The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

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BeAChooser
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Sun Sep 11, 2022 4:09 am

Yet another self proclaimed *science communicator* joins the attack on Lerner ... a man named David Klinghoffer.

His assault comes from an unexpected quarter given that his "pet" theory, requires an honest to gosh diety.

I refer to Intelligent Design (ID).

First Klinghoffer put out this declaration …

https://evolutionnews.org/2022/08/calm- ... -happened/
Calm Down: Yes, the Big Bang Happened

Don Lincoln, a Fermilab scientist, addresses claims (reported on here) that infrared images from the James Webb Space Telescope cast doubt on the veracity of the Big Bang. He links to an article at Evolution News and seems confused as to the general view among intelligent design proponents on the subject. … snip …

The Webb images of ancient galaxies “seem to be far larger and more regularly shaped than what was predicted.” And ID proponents are on board with Eric Lerner’s marginal claim that the “Big Bang Never Happened”? If true (and it’s not), that would be quite surprising in light of the fact that, in philosopher of science Stephen Meyer’s most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, the observation that the universe had a beginning (aka the Big Bang) is given as one of three pillars supporting the case for a transcendent mind at work in nature.

… snip …

let’s all calm down and stop falsely tarring proponents of intelligent design for things we don’t believe and that would go against our most prominently articulated arguments. 
But the controversy continued so I guess he felt it necessary to put out a second declaration …

https://evolutionnews.org/2022/09/steph ... disproven/
Stephen Meyer: No, the Big Bang Hasn’t Been “Disproven”
Despite the title, at first I was hopeful that a bit of rationality might prevail as it started out thus …
As soon as I see multiple uses of scare words like “denial,” “disinformation,” and “pseudoscience,” my eyebrow goes up. Today, the mark of genuine disinformation is, often, the repeated, robotic use of the word “disinformation.” A piece at Space.com seems to be competing to see how densely it can sprinkle such terms across a short article.
But then I was disappointed. He wrote …
Keith Cooper writes, “The James Webb Space Telescope never disproved the Big Bang. Here’s how that falsehood spread.” He’s referring to “an article about a pseudoscientific theory that went viral in August, and which mischaracterized quotes from an astrophysicist to create a false narrative that the Big Bang didn’t happen.” … snip … And Cooper is correct that the original story was highly misleading.
I totally disagree with his characterization of Lerner's article, for all the reasons I stated above, not of which have been debunked.

But at least this communicator noticed this ...
But count the number of variations on the phrase “science denial” in just two paragraphs. This is verging on hysteria
Indeed. I counted 7 variations in that small portion of Cooper's article. And hysteria is a sign of … what? … PANIC. So Lerner might be right. And the fact that all of mainstream has mobilized to attack Lerner is another sign of that panic. They simply can not let the observations he made about JWST results and Big Bang take root. Because that would threaten their funding. So Klinghoffer continues …
I was much more interested to hear what philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, author of Return of the God Hypothesis, had to say about the same viral story in a conversation with podcaster Frank Turek. The two ask, “Has the Big Bang Been Disproven?” 

The answer is no: observations so far from the Webb Space Telescope have strengthened the case for a cosmic beginning, as Meyer shows, not weakened it. He explains why science writer Eric Lerner and his “pet theory” about the Big Bang are wrong. It’s much more persuasive to say so, lucidly and soberly, without trashing other people as “serial deniers” or pushers of “pseudoscience.” I highly recommend Dr. Meyer’s detailed discussion of why, yes, the universe began with a “bang.”
Isn’t that interesting? Not a astrophysicist, but another philosopher is being used to resolve this scientific dispute. And what evidence does Klinghoffer offer from this philosopher to prove the JWST data has strengthened the case for a Big Bang and that Lerner and his “pet theory” are “wrong”. Well … nothing, other than linking Meyer. So I guess I have no choice but to listen to what Meyer said.

So, first, who is Stephen Meyer? Well, to begin with, Klinghoffer is a “senior fellow” at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture where Meyer is the Director. So you could say Meyer is his boss, which might influence his views, if Meyer attacked Lerner.

Also, beside Meyer having a PhD in the Philosophy of Science, he’s another advocate of ...as Wikipedia puts it … the “pseudoscience of intelligent design.” Indeed, he’s been focused on ID (fighting for it’s acceptance) since before he got the “philosophy” degree back in 1991 ... as long as Lerner has been struggling to promote Plasma Cosmology. The fact both believe in ID might also have influenced Klinghoffer to attack Lerner.

Now interestingly enough, like Lerner, Meyer has had trouble publishing his work in *respected* scientific journals. In fact, in 2005, the National Center for Science Education even called a paper by Meyer on ID that the Proceedings of Biological Society (BSW) had first published then retracted … for not meeting its scientific standards … “pseudoscientific”.

And like Lerner, Meyer has claimed that those who oppose Darwinism are persecuted by the scientific establishment and prevented from publishing their views. He even signed a statement in 2001 titled “A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism” to that effect (much like Lerner and others did in the case plasma cosmology).

And again, like Lerner, Meyer has been the target of serious attacks by scientists, many of whom see themselves as *science communicators*. For example, in 2013, paleontologist Donald Prothero published a highly negative review of Meyer's 2013 book on ID under the title "Stephen Meyer's Fumbling Bumbling Amateur Cambrian Follies". Gareth Cook, a *science communicator*, published an article attacking Meyer's book under the title "Doubting Darwin's Doubt". He called Meyer's book a "masterwork of pseudoscience". Many others did much the same thing.

