Why does the Steady State Theory not work?

[Newtype_A]

Since I'm a spoilsport, I might as well ask, because this has been bothering me for, like, an hour now.

Supposedly, the Cosmic Background Radiation we see today was emitted at the birth of the Universe some thirteen billion years ago. This radiation was emitted, so the theory goes, when the universe had a temperature of about three thousand kelvins, 380,000 years old, and had FINALLY become expanded to a low enough density so as become transparent to radiation. If I'm wrong about any of this so far, cut me off at this point.

Here's what's bugging: given a constant speed of light, if the universe is thirteen billion years old, then the light from the CMB had to have been emitted when the universe was at least twenty six billion light years in diameter. The problem is, given that the CMB was emitted 380,000 years after the big bang (according to the theory) then for that entire time the Universe would have been expanding at some thirty four thousand times the speed of light (34,210C if my math is right). Thing is, the universe is obviously NOT expanding at that rate, else we'd be able to observe much closer objects (nearby quasars, for example) flying away from us at hundreds of times the speed of light. How, then, did the universe manage to expand to a radius more than twenty six billion light years across quickly enough that the faint glow from its earliest years would still be visible at that distance? For that matter, the same goes Quasars eight to ten billion light years away; if they were actually formed in the earliest stages of the universe, then the universe would have to have expanded considerably faster than the speed of light for them to have GOTTEN that far away in such a short period of time.

I am, of course, as far from a physicist as you're likely to find anywhere on these boards, but I'm grappling with the LOGIC of the theory, and failing badly. Given that Dark Energy is commonly used to explain why the universe not only fails to collapse in on itself but is, in fact, ACCELERATING, I have a hard time grasping just how it is thay physicists manage to posit an invisible, omnipresent energy force that manages to accelerate objects up to and beyond the speed of light yet still be finite.

 

[Freakness]

well, there's the idea of Cosmic Inflation, right? but i don't really know very much about how it's supposed to have worked.

 

[Balthier the Great]

I'm not convinced of the usual way that inflation is explained.

The idea is that the early universe expanded faster than light, thus the universe has the same characteristics everywhere.

However, the cosmological speed limit is supposed to be the speed of light. So either the theory is wrong or the speed limit isn't the speed of light. Personally, I hope for the latter, but it seems like a problem.

 

[Outpost4]

I read a book a few years ago that made exactly this point. If you have a varying speed of light in the early universe, you don't need some kind of repulsive force to cause inflation. Particles moving faster than the speed of light alone can cause the inflation and homogeneity. The author found limited acceptance in the scientific community for his ideas.

You're on dangerous ground when you try to apply current physics the the very early universe. That doesn't mean you're on any better ground when you break these rules. It just means there can be more than one explanation. It's generally regarded as best the more of our current physical laws we can take back in time. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

 

[Outpost4]

BalthierTheGreat said:
However, the cosmological speed limit is supposed to be the speed of light. So either the theory is wrong or the speed limit isn't the speed of light.

While obviously in my above post I say you could be right you have made a mistake here. Nobody has ever said that space itself can't expand faster than the speed of light. Particles can't go faster. Waves can't, too. Gravity also works at the speed of light. Nothing in any theory says that space itself can't expand at any rate it wants to.

The speed of light is not an absolute barrier. Sub atomic particle experiments have shown that quantum information can travel instantaneously, with no regard for the speed of light.

 

[Newtype_A]

Outpost4 said:

BalthierTheGreat said:
However, the cosmological speed limit is supposed to be the speed of light. So either the theory is wrong or the speed limit isn't the speed of light.

While obviously in my above post I say you could be right you have made a mistake here. Nobody has ever said that space itself can't expand faster than the speed of light. Particles can't go faster. Waves can't, too. Gravity also works at the speed of light. Nothing in any theory says that space itself can't expand at any rate it wants to.

But the expansion of space PRODUCES speeds greater than the speed of light, if the theory is correct, which presents the same problem. The conclusion from cosmological redshift is that distant objects are moving away from us, and ACCELERATING away from us; thus, even if the expansion of space doesn't have limitations on how quickly it can expand, OBJECTS in space DO have those limitations.

