Thanks for your responses, jacmac and jackokie.
Lerner certainly has stirred up a hornets nest.
One science communicator after another is attacking him.
Here's another ...
Science.the wire.in allowed Karthik Vinod, a baby astrophysicists right out of the University of Manchester, to do a hit piece on Lerner:
https://science.thewire.in/the-sciences ... bang-jwst/ . He writes that “Numerous astronomers and astrophysicists have rebutted Lerner’s claim”, claiming he’s opportunistic and that his claim is thin on proof and supported by inconsistent arguments … none of which to me seem valid criticisms, having actually read Lerner’s article. Vinod also claims the astrophysicists "whose work Lerner cite[d]" have “distanced themselves from him.” The problem is they were never close to him in the first place and he never once suggested any Big Bangers agreed with him.
Later the author misrepresents Lerner by saying he’s a proponent of “a universe that is static and immortal” which “invites the intervention of a divine creator.” Well, first, Lerner doesn’t advocate a “static” universe. Far from it. He posits a “Steady State” universe and you'd think and astrophysics major would know the difference. If the author had actually read Lerner’s the Big Bang Never Happened book, he’d know that. If he’d even used Wikipedia, he’d know that.
And it’s not the Steady State that invites the intervention of a divine creator, it’s the Big Bang. In fact, in Lerner's book, he has a chapter titled "Cosmology and Theology", and the first thing he does is accurately observe that “from theologians to physicists to novelists, it is widely believed that the Big Bang theory supports Christian concepts of a creator.” He backs this up by citing an article in the New York Times that argued scientists and novelists “were returning to God, in large part through the influence of the Big Bang.”
VInod's next criticism seem to be that Lerner’s beliefs aren’t original … as if that matters one iota. Besides, not a thing that science *communicator* Vinod says in his article is original either. But I don’t hold that against him.
Next he rehashes the beliefs of mainstream cosmology without touching on a single point Lerner made in the article he’s trying to rebut. Like all the others, he simply ignores what Lerner actually wrote and his chief argument is that “steady state theory” has faded away from “scientific discourse.” What he overlooks is that “discourse” takes a participant from both sides and one of the sides of this debate has historically refused to acknowledge what the other actually says. Mainstream astrophysics not only ignore their opponents, they have rigged things so their opponents can’t even publish their side in media where a “discourse” might occur. In short, the Big Bangers have been hiding from “scientific discourse” for a long time.
Now Vinod claims that Lerner’s claims were debunked by Edward L. Wright “on multiple counts” and provides a link to Wright’s web page. What he doesn’t do, is provide a link to Lerner’s response to Wright's criticisms: namely,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160108004 ... rg/p25.htm . See? That’s an example of mainstream science communicators only telling half the story. They don’t want you to make up your own mind. They want to influence your belief by only telling the side they support.
Vinod’s next tactic is to resort to adhominems. He quotes physicist and “science communicator”, Sean Carroll, from a 2004 article (that he doesn’t link) calling Lerner a “crackpot”, then provides no details. So I tell you what, let’s see if we can discover those details.
Here’s Carroll’s blog post from 2004:
http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.co ... rated.html , titled “Doubt and dissent are not tolerated”. That’s HIS attitude … not very *scientific*, if you ask me. In the article he mentions Lerner and calls him a crackpot. That happens after linking an open letter on Cosmology that Lerner published in 2004 (
http://cosmology.info/media/open-letter ... mology.html ), a letter which was signed by 34 different scientists, including Anthony Peratt and Halton Arp.
In the letter, it’s observed that Big Bang “relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities that have never been observed — inflation, dark matter, and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction 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.”
I have to agree with all that and everything else in the letter (which makes me a crackpot too, I guess).
Now here we are, nearly 20 years later, and nothing has changed. Every single statement in the letter Lerner and 33 other scientists signed is still true. The gno … er ... hypothetical entities that Carroll believes in are still propping up Big Bang. And what was Carroll’s criticism of that letter? He said the “alternatives to the Big Bang are just plain silly.” Wow … that’s convincing. And rather ironic.
