NationStates Jolt Archive

I'm putting this up since at first glance it is similar to the "arguments" between creationists and those who realize the reality of evolution; but this is in fact profoundly different:

Big Bang Theory Busted by 33 Top Scientists:
http://rense.com/general53/bbng.htm

Big Bang Theory Busted by 33 Top Scientists:
http://rense.com/general53/bbng.htm

somebody check me on this - i counted 34 names

me too

somebody check me on this - i counted 34 names

Yes, so did I. It's difficult to say whether that hurts or adds to the credibility of the link.

Check http://www.rense.com and then tell me the site is unbiased. Just the front page has dozens of links to "articles" about evil Zionist infiltration, UFOs, and other idiocy. If that's the host site, I put no faith in the material from it.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the alleged Church Satanism, stories about Bigfoot, Life After Death, and gay propaganda. How careless of me.

If they can prove it, let them write papers in the relevant journals, and then scientists will have a debate about it.

That's how it works.

You saw well. If you read it well, you can find a few logical fallacies contained in it, and current science has rendered part of it factually wrong - the first measurements of dark matter have already been taken. Dark energy (Einstein's famous Cosmological Constant) is also being investigated, and there appears to be evidence for such a force as well.

It sounds to me that this is nothing more than an attempt at getting more research money for pet projects (they want non-cosmologists to help divide the pot of money going to cosmologists) than anything else.

Yes, so did I. It's difficult to say whether that hurts or adds to the credibility of the link.

I wouldn't say that hurts it. But having articles such as

http://www.rense.com/general69/satanic.htm

http://www.rense.com/general69/hyp.htm

http://www.rense.com/general69/911ms.htm

do kind of hurt the credibility of the site.

right. 34 people claiming to be scientists (but obviously not mathematicians, as they can't count) say the big bang didn't happen. Therefore it didn't.
You know, I bet I can find 35 people claiming that they pulled this out of their butts.
Guess that makes me more righter than you.


btw, their arguments are flawed. I haven't got my quatum physics stuff here at school, but most of what they claim to be flaws have alreay been explained. They're taking the theory from 20 or 30 years ago.

Check http://www.rense.com and then tell me the site is unbiased. Just the front page has dozens of links to "articles" about evil Zionist infiltration, UFOs, and other idiocy. If that's the host site, I put no faith in the material from it.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the alleged Church Satanism, stories about Bigfoot, Life After Death, and gay propaganda. How careless of me.

I am certainly not going to claim that rense is an unbiased (or accurate or intelligent) site but if you look at the page I linked to itself, it is from New Scientist magazine (in other words the content is not from Rense). Nor do I endorse the conclusion reached (largely because I know very little about astrophysics) but I figured it would be interesting to put it up.

The 'big bang' (a term coined to ridicule the idea of the universe starting out as an incomprehensibly hot vastly smaller object) is without doubt at this point. The Cosmic background radiation has been well investigated. If it isn't the afterglow of the big bang, the first light, etc, then quantum mechanics has some pretty serious fundemental issues since electromagnitism doesn't work like we think it does. Yet we've got it nailed down to better than one part in a billion. To say nothing of physical chemistry and red shift. Or supernova surveys and the like.

Yeah at this point believing that the universe isn't expanding, is akin to believing the moon landings were faked, and computers really run on magic smoke.

Any site that has this to say about porn and sexuality:
http://www.rense.com/general69/allppor.htm
Why All Porn Is Gay
By Henry Makow PhD

If the Playboy founder is any indication, a life dedicated to porn and free sex leads to homosexuality and impotence.
...

Forget about what you normally think of gay or straight. Think of heterosexuality as monogamous and homosexuality as promiscuous.

Heterosexuality involves bonding permanently with a member of the opposite sex for love and usually procreation. It is participating in the natural life cycle, in the intrinsic meaning of life. Personal and societal health depends on heterosexuality.

Homosexuality is arrested development due to an inability to form a heterosexual bond. As a result, homosexuality is characterized by sex for its own sake (divorced from love or procreation.) In these terms society has become homosexual to a large degree due to social engineering e.g. "sexual revolution," feminism.


Has to be taken with a large grain of salt. Like a grain the size of the friggin' moon.


know these definitions are not "politically correct." PC is propaganda, social engineering and mind control. PC is an old Communist Party (i.e. Illuminati) term.
Yay!!!:) He used the illuminati term! I only had to read two articles to get find it.
This MUST be a valid, rational, scientific site.

Has anyone heard of the plasma theory?

Yay!!!:) He used the illuminati term! I only had to read two articles to get find it.
This MUST be a valid, rational, scientific site.

As already mentioned, the page is posted on Rense but is not written by Rense (as far as I can tell they are a site that will post ANYTHING from any source that goes against the mainstream views). Since the people who wrote that epitome of stupidity are in no way connected to the other piece, it does not reflect on the credibility of it. Though that is not to be interpret as me vouching for the credibility of my link.

somebody check me on this - i counted 34 names

Why the fuck did you bother to count the names?

Interestingly, that site seems to be entirely based on conspiracies. Leftist, rightist- doesn't matter, if there's a conspiracy, Rense.Com is covering it.

Post a link to a legitimate, recent source and you'll probably be taken more seriously.

right. 34 people claiming to be scientists (but obviously not mathematicians, as they can't count) ....