So given all those similarities in the way the mainstream has treated Meyer, you would think that Meyer would have more understanding and sympathy for Lerner’s situation. But apparently not. Apparently he was willing to through a fellow mainstream science dissenter under the bus just because he perceived that would play well with the mainstream media and possibility make his little movement seem more rational (than it probably is, truth be told). Besides Creation seems to require a God, much like ID does.

Now, on to what Meyer said in the Turek interview, which Klinghoffer linked (https://crossexamined.org/has-the-big-b ... n-c-meyer/) as proof Lerner is wrong. Here's a transcript of the interview: https://crossexamined.org/wp-content/up ... 1-2022.pdf .

The interviewer (Turuk) starts by saying "some people on the web have been saying" about the JWST data disproving the Big Bang, says "Particularly, even the redshift is now somehow disproven." Meyer responds, saying that "is completely incorrect. This is the pet view of one particular astronomer named Lerner." The problem is that Lerner never assumed in his article's analysis of the JWST data that redshift is not an accurate measure of distance like the mainstream claims. In fact, he did his analysis and drew his conclusion that JWST data contradicts the Big Bang Theory BASED ON THAT ASSUMPTION. So now we have to wonder if Meyer even read Lerner's article.

It is true that Lerner said that IF the Big Bang Hypothesis is thrown out, "the Hubble redshift relation would" "need some new physical process to explain the loss of energy as light travels huge distances", but he did not say that the redshift relationship was wrong in the analysis that led to him concluding that the Big Bang didn't happen. He didn't need to make that claim to show inconsistencies between Big Bang and JWST results.

Then after Meyer pontificates about redshift a while, Turuk says "this astronomer by the name of Lerner - I read the article that he wrote about this - he said he could explain the redshift by something called tired light". Problem is that Lerner never once mentioned tired light in his "The Big Band Didn't Happen" article. Not Once. So now we have to wonder if Turuk actually read Lerner's article. And Meyer, clearly not having read the article either, responds to this as if Lerner did say it in the article.

Meyer says "the galaxies that are 13.5 billion years old and as far away as would correspond to that age should have light that they would be moving very fast. And the light coming from them would be what I've coined the term uber redshifted. It shouldn't be redshifted; the light should be really stretched out. And the James Webb is looking for light which is super uber redshifted. That's very stretched out. And the very fact that they have confirmed galaxies of that age shows that they're getting the degree of redshift that you would expect given the distance to them."

That's a description by someone who hasn't a clue what he's really talking about. First, the light from distant galaxies "would be moving very fast"? How fast? Faster than light? Cosmological redshift isn't due to light moving uber fast ... it's due to space expanding. Second, what the heck does he mean by the light "shouldn't be redshifted". Especially when he calls it "super uber redshifted". His explanation is just gobbledegook.

Then he continues ... "Now, Learner's claim that he can explain that degree of redshift through tired light, is a tacit admission that the James Webb Telescope is detecting the degree of redshifted light, or electromagnetic radiation, that would be necessary to confirm the Big Bang model." Again let me point out that Lerner did NOT use the expression "tired light" in the article this joker claims to be discussing. And Lerner ASSUMED in his article's analysis that light redshifts just like the Big Bangers claim. What this again proves is that Meyers did NOT read Lerner's article.

His whole diatribe in fact has NOTHING to do with the actual evidence, citations and logic that Lerner supplied in his article to back up his thesis that the JWST results contradict the Big Bang model. Meyer and Klinghoffer have offered nothing but a strawman, or perhaps more accurately, a red herring, to try and smear Lerner. Furthermore, let me point out that the transcript on Turuk's website mispells Lerner's name over and over and over. It's identifies him as "Learner". And Meyer has to have seen the transcript, so the fact that he didn't make Turuk correct the mistake is one more reason to suspect that Meyer never even bothered to read Lerner's article.

Let me also point out that Meyer's attempt to debunk the idea that tired light doesn't explain redshirt only shows that he's not current with physics and certainly not plasma cosmology. Yes, Lerner mentioned tired light in his 1991 book ... because the was the state of knowledge back then. And yes, there are reasons to question tire light as a mechanism to explain redshift. But Lerner offered tired light as an alternative before those reasons were know and, this is important, bbefore scientists discovered other mechanisms that sap energy from light and could lead to redshift.

The Wolf effect, for example, is a phenomenon that was predicted by Emil Wolf in 1987 and subsequently confirmed in the laboratory by Mark Bocko, David Douglass, and Robert Knox. Wolf and James, in 1996, reported the "“Under certain conditions the changes in the spectrum of light scattered on random media may imitate the Doppler effect, even though the source, the medium and the observer are all at rest with respect to one another." In 1998 and 2000, Wolf and several others suggested that the Wolf Effect might explain discordant redshifts observed in certain quasars.

The late Paul Marmet in 1988 did calculations (http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/hubble/) that indicated a very slight inelastic scattering phenomenon using electromagnetic theory and quantum mechanics could be compatible with observed redshifts He calculated that concentrations of about 10-2 particles per cm^^3 of gas is enough to produce a redshift that would be indistinguishable from the effect resulting from the Doppler shift attributed to the expansion of the universe. That density is less than what's currently thought to be the density of the intergalactic medium (1 atom per cm^^3). Here's another paper Marmet published in 2000: http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/hydrogen/ about that alternative redshift mechanism.

And there are other known mechanisms. In 2005, Ari Brynjolfsson postulated (https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0401420.pdf) a redshift that occurs when a photon enters a hot, sparse electron plasma. And here's a paper (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1306.4407.pdf) from 2013 that describes what seems to be a similar mechanism. It shows that this mechanism could not only explain observed redshifts but eliminate the need for dark matter to explain the redshift of galaxies in the Coma cluster.

