Has the Webb Telescope Disproved the Big Bang Theory? (iai.tv) 273
"The very first results from the James Webb Space Telescope seem to indicate that massive, luminous galaxies had already formed within the first 250 million years after the Big Bang," reports Sky and Telescope.
"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking." Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)....
Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment."
Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes: In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!"
Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...."
Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.....
Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory....
According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur....
While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years....
Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
UPDATE: Kirkpatrick says her quote was was taken out of context, in an article from Space.com that dismises Eric Lerner as "a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative."
"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking." Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)....
Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment."
Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes: In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!"
Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...."
Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.....
Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory....
According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur....
While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years....
Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
UPDATE: Kirkpatrick says her quote was was taken out of context, in an article from Space.com that dismises Eric Lerner as "a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative."
Scirntific progress goes "boink!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Those who are panicing are displaying a lack of adherance to the true principles of science.
TBBT's always been exactly that... a theory. Until proven sufficiently, it remains merely a theory. So this new data will either refine the theory, or the theory will prove so entirely broken it'll be thrown out and a new theory will take its place.
Nobody panic, everybody carry on.
Who exactly is "panicking", though? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who exactly is "panicking", though? (Score:5, Informative)
I have a feeling it's just another bombastic claim by an article writer and no one who is actually a real scientist "is panicking" over this at all.
Nobody has panicked. Unfortunately, a couple of scientists got caught up in social media hype and hyperbole and used a poor choice of words. Now this twat is jumping on it as proof that he is right and everyone else is wrong.
The big bang theory may be wrong, or partially right, we don't know yet. At the current time, the big bang theory remains just a shitty TV show.
Re:Fundamental Truth (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, come on now, nobody in the history of the world ever needed to be careful with generalizations.
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no one who is actually a real scientist "is panicking" over this at all.
More likely they're thinking, "Hey, that's interesting!".
Re:Scirntific progress goes "boink!" (Score:5, Insightful)
But yes, if new data comes in, it has to be accounted for.
Re:Scirntific progress goes "boink!" (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, "a theory" is as good as you get in "the true principles of science". But yes, if new data comes in, it has to be accounted for.
Helplessly going wherever facts and reason dictate is indiscernible from flip flopping when you lack a basic understanding of scientific principles.
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It worries ME slightly (Score:5, Insightful)
"It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)
It worries me slightly that Richard Ellis wasn't ecstatic at the prospect of something we've held on to for so long perhaps not being what we thought. I'm salivating at the notion that we may have been wrong, that we have new data to look at, and that may need to fine-tune or even rethink our theories on the early universe.
Pretty exciting if true!
Re: It worries ME slightly (Score:2)
After all a lot of the physics and scales are based on the assumption that the speed of light is constant. What if it isn't?
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Of course it's not. Everybody knows that when you turn the flashlight off, the speed of light ceases to exist.
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You are confusing "a theory" and "the theory of xyz". These are fundamentally different and the 2nd form is never "just" a theory.
However, what we are talking about here is called "early conjecture", nothing is "disproven" at this time.
Or the universe is older than current theory (Score:5, Insightful)
What we know better is how little we know (Score:2)
Right now, it is too early to *know* what these results mean.
I would argue framing it as "knowing" is not helpful, because we did not know before the Big Bang happened - but what we "know" for sure now, is that way too many aspects of that theory are now out the window to say the Big Bang hypothesis can stand as it is, it needs at least a major overhaul but it cannot be the answer to how the universe formed any longer, too many predictions from that model were way too wrong.
We can't really "know" when a thi
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Fred Hoyle was RIGHT!
Well, ok. Probably not. But I've never felt that the Big Bang Hypothesis was a theory...except in the very weak sense of "I've got a theory that 'Big Bang's occur repeatedly within the same universe." (I do have that theory, but I don't have an special evidence that it's true. I just prefer theories that favor larger universes...though I'm not sure about "eternal inflation")
Re:What we know better is how little we know (Score:5, Informative)
I've never felt that the Big Bang Hypothesis was a theory
An hypothesis is a testable prediction. A theory is a model that produces predictions. A theory is scientific if it produces testable predictions.