That's one of the funky things about relativity, if you think about it. Given a universe with a diameter of, say, 90 billion light years, it's entirely conceivable that distant objects at the "other side" of it are currently moving away from us at faster than the speed of light. But that's just relative to us; to them, WE are moving away from them at faster than the speed of light. General Relativity should make this an impossibility, yet it seems to be a natural consequence of the expanding universe itself.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Outpost4 said:
I read a book a few years ago that made exactly this point. If you have a varying speed of light in the early universe, you don't need some kind of repulsive force to cause inflation. Particles moving faster than the speed of light alone can cause the inflation and homogeneity. The author found limited acceptance in the scientific community for his ideas.

So if the speed of light varies, how or why is the speed of light constant now? It seems that it's fairly constant now.

You're on dangerous ground when you try to apply current physics the the very early universe. That doesn't mean you're on any better ground when you break these rules. It just means there can be more than one explanation. It's generally regarded as best the more of our current physical laws we can take back in time. It doesn't have to be that way, though.

Why would the laws change?

I don't quite follow everything in cosmology, so I'm sorry if I'm asking stupid questions.

 

[Outpost4]

Yours are definitely not stupid questions. Cosmology is confusing. I only think I got the Special Theory of Relativity when it was explained to me for the tenth time, or maybe it was the fourteenth.

This reasoning may seem circular but the speed of light is constant because we say it is. In 1983, the speed of light was defined as 299,792,458 meters per second. That's the definition of C. Now it helps that every single measurement of light's speed in a vacuum has given us this number, and the fact we've discovered the motion of the observer has nothing to do with this figure lead Einstein to the Special Theory of Relativity, which further cemented the idea of a constant speed of light. But if we defined the speed of light as 17 spaghetti noodles per duck fart, and you could come up with the measurements that backed up that definition, then that would now be the speed of light.

As to why the speed of light might be different in an early universe, we get down to heat. Remember the early universe just after the Big Bang was immensely hot. Particles as we know them didn't exist. There was too much energy for matter and the forces we know (gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnatism) to come together in the cosmic soup. As the universe cooled, these particles and forces came into existence. Now imagine that the first photons to pop out of this cosmic soup were different than the ones we see now. They had less than a zero rest mass. Physicists say it would have an imaginary rest mass because to measure it we have to use imaginary numbers. (Imaginary numbers are a very real and useable subset of numbers whose squares are a negative number.) Don't get hung up by the concept of a particle having an imaginary rest mass. Think of it as a negative rest mass if that makes your head spin less. In either case, these early proposed photons aren't of our present universe. We can't use our current yardsticks and measuring devices to examine them. Just like our measurements of C, current photons only have a zero rest mass because we say they do. That's how we measure them. It's like saying water freezes at 0º C. We also can say that water freezes at 32º F. Same thing. They are just definitions. The math proves that a zero rest mass particle must move only the speed of light. A particle with an imaginary rest mass would have to move faster.

I make it sound like that photons in the current universe have a zero rest mass because we like it that way. No. Photons have a zero rest mass because that's what the math says. We can measure the speed of light. For the math to work out, the particles that make up light - photons - must have a zero rest mass. The reverse is also true. Any particle that has a zero rest mass, and some bosons do, must move at the speed of light. Any particle with greater than a zero rest mass must move less than the speed of light for the math to work. Zero rest mass photons and the speed of light are all experimentally proven concepts. And the math is very basic, deriving from fundimental formulae like F=MA and E=MC².

What I'm saying here is that if we could conceive of a photon with an imaginary rest mass, it would have to move faster than the speed of light. We have no evidence that they ever existed, but people want to be speculative in this thread and this is the speculation.

If the concept of a particle with negative rest mass bothers you, welcome to the paradoxical world of particle physics.

Or of science fiction. All the times Trek refers to tachyons? These are particles that always move faster than the speed of light and would have a negative mass. We have no evidence that tachyons exist.

 

[TerriO]

BalthierTheGreat said: I'm sorry if I'm asking stupid questions.

Hey, the only stupid question is the one you don't ask.

Inquisitiveness is a good thing.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Yours are definitely not stupid questions. Cosmology is confusing. I only think I got the Special Theory of Relativity when it was explained to me for the tenth time, or maybe it was the fourteenth.

[/QUOTE]

Well, at least I'm not the only one.



[/QUOTE]This reasoning may seem circular but the speed of light is constant because we say it is. In 1983, the speed of light was defined as 299,792,458 meters per second. That's the definition of C. Now it helps that every single measurement of light's speed in a vacuum has given us this number, and the fact we've discovered the motion of the observer has nothing to do with this figure lead Einstein to the Special Theory of Relativity, which further cemented the idea of a constant speed of light. But if we defined the speed of light as 17 spaghetti noodles per duck fart, and you could come up with the measurements that backed up that definition, then that would now be the speed of light.


