In 1931, Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître (b. 1894; d. 1966) put forth the idea that there was once a primordial atom which had contained all the matter in the universe. The other support for the Big Bang that LeMaitre used — was the idea of entropy, which states that “everything is moving towards greater and greater disorder” (chaos, being the ultimate steady-state).
One might conclude that COSMOLOGY is a science of opinions. There are few facts. Just some observations. 😉
DwN
answers: Pediatric endocrinologists know nothing. As a pediatric endocrinologist (who has asked these questions since the late ’50s), here are my “thoughts” (in blue font) on M’s list of questions.
[a] If “everything” started with a Big Bang, where did the original material, or the energy, come from? From what I know about physics, something cannot appear out of nothing. Ergo, there must have been something before the Big Bang. ——The mathematics (to the extent I can understand) indicates a “singularity” at time=0. “Singularity” essentially means “a discontinuity that cannot be described mathematically.” Lemaître’s “primeval atom” was a singularity of infinite mass and density with no describable dimensions. Then the Big Bang occurred.
[b] The experts claim that the universe has been expanding, ever since the Big Bang. And their calculations are able to assess the velocity by which this expansion is taking place. If this expansion is true, into what is the universe expanding? ——This question has always bothered me (as does Matti’s questions c, d, and e). I believe [which is a commonly-used term in cosmology] that all three questions have related answers. From the cradle, we have all thought in three dimensions (x, y, z axes) with a linear fourth dimension of time. The key idea that is so hard to “wrap our heads around” is that at t=0 there were NO dimensions. As the universe expanded, so did its coordinate system. Space itself expanded. Time expanded. Our classic languages lack the terms and systems to discuss the universe at t=o, when there was NO space or NO time. So, the answer to question [b] is that the universe was not expanding into something, because that something was itself expanding (quickly!).
[c] If the Big Bang had a precise time-point at which it originated, what was there before that time-point? ——There was no “before,” because time itself began at t=0.
[d] Where was the original location of the Big Bang — at the center? or at the edge of something? ——Because the Big Bang at t=0 was the beginning of both space and time (which are really one thing, Einstein called it “spaceime”) — there was no “center” or “edge.”
[e] Does that “something” (into which the debris from the Big Bang debris is expanding) have boundaries? If it does, what is beyond thosee boundaries? If it does not, can anything be limitless, without boundaries? ——There is no “something” into which “debris” from the Big Bang expands; spacetime itself expands. There are no “boundaries.” The structure of Questions c, d, and e presume what lawyers would term “facts not in evidence”; we have no evidence for there being anything — ANYTHING(!) — before t=0. Thus, there is no “before” or “beyond.”
[f] Is there a parallel universe? or a mirror-image universe?
[g] If there is more than one universe, how many universes are there? ——Questions f and g have the same answer: “God only knows, but she hasn’t told me!” Maybe my replies sound religious, but I’m old now. And that’s the best answer I can come up with. So far. 😉 😊
WM
From: Nebert, Daniel
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2022 9:29 PM
It’s nice to know my Nordic colleagues have inquisitive minds and are asking questions about things that have no answer. 😉 All these questions posed by Matti have been asked by many scientists, ever since the Big Bang Theory was first set forth.
Perhaps the questions are “easier” — if there was not a Big Bang? Then, we might have a universe that has no beginning and no end. These galaxies might be wandering around in multiple directions, without limits. New stars form and old stars explode and die. Black holes are swallowing up all sorts of debris. These are the stuff that science-fiction novels are made of, … … … … 😊😊
DwN
From: MLg
Sent: Tuesday, August 30, 2022 4:43 AM
Hi Dan,
In my <
[a] If “everything” started with a Big Bang, where did the original material, or the energy, come from? From what I know about physics, something cannot appear out of nothing. Ergo, there must have been something before the Big Bang.
[b] The experts claim that the universe has been expanding, ever since the Big Bang. And their calculations are able to assess the velocity by which this expansion is taking place. If this expansion is true, into what is the universe expanding?
[c] If the Big Bang had a precise time-point at which it originated, what was there before that time-point?
[d] Where was the original location of the Big Bang — at the center? or at the edge of something?
[e] Does that “something” (into which the debris from the Big Bang debris is expanding) have boundaries? If it does, what is beyond thosee boundaries? If it does not, can anything be limitless, without boundaries?
[f] Is there a parallel universe? or a mirror-image universe?
[g] If there is more than one universe, how many universes are there?