Theory that is wrong is still a theory. As long as an hypothesis is testable, it remains an hypothesis. An hypothesis will never turn into a theory. Neither will a theory turn into an hypothesis. They are fundamentally different things.
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What about conjectures that can, in principle, be tested, but not in practice? What about same that can do it when a proposed experiment gets built, but the funding hasn't been approved?
I don't thing the lines are as well defined as you are asserting.
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Either that, or we're severely misinterpreting something about this new data. Or made unjustified assumptions in our previous predictions.
After all, that's usually what it turns out to be when new results seem to break physics. And the "Panic alarm" serves to bring all hands on deck to cross-examine the failure from every angle.
That said, I'm always rooting for breaking physics - it doesn't happen very often, but that's when the real exciting science happens. And there's a lot of overlap between cosmolog
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"...but what we "know" for sure now..."
Do we? I thought we were supposed to question authority? For those of us that already do, why would we know this just "now"? And what has changed? Are these new "facts" and why don't you question this new authority? Do we know that anything new contradicts long standing theory?
"...it cannot be the answer to how the universe formed any longer, too many predictions from that model were way too wrong."
A conclusion that can only be drawn by blindly accepting the most
It would be great if this were true (Score:5, Insightful)
For every retirement age scientist who doesn't want to believe that everything they've studied in their career is wrong (and I suspect there are not very many that feel this way) there is another who is just starting out who is delighted by the prospect that there are new things to discover.
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"Yes, and fuck that second guy in particular. He must be stopped at all costs." -- Retirement Age Scientist
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It used to be worth an automatic +5 on here, but at some point people abruptly stopped being fooled. Not sure what happened.
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Everyone who isn't a neo-luddite, except those here to laugh at the neo-luddites left.
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Having had a few moments in my life where I realized I was fundamentally wrong about something important, I suspect that there will always be that panicked sense of having the roller coaster drop out from beneath you. All the more so if you've tied years of your life and reputation to the pursuit of an idea based on a theory that, oh by the way, is wrong. So much wasted effort, and your reputation undermined.
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"An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth."
--Max Planck
I'm old enough to retire... (Score:2)
I'm old enough to retire... and my reaction was, great, more data. After all whether the actual truth is BB, Fred Hoyle, or God, or something else, the probability it will have any significant effect on anybody in a physical sense is zero.
Flat universe theory (Score:5, Funny)
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There's famous people who still don't believe the earth is round. https://sports.yahoo.com/news/... [yahoo.com]
Re:Flat universe theory (Score:5, Insightful)
There's famous people
You misspelled stupid.
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Seven days? What group believes that?
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Most creationists believe this
What? Creationists, at least the Christian variety, believe in a six-day creation. I don't think the Raelians or the simulation nuts go in for a seven-day creation either.
"Disprove" (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're going to completely disprove the big bang theory, you're going to need to come up with some other explanation for background radiation [wikipedia.org]. There's evidence for the big bang theory.
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That's not how science works - it's not some kind of winner-take-all cagefight amongst competing theories.
No matter how much evidence supports a theory, to disprove it it's only necessary to provide evidence that invalidates it; how and when that happens is - up to a point - a matter of scientific consensus, which certainly hasn't happened here yet, but that's the acid test.
Re:"Disprove" (Score:5, Insightful)
Ehh...no. People still use Newton's mechanics. Any practical results of the "Big Bang Theory" will continue to be used, because they give working answers.
The question is what will replace it. Einstein's replacement of Newton's mechanics was essentially just fine tuning as far as most purposes go. But Epicyclic Mechanics just got dropped. Because it stopped being useful. (It still works as well as it ever did, but it was really clunky and difficult to use compared to Newtonian mechanics.)
So if the more refined replacement of the "Big Bang" theory involves horrendously more complex calculations, then the "Big Bang" theory will continue to be used.
