The Big Bang is NOT Scientific

AdminI hereby apologize for going off topic. Next time I will do a better job of reading the preceding posts and knowing the topic.I will also remind myself not to do topic replies at 4:30 in the morning on 4 hours sleep.{prostrates himself in appropriate groveling posture}

Sidelined! Needing more sleep, old chap? I too often reply at 4 a.m. Occasionally, unable to sleep, I find myself at EvC. And its not just understanding the topic so much as it is determining the communication motive of the author of the topic. This is why I said what I said to lost-apathy here in the preceding post. Its not just the topic...its what the author wishes to discuss. IMHO, anyway! This message has been edited by Phatboy, 04-29-2005 10:25 AM

Phatboy Usually I am asleep till 5 or 5:30 but today being payday we stared early to finish early.LOL and then we got snowed out and shut down after 3 hours.To top off my day I return to the shop for my check to find that they are missing 20 or so hours on the last pay period.Lousy bastards.Lack of sleep makes not only for errors in posting attention the quality of the response falls off in direct proportion to the exhaustion of working long hours.Oh well I should have stayed in school and been a lawyer so I could at least get paid well for being so ill respected.

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I'm afraid you've seized on something out of context as support for your assertions, where it really isn't.

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In particle physics, lifetime measurements of particles are made at resolution below a picosecond. These lifetime measurements are a quite direct verification of special relativity. The relativistic effect on the particle lifetimes and trajectories are readily observable. This is also observed in cosmic ray muons.

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Your assertions that special relativity has not been verified by experiemt and observation are simply incorrect.

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Its seems that you are misunderstanding what I am talking about.
1. I am not talking about special relativity but general relativity
2. I am not talking about how there is evidence that proves relativity wrong, but how there is not sufficient evidence to back it up.
3. If I am wrong explain to me how these certain things are sufficient evidence instead of just blatantly saying I AM WRONG.

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Sorry, you got it wrong. It is true that the GPS system is not good for testing relativity, but it's not because we can't test relativity; rather, it's because GPS is nowhere near as accurate as the best instruments we have for testing relativity, and to keep it performing its primary function we have to reset the clocks periodically. But it's an excellent example of practical application of relativity.

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You have just backed up my point that the article given is not sufficient evidence for relativity, but just a mere example.

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Actually, what I meant was that the phrase "defy all outliers" is meaningless. One can defy authority, one can defy expectations, but I have never heard of anyone defying an outlier. Unless by "outlier" one means the particular person in a position of authority who is out lying in that field. While I am not necessarily against a creative use of language, I am always suspicious when a person who is arguing against the scientific consensus uses terms in a non-standard way -- it sets off my "crackpot" alarm.

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I hope you know what you're saying by this. Has it ever occured to you that outliers may be because of human error or miscalculation? Lets take a example of carbon dating. There have been many cases to where carbon dating has not been accurate, which is why we do the test many times. If a rock is dated to be 5 billions years old 5 times and two times is some crazy number, they are not going to take the average of all the numbmers, but the most accurate ones. Its just a matter of how you look at it.

Again this assertion is in error. There is significant experimental and observational confirmation of the accuracy of general relativity; Einstein's model has been confirmed in every test performed to date. From the Wiki article:

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Like any good scientific theory, general relativity makes predictions which can be tested. The predictions of general relativity include: the perihelion shift of Mercury's orbit, the bending of starlight by a massive object and the existence of gravitational waves. These are discussed further in the article tests of general relativity. These three tests , with the exception of the third, have been verified to a high degree of accuracy and precision. Most researchers believe in the existence of gravitational waves, but more experiments are needed to raise this prediction to the status of the other two.

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Other predictions include the expansion of the universe, the existence of black holes and possibly the existence of wormholes. The existence of black holes is generally accepted, but the existence of wormholes is still very controversial, many researchers believing that wormholes may exist only in the presence of exotic matter. The existence of white holes is very speculative, as they appear to contradict the second law of thermodynamics.