Carroll then announces that he “usually” keeps his “intellectual disagreements on the level of reasoned debate, rather than labeling people [he] disagree[s] with as ‘dumb’“. He says he “reserve[s]” that smear (my term) “for the President [meaning George Bush]; but in this case I have to make an exception. They just aren’t, for the most part, very smart.” LOL! Then he singles out Eric Lerner. Wow!
Now before I note what he said about Lerner, I want to point out that he’s not being entirely truthful. Labeling people as crackpots (i.e., “dumb”) is something he frequently does. For example, in 2006, he published an article in Discover magazine titled “Crackpots, contrarians, and the free market”. In 2008 he published an article in Discover Magazine titled “Reasons to Believe (that Creationists are Crackpots)”. In 2009, he published a statement on his blog titled “The Varieties of CrackPot Experience”. It seems every few years he’s publishing something about crackpots, and more than once he’s claimed he doesn’t “usually” do it … just before he does it again. Just saying …
Now Carroll labels Lerner a crackpot in part because Lerner says the Big Bang “has no empirical successes” (and again have to agree with Lerner) but, mostly, because he says that Lerner said "The hypothetical dark energy field violates one of the best-tested laws of physics--the conservation of energy and matter, since the field produces energy at a titanic rate out of nothingness. To toss aside this basic conservation law in order to preserve the Big Bang theory is something that would never be acceptable in any other field of physics." Carrol got the latter quote (without giving attribution) from this webpage:
http://www.mysearch.org.uk/website1/htm ... erner.html . Based on that, Carroll said Lerner doesn’t understand the basics, since in an expanding universe, thanks to General Relativity, total energy need not be conserved. It has “Nothing fancy to do with dark energy.” Then he says that if he “gets to decide whether to allocate money to Big Bang cosmology, or divert it to a crackpot”, who doesn’t believe that, “it’s an easy choice.”
Well, the first problem with the aboe is that what Carroll quoted was not written by Lerner, which he’d have realized had he rubbed two neurons together. The proof of that is there's a similar page on Anthony Peratt (
http://www.mysearch.org.uk/website1/htm ... eratt.html ) and Hannes Alfven (
http://www.mysearch.org.uk/website1/htm ... lfven.html ) at the website, all written in third person. And the Hannes Alfven page was put up “06 October 2018” (according to this:
http://search.freefind.com/find.html?pa ... cs=1&fr=10 ), more than 20 years after Alfven died! There as similar pages on all sorts of dead people on the website.
Carroll should have gotten a clue on the first page of the overall website (
http://www.mysearch.org.uk ) which states in the very first paragraph “The websites linked to the navigation bar above are primarily
a reflection of my own personal interests … snip … As such, the websites are, and will probably always remain, work in progress. … snip … So, as indicated,
this website essentially reflects a personal learning process and, as such,
it is recognized that some information may be in error and will therefore require correction.” Now Carroll may be an astrophysicist … but that doesn’t mean he isn’t “dumb”. I think he just proved it. And on top of that, how can Carroll know what dark matter does or doesn’t do, when he and the rest of his colleagues still haven’t a clue what it is? When they haver no real proof it even exists after 50 years of looking.
And just for the record, the truth is a whole lot of people must be crackpots (“dumb”) in Carroll's mind because a whole lot of people question whether dark matter conserves energy. So many people have questioned it that *science communicator* Ethan Siegel had to publish a whole article on the question (
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/i ... 6572cc6853 ) in which, after explaining what the mainstream thinks is going on with dark matter, he writes: “‘Wait a minute,’ I hear you objecting, ‘
if you’re just spontaneously creating more space out of nothing, and space has an intrinsic energy, aren’t you violating the conservation of energy?’ It’s a good objection. It’s a reasonable objection. And it’s not one that I’m going to weasel my way out of on the technicality that in General Relativity, 'energy' is not a technically well-defined quantity.”