Just consider: We know that Quantum theory is inconsistent with Relativity. So at least one of them is wrong...but both provide correct answers in a huge number of domains. A GTOE is being diligently sought, but there's no reason to believe that a Grand Theory Of Everything will be easy enough to calculate that it will replace EITHER quantum theory or relativity...except in certain really special cases. (Just as where Quantum Theory and Relativity replace Newtonian mechanics in certain special cases.)
Actually they do not (Score:2)
Any practical results of the "Big Bang Theory" will continue to be used, because they give working answers.
That's sure not what the summary says, out of ten clear and obvious predictions that should have been true, only one was.
The paper linked too has all kinds of explanation for how the BBT wasn't correctly predicting redshift we had observed from different galaxies.
So practically speaking the BBT seems to be on last legs here, as very few predictions based on that model seem to be accurate - thus it's a
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I was gently wondering what applications BBT actually has.
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how and when that happens is - up to a point - a matter of scientific consensus, which certainly hasn't happened here yet, but that's the acid test.
Up to a point? Acid test? You're having trouble thinking of a coherent theory of science, although it seems you are aware of it. I might suggest reading some books about theories of science.
"The End of Physics" is one I recommend, along with anything by Richard Feynman.
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But without consensus, science can't advance
No, without evidence science can't advance. Consensus is bullcrap. Consensus starts wars. Social darwinism was consensus, because scientists collectively assumed things that weren't supported by evidence.
continental drift was a fringe theory, for all practical purposes outside of mainstream science, until people in the field were persuaded to give it a hearin
It was a fringe theory until the evidence for it was so overwhelming that the scientific establishment was forced to give it a hearing.
As another wise person said, "Science as a tool is often useful; science as an establishment is always problematic."
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If you don't have the ability to evaluate evidence, then you must rely on other people. I think that is what you are saying. It is true, but it is not science.
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If you're going to completely disprove the big bang theory, you're going to need to come up with some other explanation for background radiation [wikipedia.org]. There's evidence for the big bang theory.
And now there's evidence against the big bang theory.
It's still too early to say it's disproven, but if this new research holds up and there's no way to make it compatible with the big bang theory then it simply means we don't have a good theory for the origin of the universe.
Which is actually pretty damn cool.
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it simply means we don't have a good theory for the origin of the universe.
That is true already. Even if we did, we still have the massive question, "What happened before the big bang?"
Relatedly, we also don't have a good theory of physics in general. It has all kinds of holes, and weirdnesses.
Re:"Disprove" (Score:4, Funny)
Oh, he has. Lerner is a plasma universe guy.
I for one am excited that Slashdot is carrying electric universe stories again. Now we just need some Natalie Portman and hot grits in the comment. I think the time cube guy died, but maybe someone can take up that torch too?
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I for one am excited that Slashdot is carrying electric universe stories again
OK, well then. I guess the fact that the JWST saw older things proves that the universe is younger. Am I understanding the electric universe theory correctly?
Re:"Disprove" (Score:5, Insightful)
You only have to disprove any key aspect of a theory to prove it wrong.
New evidence that modifies a theory is not the same as disproving a theory.
Also, Betteridge's theory of headlines applies.
Not surprising (Score:5)
Or, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are things we don't even know we don't know.
Re:Not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Or, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, there are things we don't even know we don't know.
I wasn't a big fan of Donald Rumsfeld, but I did think his comments about "known knowns" versus "known unknowns" versus "unknown unknowns" were surprisingly insightful. Too many people seem to think they either know it all already or just assume anything they don't know has to be inconsequential. That's bad enough in everyday life; for the government it can be disastrous.
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Slight difference though when you are speaking of the very limits of human knowledge, or if you are about to set policy to engage in a 20 year cluster-fuck because you half-assed your intelligence and evaluating your capabilities.
Would have been better to state "we didn't know any better, and here's why", but he couldn't even manage that minimal amount of honesty, speaking of unknown unknows.