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Many other quantitative predictions of general relativity have since been confirmed by astronomical observations. One of the most recent, the discovery in 2003 of PSR J0737-3039, a binary neutron star in which one component is a pulsar and where the perihelion precesses 16.88 per year (or about 140,000 times faster than the precession of Mercury's perihelion), enabled the most precise experimental verification yet of the effects predicted by general relativity.

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General relativity - WikipediaThe only scientific theory with more evidence behind it is, possibly, the theory of evolution.

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Sup? You started this topic, so lets discuss a few things.
1) Where are you at in school? I am curious..do you want to study science, philosophy, religion, or perhaps all three?
As for me, I grew up basically ignorant of religion and science. I did study philosophy a bit. I read lots of books about many different topics...I used to like to read the encyclopedia!

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I am actually going to start college soon, and am actually wondering what major to pursue. Yes I am not very knowledgable about relativity, but I doubt anyone here on the forums knows the math to general relativity making us all somewhat ignorant to the topic. As to what to study, maybe you can point me in the right direction I honestly really don't know.As for getting off topic I am sorry I am trying to answer all the questions I can but arguing with 5 people at a time is very hard when I only have limited time. I've honestly wanted to post all day today but just couldn't.To get on topic I will start with this.
Btw this is just a topic I made to discuss things that Sylas posted in his post "Big Bang Critics" AKA "List of mentally insane people" heh just joking, but anyways everyone should be more open minded about other idea's instead of just ranting on about how you are correct and nothing else is even close.Anyways here is what I wanted to originally talk about. Space and why it is changable or not changable, because on of the main assertions of the big bang is that space and time are created with it.
My reasoning.
1. Space is seriously something that cannot be observed and testing it is very very hard. How can we test something such as space that is not touchable, seeable, smellable, or hearable? What i see space to be is basically nothing. The only thing it does is serve as a place which matter can occupy.
2. If this world were related to numbers space would be zero, positive numbers would be matter, and negative numbers would not exist. Matter can be changed by multiplication and division, although space(zero) cannot be changed by multiplication or division, because the resulting answer will always be zero. A real life example of this is if I take a hammer and pound a chair to bits that will divide it into many pieces.
3. The main question I am not being able to comprehend is how can "nothing" change. What is the main evidence for a finite universe? How sure are you about the big bang percent wise? If you are above 95% sure what gives you so much faith?P.S. I can post links too.
Page Not Found | Science Mission Directorate
This is a pretty interesting article that dosn't take the side of either for or against relativity. Plus it's from NASA.

Well, I don't know that he is a specialist but Eta is an astrophysicist who has some knowledge of GR. He hasn't dropped in while you've been posting. Let's see what he does know when he drops in.( I know I found the math too tough for me )Your link is amusing. What the Gravity Probe B is measuring is the changes of spacetime itself. I have the impression that you think this can't be done. I'd suggest reading the links you post very carefully.This message has been edited by NosyNed, 04-30-2005 02:33 AM

