Posted on 04/06/2016 6:31:24 PM PDT by SoFloFreeper
In this excerpt from his message at our 2012 National Conference, Dr. Stephen Meyer tells the story of how Hubble showed Einstein that the universe was not eternal but must have had a beginning.
-vid at link
Hubble came into astronomy in the 1920’s at a very propitious time. It was at just the time that astronomers were gaining access to these large dome telescopes that were able to resolve very tiny pinpoints of light in the night sky. Prior to Hubble and the scientists who were looking into the night sky in the 1920’s, there was debate among astronomers as to whether or not the Milky Way galaxy, in which our solar system resides, was the only galaxy, or whether there might be others beyond it. Hubble resolved that issue as he also resolved these points of light, because as he looked through this great dome telescope at the Palomar Observatory, he was able to determine that little points of light that had been viewed through ordinary telescopes before, and just looked like little points, actually revealed galaxies—whole galaxies with hundreds and millions of stars.
The picture behind us is a Spindle Nebula, and he saw Spiral Nebula, many different galaxies in every quadrant of the sky. Such that today, astronomers have something they call the “Hubble Deep Field,” and it’s a picture of the night sky. On the picture behind you’ll see a little square box, a little quadrant. Now the next slide is going to be that quadrant magnified further and you see that even in the tiniest little square in the night sky there are galaxies galore.
And so, the first thing that Hubble determined was that we live in an immense universe. It was grand in scope beyond our wildest imaginations; galaxies in every direction. Now that was just awe-inspiring, but there was also a very theoretically and philosophically significant discovery that he made that was closely associated with this, and that is the discovery that these galaxies are moving away from us. In every direction of the night sky the galaxies are receding. And the evidence for that came from something called “Red Shift.” It’s that the light coming from those distant galaxies was redder in its hue, in its electromagnetic spectrum, in its color, than it would otherwise be if the galaxies were stationary in relationship to us.
How many have heard of the Doppler Effect? Do you know of that? If you have a train moving away from us, the sound of the train whistle will drop in pitch. Well the drop in pitch corresponds to a shift in wavelength. Up in Seattle, we have these…I don’t know if you can talk about beer commercials in a church, but why not…we have these beer commercials for Rainier Beer. And they had these guys dressed up as beer cans that rode around on motor bikes. And at the end of the commercial they would ride off into the sunset saying, “Raaainieeerrrrr Beeeeer,” and you had the Doppler shift happening. I’m probably the only person that watched that and thought Doppler shift rather than let’s go get a brewsky, you know?
The same thing happens with light. Now what do you infer from that? I have a visual aide, and it’s not a beer can, it’s a balloon. Hubble got to thinking about this and he realized that if the galaxies—and I’ve drawn these little spirals on the balloon, so think going in the forward direction of time what’s happening—If all the galaxies are moving away from us, that means the universe must be expanding outward in a kind of spherically symmetric expansion. So as you go forward in time, you get the universe getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. Now what happens if you wind the clock backwards like the Saturday morning cartoons where they make the characters go backwards? What if you, the technical term is back extrapolate in time, if you go back 1,000 years? Is the universe bigger or smaller? Ok, and as you go back, and go back, and back, and back, and back, the further you go back in time the universe gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller until eventually you reach the beginning point of the expansion, where everything was congealed together. And Hubble realized that an expanding universe implied a finite universe—a universe that actually has a beginning; a beginning in time.
Now this was a really significant discovery because at the very same time on the other side of the country there was this physicist with bad hair named, Albert Einstein. And Einstein had come to the same conclusion that the universe must have a beginning, but then he said, “No, no, no, no, that cannot be right.” And Einstein came to it on the basis of his theory of general relativity which was a theory of gravitation. And the equations of his theory suggested that the universe must be expanding outward and decelerating in order for all the math to work out. But when he realized that if it was expanding outward it must have had a beginning, he said no that can’t be right. So then he posited an arbitrary force that was meant to counter act the force of expansion in just the right measure so that the universe would be static, and therefore could have existed eternally, without expanding or contracting.
When I was a physics student we use to call this “dry-labbing.” Where you know, the professor gives you an experiment to do and you know what the answer is supposed to be, but you do the thing with the hockey pucks on the air table, and it’s not coming out right. And it’s getting near the end of the period and you want to go to dinner, and so what do you do? Now I’m not saying I ever did this, but I know some people who did. And you take the pen and you adjust the values so that they match the theory. Ok—that’s called dry-labbing. That’s essentially what Einstein, one of the greatest physicists in the history of the world, that’s essentially what he did. He fudged. He fudged, because he had a preconceived idea that the universe must be eternal. And that was such a strong philosophical predilection that he adjusted the science to try to meet with that.
Then Hubble comes along and discovers that the universe actually is expanding; there must have been a beginning. And so he invites Einstein out to California to view the evidence that he’d been viewing through this grand telescope. And there’s some famous newsreel footage where Einstein comes out and he looks through the telescope with Hubble in the background smoking his pipe, and he comes out and meets the media and says, “I now see the necessity of a beginning.”
In any case, Einstein gets it, and later says that his cosmological constant, his little fudge factor, was the greatest mistake of his scientific career. In essence, the heavens talked back. And the testimony of the sky was that there was a beginning to the universe.
Today’s scientific method...
Form a hypothesis.
Devise a means to test your hypothesis.
Do the test.