Fuck him.
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Would have been better to state "we didn't know any better, and here's why", but he couldn't even manage that minimal amount of honesty, speaking of unknown unknows.
He did give a breakdown of his mistakes, though, and how he didn't follow his own system, and led him to being totally wrong about most of the most important questions the administration was facing.
Fuck him.
No, fuck you, if he explained what happened or not is a known unknown to you, and yet you pretended to know it anyway. That's an even worse mistake than Rumsfeld, who was merely credulous that smart people had turned the unknowns into knowns.
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TBBT never really felt right, I always just considered it a placeholder till we maybe one day learn more.
What felt wrong with it? Of all the theories of advanced physics, that one seemed most reasonable to me. (Compared to concepts like time dilation or space dilation, although admittedly TBBT builds on those).
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TBBT never really felt right, I always just considered it a placeholder till we maybe one day learn more.
What felt wrong with it? Of all the theories of advanced physics, that one seemed most reasonable to me. (Compared to concepts like time dilation or space dilation, although admittedly TBBT builds on those).
That time is not a constant and there was a time when there was no time? Or space? Having a starting point obviously makes our rudimentary mathematical formulas fit better, but it stretches credulity in a common sense sort of way. Like you can't believe what you see, it's not real.
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That time is not a constant and there was a time when there was no time? Or space?
That is awkward I admit.
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If only someone could compile a list of problems. [wikipedia.org] Oh wait! /s
Re: Not surprising (Score:2)
Ok, fine, now what? (Score:2)
Let's assume for a moment what the JWTS shows "disproves" the Big Bang. What other testable idea/theory/whatever is out there to explain what we see? The one Lerner pushes apparently is full of holes. What else could explain the red shift we see? What else would explain how matter formed? What else would explain the distribution of matter? The age of galaxies out to 13.5 billion years?
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Well, I've never been happy with "hyper inflation" and "spontaneous symmetry breaking", but this doesn't mean they aren't correct. The new observations may well have an explanation that only invokes a modified "Big Bang Theory". We'll have to wait a bit.
BB is just a convenient reference point. (Score:2)
Pop science just mentions singularities with respect to the BB and black holes because it sounds cool and there's nothing better to offer at the moment, not because there's any conceivable evidence they exist.
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IIUC, string theories can get rid of the singularities. This doesn't mean that they're correct, of course, but it does mean that existing theories can get rid of the singularities.
True. BB should be taken as shorthand. (Score:2)
I've never heard of this source. (Score:4, Insightful)
Important quote from summary, for Slashdotters (Score:2)
"It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
A lot of times it seems like, on Slashdot, people think an paper posted to arXiv equates to completely settled science.
There are even a couple examples of this higher up in this discussion, actually.
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Red shift (Score:2)
So what causes the red shift in distant objects?
Red Shift (Score:3)
One family of explanations is simply that spacetime (or something in it) puts up some *very* slight resistance to the propagation of photons. The further the photon travels the more energy it loses, and the redder it becomes.
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Indeed. Cosmology and particle physics overlap quite a bit.
I want to say I've heard one or two theories that predict it. Nothing widely accepted, but if these results are confirmed they might be getting a lot more attention.
Challenge big bang or galaxy formation? (Score:5, Interesting)
Any theory that doesn't include a big bang has to predict the CMB background - which is most easily explained as the big bang fireball (from when the universe cooled enough to be transparent).
After the CMB and before the first stars and galaxies, there is a time where we so far have no measurements (the "dark ages"), and there is active work to develop radio astronomy instruments to investigate that time. (using 21cm hydrogen spin flip radiation). If confirmed, that might up the priority on those experiments to fill in the gap between the visible CMB radiation, and the visible galaxies - if those are starting to seem inconsistent.