The point of all this is that simply debunking tired light because Lerner relied on it 30 years ago when he wrote his first book does not debunk what's in his current article and the new alternative redshift mechanisms. Furthermore, Miller is also apparently unaware that Lerner, in a 2018 peer reviewed paper, “Observations contradict galaxy size and surface brightness predictions that are based on the expanding universe hypothesis”, published ( https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/ ... 85/4951333) in a leading cosmology journal, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, found that observations of the size and brightness of thousands of galaxies contradict predictions based on the Big Bang expansion hypothesis. He found that none of the published expanding-universe predictions of galaxy-size growth fit the actual data and he found that all of the proposed physical mechanisms for galaxy growth, such as galaxy mergers, also contradict observations. However, the data were closely fit by the contrary hypothesis that the universe is not expanding, and that the redshift of light is caused by some other unknown process. Tired light wasn't mentioned.

Besides, I don't believe Meyer is even qualified to debunk the notion of tired light although I didn't take the time to see if it made any sense.

In any case, after that, Turuk and Meyer return to discussing Meyer's "God Hypothesis" and regurgitating all the previous reasons that have been given for postulating a deity produced the Big Bang. Meyer says "the Big Bang model provides an obvious confirmation of the most important claim in the biblical account, which is that there was a beginning to the universe." And then the two of them get lost in the philosophical weeds, never to return to the topic of Lerner. All in all, Meyer's interview is not a very convincing refutation of the claims Lerner makes in his most current article. Klinghoffer was just blowing smoke, anticipating that few people would even bother to look at what Meyer said.

And one last observation. The one good thing I'll say about Stephen Meyer is that he's not a defender of mainstream thinking on Climate Change. Quite the opposite: https://stream.org/bill-nye-perfect-tal ... h-science/ . But then taking that position doesn't threaten his core issue, intelligent design, does it? Just saying ...

jackokie
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by jackokie » Mon Sep 12, 2022 2:56 am

@BeAChooser A slight quibble. Intelligent Design has been seized upon by Creationists, but ID does not require a Deity, a God, except as Arthur C. Clarke opined, any sufficiently advanced technology would look like magic to a less advanced society. So theoretically a super advanced alien civilization could have decided for reasons of its own to seed the solar system - the galaxy - all Creation (oops, the universe) with the necessary templates for life. For example, it's possible that Eucaryotic DNA contains overcodes similar to steganography that kick in under certain circumstances to jump start the punctuation in Punctuated Equilibrium. But it's really a useless controversy because ID on either side of the argument is not a subject for science. Creationism is in the same boat - we can argue till the cows come home that it could or could not have happened, but again that's not a subject for science. Ditto for the existence of a Deity. And until we can simulate in a lab the original initial conditions, the "primordial soup", and have a self-replicating organism emerge, that's also just something to argue about. And some die-hard somewhere could argue that, yes it happened in your lab, but that's not necessarily how it happened originally.

My dive into microbiology, which I hope to wrap up soon, was actually rather shocking in finding how sophisticated even the unicellular organisms are. The fail-safes, the fault-tolerance, the operational controls, the communication between components, the data processing - incredible. Many of the papers and textbooks I read referred to the replication functions as "machinery", and with good reason. That doesn't mean it all couldn't have evolved naturally. New instruments for the first time allow a view into the functioning of living cells, and there are a number of computer simulations currently attempting to model the emergence of self-replicating organisms. So maybe we'll be able to be comfortable with the idea that life arose through natural processes. But man, after spending time with microbes, ID doesn't seem as far-fetched as it did before.
Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.

Cargo
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by Cargo » Mon Sep 12, 2022 3:20 am

The Meta Franken Astro Tyson has now spoken.
You may need medication before viewing this, as I only saw a preview and not sure if I can stand to watch 11min of N.Tyson blabbering.
BUT, the cracks are really starting to spread. How dare Tyson even Question this question, things must be getting really crazy for the BB Cult.

Is the Big Bang Theory Wrong? | Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains...
528,343 views Sep 6, 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJLh6Wha76A

PS _ it is pretty much fact that 'views' for the TB channel videos are 'misinformation', and in reality are probably missing a 0 or three.. just thinking out loud..
interstellar filaments conducted electricity having currents as high as 10 thousand billion amperes
"You know not what. .. Perhaps you no longer trust your feelings,." Michael Clarage
"Charge separation prevents the collapse of stars." Wal Thornhill

BeAChooser
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Mon Sep 12, 2022 4:57 am

jackokie wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 2:56 am @BeAChooser A slight quibble. Intelligent Design has been seized upon by Creationists, but ID does not require a Deity, a God, except as Arthur C. Clarke opined, any sufficiently advanced technology would look like magic to a less advanced society. So theoretically a super advanced alien civilization could have decided for reasons of its own to seed the solar system - the galaxy - all Creation (oops, the universe) with the necessary templates for life.
Fair enough. But this particular *science communicator* does believe a Deity did it.
jackokie wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 2:56 amThat doesn't mean it all couldn't have evolved naturally.
All it takes is time. Because as Jeff Goldblume said in the movie, "Life finds a way." ;)

BeAChooser
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Mon Sep 12, 2022 5:25 am

Here's a couple of intertwined articles on Lerner's claims about JWST results that are worth dissecting ...

https://mindmatters.ai/2022/09/re-the-w ... ng-anyhow/
Researcher and science writer Eric Lerner would never have attracted the attention he has in recent weeks if the Webb findings were not disturbing to many cosmologists
That's what I've been saying, which in itself is proof Lerner was right about there being a bit of panic in the mainstream community over the JWST findings.
It seems clear, from the the ongoing kerfuffle and vigorous denials that the James Webb Space Telescope findings shook many of them up. Both science writers and scientists sense this. For example,

"For a long time, for instance, scientists believed the universe’s earliest, oldest galaxies to be small, slightly chaotic, and misshapen systems. But according to the Washington Post, JWST-captured imagery has revealed those galaxies to be shockingly massive, not to mention balanced and well-formed — a finding that challenges, and will likely rewrite, long-held understandings about the origins of our universe."