[/QUOTE]

So the basic idea is that every time we measure lightspeed, it's the same, so it's a constant, right?

As to why the speed of light might be different in an early universe, we get down to heat. Remember the early universe just after the Big Bang was immensely hot. Particles as we know them didn't exist. There was too much energy for matter and the forces we know (gravity, strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnatism) to come together in the cosmic soup. As the universe cooled, these particles and forces came into existence. Now imagine that the first photons to pop out of this cosmic soup were different than the ones we see now. They had less than a zero rest mass. Physicists say it would have an imaginary rest mass because to measure it we have to use imaginary numbers. (Imaginary numbers are a very real and useable subset of numbers whose squares are a negative number.) Don't get hung up by the concept of a particle having an imaginary rest mass. Think of it as a negative rest mass if that makes your head spin less. In either case, these early proposed photons aren't of our present universe. We can't use our current yardsticks and measuring devices to examine them. Just like our measurements of C, current photons only have a zero rest mass because we say they do. That's how we measure them. It's like saying water freezes at 0º C. We also can say that water freezes at 32º F. Same thing. They are just definitions. The math proves that a zero rest mass particle must move only the speed of light. A particle with an imaginary rest mass would have to move faster.

So is speed related to mass? If I could somehow lighten an object to waying less than zero, the object would move faster than a photon? It would make sense, objects heavier than a photon would have a harder time moving at lightspeed.

Now I remember imaginary numbers in math class as SQR(-1), but I'm not quite sure how a object can exist -- if I recall correctly SQR(-1) is undefined, so I'm not sure how that would work exactly. I'm also not sure why an imaginary photon would disappear later on.

And one man's easy math is another man's nightmare. I did a little calculus, but, I just don't follow how those two equations lead to zero mass for photons.

What I'm saying here is that if we could conceive of a photon with an imaginary rest mass, it would have to move faster than the speed of light. We have no evidence that they ever existed, but people want to be speculative in this thread and this is the speculation.

If the concept of a particle with negative rest mass bothers you, welcome to the paradoxical world of particle physics.

Or of science fiction. All the times Trek refers to tachyons? These are particles that always move faster than the speed of light and would have a negative mass. We have no evidence that tachyons exist.

Well, maybe. Somehow I keep hearing Athur C. Clarke echoing in my head -- sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable form magic. It seems to work doubly for cosmology -- advanced cosmology sounds like magicks.

I can't give a concrete reason why such things are impossible, but somehow I can't help wondering if parts of the inflation theory are more fiction than fact. Personally, I'm sort of skeptical of things that seem to throw away what are known laws. Maybe if we actually find tachyons it wouldn't be so hard ...

Hopefully we'll figure this out a bit more.

 

[Newtype_A]

I prefer to apply Occam's Razor: all things being equal, the simplest explanation must be the truth.

It seems to me (though I may be biased, or just too stupid to know better) that the premise "the Universe is expanding" creates more questions than it answers, and requires an ever increasing number of elements in order to be made consistent. Conversely, the premise "the wavelength of light shifts frequency over intergalactic distances" leaves only one un-answered question: HOW?

Given this, I think the steady-state theory could still be viable, at least insofar as it has the fewer number of unknowns and requires a smaller number of unnecessary elements to be discerned.

 

[Outpost4]

Now wait.

You can't just apply Occam's Razor willy-nilly. Let's get rid of the Periodic Table of Elements. All we need is the good old earth, air, water and fire. It's simpler.

That red shift exists has been proven over and over again. The only thing that explains the spectral shift of absorption lines in light coming from different galaxies is red shift. It is an easily observable fact. That the shift of the absorption lines is greater the farther an object is away from us has been documented hundreds if not thousands of times. The only mechanism that explains this the expansion of the universe. People have looked for almost a hundred years for an alternate explanation of the observed data and nobody has come up with one. This is about as close to an undeniable fact as you will find in astrophysics.

Plus you can have an expanding universe and still have steady state theory. All you have to do is come up with a mechanism for creating matter near us. Otherwise the density of the universe has decreased over time with its expansion. Unfortunately, nobody has detected that creation of matter. That's the problem.

You can't use Occam's Razor as a defense for ignoring observable facts. It's a great tool but not in this case.