Re:Challenge big bang or galaxy formation? (Score:5, Informative)
Hold on to your hats, here come the Creationsists (Score:2)
Me, I'm not 'panicking' and don't understand why anyone would. The Universe is still here, we're still here, and our species will die out (and our sun will die out) long before anything major happens to the Universe. So some theories may or may not be wrong, so what? We'll figure it all out sooner or later.
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That's the definition of 'creationist,' so yes
Nobody is going to start or stop believing in creationism because of this, regardless of where it leads.
absurd to suggest this "disproves the big bang" (Score:2)
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Be interesting if we could measure what those galaxies are made of. Big bang Theory says they should have close to no metals
When the spectroscopy comes back (Score:2)
No (Score:2)
But the Weeb Telescope [reddit.com] might.
Summary is Badly Misleading (Score:2)
The /. summary is misleading. It starts with the recent Sky&Telescope article (a well respected semi-technical magazine for amateur astronomers) and then slides into various writings of Eric Lerner, whose ideas are not much accepted in the professional fields he writes about. The confluence of these in the summary makes it appear that Lerner's claims show up in the S&T article (and receive some legitimacy from S&T) which they don't.
Phlogiston, anybody? (Score:3)
Phlogiston was the scientific community's approved explanation for fire for something like 100 years. Even when its most obvious defect was pointed out, that things that burned gained rather than lost weight, they just suggested phlogiston had negative weight. A bit like the expanding universe theory requires dark matter and dark energy to explain the apparent rotational speeds of galaxies and their distribution. As the paper's author points out, that's a pretty expensive fix to make the theory work, whereas he claims the theory advanced, that the universe is not expanding and redshift occurs for some other (currently unknown) reason, requires (at the moment) no other such fixups.
You can't argue but that his paper follows best scientific method: it takes a theory, makes a prediction, and then via JWST measures results that confirm the theory. Now all he has to do is wait for the Big Bang Believers to die of old age...
Re:Just goes to show - I took in it in the ass fro (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine question all you want. But back it up with data. Otherwise you're just a Joe Rogan wannabe.
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Fine question all you want. But back it up with data.
I totally agree but...
Let me amend my statement to say, there are too many people willing to believe a thing, even when shown abundant data that what they "know" is wrong. Too much science these days is treated as if it were a religion, unquestionable no mater what new data says.
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"...there are too many people willing to believe a thing, even when shown abundant data that what they "know" is wrong. "
You mean like your insistence that Rosetta 2 is not an emulator? Or literally every one of your positions on COVID?
"Too much science these days is treated as if it were a religion, unquestionable no mater what new data says."
Any amount is too much, but it doesn't really happen and this article is not evidence otherwise. On the other hand, arguing hydroxychloroquine, something you have d
Re:Just goes to show - I took in it in the ass fro (Score:5, Informative)
Anonymous seems to be angry that science actually uses data to question things.
No, they're not. What they're saying is if you question an established theory you must provide your evidence to show why it's wrong and/or why your theory is better. Simply saying, "See, it's wrong!" doesn't count.
That is how science questions things.
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I usually stay out of those discussions, they are not scientific.
I only commented on questioning existing theory with new( and maybe wrong) data.
Forgive me.
Re:Just goes to show - I took in it in the ass fro (Score:5, Informative)
I had no idea this was a political argument. Perhaps this person has angered some. I was not aware.
It's political because certain segments of society make it political. Specifically those with a religious bent. Those people will now say, "See! You're wrong. We're right." and end the discussion there. They won't provide any evidence to the contrary other than, "It's in the Bible" which is of course not evidence since they can't show evidence for their supposed supreme being. The one who killed all the first born males in Egypt to punish pharoah until he released a certain group rather than simply killing pharoah himself (it's perfectly logical, really).
That said, most people in the scientific fields are capable of holding civil, if heated, conversations in their area of expertise, though there are exceptions. This is where my memory fails me. I remember reading about a certain topic which is forbidden to be spoken of at conferences because scientists on opposing sides have come to blows over it. If anyone can enlighten me on what that subject is I'd appreciate it.