Gee … did Seigel just call Carroll a weasel? He does go on to claim Dark Matter doesn't violate conservation of energy, "if you choose to allow it [energy] to be defined." So maybe they're still friends.
In any case, let's return to discussing the rest of what Karthik Vinod said about Lerner, starting with him saying that “negative feedback and derision hasn’t dissuaded Lerner from continuing to publish his views”. I say that's a good thing for science. He then says Lerner’s articles “continue to harbour a cascade of inconsistencies.” But I’m still waiting to hear what those are for Vinod or any of these *science communicators*.
Next he notes that Lerner’s lastest article claimed “the galaxies the telescope [the JWST] observed were ‘too smooth, too old, too small’ to allow for the Big Bang. He contended that the universe appears to have had too many disc galaxies when it was 400 million years old.” Instead of showing Lerner is wrong about that (and he clearly can’t since the Nature article admits these facts are puzzling Big Bang astrophysicists), he attacks Lerner by saying his arguments are about galaxy formation theory, not the Big Bang model, “prompting many physicists to call his unqualified extrapolation opportunistic.”
Now, first of all, I just did a Google search using the two keywords “Eric Lerner” and “opportunistic”, and the only hits I got were to Vinod’s article. I tried “Eric Lerner” and “opportunism” and only got links to Vinod’s article. Where are all these scientists Vinod claims are calling Lerner opportunistic? Maybe in twitter world? Well, Vinod links in his article a tweet by an “astrophysicist” named Leonardo Ferrerria who mentions “opportunistic people” in that tweet. But that’s in the context of “people disapproving” of the title of his paper “Panic! at the Disks” which Lerner cited. And the people who respond to his tweet comment about his title, not Lerner.
Furthermore, when you go to Ferraria’s twitter page (
https://twitter.com/astroferreira), you find out he’s a PhD “student” in Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. And you find him tweeting this: “A good summary of the whole story surrounding the 'big bang is wrong' issue. Opportunism is a very soft word to describe what this dude did.” BUT … and here’s the kicker … that tweet is a RESPONSE to a link to Vinod’s article accusing Lerner of opportunism which was posted 3 hours earlier! Sounds like Vinod encouraged the use of that word by Ferraria, instead of reporting it. I call FRAUD. And where are all the others that Vinod claimed used that term? I think he's at best made an “his unqualified extrapolation.” Just saying.
I still have to ask … is this guy for real? Can he not understand why if the observed early universe is not what the Big Bang theorists *predicted* … and it isn’t … there’s good cause to now question whether Big Bang Theory is correct? That’s the way science works.
Next, Vinod makes the bizarre argument that since the Big Bang Model was born out of mathematics of general relativity, “to deny the Big Bang is, in the absence of extraordinary evidence, to effectively deny the universe’s evolution.” Huh? I again ask, is this guy for real? Where's the evolution if the early galaxies number and look much like the current ones?
Finally, and almost laughably, Vinod bolsters his argument by naming two other “astrophysicists and "popular YouTubers" who “supported” Ferreira’s “findings”. But note, Lerner didn’t dispute Ferreira’s findings … that “We found more disks than we anticipated...<Panic!> “. He embraced them.
He named Rebecca Smethurst as one of those YouTubers, and thinks it’s significant that Smethurst called Lerner’s positions “pseudo-science” in her tweet. Now just so you know, Smethurst’s Wikipedia page says she’s a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She got her doctorate in 2017 and like Kirkpatrick now studies black holes ... and their effect on star formation. And she considers herself a *science communicator* whose mission in life is to enlighten the public about the mainstream’s countless gno … er … hypotheticals. Now she hasn’t yet published her own article or done a YouTube on Lerner yet, but someone has certainty done a YouTube on her:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GP3u42eBDDY . LOL!