I think we should get rid of the concept of bacteria myself. I've never seen any. I think I'll go back to believing in spontaneous generation. If I leave a piece of fruit out on the counter and it rots, that life spontaneously arose. That's a hell of a lot simpler explanation than it was invisible bacteria that caused the process of decay. Newtype A, that is where your logic leads.

You may want to rethink your argument.

And Balthier, speculative cosmology is not supposed to make sense. I can't visualize quantum mechanics so I'm lost in the first place. If I told you the universe was made up of 11 dimensions, which is the current theory, I'd like you to imagine that, too.

Don't confuse rest mass with real mass. Look at rest mass this way. It is the mass an object would have at rest. We know because of relativity that the faster an object moves, the more mass it has. As an object approaches the speed of light, it gets so massive, it can't ever achieve the speed of light. Rest mass is the mass of an object when it is completely stationary, at rest. Since a photon always moves at the speed of light, it is never at rest. It is therefore said to have a zero rest mass.

As for the math, I've seen it but it is beyond me to reproduce it. It's out there if you want to Google it.

People have been looking for the early photons that may have existed with an imaginary rest mass and haven't found any.

This is all really fringe stuff. I wouldn't let it get to you. God knows if any of this is right.

 

[Newtype_A]

Outpost4 said:
Now wait.

You can't just apply Occam's Razor willy-nilly. Let's get rid of the Periodic Table of Elements. All we need is the good old earth, air, water and fire. It's simplier.

C'mon, now, you're mincing words. As applied, "simpler" is merely that which requires the smallest number of unnecessary entities. If you find a dead man on the sidewalk with a bullet wound on his head, you can assume that somebody shot him dead on the sidewalk and left, OR you can assume that someone threw this man out the window of nearby building, that someone else threw a pistol out another window, that the pistol landed on the sidewalk pointing up, discharged into the side of his head, and was then picked up by bystanders and carried away before you got there. The second explanation has two extra people that have to be accounted for: the guy who tossed the gun, the guy who carried the gun away, and the guy who threw the victim out the window. The first explanation only has one: the guy who pulled the trigger and then left.

That doesn't take you any closer to figuring out what actually happened, but if all you have to go on is speculation--as is the case for much of cosmology--then the one that requires the smaller number of assumptions is the more likely one.

The Big Bang theory, IMO, requires a large and ever growing number of assumptions to be consistent. Dark matter and dark energy being just the tip of the iceberg; it also turns out that the universe would have to have expanded at faster than light velocities to look the way it does, something else that has to be accounted for. In the end, you have three basic unknowns (unknown matter, unknown energy, unknown expansion mechanism). Steady state theory would only require an explanation for intergalactic redshift unrelated to relative velocity.

Outpost4 said:
You can't use Occam's Razor as a defense for ignoring observable facts.

Of course not. Just the conclusions. In the example above, we have a dead man with a bullet in his brain on the sidewalk. We don't have the gun, or the shooter, and we don't really know how he got there. You can conclude it was an accident or you can conclude it was a murder, but the explanations can't be directly evaluated in either case.

The expansion of the universe is a CONCLUSION based mostly on intergalactic redshift. From that conclusion, all kinds of further assumptions follow. But some of the particulars of this case require explanations that are unnecessarily fanciful and require an expanding number of additional entities in order to be made consistent with observations. In short, the theory is only viable if you assume that gigantic parts of the universe routinely violate the laws of physics for no discernible reason, and if you're going to make that assumption, you might as well conclude that light naturally shifts into the red over intergalatic distances.

Like I said, it's just my bias, but I think a theory based on ONE strange thing is more plausible than a theory based on TEN strange things.

Outpost4 said:
I think we should get rid of the concept of bacteria myself. I've never seen any. I think I'll go back to believing in spontaneous generation. If I leave a piece of fruit out on the counter and it rots, that life spontaneously arose. That's a hell of a lot simpiler explanation than it was tiny bacteria that caused the process of decay. Newtype A, that is where your logic leads.

I can tell you're not getting this. Try this one: I can pick up a microscope and look at a microorganism. I can conclude, based on what that organism does, that it is the same organism that causes a certain type of infection. We can see it destroying tissues with enzymes that break them down and destroy cell membranes and so on.

