Big Bang Theory & early 'Plasma Universe' Cosmic Acoustics

[Jarvamundo]

http://sdcc3.ucsd.edu/%7Eir118/MAE87S08 ... dWaves.pdf

An early 0-380,000 year BBT theory of cosmic acoustics causing filaments and the ANISOTROPY in the apparently "isotropic" CMBR.

More hot gas analogies. Not one mention of charge, current, potential, charged particles, Birkeland currents, circuits, magnetic fields.

[jjohnson]

I used to get Physics Today, as a member of the American Institute of Physics, a by-product of being an acoustician member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA). Articles like this were a part of a growing number of disillusionments with the present state of astronomical and cosmological physics. I'm not alone. Even mainstreamers have doubts. Lee Smolin (The Trouble With Physics) and Peter Woit (Not Even Wrong) attack the tactics used by the establishment to steer people away from anything that smacks of views opposing or changing the Standard Model today. Inertial mass is real and it resides in the mainstream.

This acoustic stuff was supposed to be occurring during the early-on "plasma epoch" after the alleged Big Bang (flimsy card #1). That alleged epoch is a part of the hypothesized "early" universe when, without a shred of evidence to actually observe (no humans back then, in an ionized state or any other state, to see what was going on!) elementary particles were charged and separated everywhere in some "primordial soup". After that, things got back together and lumped into neutral atoms and kept cooling down. No more plasma! (Flimsy card #2, based on current plasma science and observations of the cosmos.) The universe continued to expand and cool. (Flimsy card #3 - the universe ("universe: combined or turned into one (n.,Latin, from unus, one, and versus, past participle of vertere, to turn") which is all there is, expanded into...what? There cannot be something or some place into which the universe could expand because the universe by definition is and contains all that there is! Hard to expand into something or some place that isn't!)

Anyway, this acoustic thing was supposed to have been able to occur in the plasma epoch and left its imprint on the universe forever afterword.

Finally, the positions of the peaks in the angular power spectrum are a manifestation of the preferred acoustic length scale. If one knows that length, one can infer our distance from the surface of last scattering. That distance depends sensitively on the spatial curvature of the intervening universe, and on the history of dark energy in the past 10 billion years. The CMB data have already determined that the cosmic radius of curvature, if not infinite, is certainly larger than the radius of the currently visible universe.

"If one knows that length..." Does one? Accurately? How do they know their posited length is correct? Is it inferred from assumptions that were placed before it and which lead to it? Are those assumptions true beyond a reasonable doubt? Are there any error bars associated with those assumptions and the consequent "preferred acoustic length scale? Did someone build a model or simulation and deduce it from that? based on those initial a priori assumptions?

"That distance (to the surface of last scattering) depends sensitively (bold highlight mine) on the spatial curvature of the intervening universe..." Okay, let's give them that the universe was expanding during the plasma epoch, and has continued to expand through today at supposedly uneven rates, and that there actually was one expanding sound wave in the plasma, then the spatial curvature of a dynamically expanding universe either (A) has been changing through all that time so it must have been getting flatter — radius increasing, or (B) there is some other metric applied to the curvature of space during all that time, and it is a constant. Evidence of the former would give a lot of different distances so which is the curvature? and if a constant, how is it known? What physical value describes the "curvature" of space? How is it measured, as a practical point?

"...and [also depends] on the history of dark energy in the past 10 billion years." Here's the real history of dark energy over the last 10 bazillion years: "It was recently invented as a sort of cosmic placeholder to try to account for a posited recent acceleration of the expansion of the universe that seems to be based on the questionable Hubble redshift that Hubble himself seriously doubted. Before that recent history there is no history of dark energy, since it is, by its own definition, not directly observable, and was inferred because "something or other must be doing this to our universe".

"The CMB data..." —now being called into question even by mainstream astrophysicists due to sloppy calibration and data massaging allegations...

"...have determined that the cosmic radius of curvature, if not infinite, is certainly larger than the radius of the currently visible universe." Okay, if the radius is infinite, and is in some descriptive equation governing the acoustic length scale, then the acoustic length scale would seem to either be zero or infinite. If it is "certainly..." (error bars, anyone?) "...larger than the radius of the currently visible universe" then we have no idea how large it really is. "Really large" is a sloppy approximation in almost anybody's physics class. Thus, some important distance measurement is "sensitively" based upon all sorts of inferential evidence, ad hoc conjecture and a lot of unknown or incalculable numbers.

It is nicely illustrated by cool-looking 3D graphs of the initial perturbation spreading out into a bunch of lumpy peaks and valleys which allegedly clump up gravitationally into a filamentary universe, though. How plausible is that?

What is physically the "surface of last reflection" — the "edge" of the universe? A very dense reflecting surface of dark matter lurking in... well, the dark? Holographic mirrors surrounding the universe to make it work correctly? Somebody's idea of a cosmic symphony hall?

Do waves propagate in plasma? Yes, undoubtedly. They all appear to be magnetically or electrically controlled except possibly the ion acoustic wave. "MHD predicts a sound wave that is identical to the ordinary hydrodynamic sound wave of an unmagnetized gas... the two-fluid (MHD) model shows that sound waves can exist only when [electron temperature] >> [ion temperature] because only in this regime is it possible to...have inertial behavior for ions and kinetic behavior for electrons." (Fundamentals of Plasma Physics, Paul Bellan, 2006, Cambridge University Press). This ion acoustic wave in certain plasmas has a velocity proportional to temperature and inversely proportional to the mass of the charged particle(s). So I'm not particularly questioning modern plasma science with respect to acoustic waves, but am seriously dubious about the rest of the house of cards methodology based on big bang and dark energy conjecture.

Junk science in action, but I'm only a retired acoustician with a lousy architecture degree and a pilots license and some old shop equipment and a Mac. Why should I be suspicious of stuff like this?

More to the point, why shouldn't anybody? This is the type of probing and questioning that is supposed to make science get better, not to irritate those who built up the system and jealously guard it against such enquiry. Writers of stuff like this deserve to be called on it.

Jim

[Jarvamundo]

great post jim as usual, thanks.