Sun 16 Mar 2008

8 Responses to “ Cosmic Bullshit Session ”

Comments:

1. John Merryman says:
   March 16th, 2008 at 12:47 pm

   John,

   I’m one of the dissonant posters at Cosmic Variance and I thought I’d raise some of my own arguments with you. I’ve spent years bringing this up on any number of internet discussions, so I’m editing this as much as possible.;

   I didn’t set out to question physics and cosmology, but in my efforts to educate myself, one particular point caused me to see it in a different light. In Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, he raised the issue of Omega=1. That the expansion of the universe is in inverse proportion to gravity, for the universe to be as stable as it is. It seemed to me this completely shot down the entire premise of Big Bang Theory. If the expansion of space is completely offset by the gravitational collapse of space, then the universe, as a whole, is not expanding. What seems a more logical explanation is a convective cycle, where what is falling into gravitational vortexes is radiated back out to cool down and start the process of collapse over again. This would make galaxies a form of gravitational storm, with the black hole as the eye of the storm and the 2.7k level of cosmic background radiation as the dew point above which radiation starts to condense out as particulate form, possibly neutrinos or even photons.
   Apparently stellar radiation isn’t sufficient to account for everything falling into gravity wells, but there are the jets of electrons ejected out the poles of galaxies, as well as the fact that the establishment likes to propose any number of other dimensions to fill the gaps in theory, so maybe some of what falls into black holes, emerges as quantum fluctuation across intergalactic space.
   The reason for proposing an expanding universe is the redshift of the light spectrum of distant galaxies. We accept that gravity bends space inward, but from what? Is it flat space, where there are no strong gravity fields, or does space effectively bend/expand outward? How do we know that between these gravity wells, there are no hills for light to be stretched over. Sort of as if this light had to run up the down escalator. It wouldn’t really curve the path of the light, since there is no gravitational point around which it bends, but possibly redshift is an effect which radiation has on other radiation, since every point in open space is crossed by radiation from every direction. Einstein originally proposed the cosmological constant as a balance to gravity, to maintain a non-collapsing universe. According to observations, there is a form of cosmological constant, currently called dark energy. It is proposed as a force that is pushing the galaxies apart at an increasing rate, but if this redshift is actually an optical effect that compounds on itself, so that the further light travels, the more the redshift is multiplied, so that at far enough distances it appears the source is receding at the speed of light. Beyond this horizon line, the actual source would be invisible, but there would still be black body radiation, just as the cosmic microwave radiation is said to be the last scattering of energy from the Big Bang, 13.7 billion lightyears ago. Gravity is actually an optical effect as well, since it bends light from a presumed straight line, otherwise we wouldn’t know it’s bent. When prisms do this, we don’t say space is bent, because we know what the mechanism is, but with gravity, the mechanism is still a mystery, so we say it is the space that is bent.
   If space itself relativistically expands, but the universe does not, possibly this would create additional pressure on gravity wells. This along with an infinite timeframe to overcome inertia would explain why the outer rings of galaxies spin as fast as the inner rings, which dark matter, or modified gravity are the current explanations. Than there is Inflation Theory, which neatly shoehorns all the spatial elements of infinite space into a finite model of the universe.
   I could go on about this, but I’ll conclude this topic with one more point; If space expands, such that the universe grows larger, why doesn’t the speed of light increase proportionally? Think about it; If the universe were to double in size, presumably points x lightyears apart would be 2x lightyears apart. ? The problem is that this means space, as measured by C, isn’t really expanding. It is simply an increasing distance of stable space. This throws another monkey wrench into Big Bang Theory, since other galaxies are redshifted so that they appear to be flying directly away from us. If it is simply an expanding volume of stable space, this would mean we are at the center of the universe. That’s why the original theory was amended to say that space itself is expanding. The rising loaf of raisin bread analogy. If redshift is actually an optical effect, it would be quite logical that all other galaxies are redshifted in such a way.

   In the course of thinking about this, a basic observation about the nature of time occurred to me;

   Consider; If two atoms collide, it creates an event in time. While the atoms proceed through this event and on to others, the event goes the other way. First it is in the future, then in the past. So which is the real direction? If time is a fundamental dimension, then physical reality proceeds along it, from past events to future ones. On the other hand, if time is a consequence of motion, then physical reality is simply energy in space and the events created go from being in the future to being in the past. Time as consequence of motion means it has more in common with temperature, then space, since they are both descriptions of and methods for measuring motion, rather then dimensional basis for it. This relationship between the matter/energy moving forward in time, as the events created move back in time applies to all scales, whether the earth rotating and creating days, or a cesium atom going through transitions, or strings and their vibrations. This isn’t presentism, because as a measure of motion, it would be meaningless to describe time as a point. The only absolute temperature is the cessation of all motion and the same would apply to time.