“The models just don’t predict this,” Garth Illingworth, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, told WaPo. “How do you do this in the universe at such an early time? How do you form so many stars so quickly?”"

MAGGIE HARRISON, “SCIENTISTS PUZZLED BECAUSE JAMES WEBB IS SEEING STUFF THAT SHOULDN’T BE THERE.” AT FUTURISM (AUGUST 30, 2022)
Yep ... a real puzzle demanding an explanation give that the public has been told over and over ... the science is settled.
Universe Today reminds us, “It all started with an article published in Nature, where astronomer Alison Kirkpatrick talked about the inconsistencies between observations and theory and used the following phrase: ‘Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning, wondering if everything I’ve ever done is wrong.’”
Actually, as I proved above, the Universe Today article is highly flawed, and this didn't start just because Allison Kirkpatrick responded to the JWST results in the way described. Lerner would have written his article anyway, just without mention of Kirkpatrick. I'm pretty confident of that.

But this article is right when it says ...
First, Lerner would never have attracted the attention he has in recent weeks if nothing were happening. His book came out twenty years ago, with no especially significant outcome.

Second, as noted earlier, there are two separate questions here: Must the universe have a beginning? Yes, if you want to avoid the impossible mathematics of infinity. But did that beginning play out just as the textbooks and popular science documentaries claim? That’s the part under discussion and many are distressed by the debate the Webb findings have inevitably created.
I would argue that creation (which is what Big Bang is) has it's own impossible mathematics. And to prop up the current Big Bang universe, mainstream astrophysics has created a number of other things with apparently impossible mathematics ... like inflation, black holes, and dark matter.

The Mind Matters News article continues ...
Jeff Zweerink offers that neither the certainties nor the uncertainties are entirely new. The Big Bang is supported by a number of observations that the Webb is not even designed to test.
Except, as pointed out in the MMN article, this is another guy who believes a GOD created the universe. Naturally he's partial to the Big Bang explanation and might be prone to shade the facts a bit to justify that. For example, in the article Zweerink admits that Ned Wright, whose website he uses to dismiss Lerner's theories, is a "colleague". And he, like the others who've relied on Wright to attack Lerner, fails to mention that Lerner responded to Wright's criticisms and Wright appears to have ignored that response.
Zweerink also argues that "The strongest evidence for big bang cosmology arises from observations of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation (by COBE, WMAP, Planck, and others) and from measurements of the distance/redshift relationship obtained by observing galaxies throughout the universe. None of the JWST images impact this evidence!"
The first claim is irrelevant to the criticisms Lerner made in his latest article, and it should be pointed out the CMB could have other possible sources. The second claim is exactly what Lerner challenged with the peer reviewed paper he published in 2018 and the facts and logic he presented in his latest article. Sorry, but Zweerink doesn't disprove the reasons Lerner provided in his article for doubting Big Bang simply by ignoring them.

Zweerink then says
We now know that quantum fluctuations in the earliest moments of the universe produced the necessary ripples in the CMB that ultimately developed into the structure seen in the universe.
NO, we do not KNOW that. It's just a theory. Just as Dark Energy and Dark Matter and inflation (which, by the way, Big Bang is dependent on but which recent MAINSTREAM work seems to rule out) are just theories. The mainstream is claiming we "know" a lot of things that are actually not proven.
Scientists routinely produce alternative models like Eric Lerner’s.
Not true. MOND and other models are but tweaks of the mainstream cosmology. Only plasma/EU cosmologies deal fully with the only substance that we know for sure constitutes 99.9999% of the visible universe. Only plasma/EU cosmologies doesn't ignore the full suite of electromagnetic effects on plasmas. The mainstream model and the tweaks do.

Remember, it wasn't long ago that mainstream astrophysicists completely dismissed the notion that plasma filaments are ubiquitous throughout the universe. Only relatively recently, due to telescope observations, have they been forced to admit they are. The truth is that mainstream cosmology has ignored or waved their hands to explain away countless other observations over the years ... like the rotation and helical winding seen in plasma filaments everywhere, even at the scale of galaxies and clusters ... like the jets of quasars and Herbig-Haro objects, supposedly one with a black hole and the other without.

The truth is that only plasma cosmologists (and electric universe advocates) have offered logical and science based explanations for these phenomena and many others (like the angular momentum distribution of the solar system). Explanations that can be reproduced in earth labs and modeled with truly verified computer codes. There is a reason why the plasma community separated from the mainstream astrophysics community years ago. One went down the road of real science and the other insisted on chasing countless mythical creatures ... not a one of which they've actually proven exists in 50 years of trying.

