Clearly we disagree. Try backing up a single one of your claims.
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I’m sorry, but I’m not into the whole “testifying” thing. The story of your conversion is not scientifically interesting. (Well, if psychology is a science; but I digress.) Huxley was wrong; what slays a theory is a better theory, one that accounts for the ugly fact as well as all the beautiful ones. You have no such theory.
Are you ever going to explain why? All you do is throw out one liners like that without ever explaining why that’s the case. Do better.
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Let’s not throw away the baby with the bathwater. The big bang theory does not need inflation or variable speed of light to work, and it (the BBT) gives a lot of predictions that are corroborated to incredible precision with current generation observatories.
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That’s not even close to what we mean when we refer to the predictions of a scientific hypothesis. The point of doing science is that we specify the mechanism in our hypothesis sufficiently so that everyone agrees on its predictions of what we will directly observe.
We minimize the human tendency to engage in wishful thinking that way. You should try it sometime!
Would you like to with your lock-and-key description, only with real data instead of cartoons?
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In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe…We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
First off, the important thing is that even under the Big Bang model, we live in an exceptionally privileged time relative to all possible times from t=Zero to t=Infinity…it would seem provident that human life emerged at the right time to know it is special and privileged.
Next, I’m going to have to dust off my old relativity and cosmology and astrophysics textbooks now as I’ve forgotten so much, BUT, there are things that always looked peculiar:
We can expand space under the Friedman-Lemaitre-Roberston-Walker (FLRW) solutions to the Einstein Field equations? By way of analogy, we can take Newtons classical approximation:
F = ma,
where
F = force
m = mass
a = acceleration
But what if we made “m” negative? We can come up with all sorts of interesting and likely dubious claims! Just because we can concoct a mathematical solution to an accepted equation of physics doesn’t mean the solution is a physically realizable solution. In QM 101 several mathematical solutions to the Schrodinger equation are posed, but then only a few are accepted – See Griffiths early chapter homework examples…
So expanding space? For now it is approximated now under FLRW, but over time scientists have given it a few tweaks. Under inflation, expansion goes thousands or millions times the speed of light and starts and stops at just the right time for no good reason. In the present day we postulate space expands, but now may be accelerating expansion, and btw the expansion now is accelating and btw the acceleration is variable. Fudge factor after fudge factor.
I’m sure there are answers to why the added potential energy due to expanding space isn’t really creating more energy, or that Einstein’s Field Equations really don’t have conservation law written into them, etc. etc… whatever.
The point is this, if we can move galaxies about at variable speeds even exceeding the speed of light, this looks klugey. Do we have an inverse FLRW where we can also compress space, why don’t we throw that in as needed? Now mix some ETERNAL dark matter which can be detected to patch up more problems…
All said, how is YCC that much more outrageous than Big Bang that requires these kluges. If we can vary the relative movement of galaxies by expanding space as needed, can’t the same be done with the relative distances of YCC models? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Thus as negative as I am about the 12 (or whatever number) of YCC cosmologies, the Big Bang isn’t far behind, though as I’ve said, Big Bang is a beautiful theory and I’ve used it as a witnessing tool to help a young lady to the Christian faith (and I qualified my concerns about Jastrow’s book at the time, but I gave Jastrow’s book to her. Jastrow eslwhere wrote this:
Now we see how the astronomical evidence supports the Biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and Biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.
There is a strange ring of feeling and emotion in these reactions [of scientists to evidence that the universe had a sudden beginning]. They come from the heart whereas you would expect the judgments to come from the brain. Why? I think part of the answer is that scientists cannot bear the thought of a natural phenomenon which cannot be explained, even with unlimited time and money. There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause, there is no First Cause. … This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.
– Jastrow, Enchanted Loom
Sal, I don’t know where to start with this, but I think you need to look back into your textbooks. The physics you are writing does not make sense at all, and it seems that you are not criticizing the current understanding of cosmology, but your own misunderstanding of the current understanding of cosmology.
Again, let me repeat, the Big Bang is postulated to fit scientifically observed datapoints, while YCC cosmology is postulated to fit particular interpretations of the bible.
Also, please note that the Big Bang has been successfully corroborated by multiple modern observations. Further, many of the best Big Bang predictions were made before it is later confirmed by observations. This makes it personally very convincing for me. I won’t put the Big-Bang model at the level of our knowledge of the solar system, but still quite convincing.
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Well, you’ve motivated me to start reviewing what I misunderstand and understand. You’ve certainly corrected some of my misunderstandings.