   Think about a thermodynamic medium, say a pot of hot water, with lots of water molecules moving about. If we were to construct a time keeping device out of this we would take the motion of one of these points of reference and measure it against the medium it is moving through. The point is the hand and the medium is the face of the clock. Obviously all the other points are hands of their own clocks, but are medium/face for all other clocks. The motion of any point/hand is balanced by the reaction of the medium/face of the clock. To the hand of the clock, the face goes counterclockwise. At any one moment, the positions of all these points constitute an event, so while any and all of them go from past events to future ones, the medium against which any point is being judged is the overall context, which once created, is displaced by the next, as all these individual points move around, so the events go from future potential to past circumstance. The illusion of direction is created because the physical reality of the points moves one way through the series of circumstances, though these events go the other way. There are innumerable points of reference describing their own narrative and all this activity exists in an equilibrium, so every potential clock constitutes its own measure of time.

   This model defines life as well. The physical brain moves forward in time, but the mind is a record of the events receding into the past. Most motion is at the speed of light, but we cannot process it in real time, so our minds create flashes of perception, like frames of film. Thus to us, time does seem like a series of instants. Of course these thoughts go from present to past, as the brain goes on to the next. The older we get, the faster our minds process these flashes and the faster time seems to move. Ultimately life amounts to a larger organism that is constantly moving on to the next generation and shedding the old like dead skin. It is the units of our individual lives, like markers on the face of a clock, that start in the future and end up in the past.

   While the logic of this point seems clear enough to me that it’s a matter of observation rather than theory, it’s not so clear to adherents of the assumption that time is a fundamental dimension.

   This observation about time as having two directions ties back to the description of cosmology being a convective cycle. The energy constantly radiating away from older bodies and clumping to form new ones, is the process direction, constantly going on to new units of time and leaving the old. While the collapsing matter is the unit direction of time. Its form first in the future, then the present and then the past.

2. Uncle Al says:
   March 16th, 2008 at 3:38 pm

   Sean Carroll and string theory respect observation and mathematical rigor. At worst they embrace falsifiable postulates. Don’t test conjoint congruence, test disjoint divergence. Be more than yentas at kaffee klatsch yammering in the mamaloshen.

   From a poster, Gravity is actually an optical effect as well, since it bends light from a presumed straight line, otherwise we wouldn’t know it’s bent. When prisms do this, we don’t say space is bent, because we know what the mechanism is, but with gravity, the mechanism is still a mystery, so we say it is the space that is bent.

   http://relativity.livingreviews.org/Articles/lrr-2006-3/
   Section 3.4.1, Figure 5
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_(general_relativity)
   http://arXiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9909014
   Phys. Rev. Lett. 92 121101 (2004)
   Amer. J. Phys. 71 770 (2003)
   Nature 425 374-376 (2003).

   Metric gravitation with pseudo-Riemannian spacetime (curvature) is wholly contained within teleparallel gravitation and Weitzenböck spacetime (torsion) – plus more. The “more” is testable. It falsifies metric gravitation and quantized gravitations with a chiral footnote. How much fun would that be, either way?

   http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/lajos.htm#a2
   Every EP test since Simon Stevin (1586 AD, Bruges) has nulled. Don’t look more, look different.

3. Andrei Kirilyuk says:
   March 16th, 2008 at 7:48 pm

   So welcome to another canonical “interview with our great scientist”, just totally confirming my conclusions from a previous post comment ( http://www.stevens.edu/csw/cgi-bin/blogs/csw/?p=123#comment-20562 ). I understand that it’s difficult to have other choice in the official system of knowledge, but that’s exactly why one should try and create the missing possibilities (different from existing attempts of private support of “unconventional” research realised by the same, conventional scientists using the same, conventional methods and attitudes).