Nobody said mathematicians can count. I took a test once on which I did a good bit of advanced math in my head, and proved all sorts of things. All correctly. Except for the fact that I added 6 and 7 and got 15. I walked out of the test and observed to a friend "Complex integration can be done in my head, but simple subtrition and attraction, I have problems with..."

Well, it WAS an article in New Scientist, a magazine which is not a peer reviewed publication.
Lerner, Eric. New Scientist, 5/22/2004, Vol. 182 Issue 2448, p20-20, 1p, 1c; (AN 13260278)

It also clears up the mystery of the 34 names though.

Bucking the big bang



Our ideas about the history of the universe are dominated by big bang theory. But its dominance rests more on funding decisions than on the scientific method, according to Eric Lerner and dozens of other scientists

BIG bang theory relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities — things that we have never observed. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent. Without them, there would be fatal contradictions between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements.

And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy.

What's more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesise an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the red shift of faraway galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do.

Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not explain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that "science is the culture of doubt", in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific enquiry.

Today, virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies. Funding comes from only a few sources, and all the peer-review committees that control them are dominated by supporters of the big bang. As a result, the dominance of the big bang within the field has become self-sustaining, irrespective of the scientific validity of the theory.

Giving support only to projects within the big bang framework undermines a fundamental element of the scientific method — the constant testing of theory against observation. Such a restriction makes unbiased discussion and research impossible.

To redress this, we urge those agencies that fund work in cosmology to set aside a significant fraction of their funding for investigations into alternative theories and observational contradictions of the big bang. To avoid bias, the peer review committee that allocates such funds could be composed of astronomers and physicists from outside the field of cosmology.

Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang's validity, and its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our most accurate model of the history of the universe.

"Big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have since been validated"

This statement is co-signed by 33 other scientists from 10 countries

Why the fuck did you bother to count the names?

cause i didn't feel like reading the article and went for the cheap shot instead

cause i didn't feel like reading the article and went for the cheap shot instead

You should go to Vegas.

I'm putting this up since at first glance it is similar to the "arguments" between creationists and those who realize the reality of evolution; but this is in fact profoundly different:

Big Bang Theory Busted by 33 Top Scientists:
http://rense.com/general53/bbng.htmReading it cold, my immediate reaction is that all they're really saying (all that they are legitiamtely saying) is that "fudge factors" are being added to explain the speed of expansion since the old BB, and others to deal with the apparent rotational discrepancies of observed galaxies, etc...

The underlying theme that "space expanded from a single point" is essentially the best (and only non-complicated?) theory to explain why:
The further away things are, the faster they appear to be moving away from us
Why we have managed to find (as predicted) a near-constant background radiation across the whole sky...


Ok, so we have a few problems with the speeds of things apaprently indicating periods of "expansion", there are the 'fudges' of Dark Matter/Energy to explain various observed qualities of the cosmos, and there are ripples in the CBR that mean 'something', but there's really no emperical support for Steady Stait/Contnuous Creation/whatever alternate theories...

Anyone see "A Sidewalk Astronomer"? I think it was that guy who had some pretty weird notions of science and the big bang and how god fit into it (being an ex-monk, himself).

Regardless of how senile he may or may not be, he has interesting ideas.

You should go to Vegas.

Most of the physicists here are working on the "frequency of showgirl breast undulation in moderate to high pressure environments", except for one guy who's working with antimatter molecules in the Bigelow building.

oh, 33 other scientists...I thought they just weren't counting the guy from Cal State Fullerton...cause, you know...

Why the fuck did you bother to count the names?

I think the real question is: Why wouldn't you?

Paul Marmet, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics (retired) (Canada)
He must not count, on the basis of him being retired, or the only Canadian.

Thus, thirty-three.

Has anyone heard of the plasma theory?
Is that something to do with the solid state theory they had before the notion of the big bang was conceived of?

They considered Steady-State viable, thus they are complete morons.

"Did the Big Bang really occur?"

Yes, it reeely, reeely did. It's simple extropolation tracing the current expansion of the universe back to the singularity from which our universe began. Call it the epigenesis, the "big bang," or the George, it's still there. Idle thinking, fervent wishing, and the delusions of "creationists" won't make it go away.

He must not count, on the basis of him being retired, or the only Canadian.

Thus, thirty-three.

From the article:
This statement is co-signed by 33 other scientists from 10 countries
Notice the other. Thus, with the author it makes 34. The headline is just lazy journalism.

"Did the Big Bang really occur?"

Yes, it reeely, reeely did. It's simple extropolation tracing the current expansion of the universe back to the singularity from which our universe began. Call it the epigenesis, the "big bang," or the George, it's still there. Idle thinking, fervent wishing, and the delusions of "creationists" won't make it go away.

If you want to connect objections to the big bang (or specifically the arguments for steady state theory and plasma theory) to an ideology it is certainly not creationism; the big bang can be used in arguments by liberal christians and rational thiests since it suggests the universe has a beginning. A steady state universe would render the existence of God meaningless (if the universe is eternal there is no need for a first cause).

Perhaps, perhaps not.

However, the Big Bang is definitely the theory closest to observable facts. And yes, it's very flawed. It wouldn't surprise me if it were partially or wholly replaced.

A static universe seems highly unlikely.