integration time, or how long do you look at the source, and \Delta \nu is the antenna bandwidth.

Antenna self-noise is not the only number that enters into the noise! For example, it doesn’t matter if your antenna noise is low if you didn’t bother to look at the sky for enough number of seconds.

When Herouni claimed that he cannot detect the CMB, what is his bandwidth? How long is his integration time? In fact, one can plug in Herouni’s number into the SNR equation and see that unless his bandwidth is very small, he should have been able to detect the CMB with the self-noise temperature that he reported.

Where did you find this paper? I must say, it looks very amateurish - neither the scientific analysis or composition is up to par with the average radio astronomy paper. Certainly doesn’t seem like the work of someone who has ~50 years of experience in the field.

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I’ve been meaning to comment on this. If we take this as a given, then it is equally true to say the universe is billions of years old except for our solar system? galaxy? where time runs much more slowly.

Voyager 1 & 2, while still within the ‘boundaries’ of our solar system are technically in interstellar space. Shouldn’t we expect to see an increase in velocity since time will be running faster?

What about the Crab Nebula? If time is faster in its location, shouldn’t we be able to measure it indirectly through the expansion of gas shell? And if it doesn’t show any meaningful increase in the rate of time, this implies that other, ‘close’ and older nebula are dated correctly because the effects of variable time only become apparent outside our galaxy? (Which would make sense, otherwise we would not see a uniformly rotating mass of stars around our galactic center).

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You are correct about it still being a very old cosmos in Humphreys original model (and even his later one). Yes, even Hartnett’s model found an very old cosmos ‘out there’.

This idea of time running at different rates in different parts of the universe met with disagreement early on - I am specifically thinking of a rebuttal statement made by Hartnett towards Humphreys original model on exactly those lines. (Can’t find it right now).

Honestly? There is nary a one really good YEC cosmology that has been proposed. And the two latest ones cited by @stcordova from the 2018 ICC fell under rapid scrutiny because they both invoke Lisle’s ASC, an utterly failed paradigm (not to mention an embarrassment to the YEC cause).

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PdotdQ, Rich Hampton,

Thank you both for your forebearance. As much as I’m obviously prejudiced against certain viewpoints, it would be irresponsible of me to not convey your criticisms of YEC/YCC views to my students. I will convey what you have said. The arguments you have asserted in this discussion, I personally deem too weighty not to give it an adequate hearing even when I teach the varieties of Creationism, especially YEC/YCC creationism.

Thank you again for participating in this discussion.

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FWIW, I feel relatively comfortable sharing an article like the following with my students. It reflects my concerns about cosmology, but spoken from secular (not YEC/YCC) quarters. It reflects what I’ve heard from grad students and faculty in the schools I was a part of (GMU and JHU). Some of the faculty have gone public like Menas Kafatos and Sisur Roy. There are many others with private skepticism.

It doesn’t prove YEC/YCC, but it does convey my general feeling for some big questions about the universe, its too early to be making pronouncements. And also some of the patches to Big Bang, imho, are comparably outrageous to claiming creation by miracles. That still doesn’t make YEC/YCC true. However, as much as I will give space to opponents of YEC/YCC when they make weighty objections, it will also bother my conscience if I didn’t mention there are concerns with mainstream cosmology from secular quarters.

Of course there are still phenomena that cannot be described by modern cosmology. However, the evidence is clear that the big-bang model is in large brush strokes successful in modelling the Universe.

To wit, all of the “big problems” in the blog post that you cited relate more to the details of particular big-bang models, higher order corrections, so to speak. These problems, for example, stem from what exactly is dark matter - is it charged, is it interacting, is it quantum, does it even exist as “matter”? While this might mean that Lambda-CDM is false, this is a far-cry from saying that all big-bang models are wholesale false.

Think back to Newton’s law. It is false, because it cannot explain the precession of Mercury, but it accurately models in large brush strokes, most of the rest of the solar system. This is the level of error that is plaguing modern cosmology.

Please refrain from comparing these issues with the problems of YEC/YCC cosmologies, which cannot even model the Universe in large brush strokes, as you admitted yourself.

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Think back to Newton’s law. It is false, because it cannot explain the precession of Mercury, but it accurately models in large brush strokes, most of the rest of the solar system. This is the level of error that is plaguing modern cosmology.

But we have adequate tests of Newton’s laws in the classical domain every day, and the approximation is very good in that domain and is used to make life-critical systems year in and year out. Reminds me of that line in the movie Apollo 13 where Astronaut Jim Lovell says, “We just put Sir Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat.”

This is not the case with inflation and dark matter and dark energy or any number of even more basic issues like redshift in quasars and even to some degree stellar structure. We can’t break apart stars to find out how good our models are. One star did break apart recently and it did show our models were good but need some revision:

It was a spectacular achievement the the structural models were as accurate as they were.

Nevertheless, after I saw the difficulty in confirming theories in astrophysics and especially cosmology, I realized the condensed matter and biophysics realm were more suited to the level of confirmation that would make me comfortable in postulating and defending ideas.

I am going to repeat what I said, Lambda-CDM is successful in modeling many facets of the Universe in large brush strokes. Just a short list, it is successful in explaining the chemical abundance in the Universe, the Lyman-alpha forest, and the baryon acoustic oscillation.

Of course, there are higher order effects that it cannot explain, such as whether the expansion is time-dependent (which causes the Hubble tension that the link in your previous post refer to). No astrophysicist claims that Lambda-CDM is 100% correct. Is dark matter actually interacting? Is it actually matter or some sort of modification of gravity? These are all questions that can be asked as corrections to our current understanding of big-bang theories.

This is similar to many other things in astronomy, for example, the article that you linked,

the researchers discovered that its carbon and oxygen core was twice as big as the theory predicted

As you admit, this means that we got most of the theory correct! White dwarfs do have carbon and oxygen cores, just that we got the size of it wrong by a factor of two - an incredible feat for stellar physics standards, where quantitative predictions are often made within an “order of magnitude” (though this is quickly changing now).

Also, on your complain about redshifts in quasars: that quasar exhibit no time dilation is data coming from a study by one person that is never independently confirmed/repeated. Not one group, but one person! You mentioned above that you think that CMB lensing is a “statistical phantom”, despite their many detections, even one at 40 \sigma. I apologize, but I have to call you out on your double standard here: If there is ever a statistical phantom, don’t you think it is more likely to come from a study by a single person that is never independently repeated?

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@stcordova, notice that cosmologists “have a theory”, a foundation they are working from. I am not your enemy, but this is precisely what you and YECs lack – a theory. Not to mention a theory that largely works, like the BB…!

Again, I am not your enemy, but you seem to listening a lot to YEC personalities like F., H., H., S., without mentioning their names, who will frankly keep you tied up in knots about details and anomalies in our understanding of the Universe…but will never come up with a working model. Or so it seems at present.

You have to be better than them to help bring in the next generation of serious YEC thinkers. You must find a way to break free from their hypnotic hold and 1. start to question first the ruling YEC paradigm and ask why it is not really working and 2. start to formulate valid, testable hypotheses that still uphold the Bible.

Challenge to you and all YEC cosmologists: If you cannot do science, then stop trying. Start preaching the gospel again and leave off with science…! Either do science or don’t but stop acting like you are doing science just by continually attacking a solid [largely] working paradigm like big bang.

Reminder. I am your friend, not your enemy, but I must get honest with you about these things.

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