As for Michael Merrifield, of course he’d support Ferraria. He’s a professor of Astronomy at the same University of Nottingham, in the same group as Ferraria. In fact, Ferraria was probably one of his students at some point or even now. Perhaps because of that, he did an interview defending the title of Ferraria’s paper:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7lxzS6K9PU . In the interview he also admits that JWST is finding galaxies that are not what they expected … that they are finding about 50% of early galaxies are spirals … which is TEN TIMES what they expected … just like Lerner’s article stated. He admits “it was a very unexpected result … hence the panic, but it’s not, you know, it’s not turning the Big Bang upside down.” He then says “it’s turning our understanding of how galaxies form a bit upside down but it’s not revolutionizing absolutely everything.” No … of course not.
The interviewer responds “That does seem significant to me that we used to think the early galaxies were a bit chaotic and turbulent but actually they’re pretty [much] like they are now.” Merrifield nods his head, thus agreeing with what Lerner wrote in his article about the observations, but then he explains “there’s a reason”. He notes that Hubble was primarily an optical/ultraviolet telescope whereas JWST is an infrared telescope. He says that an ultraviolet telescope will tend to pick up younger, more energetic stars, which would make the galaxies it sees look … more “clumpy” … and make scientist “naturally” expect more of the same farther out. But I see this as an example of narrow thinking. They can speculate about dark matter, dark energy, inflation and countless other hypothetical entities, but not one of them speculated that switching to an infrared telescope would make galaxies look different? Hmmmm. Maybe its' that same narrow thinking that's keeping them in the Dark Matter Box they're in now?
Anyway, Vinod ends his Lerner hit piece by quoting another physicist and “science communicator”, Sabin Hossenfelder, who says “the Big Bang singularity is a mathematical artifact and not what really happened. … snip … We should be using a better theory, one that includes the quantum properties of space. Unfortunately, we don’t have the theory for his calculation. And so, all that we can reliably say is: If we extrapolate Einstein’s equations back in time, we get the Big Bang Singularity.” Oh goody. Just what we need ... to add more hypothetical unprovable stuff to the theory of the Universe.
I have a few more quotes from her.
From an August 27th tweet,
https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1563497613483134977 , “Physicists have many theories for the beginning of our universe: A big bang, a big bounce, a black hole, a network, a collision of membranes, a gas of strings, and the list goes on.
What does this mean? It means we don't know how the universe began.” And we’ve wasted how many billions of dollars pursuing this question the past half dozen decades?
And this is an article from August 25th:
https://time.com/6208174/maybe-the-universe-thinks/
Maybe the Universe Thinks. Hear Me Out
Our universe contains about 200 billion galaxies. These galaxies are not uniformly distributed – under the pull of gravity, they lump into clusters, and the clusters form superclusters. Between these clusters, galaxies align along thin threads, the “galactic filaments”, which can be several hundred million light-years long. Galactic clusters and filaments are surrounded by voids that contain very little matter. Altogether, the cosmic web looks somewhat like a human brain.
To be more precise, the distribution of matter in the universe looks a little like the “connectome,” the network of nerve connections in the human brain. Neurons in the human brain, too, form clusters, and they connect by axons, that are long nerve fibers which send electrical impulses from one neuron to another.
The resemblance between the human brain and the universe is not entirely superficial; it has been rigorously analyzed in a 2020 study by the Italian astrophysicist Franco Vazza and neuroscientist Alberto Feletti. They calculated how many structures of different sizes are in the human brain’s connectome and in the cosmic web, and reported “a remarkable similarity”.
Brain samples on scales below about 1 millimeter and the distribution of matter in the universe up to about 300 million light years, they found, are structurally similar. Could it be, then, that the universe is a giant brain in which our galaxy is merely one neuron? Maybe we are witnessing its self-reflection while we pursue our own thoughts
And that said, Vinod cites her as an expert yet dares call Lerner a crackpot? Doubly ironic, if the universe does think, what do you imagine is the method with which it’s “neurons” pass information around? Yeah … electric current traveling in those galactic filaments.