This discussion to me is analogous to the question, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” ☹
– – -M
From: Olavi Pelkonen
Dan,
I have not lost any sleep over this debate; however, it is very interesting and thought-provoking. It is a worthwhile topic for us to follow! OP
Hi Dan
Thanks for sharing this.
Indeed, very interesting!
Best, M S
From: Nebert, Daniel (nebertdw)
Sent: Monday, August 29, 2022 4:43 PM
There is no need to lose sleep over this. The “science of cosmology” — is far from settled. 😊
This article [below] was donated by Paul Kepshire (son of a friend);
and also by John Reichard, PhD (Dept Environmental & Public Health Sciences, University of Cincinnati).
DwN
No, James Webb Space Telescope Images Do Not Debunk the Big Bang
The JWST provides an intriguing look at the early universe, but it’s not yet rewriting fundamental theories of the cosmos
Jackson Ryan
Aug. 22, 2022
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope has not provided evidence the Big Bang didn’t happen.
How did the universe come to be? The prevailing theory is everything that is — began with the Big Bang. In a nutshell, the theory suggests everything, everywhere, all at once suddenly burst to life. The caveat being everything and everywhere prior to the Big Bang is fairly hard to conceptualize.
The Big Bang theory is currently the best model we have for the birth of our universe. Astrophysicists have shown the theory explains, fairly comprehensively, phenomena we’ve observed in space over decades, like lingering background radiation and elemental abundances. It’s a robust framework that gives us a pretty good idea of how the cosmos came into being some 13.8 billion years ago.
But with the flurry of preprint papers and popular science articles about the James Webb Space Telescope’s first images, old, erroneous claims that the Big Bang never happened at all have been circulating on social media and in the press in recent weeks. One scientist has claimed that the JWST images are inspiring “panic among cosmologists” — that is, the scientists who study the origins of the universe.
This is simply not true. The JWST has not provided evidence disproving the Big Bang theory, and cosmologists aren’t panicking. Why, then, are we seeing viral social media posts and funky headlines that suggest the Big Bang didn’t happen at all?
To answer that question, and show why we should be skeptical of claims like this, we need to understand where the idea came from.
Where did “the Big Bang didn’t happen” come from?
It all started with an article at The Institute of Art and Ideas, a British philosophical organization, on Aug. 11. The piece was written by Eric Lerner, who has long argued against the Big Big theory. He even wrote a book titled The Big Bang Never Happened in 1991.
This provocatively headlined article at IAI is also related to an upcoming debate Lerner is participating in, run by the IAI, dubbed “Cosmology and the Big Bust.”
Lerner’s article gathered steam across social media, being shared widely on Twitter and across Facebook, over the last week. It makes sense why it’s caught fire: It’s a controversial idea that upends what we think we know about the cosmos. In addition, it’s tied to a new piece of technology in the James Webb telescope, which is seeing parts of the universe we’ve never been able to see before. Including Webb as the news hook here suggests there’s new data which overturns a long-standing theory.
Don’t get me wrong — there is new and intriguing data emerging from the JWST. Just not the kind that would undo the Big Bang theory. Most of this new data trickles down to the public in the form of scientific preprints, articles that are yet to undergo peer review and land on repositories like arXiv, or popular press articles.
Lerner’s piece uses some of the early JWST studies to attempt to dismiss the Big Bang theory. What’s concerning is how it misconstrues early JWST data to suggest that astronomers and cosmologists are worried the well-established theory is incorrect. There are two points early in Lerner’s article which show this:
He points to a preprint with the word “Panic!” in its title, calling it a “candid exclamation.”
He misuses a quote from Allison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas.
The first point is just a case of Lerner missing the pun. The full title of the paper is “Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z>3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field.” The first author of that preprint, astronomer Leonardo Ferreira, is clearly riffing on popular 2000s emo band Panic! at the Disco with his title. It’s a tongue-in-cheek reference, not a cosmological crisis.
As for the second point, Lerner takes this quote from Allison Kirkpatrick, which comes from a Nature news article published on July 27:
“Right now, I find myself lying awake at three in the morning and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”
This cherrypicked quote isn’t in direct reference to the Big Bang theory. Rather, Kirkpatrick is reckoning with the first data coming back from the JWST about the early evolution of the universe. It’s true there are some puzzles for astronomers to solve here, but, so far, they aren’t rewriting the beginning of the universe to do so. Kirkpatrick has stated her quotes were misused and even changed her Twitter name to “Allison the Big Bang happened Kirkpatrick.”
“We as scientists have a responsibility to educate the public, and I take that responsibility very seriously,” Kirkpatrick told CNET. “Deliberately misleading the public makes it difficult for them to trust real scientists and to know fact from fiction.”
