quote:
Let him get a little excited. I still agree with him about extreme atheistic bias in the suppresion of this discovery. My hands would have been shaking so hard I couldn't have typed - especially if I'd been Tifft.
Probably shaking as hard as Gentry's when he found instantaneous polonium halos in granite dikes.. not realizing of course that a granite dike could not be a primeval rock.
The problem with your getting all of your information from Creationist popular magazines, TB, is that they are not accurate. Their agenda is to push a particular wold view at the expense of any even handed relating of actual science or evidence. And this is precisely what has occured in this instance.
What Tifft found was not "shells" around the universe, but the now widely known large scale structure of the universe as mapped by many redshift surveys since Tifft.
This structure is not a set of concentric shells around the milky way at all, but shows a pattern of cosmic bubbles, filaments, and voids in which the milky way and its local supergroup are embedded.. no different from any other galaxy. There are no shells at all.
Sadly, this is a common story for a creationist mis-reporting of science. They read an article from the 1970's about an anomaly in the distribution of galaxies (previously thought to be homogenous), latch on to a few early ideas such as the "quantization of redshift" proposed to explain the anomalous data at the time, then ignore the actual unfolding of the mystery since then.
The real story is actually pretty exciting. From that early survey of galaxies which showed gaps in the distribution of galaxies, we now know that the universe is not uniform on the order of magnitude of 100ML or lower (though *these* larger structures are homogeneous as far as we can see). Modern redshift surveys, and deepfield long range redshift surveys show this filament/void pattern extending as far as we can see... and these patterns of filaments and voids (or bubbles) are not anything like the 'shells' proposed by creationists.
Enough with the blather.. here are links to a variety of web sites devoted to the subject, with graphs of many later redshift surveys. You can judge for yourself whether there are 'concentric shells' or not (Hint.. you won't find any).
My advice to creationists it simply to not read creationist journals. They typically are full of lies and half truths that exploit your lack of knowledge about a subject to promote their agenda. And if you do accidentally find yourself reading one of these magazines, please take the time to do a quick search with Google or PubMed to actually dig up the truth.
Scientific american 1999 "Mapping the Universe"
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0001AA37-92BA-...
Skyserver page on cosmic structures (graph of redshift survey)..
http://skyserver.fnal.gov/en/astro/structures/structures.asp
Graph from LEDA survey showing the great wall.. note the lack of concentric shells..
http://www.rm.astro.it/amendola/lss.html
The swift wide field survey.. computer rendering of present distributions of galaxies.. good picture of what the cosmic distribution of galaxies kind of looks like.
http://www.noao.edu/swift/proposal/node5.html
More redshift survey plots (from a paper on statistical analysis of redshift plots).. You can see the structures of filaments and voids here as well.
http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Bothun2/Bothun3_2.html
http://www.tac.dk/~lars_c/thesis/node27.html
Another good graph of redshift distribution locally.. this shows the structure of filaments and gaps pretty well.
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/cosmology/1.html#Fig2
So.. TB.. having been show AGAIN that what creationists say in their journals does not accurately reflect the state of actual science in the real world.. how can you defend the continuous stream of misinformation that they put out?
I am actually really interested to know how creationists rationalize away the continuous misinformation they seem to run through year after year, and then expect that the next "AHA.. GOTCHA!" argument they read in a creationist journal won't turn out like the last dozen.