The First Crisis in Cosmology Conference
By Tim Ventura | Published 08/30/2005 | Research | Rating:
Tim Ventura
The Linus Torvalds of Antigravity ... Since the birth of American Antigravity in 2002, Tim has been featured on a multitude of television networks, such as Nippon TV and the BBC, as well as extensively covered in print by sources as diverse as Wired Magazine and Jane's Defense Weekly.
View all articles by Tim Ventura The Big Bang was wrong
by Hilton Radcliffe [mailto:ratcliffe@iafrica.com]
Introduction: In May 2004, a group of about 30 concerned scientists published an open letter to the global scientific community in New Scientist in which they protested the stranglehold of Big Bang theory on cosmological research and funding. The letter was placed on the Internet and rapidly attracted wide attention. It currently has about 300 signatories representing scientists and researchers of disparate backgrounds, and has led to a loose association now known as the Alternative Cosmology Group. This writer was one of the early signatories to the letter, and holding the view that the Big Bang explanation of the Universe is scientifically untenable, patently illogical, and without any solid observational support whatsoever, became involved in the organisation of an international forum where we could share ideas and plan our way forward. That idea became a reality with the staging of the First Crisis in Cosmology Conference (CCC-1) in the lovely, medieval walled village of Moncao, far northern Portugal, over 3 days in June of this year.
Big Bang theory depends critically on three first principles: that the Universe is holistically and systematically expanding as per the Friedmann model; that General Relativity correctly describes gravitation; and that Milne’s Cosmological Principle, which declares that the Universe at some arbitrary “large scale” is isotropic and homogeneous, is true. The falsification of any one of these principles would lead to the catastrophic failure of the theory. We saw at the conference that all three can be successfully challenged on the basis of empirical science...
http://www.americanantigravity.com/articles/209/1/The-First-Crisis-in-Cosmology-Conference
NO ONE HAS THE LAST WORD IN SCIENCE.
Never said anyone did. (and your subject shift is noted).
Anyhow, on to the Wide World of Wanna-be science:
Tim Ventura
The Linus Torvalds of Antigravity ... Since the birth of American Antigravity in 2002 ...
Anti gravity? This isn't the "Hutchinson Effect" is it? ... By Jove, it is!
For those playing at home, a Canadian, John Hutchinson ran 1,600Mva through a set of Tesla coils and lifted a frog off a plate. A whole flock of folks that claim it's a demonstration of telekinesis, or psychokinesis, or UFO propulsion, or anti-gravity depending on the individual's cognitive handicap.
But let's continue:
Introduction: In May 2004, a group of about 30 concerned scientists published an open letter to the global scientific community in New Scientist in which they protested the stranglehold of Big Bang theory on cosmological research and funding. The letter was placed on the Internet and rapidly attracted wide attention. It currently has about 300 signatories representing scientists and researchers of disparate backgrounds, and has led to a loose association now known as the Alternative Cosmology Group. This writer was one of the early signatories to the letter, and holding the view that the Big Bang explanation of the Universe is scientifically untenable, patently illogical, and without any solid observational support whatsoever, became involved in the organisation of an international forum where we could share ideas and plan our way forward. That idea became a reality with the staging of the First Crisis in Cosmology Conference (CCC-1) in the lovely, medieval walled village of Moncao, far northern Portugal, over 3 days in June of this year.
Oh how exciting! Alternative Astronomers having an Alternative Cosmology Conference in Moncao.
A while back Scott Hughes pointed me to the web page of the Alternative Cosmology Group. (Scott, what did I ever do to you?) These are folks who don't really believe in the Big Bang model. The Big Bang is simply the idea that we live in a universe which is nearly homogeneous and isotropic, and has been expanding from a hot, dense state for the last several billion years. Evidence for this model is overwhelming, starting with the fundamental successes of the Hubble Law (distance proportional to velocity for nearby galaxies), the existence of the cosmic microwave background radiation (a relic from the early hot state), and the primordial abundance of light elements (a signature of nucleosynthesis when the universe was about a minute old). More recently, specific models within the Big Bang framework have scored fantastic empirical successes at explaining anisotropies in the microwave background, the characteristics of large-scale structures, the age of the universe, and so on. And patient experts continue to slap down various proposed alternatives. Still, there are doubters. Remind you of any other famously successful scientific theories?
It's fun to go through the introductory paragraph of the Alternative Cosmology Group web site, searching for true statements. Fun, but not especially rewarding.
The Alternative Cosmology Group (ACG) was initiated with the Open Letter on Cosmology written to the scientific community and published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004.
Hey, that one's true! The ACG was initiated with that letter. As far as I know, anyway. (It's all downhill from here.)
The letter points to the fundamental problems of the Big Bang theory, and to the unjustified limiting of cosmological funding to work within the Big Bang framework.
No, it doesn't, since the problems are not fundamental, and the limiting is perfectly justified. We're short of funding as it is; why spend money on theories that have been disproven?
The epicyclic character of the theory, piling ad-hoc hypothesis upon hypothesis, its incompleteness and the appearance of a singularity in the big bang universe beginning require consideration of alternatives.
No, they don't. Various hypotheses may or may not be ad-hoc, but they are simply required to fit the data. We should certainly be looking for ways to go beyond the currently favored version of the Big Bang model by reducing the number of hypotheses, and tying up some of the loose ends, but any such theory will simply be an improved version of the model. You won't replace the fact that the universe is expanding from an initial hot, dense state.
This has become particularly necessary with the increasing number of observations that contradict the theory's predictions. No, it hasn't, since there are no such observations.
Big Bang cosmology has been in a crisis since the early 90's when the Cold Dark Matter model began to fail.No, it hasn't. The most restrictive possible version of the "Cold Dark Matter Model," in which there was a critical density of matter particles, was indeed in trouble by the early 90's. Those troubles were resolved in 1998 when it was discovered that the universe is accelerating, implying the existence of dark energy. The "Standard CDM" model was swiftly replaced by the "Lambda-CDM" model (Lambda standing for the cosmological constant), and problems with structure formation and the age of the universe were resolved in one fell swoop. The Big Bang model itself, of course, was never in trouble at all. (A persistent error on the part of critics is to confuse particular scenarios within the Big Bang framework with the framework itself.)
Fifteen years later, this crisis has worsened, despite the addition of dark energy.No, it hasn't. To the extent that it ever existed, it has gone away. Dark energy, like it or not, keeps being verified by new and independent measurements.
-- more at Preposterous Universe - Alternative cosmologies