Now, suppose a scientist looks at the same bacterium and concludes that it was created by a mutation in human white blood cells, evolving by a process that involves fifty to a hundred different genetic modifications from recognizable white blood cells. Suppose he has a theory all worked out as to how a white cell could have developed into the bacterium you're looking at, a story that includes interactions with viruses, other cells, mutations, radiation, and a fair number of things that by their very definition cannot be detected by any instrumentation. I would disagree with this scientist, because his assumption on the origin of that bacterium is a conclusion drawn from that simple observation; that bacterium could be a foreign organism in no way related to human biology at all, and that would make alot more sense.

Now, the white-cell-evolution theory has alot more unanswered questions, and alot of extremely complicated answers along the way to its conclusion. The foreign-organism theory has only one: from what external source did this bacterium originate? If you theorize that it came from the doorknob on your bathroom door, then you've got a relatively complete theory with aspects that can be explored in more detail later, rather than a theory with gigantic holes that have to be patched by the unexplainable, the undetectable, or the just plain contradictory, all based on a single assumption taken for granted as fact: that intergalactic redshift implies the universe is expanding and, indeed, ACCELERATING.

 

[Outpost4]

^ Nice defense. Let me chew on this for a while. Maybe somebody else wants to argue the point. I'm mentally bushed. This cosmology stuff is hard!

 

[Balthier the Great]

Newtype_A said:
I prefer to apply Occam's Razor: all things being equal, the simplest explanation must be the truth.

It seems to me (though I may be biased, or just too stupid to know better) that the premise "the Universe is expanding" creates more questions than it answers, and requires an ever increasing number of elements in order to be made consistent. Conversely, the premise "the wavelength of light shifts frequency over intergalactic distances" leaves only one un-answered question: HOW?

But the red shift makes perfect sense. We actually use similar technologies in sonar. So if the effect fades over distance, I suppose someone ought to tell the Navy.

Besides which, there are problems that you still haven't answered. One is the anomaly of the blue shift for Andromeda. If the effect is one of distance, why is Andromeda blue shifting? It makes perfect sense if the light-shifts represent a change in distance -- the answer is that Andomeda is getting closer. If the light-shifts aren't related to distance, then there is a mystery. Something most be wrong with the blue shifting galaxies -- so what is it? The universe shouldn't be able to single out a set of galaxies to behave differently if the galaxies are physically similar.

Given this, I think the steady-state theory could still be viable, at least insofar as it has the fewer number of unknowns and requires a smaller number of unnecessary elements to be discerned.

Not really. From what I understand, Steady State Theory actually requires matter to be created in small amounts in the center of the universe. But that violates the law of conservation of matter -- the amount of matter and energy are constant.

I think people are right to be skeptical of theories that require rewriting known laws.

 

[Newtype_A]

Well for Andromeda, it would simply mean that a naturally-occurring redshift is throwing off our distance measurements and the galaxy is moving towards us a bit faster than we think it is. For example: if the shift has something to do with some aspect of gravitation we don't understand yet (which would also account for the observations that lead to Dark Matter theories) then we should expect a fairly predictable rate of correction that would, in that case, yield the REAL movements of stars and galaxies at million and billion light year distances. A good way to test this theory might be to examine the current structure of the universe and work backwards from that, flatten the curve of observed redshift to plot their relative motions APART from Hubble's Law. If one finds that the structure of the visible universe makes more sense under those conditions, then we might have something...

From what I understand, Steady State Theory actually requires matter to be created in small amounts in the center of the universe.

I've never heard that. From my understanding, Steady State theory requires the universe to be constantly converting energy into matter and matter into energy on a continual cycle. There are alot of different versions, though, so I'm not sure.

 

[Outpost4]

Newtype A, I've reread your posts. Again, they're good ones. Nothing to argue with about your general interpretation of Occam's Razor. I want to apply this principle in a different way that might give you another answer. But first, it's time for a some history.

Let's not expect too much of cosmology, shall we? Earlier in this thread I reflected that when I was a kid, we didn't know where the Moon came from. Now we do. A hundred years ago we didn't know how the Sun worked. Quasars were a complete mystery in the 1960s. The Special Theory of Relativity is only 102 years old. The Big Bang theory was definitely an also ran until the 1970s and only became popular after the cosmic background radiation was discovered in 1964.

Cosmology is a young science.

The truths cosmology is discovering are like peeling an onion. Let's give the Greeks the first credit for figuring out the Earth was a sphere. Copernicus gets the second nod for putting the Sun in the center of the solar system, with Galileo, Kepler and Newton getting solid assists. Wait, I hear Sir Issac's ghost already bitching, being relegated to a supporting role. OK. You can send a rocket to the moon using not much more than Issac Newton's equations. Happy now, you squirrelly old man? After Newton, chemistry and biology became the premiere sciences and physics was demoted. We knew everything anyway. You want support of a solid state view of the universe? Check out the nineteenth century. Nobody believed anything else.