Sorry if this post is long I hope it will still be of some value to you. Good luck with it. Actually, a couple of us here DO know the maths to general relativity.I need a text book by my side to manage anything really tricky with tensors; but I've become quite familiar with the conventional models for space and time co-ordinates in cosmology and expanding spaces. Sometime I will be writing a post to describe some results I’ve proved on my own behalf using a numeric integration of the differential equations used in GR for scale factor, in order to explore some of the unconventional models like quintessence or phantom energy. It confirms what is published by the experts; but having worked through it personally I’ve been able to understand the literature much more deeply.If you have questions on Big Bang cosmology, I can probably answer them, even if the answer is "no-one knows".In this thread, however, the real problem is to get past some fundamental confusions and errors about the nature of evidence for general relativity, which is plentiful, repeatable, and extremely accurate. The way you have handled this debate has been very unimpressive so far, frankly. You need to pull up your socks, and get serious about looking at the actual examples given to you with a bit more integrity.I’m being hard on you here; I suspect in real life you do have a keen interest and a capacity to learn. I hope so; because you’ll need it to get through college.But our real expert here is Eta Carinae, who in real life is a working astrophysicist with many scientific publications under his belt. Eta is the guy most at home with the maths of relativity, I think. That is not what I said in Big Bang Critics. I don’t say everyone else is wrong; but I DO say that SOME other people are wrong, and that it is possible to look seriously at conflicting ideas and evaluate them. Being open minded does not mean all ideas are equal, or that you can never tell when an idea is wrong! It simply means being willing to make the evaluation of other ideas on their merits. Serious criticism is far more useful to anyone genuine about proposing new ideas than is a vacuous acceptance of all ideas as equally valid!It is a fact of life that not all ideas are equal. For example: some criticisms of conventional physical theories like relativity are merely silly, and some are unlikely but interesting and worth exploring, and some are indications of widely recognized inadequacies or incompleteness in present physics.One of the things that should occur as we learn about the subject is an improved capacity to distinguish a crank with no clue from a maverick with an unusual perspective that is worth considering in more detail.By far the majority of "Big Bang" criticism is grossly incompetent. Some criticisms made in the past were sensible in their time, but have since been solidly refuted. This includes notions from Arp, from Alfven and from Hoyle. Arp is the only one of these still alive, and he is still publishing and exploring ideas. His notions are worth consideration, but they are not worth a big research program. Most scientists quite rightly mostly ignore it as being less significant than many other open problems.There are many unconventional ideas that work within the framework of Big Bang cosmology: ekpyrosis, various inflation models like slow roll inflation or chaotic inflation, unconventional speculations on the nature of dark energy or dark matter like quintessence or even phantom energy (now that is weird!), various models for quantum gravity or string that apply in the very earliest times for the universe, and lots more.The really good news is that working in modern science is NOT about rejecting all ideas except your own. There are many open questions. Most of the Big Bang critics are missing out on the really interesting and difficult problems, and making quite basic errors in physics which ensure that their work will remain wasted. I know this in many of the cases I have looked at, not because they have different ideas, but because I can see for myself the specific errors and confusions in play.Here now are my answers to your questions: To really understand this, it helps to work through the various bits of observational evidence for relativity, which treats spacetime as having an intrinsic geometry. The geometry of spacetime is measured with clocks and rulers; and light beams are useful as rulers.It would take more than a single post to explain this adequately, but it is not actually as mysterious as it sounds. For now, I’ll just quote the source: This book is old, but well written and widely available as an English translation.There are a number of examples of evidence you have failed to acknowledge or comment upon. For example, the GPS system link gives as evidence the data from the 1977 NTS-2 satellite. Note that this is data from BEFORE the GPS system was developed, and so the difficulties of using the GPS system directly as a test do not apply. The 1977 NTS-2 satellite was specifically designed to test relativity, and the data returned was a solid confirmation of the theory and very strong evidence indeed. I quoted the evidence in Message 35. That’s not sufficiently coherent to mean anything. Actually, this was a significant theoretical error in your original questions. In fact, we don’t have strong evidence for a finite universe, and the Big Bang is quite compatible with a universe that is either finite or infinite.I personally lean to finite, and hesitate to put a number on my confidence. My reasons are both theoretical and philosophical; they are not based on strong observational evidence. My confidence in the Big Bang is very solid indeed, because the observational evidence is very solid as well; but explaining this would take more than one post as well, because of the necessary background that would need to be explained. This is why you learn more by going to college than by reading posts.There are some weak observational indications of a finite universe in an analysis of the Sloan Digital Sky survey, published in January of this year. The reference is astro-ph/0501171, but it is very technical and you won’t even find the word finite or infinite in the paper, because that was not really their primary research question. Yet it is implicit in their results. (Look for Ω_K < 0)Cheers — SylasPS. I like your link on Gravity Probe B! In fact, I spoke it already in Message 35. This experiment is being watched with great interest by many including myself. Yet in a sense, it has been pipped at the post. Analysis of the LAGEOS satellites has already confirmed one of the predictions of relativity that Gravity Probe B is designed to test! Yet it is not wasted; the Gravity Probe you cite is far more accurate, and there is yet scope for new surprises.What you are missing is that this experiment is making the very measurements of space that you have been describing as impossible. Also, even if this does return results in conflict with relativity, it won’t undo the basic details of expansion and geometry of space. We already know relativity is inadequate; and the hunt is on for an amalgamation of relativity and quantum mechanics. When and if this is achieved, it will be a refinement of Einstein’s work; just as Einstein in turn was a refinement of Newton. Relativity will always remain a useful approximation for a more complete theory, just as Newton remains a useful approximation for relativity.This message has been edited by Sylas, 04-30-2005 04:49 AM