In addition, Lerner’s article claims that his ideas are being censored by the scientific establishment, and later he also points to his theory being important to develop fusion energy on Earth. It’s no coincidence the same paragraph links to LPPFusion, a company run by Lerner aimed at developing clean energy technologies.
Why does this matter?
One of the chief reasons the Big Bang theory stands up is because of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This was discovered in 1964. In short, the CMB is the radiation leftover from the Big Bang, right when the universe began and scientists have been able to “see” it with satellites that can detect that lingering radiation.
So, to bolster evidence the Big Bang theory is incorrect, you’d need to explain the CMB another way. Lerner’s dismissive of the CMB, and his proposal for the observation has been disproven in the past. If you’re interested in further arguments against Lerner’s hypotheses and why the claims don’t add up, I recommend checking out Brian Keating’s recent YouTube video. Keating is a cosmologist at the University of California, San Diego, and dives into a bit more detail about the limits of Lerner’s arguments.
It’s also important to note Webb is not built to see and undertake new analyses of the CMB itself. The telescope can’t “see” that far back in time. However, it will look at an epoch a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. What it finds there will almost certainly reshape our views on the early universe, galaxies and the evolution of the cosmos. But it is disingenuous to claim the early images and study results have contradicted the Big Bang theory.
Kirkpatrick notes JWST’s images actually do the opposite. She said they “support the Big Bang model because they show us that early galaxies were different than the galaxies we see today — they were much smaller!”
Science is about making incremental progress in our understanding, coming to increasingly stronger conclusions based on observations. The observations astrophysicists and cosmologists have made over decades line up with the Big Bang theory. They don’t line up anywhere near as neatly if we use Lerner’s alternative theory. This doesn’t mean scientists won’t find evidence overturning the Big Bang theory. They just might! But, for now, it remains our best theory for explaining what we see.
Scientific theories can — and should — be challenged by well-reasoned scientists presenting highly detailed and thoughtful arguments. This is not one of those times. And that means, despite the headlines, most believe that the Big Bang did happen.
https://www.cnet.com/science/space/no-james-webb-space-telescope-images-do-not-debunk-the-big-bang/
From: Nebert, Daniel (nebertdw)
Sent: Sunday, August 28, 2022 5:37 PM
This article [below] has taken me hours to wrap my head around. The speed of light is ~186,282 miles per second — a universal constant known in equations as “c,” or “light speed” — in a vacuum. However, in the radioastronomy of pulsars, the speed of light is not constant, but rather varies by wavelength…!!
This indicates that the interstellar medium is not an electromagnetic vacuum. Therefore, at increasing distances, one’s estimates of “distance” will be less than the true distance, because the velocity of light is slowed down by intergalactic gases. The Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light,” rather than the expansion of the universe…!!
Because of what the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images are now telling us, cosmologists can no longer accept the hypothesis that the universe has been expanding since the “Big Bang” — which supposedly occurred ~13.8 million years ago. It needs to be pointed out that this long article is written by a cosmologist who has had trouble publishing his papers or getting funding — because he has been convinced for decades that the Big Bang did not happen. He has been censored by all mainstream journals, which hold on to “The Big Bang Hypothesis,” as if it were fact; it is not. It has never been fact. ☹
There are similarities in this field of cosmology that remind me today of the field of climatology. Will the day ever come back — when “science” returns to “facts, factual data,” and not opinions and censorship? Politics and Religion MUST be removed from math and science. ☹
DwN
The Big Bang didn’t happen ??
What do the James Webb images really show?
Deep Field James Webb min
11th August 2022
Eric J. Lerner
President and Chief Scientist of LPPFusion. He is the author of The Big Bang Never Happened.
The Big Bang Hypothesis – which states the universe has been expanding since it began ~13.8 billion years ago in a hot and dense state – is contradicted by the new James Webb Space Telescope images, writes Eric Lerner.
To everyone who sees them, the new James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) images of the cosmos are beautifully awe-inspiring. But to most professional astronomers and cosmologists, they are also extremely surprising — not at all what was predicted by theory. In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small, and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper’s title begins with the candid exclamation: “Panic!”
Why do the JWST’s images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory’s predictions are they contradicting? The papers don’t actually say. The truth that these papers don’t report is that the hypothesis that the JWST’s images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began ~14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data are causing these theorists to panic. “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning,” says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, “and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong.”