Alter the results to fit your hypothesis.
Prosper.
The most incredible element of that Einstein tale. The man whose name is the epitome of genius admitted he was wrong. Ever see the most brilliant man in the Oval Office do that?
How about that guy, who, after being told the hit-and-run driver killing the Muslim was a Muslim as well, cursed the messenger in the most violent terms.
I’m blown away by the integrity of Einstein. He shoulda been around for the global warming debate.
In the ensuing years the evidence discussed in the present book has built up to the point where it is clear that the velocity interpretation can now be abandoned in favor of a new principle which stands on a firm observational and theoretical foundation.
But of course, the stunning aspect of the ROSAT observations was that two quasars of redshift .63 and .45 are actually physically linked by a luminous connection to a low redshift object of z= .007. When I showed this to the local experts, there were alarmed states followed by annoyance.
This result made it clear that the compact and interacting groups were just a more concentrated ensemble of young, non-equilibrium companion galaxies which had been ejected more recently from the parent galaxy, and were composed of material of higher redshift. Aside from being empirically true, this interpretation solves all the conventional paradoxes of the failure of the galaxies to merge into a single galaxy on a cosmic time scale, and also explains the unbearable presence of “discordant” redshifts.
In later chapters we will show that galaxies and quasars tend to occur at certain preferred redshifts. This quantization implies that galaxies do not evolve with smoothly decreasing redshifts, but change in steps.
One major point of the present book is to try to make it impossible to ignore the enormous amount of mutually supporting significant evidence which all points to the same conclusion.
In the face of 28 years of accumulated evidence, to go on proclaiming that quasars are out at the edge of the universe seems unpardonable.
http://www.spaceandmotion.com/cosmology/halton-arp-seeing-red-errors-big-bang.htm
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Those nasty pesky Quasars! Einstein was right after all.
Forgot to add:
TRUMP’S FAULT!
Three questions I’ve always posed in a creation/atheist debate was: 1)How large what ever it was that exploded? 2)What caused it to go blooie in the first place, and 3)Where did it come from as in what made it (since matter can’t be created or destroyed)?
Or, alternatively, insertion of a fifth step:
1. Form a hypothesis.
2. Devise a means to test your hypothesis.
3. Do the test.
4. Alter the results to fit your hypothesis.
5. Relate altered test results to GlowBull Warming.
6. Prosper.
Einstein stands up very well over time.
One of the things that stands out about him to me, is the fact that prevailing thought is not locked for all time.
Scientific beliefs do change over time. Theories are overturned by new discoveries, and others are actually proven correct by new discoveries.
I am attracted to scientific theory, and love to read about prevailing thought, the possibilities, and the drifting theories over time.
For a guy like Einstein to have most of his theories remain solid over time, is remarkable.
LOL.
I think I’m snagging some comments meant for post 1.
Of course it had a beginning. It was created. Everything created has a beginning.
Hubble comes along and discovers that the universe actually is expanding; there must have been a beginning.
The BIG BANG theory rests on the assumption that all matter eventually falls back into itself, coalesces, becomes a critical singularity,
eventually exploding to propel the matter outward like shrapnel from a bomb.
But that presupposes that matter came from somewhere before the BIG BANG, coalesced in the same way and created the BIG BANG.
So the matter had to exist before the BIG BANG - or was it created somehow?
Remember the The 'Law of Conservation Of Mass':
Matter in a closed system cannot be created or destroyed.
If it didn't exist prior to the BIG BANG who, or what created it?
If it did exist prior to the BIG BANG where did it come from?
Is it matter that came from an earlier universe and BIG BANG?
And the one before that?
And one even earlier?
And.....
The Last Question by Isaac Asimov
http://multivax.com/last_question.html
Matter and energy had ended and with it, space and time. Even AC existed only for the sake of the one last question that it had never answered from the time a half-drunken computer ten trillion years before had asked the question of a computer that was to AC far less than was a man to Man.
All other questions had been answered, and until this last question was answered also, AC might not release his consciousness.
All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.
But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.
A timeless interval was spent in doing that.
And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.
But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer — by demonstration — would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light——
This is the usual reductio ad nihilim ploy of creationism : Materialistic theories can't answer everything, therefore they answer nothing. But creationism does answer everything, therefore it is true.
Galileo addresses this in his essay, The Assayer, in which he advocates the honest reply, "I do not know", in that case in reference to the explanation for the path of comets. ... old hat to us!
M + (-M) = 0
The only possible explanation. You can take it from there. I’ve done my bit.
Einstein stood the test of time well for a while, but it’s falling apart now.
The problem is that gravity isn’t the predominant force in the universe - electromagnetism is. Advances in plasma cosmology are coming up with much better answers to key questions than absurdities like black holes and neutron stars.
The universe is not gravitic - it is electric. Halton Arp is not given a fraction of his due.
The universe didn’t explode. It’s believed it expanded from a pin point. Think of the universe 1 second before the beginning expansion, as a point. Suddenly expanding rapidly in all directions, like a giant balloon inflating....The universe expanded out from a microscopic point, many believe, and much of it appears to be expanding to this day.
No ones knows what caused this expansion.
No one knows where if came from. Some believes there are multiple universes/dimensions..Or multiverses and the theories go on from there.
Thank you for chiming in on that point.
I’ll check it out.
But a pin point of what? What pinpoint could contain the mass and energy needed to form the universe?
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