The point, though, is each advancement brought us further truth. We peeled the onion back a little more. Newton didn't disprove Kepler who didn't disprove Copernicus. Each man's discovery advanced the previous conclusions. They reinforced each other.

Things stayed pretty constant until some major questions were asked in the later part of the 19th century. The Michelson-Morley experiment proved that ether didn't exist but if that is the case, how did light propagate? Maxwell and others established that light travels in waves but let's not forget the Einstein earned his first Nobel Prize for explaining that light was made up of photons. It was also a particle. That seemingly opened the floodgates for everything weird. The speed of light is constant, regardless of the observer's relative motion, energy is divisible in packets called quanta, space is curved and by the way, energy and mass are the same thing. Einstein, with significant advancements by Max Planck, Marie Curie, Neils Bohr and others, peeled back the onion with a vengeance. Things had stayed too static for too long. Physics suddenly was at the forefront. Einstein was a pop celebrity. Physics is good! It gave us The Bomb, didn't it?

Still, many of these changes were evolutionary. It was Newton that first said light was a wave. Even better, let's take the atom. Electrons were discovered in 1897; Rutherford discovered the atom was mostly empty space in 1907. Next came a subatomic particle view of the atom. Yes, quantum theory was a significant change but it didn't happen over night. Quantum theory took 40 years to develop. When I was in high school in the 1960s quantum theory wasn't taught. It was still too speculative. Even Einstein's ground-shattering work added to previous thought, making significant additions to our understanding of gravity without negating Galileo and Newton.

My point remains the same. With each new discovery, we know more about the universe. Rarely is something that was generally accepted dismissed; most of the changes were evolutionary, not revolutionary. For every Periodic Table that replaced Aristotle's Elements, you have a dozen Maxwells that refine the work of a Newton. Great leaps, like Einstein figuring out that the universe is made up of space-time, are rare. Discovering another subatomic particle is more common.

So in this grand tradition of evolutionary change, let's put red shift. We think red shift was discovered by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s. No. Try the 1840s. It was 1842 that Christian Doppler first explained why sound varied in frequency as it moved past the observer. Doppler also correctly said all waves should exhibit this effect.

We need to slightly back up and look at cutting edge optical technology of the 1840s. Let's take a spectrometer, essentially a super-duper prism, and have its output shine on a piece of photographic paper. Photography was brand new and all the rage. Congratulations. You have just invented the spectrograph. Put the spectrograph on a telescope and point it at Sun. You'll get a picture on the paper but there will be lines in it, gaps in the picture. Those gaps can be specifically identified as being attached to basic elements like hydrogen. Discovering and playing with elements was also hot science in the 1840s. In fact, this is how we discovered what the Sun was made of. Spectral lines we created in a lab on Earth matched those coming from the Sun. Now point your telescope at a distant star. The lines have moved to the right, towards the red end of the spectrum. Nobody could figure why this happened. And note we are talking about stars here, not galaxies. They haven't been discovered yet.

In 1846, a Frenchman, Hippolyte Fizeau (what a great name!), said that the the Austrian Doppler's nifty idea that waves changed frequency as they moved away from the observer should also apply to light. Remember, Newton already proved that light was a wave. The often iffy Wikipedia says that this effect is called the Doppler-Fizeau effect although I've never heard that part of this story before. Work on what would be called red shift went on for the next 70 years. It became part of what was experimentally proven. Formulas were developed to measure the speed stars were moving away from us. Hubble didn't invent or discover red shift. It was well taught in every advanced physics class by this point. What Edwin Hubble did in the 1920s was explain why different galaxies exhibited different amounts of red shift. He realized that the further away a galaxy is from us, the more its red shift. He established that the universe is expanding.

And this is where I have a problem, Newtype A, with you trying to come up with another phenomenon other than the Doppler effect for explaining away red shift. It isn't just Hubble you've got to explain away. You have to explain why light is the one type of wave that doesn't exhibit the Doppler effect. In 1871, red shift was measured in the rotation of the Sun. That light exhibited the Doppler effect was verified in the laboratory in 1901. You have to come up with ways of negating that work. You have to get explain away proven methods we have for measuring velocities of stars in our own galaxy. You have to invalidate the work of scientists for 70 years prior to Hubble. He just peeled away his particular layer of the onion.