Adding my two cents to what Sylas has already said......Did you read the previous post by Sylas? Did it stir you up so as to want to actually find out more of what he suggests? Do you yearn to meet Eta Carinae or to see what he has to say? Yes...if you truly want to be or do something, you will eventually achieve your goal. But there are no shortcuts. I grew up in High School with a lot of friends who were wannabe musicians. They wanted the image that the rock stars of the time had. They wanted the girls to look at them in awe! They wanted to be cool! What they did NOT want to do, hoever, was study guitar or take music lessons. More than that, they did not want to even practice much! As it turns out, one of them is now a musician. He took the steps. He took lessons. He paid the price and found that it was harder than he ever thought yet worth every minute! Music is still a hobby for him, but it is a hobby of love! Which ones seem interesting to you? List two or three and we will discuss each one. Translation, as I hear it:
I am no Einstein, but who is? I am challenging you to accept my ideas or to respectfully challenge me and make me think!Like I said before, if you feel an urge to really learn about science, you will need to get busy as Sylas suggests. If you feel that although you respect Sylas, Ned, and the rest of the guys for taking time to talk yet you have no real interest in checking out what they say and whether they know anything or not, you will probably not be a candidate for science.I am somewhat intelligent, but I know better than to question science based on my own speculations. That is why I never question scientific theories. I DO often challenge religious or philosophical assumptions because I know just enough to have a point..weak though it often is! Well....what do you want to talk about next? This is your thread and your original topic centered on you questioning the speculations of science. Do you want to go another route? How about Philosophy? How about God and Spirituality? If need be, we can possibly start another thread, although if you just have a point or two to make, we can finish discussing it here.This message has been edited by Phatboy, 04-30-2005 06:29 AM

Wow thanks for the long post it feels like you put your heat and soul in it.

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In fact, we don’t have strong evidence for a finite universe, and the Big Bang is quite compatible with a universe that is either finite or infinite.

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Ok this cleared quite a bit up for me I was under the impression that the big bang is a finite universe, because space and time i thought were both created at that instant also. But i guess it can go both ways.

This gets into deep waters!Yes, if you apply the conventional relativitistic models, space and time came into existence some time ago. How long depends on the model, but recent evidence is strong support for 13.7 +/- 0.2 billion years. I'm not betting the farm on those numbers just yet; but I think a finite age for the universe as we know it is a solidly reliable inference of the available evidence.So in our models, the universe does have a finite age; but it could be either finite or infinite in spatial extent; which is what I mean by "infinite". Whether finite or infinite; the standard model has it all coming into existence in the beginning of time, in a condition of unbounded density and heat, a finite length of time ago.The wrinkle here is that we know for sure that relativity fails to work. It's a good model (we think!) back to a tiny fraction of a second after the singularity. But to go back further needs a quantum model of gravity, which we don't have and which relativity does not provide in its present form. There is brief mention of this in your Gravity Probe link.What implications a solution will have for "age" is anyone's guess. My feeling is that time itself will simply not have the kinds of meanings we normally assume, making "age" a poorly defined concept. This is already the case in quantum physics; quantum mechanics is way more weird and complex than relativity, IMO.Cheers -- Sylas

An example of a practical application, mere or not, is always strong evidence for.Of course, GPS is just an easily understood selection from the tens of thousands of individual tests of and evidence for relativity.

I read something somewhere where the author theorized that by definition, the singularity at the start of it all was a realm where everything was in the same place at the same time.Beyond that, the speculations require some appreciation of theoretical physics, which I never was very good at!