Zweerink also makes the claim that plasma cosmology "offers no workable explanation for the well-established redshift/distance relationship." This is false. Many mechanisms that can produce redshift in light have been identified since redshift was first claimed to ONLY be due to the mainstream's explanation. All I've seen is handwaving to dismiss most of them. Zweerink claims that "Big bang cosmology provides a simple explanation—the universe is expanding." Except Lerner offered observations, math and logic in his paper and article that challenge the claim the universe is expanding. If Lerner's observations, math and logic are correct, then the Big Bang's explanation of redshift simply falls apart. That's why is noteworthy that for the most part, the *science communicators* have spoken about everything EXCEPT the observations, math and logic Lerner provide in his article. Spending most of their column space complaining about him supposedly misrepresenting poor Allison Kirkpatrick's views is them RUNNING from that.

Finally Zweerink graciously concludes that while "The latest JWST images don’t justify the enormous attention Lerner’s model has recently received in the public sphere" (which is arguable), "Lerner’s plasma cosmology deserves a place at the table of models". That second part is absolutely true.

The problem is that the mainstream has done everything it could the last 30 years to prevent that, including

... refusing to publish Lerner's and other PC/EU proponents in journals,

... denying public money to research the PC/EU theories,

... refusing to debate PC/EU alternatives.

... misrepresenting PC/EU theories,

... ignoring and handwaving away observations for which the mainstream has no viable explanation but PC/EU does.

Let's see if the mainstream now agrees to level the playing field so that the alternatives become known to the public and can be fairly judged. I'm not holding my breath, since it's clear that the mainstream's attacks are to defend their money, power and prestige ... not the sanctity of science.

All in all, however, this is fairest article yet, although that's really not saying much when you look at the details.

BeAChooser
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Mon Sep 12, 2022 7:06 am

Cargo wrote: Mon Sep 12, 2022 3:20 am The Meta Franken Astro Tyson has now spoken.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is another defender of whatever nonsense the mainstream is claiming ... be it on climate change ("climate change will make Earth a living hell"), Covid vaccines (he tweeted that unvacinnated Republicans are dying from Covid-19 at five times the rate of Democrats ... not true), attacking Trump as "poorly educated" and implying that Trump "Will Make America Weak, Sick and Stupid" (ironic given what's happened since January 2021), blaming racism for his own failures, or Big Bang. Here's a good article on Tyson's brand of junk science: https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2015/12/ ... sse-tyson/ . I like you can't stand this extremely well paid progressive *science communicator*. But for the good of mankind I will listen to what he says in your linked interview.

When asked by his interviewer about whether, in light of recent articles, the Big Bang Theory is wrong, he starts by saying "let me just EXXXPLLAAIIIN a few things." Then, in a totally obnoxious way, he says that if you don't like something claimed in science, you design an experiment to show it's wrong. And when we have repeated experiments verifying an idea, then we have a new objective truth. Now mind you, little in the mainstream's Big Bang model of the (especially things like dark matter, inflation, etc) has actually been verified ... in over 50 years of very expensive experiments.

He just overlooks that and instead assures us, like the good mainstream supporting toady that he is, that "ALL" of what the mainstream says about the formation of the universe) is "THOOOROUUGHLY supported by observations". Which is a LIE. Then he admits "there's some things" we don't know about yet ... like "did this really cause that" "and who ordered up the dark matter, we don't know where that came from" "and where's this expansion, we don't know where that came from". Minor problems. "But we can describe it and we can measure it," he says.

Now right there you can tell that he either hasn't read or hasn't understood the paper and article that Lerner published recently. In fact, he never mentions Lerner once ... only refers to "journalists" questioning the Big Bang. So he may not actually know what's been going on. He doesn't spend ONE SECOND actually dealing with the observations, math and logic that Lerner offered in order to contest the Big Bang in his recent paper and article. He instead pontificates with false authority, essentially regurgitating the belief that *the Big Bang is fact*. That's not an argument made by a scientist. That's an argument made by a priest defending a religious cult. And that's all he said relevant to the issue at hand.

jackokie
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by jackokie » Mon Sep 12, 2022 1:05 pm

I would hope that the high-falutin' journals are now being bombarded with papers supporting EU / Plasma Cosmology. A chance for them to put up or shut up: Publish or prove the censorship charges are true.
Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.

BeAChooser
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Sep 14, 2022 5:10 am

Sabine Hossenfelder plays word games …

https://nautil.us/the-trouble-with-the-big-bang-238547/
The Trouble With “The Big Bang”

A rash of recent articles illustrates a longstanding confusion over the famous term.

I can’t blame readers for being confused by recent news stories about the Big Bang. The article that kicked them off, “The Big Bang Didn’t Happen,” is bad enough.
Really? Let’s see if she tells us specifically why? But first I observe that she gets lost in the weeds of definitions. She may not think that Lerner and the others don't know what topic they're really talking about ... but they do. And she makes some mistakes in the process. For example, she writes …
We have overwhelmingly strong evidence that the universe expands (call it Big Bang #2), and we are confident about its history back to about the time of the electroweak phase transition, which is what the Large Hadron Collider probes.
FALSE on both accounts … which was precisely the point that Lerner’s made in his article. I wonder if she even read it?
While this may have been the first evidence, the decisive evidence for the expansion of the universe was the discovery of the cosmic microwave background that ruled out the competing hypothesis, the “steady state” universe.
FALSE again. There's no proof that only Big Bang could cause CMB. There is at least one other possible mechanism, as throughly discussed by Lerner in this paper: https://www.lppfusion.com/storage/GOLE-Lerner.pdf, which the mainstream simply ignored. CMB could be the result of light from stars being scattered by galactic dust. As he states in that article, “the isotropy and black-body spectrum of the CMB are INEVITABLE if the present day intergalactic medium has sufficient optical depth in the microwave band.” And he then goes on to present a test and observation that prove it does.