   Although everything is even too clear with that official (or bullshit) cosmology, it’s interesting to note a couple of particularly “ironic” features. When Sean Carroll plays the “liberty of choice” and says that John (everybody) is completely free to remain sceptical about modern “theological cosmology” of his professional interest, he just “forgets” a “small detail”, that irrespective of John’s, or any other American’s, opinion about this or another direction of official science, they are forced to pay a predetermined part of their tax contribution to that research, and it is the interested researchers themselves and only them that actually decide on the distribution (and largely quantity) of financial support they obtain (through the evident “peer review” trickery, etc.). It’s exactly the same as if while buying material consumption products everybody were forced to buy certain quantities of certain products and nothing else, even when they are obviously harmful instead of being useful (you cannot refuse to buy and consume them!). Even during Soviet communism here we had a larger real choice…

   Another “ironic” lie appears when the “inspired researcher” insists that mere mechanistic comparison with experiment is a too reduced vision of “genuine” science purpose, which is as big as understanding – no, he emphasises, UNDERSTANDING – of the universe, meta-universe, meta-meta-universe… Ah, that would be great, of course, that truly divine scale of our great science, unless one recalls another “small detail”, that understanding is what is precisely missing, TOTALLY missing in the official, positivistic, abstract science approach. Where, indeed, could it come from, that solemnly announced understanding, in a doctrine that operates exclusively with heavily reduced, purely abstract (mathematical) models, objects and formally imposed rules (“postulates”) of their existence? The obvious fact is that there is NO progress in understanding of the real world structure and dynamics (real problem solution) within the official science doctrine, there is a catastrophic regress instead (which is but a decisive reason to ask for a dramatic increase of investment into the same, compromised doctrine, what else?). It’s true that when we do consistently explain all major features of this universe, we have the only natural way of our curiosity development towards yet wider reality. But as a matter of fact, the decadent doctrine pretending for “understanding” of a “multiverse” cannot propose a consistent version of the real physical structure and properties of a single isolated electron, the simplest material object of our universe…

   The same elementary trickery appears when John asks very politely (too politely, John!) about “some possible problems of the Big Bang idea”. The provided answer is that there are many implied meanings of the “Big Bang”, so different among them that the resulting “confusion” is at the origin of Big Bang problems. This is already not bullshit science, it’s bullshit discussion of science. As if “our great scientist” is unaware of the fact that the Big Bang idea experiences fatal difficulties as a whole, all its real or imaginary “stages” and aspects including, the initial singularity, further “inflation” and expansion, experimental evidence for them… And much better (more consistent and concise) concepts of universe development (better explaining the same observations) are not missing already, even despite the total absence of support and fire-assisted eradication from all official science institutions and sources. In summary, that totally inconsistent, fruitless pseudo-philosophy is not only permitted but generously supported by public and private money as the most advanced fundamental science, while no problem-solving, realistic and consistent (and therefore necessary novel) analysis can even be admitted for the competition (published), let alone supported, in the best of all possible worlds.

   No, John, it can only be senseless and pitiful, your honest attempt to apply common sense, a healthy human logic to understanding of official science games and results. Genuine results (real problem solution) are absent, we know that, and can only be absent for the imposed totalitarian method of over-simplified abstractions that should “magically” provide us with the desired “understanding”. Its “unreasonable efficiency of mathematics” became simply unreasonable (non-existing) already long ago, when “our great scientists” decided to formally impose super-natural mysteries instead of realistic explanation of observations (now considered unnecessary, by postulation!). And when true results are expelled, there remains only one game in official science practice by our great scientists, the omnipresent, premeditated, blatant lie. And when it dominates as it does in the whole official establishment, then how can one avoid it and not to play the same game? On the other hand, it becomes ever more difficult to maintain it on the background of accumulating evidence and increasing decadence of knowledge.

   So when lie becomes so destructive, maybe it’s more efficient to look for a way for the truth, at least a small one, beyond the corrupt temples of knowledge transformed into dens of thieves? The truth will prevail in any case, right, just because one cannot fool nature and its real, objective laws. But looking at this and other accounts of modern science state, its huge and blind experimentation with absolutely unexplained and misunderstood real structures, the clear impression is that it would really be better if the truth could start to prevail right now, by concrete efforts of those who appreciate it more than their formal positions and prizes. [What do you say, no one of them but me?! Science professionals tend to prefer formal positions and prizes? That's exactly why they are professionals? OK, then ... let's start from scratch, that's even better, isn't it?!]