The delusions of cosmology min
It is not too complicated to explain why these too small, too smooth, too old, and too numerous galaxies are completely incompatible with the Big Bang hypothesis. Let’s begin with “too small”. If the universe is expanding, a strange optical illusion must exist. Galaxies (or any other objects) in expanding space do not continue to look smaller and smaller with increasing distance. Beyond a certain point, they start looking larger and larger. (This is because their light is supposed to have left them when they were closer to us.) This is in sharp contrast to ordinary, non-expanding space, where objects look smaller in proportion to their distance.
Smaller and smaller is exactly what the JWST images show. Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.
This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance. Starting in 2014, we had already published results, based on HST images, that showed that galaxies with redshifts all the way up to 5 matched the expectations of non-expanding, ordinary space. So, we were confident the JWST would show the same thing — which it already has, for galaxies having redshifts as high as 12. Put another way, the galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.
stephan quintetmedium
But from the standpoint of the Big Bang, expanding-universe hypothesis, these distant galaxies must be intrinsically extremely tiny to compensate for the hypothesized optical illusion — implausibly tiny. One galaxy noted in the papers, called GHz2, is far more luminous that the Milky Way, yet is calculated to be only 300 light years in radius — 150 times smaller than the radius of our Milky Way. Its surface brightness — brightness per unit area — would be 600 times that of the brightest galaxy in the local universe. Its density (and that of several other galaxies in the new images) would be tens of thousands of times that of present-day galaxies.
Big Bang theorists have known for years from the HST images that their assumptions necessitate the existence of these tiny, ultra-dense “Mighty Mouse” galaxies. JWST has just made the problem far worse. The same theorists have speculated that the tiny galaxies grow up into present day galaxies by colliding with each other — merging to become more spread out. An analogy to this hypothetical merger process would be to imagine a magical toy car a centimeter long that nonetheless weighs as much as an SUV and grows up into a real SUV by colliding with many other toy cars.
But the JWST has shot through this far-out scenario as well. If you could believe the toy car story, you would at least expect some fender dents in the colliding cars. And Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today’s galaxies. The data in the “Panic!” article show that smooth spiral galaxies were about “10 times” as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this “would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process”. In plain language, these data utterly destroy the merger theory.
With few or no mergers, there is no way tiny galaxies could grow to be a hundred times bigger. Therefore, they were not tiny to begin with, and thus the optical illusion predicted from the expanding universe hypothesis does not exist. But no illusion means no expansion: the illusion is an unavoidable prediction from expansion. Thus, the panic among Big Bang supporters. Tiny and smooth galaxies mean no expansion and thus no Big Bang.
Too old and too many galaxies mean the same thing. The JWST uses many different filters to take its images in the infrared part of the spectrum. Thus, it can see the colors of the distant galaxies. This, in turn, allows astronomers to estimate the age of the stars in these galaxies because young, hot stars are blue in color and older, cooler stars, like our sun, are yellow or red in color. According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur.
Just as there must be no galaxies older than the Big Bang (if the Big Bang hypothesis were valid), so theorists expected that as the JWST looked out further in space and back in time, there would be fewer and fewer galaxies and eventually none — a Dark Age in the cosmos. But a paper to be published in Nature demonstrates that galaxies as massive as the Milky Way are common even a few hundred million years after the hypothesized Bang. The authors state that the new images show that there are at least 100,000 times as many galaxies as theorists predicted at redshifts more than 10. There is no way that so many large galaxies can be generated in so little time, so again — no Big Bang.
While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds have been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years. The widely-publicized crisis in cosmology has drawn general attention to the failed predictions of the Big Bang hypothesis for the Hubble constant — elating redshift to distance. But our papers, published over the past decades, have pointed to far more contradictions, each individually acknowledged by other researchers.
Big Bang learner
The Big Bang prediction of the abundance of helium is off by a factor of two, the prediction for the abundance of lithium is off by a factor of 20. In addition to the absence of the larger-more-distant optical illusion, there is also the existence of large-scale structures too big to have formed in the times since the Big Bang, wrong predictions for the density of matter in the universe, and well-known asymmetries in the cosmic microwave background that should not exist according to theory. There are many more contradictions. In early July I published two comprehensive papers summarizing the situation. Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one correct one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
20 07 30.ekeberg.ata
Readers may well be wondering at this point why they have not read of this collapse of the Big Bang hypothesis in major media outlets by now and why the authors of so many recent papers have not pointed to this collapse themselves. The answer lies in what I term the “Emperor’s New Clothes Effect” — if anyone questions the Big Bang, they are labeled stupid and unfit for their jobs. Unfortunately, funding for cosmology comes from a very few government sources controlled by a handful of committees that are dominated by Big Bang theorists. These theorists have spent their lives building the Big Bang theory. Those who openly question the theory simply don’t get funded.