Also, the claim that Big Bang is true because CMB is a successful prediction is not definitive either, since the prediction doesn’t rule out Lerner's explanation being true. Whether there was a prediction or not is irrelevant. Plus Lerner points out that numerous other quantitative predictions of Big Bang have been contradicted by subsequent observations so shouldn't bad predictions cancel out good ones at some point. Nor is it definitive that the intensity of the radiation matches that of a blackbody, another fact that Big Bang proponents bring up. Predictions were made based on ancient starlight before Big Bang theory came along that also matched a blackbody. So there. Finally, Big Bang theory originally did not predict a smooth isotropic CBM. That required the ad-hoc addition of inflation to the theory, for which no proof has been shown and which recent observational tests seem to contradict. Big Bang proponents seem to have just forgotten inflation.

Next Hossenfelder states
As it often goes, the steady state hypothesis was then revised to accommodate the new data, but it is today considered summarily falsified, not just by the microwave background but also by what we know about the formation of structures in the universe.
FALSE again, and further proof that she hasn’t paid attention to what the JWST controversy is now about … that the structures that are seen are not consistent with the Big Bang model … hence the “panic”.
In the attention-grabbing article, “The Big Bang Never Happened,” Eric Lerner questions that the universe expands in the first place. His article was published in August by the Institute of Art and Ideas, a British organization that, by my own experience, prioritizes debate over scientific rigor.
Sorry, but that’s just a backhanded way to try and dismiss the article without actually dealing with the observations, facts and logic Lerner used to prove a problem with the Big Bang expansion premise. The reason he published in that venue is that mainstream media would no publish it ... not because it was wrong but simply because he advocates a theory contrary to Big Bang and has been a thorn in their side for decades.
Lerner argues against the “cosmological establishment [that] has circled the wagons to protect this failed [Big Bang] theory with censorship,” presumably because Lerner has faced some difficulties in getting his alternative theory published.
Not presumably. Lerner is 100% right is saying he’s been censured by mainstream media. He's been misrepresented too, as many of these recent *science communicator* articles prove. And he’s not alone in having these problems. Anyone who has espoused Plasma Cosmology or Electric Universe theory has encountered this deliberate censorship.
Under normal circumstances, an article that throws out a scientific theory that’s as well established as the expansion of the universe would have sunk to the bottom of the internet in about no time. But because of the confusion around the term “Big Bang,” Lerner’s claim has gathered traction.
The is utter GARBAGE. This author clearly either did not read or failed to comprehend the heart of Learner recent article. And this author clearly knows NOTHING about plasma cosmology. She’s dismissed it out of hand without even trying to learn a thing about it.
It becomes clear, later in Lerner’s essay, that he is not attacking the Big Bang Event (which can reasonably be questioned) but the expansion of the universe.
Yes, Lerner’s entire article was an attack on the expansion claim (and thus the claimed relationship between redshift and distance) because failure of that alone will collapse the Big Bang theory. What Hossenfelder hasn’t done, like all the others, is offer one piece of evidence to contradict what Lerner concluded on the basis of observations, facts and logic. She ignores that part, like all the rest, and attacks strawmen and creates red herrings as her arguments. For this reason, I view Hossenfelder as just as dishonest as all the rest of the so-called *science communicators* in her response.

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nick c
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by nick c » Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:35 pm

Though I don't disagree with his work as presented, I am not a Lerner fan.
Here is why.... it is what he left out of his book. Lerner is silent on the work of Arp. Arp is mentioned briefly twice in Lerner's book. There is one mention of Arp's classic reference work, Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, and another one sentence mention of Arp's work showing that redshifts can be measured in increments. And that second one is important, but what about the rest of Arp's work?

Arp wrote Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies in 1988, so why wouldn't Lerner have a chapter on that in his 1992 book The Big Bang Never Happened?

It seems to me that Arp's argument carries more weight than Lerner's book, in that if true, it effectively falsifies the Big Bang, Expanding Universe, and 'redshift equates to distance' theories in one fell swoop.

Arp further expanded and updated his work in his 1997 book Seeing Red.

Arp shows that high red shift quasars are not tremendously bright objects at enormous distance, but are rather material expelled from the cores of relatively nearby active galaxies. And shows that many quasars have physical connections to their parent galaxies. Presumably quasars are the seeds of future galaxies, and in their case the high red shift is an indicator of age not distance. Red Shift or some portion of it, is intrinsic to the object. He further presents statistical weight against the assertion that these galaxy/quasar connections are the product of chance alignments.

So, why does Lerner ignore Arp's work?

jackokie
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by jackokie » Wed Sep 14, 2022 4:50 pm

nick c wrote:
So, why does Lerner ignore Arp's work?
Good question. Has anyone asked him?
Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.

Harry
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by Harry » Wed Sep 14, 2022 5:57 pm

Red and blue shift data

Are affected by the area that is expanding or contracting.

Expansion and contraction varies

M87 core over 7 billion solar , dipolar jets over 100 thousand light years

Supercluster core over 200 billion solar masses dipolar jets over millions of light years

Imagine the contractions of solar images being absorbed perpendicular to the dipolar electromagnetic vector fields where expansion are monsterous.

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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Sep 14, 2022 10:14 pm

nick c wrote: Wed Sep 14, 2022 1:35 pm Though I don't disagree with his work as presented, I am not a Lerner fan.
Here is why.... it is what he left out of his book. Lerner is silent on the work of Arp.
It’s true that Lerner didn’t present much of Arp’s theories in his 1991 "The Big Bang Never Happened" book but he didn’t say anything negative about him or his theories either. On the contrary, he quoted Anthony Peratt saying “Once I found Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, it was beautiful. I could link up each picture of a galaxy with some stage of one of my simulations and I knew exactly what forces - electromagnetic forces - were shaping the galaxies” and he mentioned Arp’s work suggesting quasar redshifts are quantized.