I don’t want to impinge on your time. I will go back and review, partly because I’m conveying material to my students – that said, I have two professors of physics working with me, but they aren’t astrophysicists (like you) and cosmologists. Collectively the 3 of us need some training in this.
Thanks for your comments.
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This is how real science works, Sal. You only try to explain things after the fact and never make predictions, which is pseudoscience.
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40 posts were split to a new topic: Postdiction vs. Prediction
Good science makes predictions, and then they are confirmed or falsified. Here is one prediction that got falsified, but led to better models:
Nature article turns theory of stellar evolution upside-down
A bigger core
When examining the star, located at the edges of the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, the researchers discovered that its carbon and oxygen core was twice as big as the theory predicted.
Lawrence Krauss made a prediction that is testable in PRINCIPLE but not in PRACTICE:
In 5 billion years, the expansion of the universe will have progressed to the point where all other galaxies will have receded beyond detection. Indeed, they will be receding faster than the speed of light, so detection will be impossible. Future civilizations will discover science and all its laws, and never know about other galaxies or the cosmic background radiation. They will inevitably come to the wrong conclusion about the universe…We live in a special time, the only time, where we can observationally verify that we live in a special time.
― Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing
It’s really hard to make predictions that are testable in practice regarding the Big Bang such as this prediction by Krauss.
That said there are some tests YEC made regarding the Solar System, such as planetary magnetic fields – like a few hundred years from now, or the temperature of the planets, etc.
Yes. Where are the predictions from YEC science?
Yes, there’s no shame in falsifying one’s own prediction.
I don’t see any predictions in there.
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I’m not sure what this could mean to you as the pop-sci article has a really click-baity title. Have you read the paper, which says things like this:
The total oxygen content of the white-dwarf core reaches 78.0% ±4.2%, much higher than the expected value of around 64% for a standard evolutionary white-dwarf model of the same mass
Or when they calculate the white dwarf cooling age:
The chemical profile derived here from asteroseismology, applied to computations of white-dwarf cooling ages, leads to an estimate of (8.43±0.05)×10^6 yr for the cooling age of KIC08626021, independently of its pre-white-dwarf history.
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A post was merged into an existing topic: Postdiction vs. Prediction
Well here is the original Penzias and Wilson paper:
Which doesn’t give a lot of details either on how they arrived at a temperature by only measuring (what I believe is signal power) at 4.08 GHz (aka Mc/s). I saw nothing in any sort of materials and methods where they did the above calculations. Where is the antennae bandwidth stated, for example. How about the integration time? That would be reassuring, but it’s missing as far as I can tell.
One will argue Smoot and Mather and the NASA probes measured the black body spectrum accurately (like 1 part in 55 million for Mather), but now I’m become more skeptical about all this.
Sorry, especially after reading Penzias and Wilson’s paper that won them the Nobel Prize, the red flags are worse. Herouni’s measurments are at least on par, and there are researchers still affiliated with that antenna.
Third paragraph:
The radiometer used in this investigation has been described elsewhere (Penzias and Wilson 1965).
This paper is also from 1965; back then people aren’t so careful with their error bars. This paper won’t do for a Nobel Prize now. Herouni’s paper is from 2007.
Regardless, Penzias and Wilson’s experiment has been corroborated countless of times. Detecting the CMB is so easy that it is a common project for undergraduate/master radio astronomy classes.
You’re skeptical about this but not about Herouni’s measurement? This is double standard. Again, not all datapoints are of equal quality.
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Thanks for your comment. I’m unable to immediately find:
Penzias, A. A 1965, Rev Sei. Instr., 36, 68.
Finding it for historical reasons would be an interesting project.
The paper itself unfortunately didn’t even give even a minor detail. Did they just take the some sort of inferred radiance at 4.08 GHz and use Plank’s law and solve for T?
\LARGE B_\lambda (\lambda ,T) = \frac{2hc^2}{\lambda^5}\frac{1}{{e^{\frac{hc}{\lambda k_BT}}}-1}
Sal, that’s not the right reference. It’s Penzias, A A , and Wilson, R W. 1965, Ap J.
It’s easy to find from that paper:
- Bandwidth = 15 Mc/s
- Integration = 40 minutes
Of course, because this “paper” is a letter to the editor, when it was published it was just a minor curiosity that they found when they were doing their actual science goal in Penzias, A A , and Wilson, R W. 1965 (published in the body of the journal of the same issue).
Err… are you unfamiliar with how the different temperatures in radio astronomy work? These kinds of details are not going to be explained in the paper because they are too basic. Perhaps you should read up a book on radio astronomy first before tackling this paper.
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I’m not familiar with it at all, your comment above clarified. Thank you.
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