Until the past few years, if researchers could self-fund cosmology research as a sideline, as is the case with me, they still could publish “heretical” papers, although those papers were often ignored by the cosmological establishment. As recently as 2018, the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), a leading journal, published one of my papers showing how the sizes of galaxies contradicted the expanding universe idea.
But as the crisis in cosmology became obvious in 2019, the cosmological establishment has circled the wagons to protect this failed theory with censorship, because it now has no other defense. It has now become almost impossible to publish papers critical of the Big Bang in any astronomical journals. An anonymous senior editor rejected my survey papers, writing “There are many journals which would be interested in publishing a well-argued synthesis of existing evidence against the standard hot big bang interpretation. But MNRAS, with its focus on publication of significant new astronomical results, is not one of them”. The replies from several other journals were similar.
Such censorship is now, as always, hostile to the progress of science. Two dozen researchers in astrophysics, astronomy and space science have signed a letter of protest to the arXiv leadership. I have personally called on leading Big Bang theorists to openly debate the new evidence. For cosmology — as for any research area, including the silly hypothesis that “there is a climate crisis” — to advance, this debate must happen openly in both scientific journals and the public media.
These scientific questions matter in the here and now. Over decades scientists, starting with Physics Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven, have shown that if the Big Bang hypothesis is thrown out, the evolution of the cosmos and the phenomena that we observe today, like the cosmic microwave background, can be explained using the physical processes we observe in the laboratory — especially the electromagnetic processes of plasmas. Plasma is the electrically conducting gas that makes up nearly all the matter that we see in space, in the stars and in the space between the stars. Only the Hubble redshift relation would still need some new physical process to explain the loss of energy as light travels huge distances.
One of the key processes in plasmas that Alfven and his colleagues identified, and which has been studied for 50 years, is plasma filamentation. This is the process by which electric currents, and the magnetic fields they create, draw plasma into the lacy system of filaments that we see at all scales in the universe from the aurorae in the earth’s atmosphere to the solar corona to galactic spiral arms, even to clusters of galaxies. Together with gravitational forces, plasma filamentation is one of the basic processes in the formation of planets, stars, galaxies and structures at all scales.
That process of plasma filamentation is also key to the enormously important effort to develop fusion energy here on earth. To use fusion energy, the power that drives the universe and gives light to the Sun and all the stars, we need to understand the processes that drive cosmic evolution. Just as the Wright Brothers developed the airplane by studying how birds controlled their flight, so today we can only control the ultra-hot plasma where fusion reactions occur by studying how plasmas behave at all scales in cosmos.
We need to imitate nature, not try to fight it. We at LPPFusion have been applying that knowledge concretely to the development of a cheap, clean and unlimited source of energy that can entirely replace fossil fuels starting in this decade.
While many researchers have been funded to study these processes on the scale of the sun and the solar system, work on larger scales has been hobbled by the straightjacket of the Big Bang hypothesis, which has diverted hundreds or thousands of talented researchers into futile calculations of the imaginary entities, such as dark matter and dark energy, that have been invented to prop up a failing theory. Open debate can clear away that failed theory and lead to the reorientation of cosmology to the study of real phenomena, advancing technology here on earth. It is time to end the censorship and to let the debate begin. Cosmology can emerge from its crisis once it is recognized that the Big Bang never happened.
stephan quintetmedium
Summary: Radio astronomy observations of Pulsars indicate that the Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light,” rather than the expansion of the universe.
When Hubble published his observations of red-shifted light from distant objects — there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zwicky, was that light lost energy as it traveled, termed “tired light”. At that time, ca. 1930, interstellar and intergalactic space were assumed to be perfect vacuums and thus there was no mechanism to redden the light. Now, 90 years later, we have actual observational evidence that Zwicky was right.
In the radio astronomy of Pulsars, we find that the shorter wavelengths of the leading edge of the pulse arrive before longer wavelengths. The velocity of light, c, is NOT constant, but rather varies by wavelength. This time dispersion is proportional to the distance from us of the pulsar, indicating that the reduction in velocity is cumulative. The observed effect is isotropic. The interstellar medium is not a vacuum but rather affects light waves in a way best described as having an Index of Refraction greater than 1, unity. We find the same phenomenon in the observation of Fast Radio Bursts from other galaxies, thus indicating that the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum.
https://iai.tv/articles/the-big-bang-didnt-happen-auid-2215