Truth is, I think Lerner said little about Arp because he was working a different attack on the Big Bang Theory, and just like he has with EU, he chose not to give his opponents more ammunition to use against him by openly supporting yet another controversial theory … perhaps one more so than his own. And honestly, you have to admit that Arp’s theory was more controversial at the time, and probably still is, I'm afraid.

I think it needs to be pointed out that there are two different quantization issues.

One is that galaxies and quasars are quantized as one moves farther out away from earth. That’s the theory that the mainstream believes they’ve debunked using data from large numbers of quasars/galaxies (far larger than what Napier, Burbidge and Tifft, for example, used). Those mainstream big studies have generally failed to find quantization, although some debate continues between the two groups.

The second issue is what Arp focused on … that quasars which locationally appear to have been ejected from the same active galaxy are redshift quantized the farther they are from the galaxy. Here’s a very interesting presentation by Arp in 2000 regarding that idea …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EckBfKPAGNM . I myself tried to defend Arp’s notion on the forum that was formerly called JREF by doing some calculations to see if the redshift of quasars possibly associated with certain galaxies were indeed quantized according to Karlsson’s formula. I had some success but the results were not definitive enough to make the case. Researchers continue to find quantized redshifts in periodicity of quasar/galaxy pairs. For example, here’s a paper from June 2022 (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.11897.pdf) concluding they see periodicity.

In any case, I don’t think Lerner’s theory’s necessarily contradicts Arp’s and I doubt there is little Lerner could add to the quantized redshift debate at this point. I never heard of any bad blood between them. They just went their separate way in their research. Why not just leave well enough alone? Why would you want Lerner to introduce his own bad juju into that discussion? Look at the heat he’s drawn on his own over the years. They did come together just before Arp died to sign a letter with others complaining about censorship by the mainstream astrophysics journals of their work.

By the way, I think galaxy mergers with very close pairs of quasars is something that Arp proponents need to explain. There are apparently over a 100 such examples. For example … https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... g-galaxies and https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-021-01323-1 . NASA assumes they are the black hole cores of merging/interacting galaxies but if Arp is right, maybe they are quasars that were recently created and are in the process of being ejected from the region where the two galaxies have collided. The problem is that the NASA makes it sound like the two quasars are not “moving through space in any measurable way.” Comment?

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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by BeAChooser » Wed Sep 14, 2022 11:50 pm

Well, here's an article in Scientific American that sure seems to clear Lerner of the charge that he overreacted when he implied that astrophysicists were panicking about the JWST results. I'll quote some of the highlights, starting with the title ...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/arti ... cosmology/
JWST’s First Glimpses of Early Galaxies Could Break Cosmology

By Jonathan O'Callaghan

Rohan Naidu was sitting at home with his girlfriend when he found the galaxy that nearly broke cosmology.

... snip ...

Such observations were supposed to take time; initial projections estimated the first galaxies would be so small and faint that JWST would find at best a few intriguingly remote candidates in its pilot investigations. Things didn’t quite go as planned. Instead, as soon as the telescope’s scientists released its very first images of the distant universe, astronomers like Naidu (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) started finding numerous galaxies within them that, in apparent age, size and luminosity, surpassed all predictions. ... snip ... “Everyone was freaking out,” says Charlotte Mason, an astrophysicist at the University of Copenhagen. “We really weren’t expecting this.

In the weeks and months following JWST’s findings of surprisingly mature “early” galaxies, blindsided theorists and observers alike have been scrambling to explain them. ... snip ...

At stake is nothing less than our very understanding of how the orderly universe we know emerged from primordial chaos. JWST’s early revelations could be poised to rewrite the opening chapters of cosmic history, which concern not only distant epochs and faraway galaxies but also our own existence here, in the familiar Milky Way. ... snip ...

Steven Finkelstein from the University of Texas at Austin, the lead on CEERS, says extremely distant galaxies were only predicted to pop up “after a few cycles of data” from multiple programs. Instead, much to the surprise of astronomers, such galaxies came into view immediately. ... snip ... from the very first GLASS data, two teams—one led by Naidu in that breathless late-night discovery—independently found a candidate for a more distant galaxy, dubbed GLASS-z13, at a redshift of 13—some 70 million years farther back in time. In their thirst for quick results, the researchers relied on redshift estimates derived from simple brightness-based measurements. These are easier to obtain, but less precise than direct measurements of redshift, which require more dedicated observation time. Nonetheless, the simplified technique can be accurate, and here it suggested a galaxy that was unexpectedly bright and big, already bearing a mass of stars of a billion suns, just a few hundred times less than that of the Milky Way, despite our own galaxy being billions of years more mature. “This was beyond our most optimistic expectations,” says Tommaso Treu, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the lead on GLASS.

The record did not last long. In the following days, dozens of galaxy candidates from CEERS and GLASS sprung into view with estimated redshifts as high as 20—just 180 million years after the big bang—some with disklike structures that were not expected to manifest so early in cosmic history. Another team, meanwhile, found evidence for galaxies the size of our Milky Way at a redshift of 10, less than 500 million years after the big bang. Such behemoths emerging so rapidly defies expectations set by cosmologists’ standard model of the universe’s evolution. ... snip ... “Even if you took everything that was available to form stars and snapped your fingers instantaneously, you still wouldn’t be able to get that big that early,” says Michael Boylan-Kolchin, a cosmologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “It would be a real revolution.