Where are you going to make your stand? With Newton, saying light is not a wave? With Doppler, saying that his effect doesn't affect all waves? With Fizeau, saying light can exhibit the Doppler effect? With Hubble, saying that the Doppler effect varies with the distance galaxies are away from us? Where do you want to break the chain?

Let's get back to Occam's Razor. You can either explain away all of this scientific evidence, the work of scientists for 70 years and verified many times since then, by introducing a mysterious, unseen force, or you can say light, as a wave, exhibits the Doppler effect. I think the simpler solution wins.

Let me address one other issue. You say that the Big Bang theory requires one to come up with crazier effect upon crazier effect to explain away all its contradictions (my words). You're absolutely right. I agree. That's why String Theory or Brane Theory - I love how as each incarnation of string theory comes up with a stupider name - seems like such a detour to me. The problem is in our science. In the last 30 years there has been a revolution in particle accelerators and telescopes which has changed everything, both infinitesimally small and extraordinarily large. Our science has gotten a lot better and there is nothing a scientist likes to do but explain the latest result. God help him if he gets it right. You don't like dark energy or dark matter. Well, I don't like dark energy and dark matter. Unfortunately, experiments over the past 30 years says they are out there. We don't know what to call them. Laurel and Hardy were already taken so they became dark energy and dark matter. It's really the shits that they make up 95% of the universe. You want to grok on something, try that one. In the last 30 years we have discovered the universe has 20 times the stuff in it than we thought it did. Our science is very young and often very wrong. In this case, at least scientists are honest enough to call the unknown stuff dark. What is it? Fuck if we know.

But you can't put these recent discoveries in the same class as the Big Bang theory. Red shift gave it a solid scientific foundation. The discovery of the cosmic background radiation cemented its existence. Since the 1960s, nobody has come up with an explanation of this microwave radiation other than it is the cooling glow left over from the Big Bang. Beyond that it occurred, I will grant you that we may well be wrong about just about everything. All of the other science is too new to lock it in concrete.

For better or worse, we are in a revolutionary time for cosmology. Speculative theories and new discoveries of what we don't know confuse even the dedicated layman. Believe me, I know. But something as solid and as fundamental as the Big Bang theory is just not discountable any more. All of the details, the hair on the theory if you will, you can have. I'm sure many of them will be proven to be wrong as our knowledge increases. But the basic idea that the universe started with a big bang and is still expanding is pretty fundimental to our understanding of the cosmos. You may not accept it but the scientific community does, overwhelmingly. You might as well try and disprove relativity.

And that's OK. People here talk about their personal canon for Trek. I'm a TOS guy and a lot of folks over there say ENT happened in another time line. They won't accept ENT in their personal canon. That's their right, just as it is yours to say you don't like the Big Bang theory. Fine. Just don't expect astrophysicists to go along with you.

You know who had to finally had to give in on this one? Einstein. He was a solid Steady State believer. He liked an orderly universe. Einstein resisted until late in his life to agree that the Big Bang had to have happened. The evidence eventually proved it to him.

 

[Newtype_A]

Outpost4 said:
And this is where I have a problem, Newtype A with you trying to come up with another phenomenon other than the Doppler effect for explaining away red shift. It isn't just Hubble you've got to explain away. You have to explain why light is the one type of wave that doesn't exhibit the Doppler effect.

No, see, that's not what I said either. Not even close. What I said was that the relatively uniform redshift of light, in all directions, usually used to conclude that all objects moving away from us, MAY NOT BE THE RESULT OF MOVEMENT.

Whether or not light exhibits the doppler effect isn't up for debate, we already know it does. Yet there are other things that CAUSE the doppler effect; the intense gravitational fields like those you'd find near the event horizon of a black hole, for example. My belief is that the Doppler shift observed in the Hubble Constant does not necessarily imply that objects ARE moving away from us.

See, I'm not debating the evidence. I'm debating the CONCLUSIONS that are drawn from that evidence. Think of the example of the dead man on the sidewalk: I'm not questioning whether or not bullets actually kill people, I'm questioning whether or not you can conclude, from this evidence, that no less than four people were involved in this man's death when only one will do.

Outpost4 said:
You don't like dark energy or dark matter. Well, I don't like dark energy and dark matter. Unfortunately, experiments over the past 30 years says they are out there.