4. Mark A. Thomas says:
   March 17th, 2008 at 10:57 pm

   I believe that even with the general consensus of cosmological inflation that there are too many blinded competing interests. There are the heavy hitters, the ivy leagues, ultra institutions MIT, Oxford, Cambridge et al. They are all vying for this: to find the correct THEORY. I am surprised the media has not picked up on this. There is a race to find the theory that correctly blends both GR and Quantum physics and when this is accomplished the cosmological code near t = 0 will reveal details of how the universe is what it is. There is no doubt that cosmological inflation will be part of that theory. However, it is possible that say someone at a small university hits the nail on the head (correct) their theory gets no airplay and as a result no one spends the inordinate amount of time to determine that it is indeed the right theory. There maybe someone or small groups who realise the theory is correct but having little or no influence there is no consensus validity for this poor sots theory. Let’s say not a crank. It gets buried. Meanwhile the behemoth institutions push their agendas for pursuing the holy grails and the dreams of glory for their institution if they and they alone achieve it. They may even rediscover what someone has already done. Rediscovery always buries the prior discoverer into a dustbin. So in a funny sense copyright law hardly protects anybody in the sciences. Ideas are not copyrightable. But ideas are out there and on the table. So Newton had it right when he said that if he had seen farther it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants. So the ingredients for a proper and correct framework may already be nearly available and the big institutions know it. When it is discovered (perhaps by a golden child) they may be a big fight.

5. mike cook says:
   March 18th, 2008 at 9:22 pm

   John Merryman’s musings on a convective cycle should be understood in the light of the fact that general relativity does not describe an attractive force called gravity. General Relativity really is an elegant theory of perpetual motion of objects possessing mass in a field which is deformed by mass. Point sources of gravity with independent, unrelated motions in this field will never come together and merge because of attraction, but they will orbit each other forever following graceful geodesics.

   So how does matter manage to accrete or glom together to form useful things like suns and planets? It turns out to be an extremely complicated process which usually involves an amount of mass (or some mixture of mass and energy) fleeing or being expelled from a system, allowing the remaining objects having mass to “coalesce” or clump more proximately.

   For instance, to form a black hole or a neutron star it isn’t enough for a lot of matter to collapse toward a common center, an equivalent amount of mass (or more) is always blown outward at escape velocity. Tidal effects in disk building work the same way–some material is propelled towards the center-mass object AS IF BY GRAVITY, but more mass yet is pushed away, attenuated, even far enough to escape altogether.

   When galaxies form, there is an interesting, little-understood correlation between the mass of the gigantic black hole at the galaxy’s center and sigma, the speed at which outermost star systems swirl around the galaxy. Conventionally this is taken to be because a lot of dark matter is “out there” in a halo beyond the edge of the outermost stars. But in our faithful conception of General Relativity demanding that gravity must simultaneously be both attractic and repulsive, we can contemplate that a really big black hole must have been expelling an awful lot of stuff as it formed. Some of that stuff may not be luminous and a lot of it may still be out in the halo, not having had sufficient time to escape.

   Even though scientists know better than to describe gravity as an attractive force, it is a habit of tongue which soon becomes a limiting habit of mind.

   General relativity describes graceful motion of objects, usually in parabolas or ellipses. When massive objects get congested enough in an area then other forces can take over to help objects congeal together. Interesting especially to me is the kind of “instantaneous appreciation” that matter must be making when tidal effects smear a shattered object into a thin disk. It almost resembles quantum pairing, this business of something having to go outward so that something else can go inward. And what do geodesics and null lines have in common? Perhaps those kind of questions could be a basis for reconciling quantum mechanics and relativity. . .

6. mike cook says:
   March 19th, 2008 at 9:57 am

   I am assuming that bigger chunks of matter are a lot less opaque than fine dust (even when the net mass of both are the same). For instance, out solar system is surrounded by Kyper belt objects, the majority of which are quite difficult to see. Galaxies may have invisible outer halos of fairly big size detritus, as Charon-size objects sweep up the dust and collect it, but large chunky detritus would be very difficult to see at inter-galactic distances. For instance, if Earth’s moon were pulverized into fine dust we might not be able to see anything in the heavens, ever, but the whole moon only blocks our view of celestial objects on rare occasions, which we call eclipses. I meant to type “attractive” and not “attractic” in the previous post.

7. mike cook says:
   March 20th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

   So take this as “Cook’s Theory.” Dark matter can be explained without reverting to a lot of exotic particles and quantum energy fluctuations. The simpler explanation is that every galaxy is simply surrounded by an unimaginably vast amount of very conventional cold rocky or icy objects the size of moons or some planets in our solar system. As it happens, these objects are extremely hard to see, but the total number and total mass of them is enormous. This is a way of saying that only a small portion of most galaxies are luminous and we have been happily assuming that if we can’t see something, it mustn’t be there. Whatever arguments astronomers have been espousing to claim that these conventional but unseen large objects don’t exist must be wrong.

8. mike cook says:
   March 22nd, 2008 at 10:06 am

   Whoops,Kuyper belt. Sammie said that you can’t prove any theory wrong, but mine could be helped out a bit if stars in distant galaxies blinked a little bit on very rare and unpredictable occasions.

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