To understand the dilemma, a brief refresher is needed: ... snip ... When the universe was about 100 million years old, theorists say, conditions were finally right for the emergence of the first stars. These giant fireballs of mostly hydrogen and helium were as yet uncontaminated by heavier elements like modern-day stars—and thus possessed significantly different properties. Larger and brighter than today’s stars, these first suns coalesced in protogalaxies—clusters of gas that clung to vast, invisible scaffolds of dark matter. Gravity guided the subsequent interactions between these protogalaxies, which eventually merged to form larger galaxies. This process of becoming, of the early universe’s chaos giving way to the more orderly cosmos we know today, is thought to have taken about a billion years.

JWST’s discovery of bright galaxies in the early cosmos challenges this model. “We should see lots of these little protogalactic fragments that have not yet merged to make a big galaxy,” says Stacy McGaugh, a cosmologist at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. “Instead, we’re seeing a few things that are already big galaxies.” ... snip ...

The most startling explanation is that the canonical LCDM cosmological model is wrong and requires revision. “These results are very surprising and hard to get in our standard model of cosmology,” Boylan-Kolchin says. “And it’s probably not a small change. We’d have to go back to the drawing board.” ... snip ...

One simpler solution is that galaxies in the early universe could have little or no dust, making them appear brighter. ... snip ... Alternatively, Mason and colleagues suggest that in its early-universe observations JWST may so far only be seeing the very brightest young galaxies, as they should be the easiest to spot. “Maybe there’s something happening in the early universe that means it’s easier for some galaxies to form stars,” she says.

David Spergel, a renowned theoretical astrophysicist and current president of the Simons Foundation in New York, agrees. “I think what we’re seeing is that high-mass star formation is very efficient in the early universe,” he says. “The gas pressures are higher. The temperatures are higher. That has an enormous impact on the environment for star formation.” Perhaps even magnetic fields arose earlier in the universe than we thought, playing a crucial role in driving material to kick-start the birth of stars. “We might be seeing a signature of magnetic fields emerging very early in the universe’s history,” Spergel says.
Next part of the article notes how data was rushed to papers, perhaps leading to premature conclusions about things like redshift. But then it admits "Such issues are unlikely to eradicate all JWST’s high-redshift galaxies, however, given their sheer number. 'It’s more likely that the early universe is different from what we predicted,' Finkelstein says. ... snip ... Astronomers are now racing to conduct follow-up observations with JWST; Levenson says she’s presently reviewing about a dozen proposals from various groups asking for additional JWST observing time, most of which are seeking to scrutinize high-redshift galaxy candidates." Now why would astronomers so urgently want to examine early galaxies, if Lerner wasn't right?

Continuing from the article, I note this interesting fact ... "Some estimates suggest JWST could see as far as a redshift of 26, just 120 million years after the big bang". That would be just about the time the standard model says the first stars were forming. What if the JWST reveals galaxies at that time? Then even the science communicators would have to admit that something is seriously amiss. Right? (Don't count on it.)

And that's the end of the article. So yes, it looks like Lerner got it right. PANIC!

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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by jackokie » Thu Sep 15, 2022 5:52 pm

Eric Lerner has issued his 2nd video on the Big Bang and the JWST. It is very much worth a look.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2TFmg6NdGY
Time is what prevents everything from happening all at once.

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nick c
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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen - Lerner's redux

Unread post by nick c » Thu Sep 15, 2022 6:06 pm

Note that in my criticism of Lerner in my previous post I made it clear in the first sentence that I did not dispute Lerner's evidence or his conclusions. My criticism was focused on what he left out of his book - the work of Halton Arp. I posed the question why would a book titled The Big Bang Never Happened not include Arp's work which effectively proves that book title to be correct?

BeAChooser wrote:By the way, I think galaxy mergers with very close pairs of quasars is something that Arp proponents need to explain.
No explanation needed. Whether or not a quasar is associated with a so called galactic merger (if that is really what is happening) is largely irrelevant (see below).

Arp has pointed out numerous (I don't have time to count them) instances of physical connections between high redshift quasars and low redshift galaxies. That is impossible if redshift can be used as a measure of distance. And if those physical connections are real, it effectively FALSIFIES the Big Bang Theory, the Expanding Universe Theory, and the Redshift/distance theory. AFAIK, mainstream does not deal with this other than to dismiss them as chance alignments. Arp has countered this by presenting statistical evidence that the alignments are not random.

And then there is the case of a Quasar In Front Of A Galaxy .
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to the close pairs of quasars and galaxy mergers.

Arp's theory does not preclude multiple quasars, actually that subject is dealt with in SEEING RED. But are they actually observing a distant galaxy merger? or is that an assumption?
from the link in BeAChooser's post:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/20 ... g-galaxies
Each of the four quasars resides in a host galaxy. These galaxies, however, cannot be seen because they are too faint, even for Hubble. [emphasis added]
The galaxies involved in the supposed merger are not actually observed, but are ASSUMED to be there.

As Arp so eloquently states (P. 104 of SEEING RED) and pertaining to the general concept of galactic mergers:
Halton Arp wrote:
The Urge to Merge

...some astronomers saw peculiar galaxies neighboring each other, and immediately assumed that the peculiarity was caused by the galaxies falling into each other. By ignoring the evidence for ejection from galaxies, they illustrated an unfortunate tendency in science, namely that when presented with two possibilities, scientists tend to choose the wrong one.

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