See, that's what bothers me. EXPERIMENTS do not contain those conclusions, because dark matter and dark energy cannot be measured or quantified, nor can they be tested for. Their existence is inferred based on observations... it's another CONCLUSION. I question the existence of dark matter and dark energy because both are hypothetical entities created to fit observations, but their properties do not follow logically, and in many ways violate what we already know about the existing laws of physics.

I wouldn't mind if scientists simply left it at "something weird is happening that we don't understand," and left the question open to different theories. It seems to me, though, that it's difficult to get research grants when all you produce is question marks, so cosmologists assign the names "dark matter" and "dark energy" to the missing variables that would, if such things really existed, make their equations fit reality. This sort of masks the fact that their equations otherwise DON'T fit reality; it gets even weirder when cosmologists begin discussing the theoretical properties of DM and DE (and some of these discussions are starting to sound alarmingly similar to theology).

 

[Outpost4]

I don't know what more I can say, Newtype A. Someone better than me will have to take up the flag. You agree with the experimental evidence that red shift of distant galaxies exists. You agree that light is affect by the Doppler effect. You agree that the Doppler effect causes red shift. You don't agree that the red shift of distant galaxies is caused by the Doppler effect. You don't like that conclusion. It seems pretty obvious to me. Instead you want to assign it to other possible causes like light entering the event horizon of a black hole. I give up. It is you who is violating Occam's Razor, not going for the simplest conclusion, adding an extra layer of complexity on the issue.

You argue against the conclusions the scientists reach. Sorry. These are the only logical conclusions. Take your original dead man on a sidewalk argument. You correctly say that a reasonable detective would assume somebody shot him and left rather than a rigmarole explanation. It is the logical conclusion. Well, that the varying red shift we see with distant galaxies is a product of the expansion of the universe is also the logical conclusion. We've shown the Doppler effect upon light is measurable in the laboratory, with our Sun, with stars and with nearby galaxies. Doesn't it seem logical that redshift would work the same way with distant galaxies? You may not like the conclusion but it is the logical one and one thing scientists are is logical.

As for physics sounding like religion, don't ever read The Dancing Wu Li Masters. It was quite popular about 20 years ago. Its physics is pretty shitty but its metaphysics is great. It tries to come up with deep, meaningful causes for actions in the universe when, really, none are needed. In my personal reading, about every third book I read is a trashy detective novel. It allows me to flush my brain, giving me a break. The Dancing Wu Li Masters serves the equivalent function for physics.

 

[Geoff]

Outpost4 said:
You argue against the conclusions the scientists reach. Sorry. These are the only logical conclusions.

That's just a wee bit arrogant, don't you think?

Any scientist worth his salt would never suggest that his own conclusions were the only logical ones. Part of the Scientific Method is constantly questioning one's own conclusions and considering additional evidence that might well falsify your present conclusions, and/or suggest other ones.

On the subject of Occam's Razor, I have to side with Newtype_A. The theory of Cosmological Expansion might be the most universally accepted explanation for galactic redshift, but to suggest that the theory is the "simplest" explanation is ludicrous. The theory, frankly, is a mess of unproven sub-theories, it disregards Relativity at the macro-cosmic level, and requires the existence of exotic matter that has never yet been found to exist. And the fact that distant galaxies are more redshifted the further away they are, while described quite elegantly as Hubble's Law, has never really been adequately explained.

If we were to apply Occam's Razor, by far the least complicated explanation is the "Tired Light" theory: Simply put, the natural wavelength of light tends to increase over massive distances. That's all. Simple, easy, straightforward. It explains everything. It doesn't require any unexplained acceleration or slowdown of the cosmic expansion, it doesn't require any movement at all, and it doesn't require that we posit the existence of any undiscovered matter.

The only reason that the "Tired Light" theory (first proposed in 1925) never gained much acceptance is because no mechanism has yet been discovered which would slow down photons without scattering (i.e., "blurring") them. That doesn't mean such a mechanism couldn't exist in the cosmos. After all, we're talking about very tiny effects over millions of light years. We've just never discovered it. Just like we've never discovered the myriad other mechanisms necessary for Cosmological Expansion, except for the background radiaion which, while accurately predicted, could have other explanations.

Having said all that, I'm not suggesting that we all throw out every existing model of the universe and embrace the next wacky pet theory that someone spouts on a junk science website. I am, however, suggesting that it is entirely scientific to suggest alternate explanations for observed phenomena, provided that they accurately explain all of the observations, no matter how "accepted" the current explanations may be.