In the current case, SK is the resident troll. He will always claim to know the "real" truth and will come up with every excuse why he's right and everyone else is wrong. He's like Rudy Giuliani now claiming the con artist having top secret nuclear documents at his private residence was no big deal because the Espionage Act doesn't cover someone taking documents and keeping them in a place roughly as safe as they were in the first place. No, really. That is what Rudy said [yahoo.com]. And that's the logic SK uses.
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It's political because certain segments of society make it political. Specifically those with a religious bent.
That's the pot calling the kettle black. Look at the comments on any story about COVID and the lab hypothesis. Just because you scream "listen to the science" doesn't mean you actually know what the science and data says. Political extremism is destroying academia and the solution isn't sinking to the other side's (much lower) level.
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"You are both leftists. "
LOL that comment says more about you than me, and I didn't bring up politics "in this story", I merely pointed out that SuperKendall is a pure, tribal hypocrite.
As for the rest of your comment, it's all projection as it always is, and you'll never be over Trump. They'll bury him in a shallow grave so people like you and SuperKendall can continue to suck his mushroom cock.
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There was some cross-immunity from various other coronavirii that fall under the category of the common cold, and natural immunity(which was in fact recognized by the EU as a reason for not needing the vaccine) if you had already had the virus thus making the vaccine completely irrelevant for those individuals. What's more, the natural immunity from having the virus before is VASTLY SUPERIOR to the efficacy of the vaccines especially as more variants surface.
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Except global warming and the COVID vaccine. In those cases, the science is settled. /s
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"...yet you said nothing."
I said plenty, just nothing you're interested in. And speaking of saying nothing, what did you say?
"...one does not question the scientific status quo with words alone."
Or a hand job alone. Is that supposed to be insight? Is that supposed to be an argument that someone else has made?
The paper covers this (Score:2)
when you assume red shift is a Doppler effect the big bang naturally follows
Click on the "predicted based on a non-expanding universe" link and download the PDF - the author gets right into redshift from the introduction on.
It's a pretty technical paper but not unreadable.
Basically they are saying that redshift varies with distance, but that you don't have to have a Big Bang with galaxies being plug out from a central point to have the redshift we are observing, and in fact in a Big Bang model you should se
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That doesn't answer my question ... if it's not Doppler, what then?
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Light loses energy as it travels through space. Perhaps by rubbing against virtual particles. (Well, I didn't read the paper, but the question isn't that impossible to come up with answers to. Whether they're correct or no I wouldn't consider myself reasonable to judge, whether I invented it or someone else told me about it.)
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I read about that over a decade ago as a blurb in some cosmology article in some science magazine. It's known as the "Tired LIght" theory.
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Well quantum goes against Einstein and makes lots of useful predictions.
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Technically the cosmological redshift is not a Doppler effect. It's due to the wavelength of light getting stretched as the space it's propagating through expands.
Lerner apparently proposes that the cosmological redshift is produced by a small part of a static universe collapsing then re-expanding. The re-expansion is caused by matter and anti-matter annihilating. Apparently.
https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wr... [ucla.edu]
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But, c'mon. Did you *really* believe everything in known existence was once contained in an infinitesimal small point? Always sounded suspect.
In the beginning there was nothing.
And then it exploded.
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Well, as far as I know, the evidence still points to older stars having less metals, meaning the astronomical definition of metals, anything other then hydrogen and helium.
With our understanding of life, or life as we know it, means only so much time for civilizations to evolve and a lot of things had to go right for us to be here, including 4.5 billion years of a fairly stable Earth.
Be interesting if we can figure out what these ancient (according to the Big bang Theory) galaxies are made out of.
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Well some ideas such as Newton's are so useful that even when we know they're wrong, we still use them as they work under some conditions such as sending a probe to Neptune via 3 other planets.
Also the more established an idea is, the more data to throw it out. When the evidence showed the Ether theory was wrong, there was a lot of remeasuring and asking others to verify those measurements before they threw it out.