No Big Bang--Just gentle whisper

Y'all are really very well read and intelligent debaters. You have delved into this subject to a much greater depth than I have and that is quite apparent. You are all way above my level. Oh, I can follow almost everything in you discussions and whatever stumps me, I look up.But, to be perfectly frank, I'm still quite happy with most of the thoughts of my initial thread.You are all a pleasure to read except for those personal attacks. Those I don't believe belong at your levels.Thank you.

I'm sorry that you won't be responding further, because I think it would have been a productive exercise. If your position's justifications are truly private then you should not have introduced your position in the first place. On this debate board, members are expected to defend their positions, not declare them off-limits to discussion. See rule 4.--Percy

Hi Cavediver,My thoughts kept returning to a couple parts of your reply, so I thought I'd finally respond: Right, that's why I used M33. If we can't directly measure distance and motion of relatively nearby M33, we certainly can't do it for much more distant objects. If things that happen to the light, such as changes in wavelength, polarization, etc., are off-limits as a means of measurement, then what kind of measurement are you thinking of? The only methods left available would involve waiting long enough for the observed positions and motions of distant galaxies to become directly detectable to our instruments, or us or our probes traveling far enough to accomplish the same thing. These are methods that would take any number of human lifetimes, certainly far, far more than 20 years.This perspective on the pace of scientific advance has worked both successfully and unsuccessfully. Computers have become more powerful than people ever could have imagined, and Moore's law continues to hold up far beyond what people thought possible. I think many scientists would concede that collecting and analyzing the details of the CMB have been far more successful than ever dreamed. But fusion remains the power generation technology of the future, and perhaps always will be. Gene therapy has yet to fulfill its early promise and may never do so. Alchemists never did uncover chemical methods of turning lead into gold. String theory may be petering out, too early to tell.I'm as great an admirer of the stupendous progress of science as anyone, but the advances often come from unexpected directions. Direct measurements of distance and motion of far away objects can't be gathered any faster than the speed of light, so given the strong evidential and theoretical support for the speed of light as a limit on the propagation of information, I'll stand by my many human lifetimes figure.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Added clarifying phrase in my 3rd paragraph.

Unfortunately there is a few incorrect statements in your original post.A general tendency of criticisms about the Big Bang is to state that red-shift itself isn't enough to confirm Cosmological expansion because it could be due to other unforeseen causes.However it isn't Red-Shift itself that is taken as evidence, but the relation of the red-shift to the distance of the galaxies is exactly the ratio as predicted by the Friedman solution to the Einsteinian Field Equations.To be more accurate S, the distance to the object we are looking at, is a function of (dv/v), the fractional red-shift, in the following manner:S = c/H(dv/v) where c = speed of light and H = Hubble's constant.
Which is a linear relation.Not only does this relation hold for objects near us, but the deviation from this relation also holds when you look far enough.
The deviation being the non-linear curve being introduced. Deviations from this term come from , which is a measurement of the expansion of the universe. So the expansion of the universe predicts the qudratic and eventually cubic terms in the diagram above.Other methods would have difficulty replicating this.Edited by Son Goku, : Slight Correction.

Another couple questions just occurred to me.My first question concerns measurements of distance based upon standard candles and related approaches. Are these also considered too indirect? I was assuming you and Nwr were ruling them out, but perhaps not?My second question concerns parallax style measurements. The diameter of the earth's orbit is used by way of parallax to triangulate distances to relatively close objects, out to about about 1000 light years, and less direct parallax methods out to maybe 3000 light years. The "local distant" galaxies you're thinking of are more like a million light years away? Do I have that right?So what if our baseline were approximately the radius of the solar system, say, the distance from the earth to either the Pioneer 10 or 11 spacecraft. These spacecraft aren't equipped for such measurements, but we could send more and would only to wait about 30 years, well within a single human lifetime. How far out could such a baseline peer to make direct distance/motion measurements?--Percy

Thank you. You've put a lot of work in the response and it will get all the attention that it deserves. Will respond when I get my ducks in order.

Standard candles - great for distance (though not totally reliable as recent research has shown), but they don't give evidence of recession. nwr is not convinced that the distance related redshift is caused by recession. However, if you look at SGs post above, you will see that the BB prediction is a little more complicated than a simple distance relation, so nwr has his work cut out to come up with a competing theory.Just another point on standard candles... who would have predicted their availability in the beginnings of cosmology? To measure the distance of even near-by galaxies must have seemed like a task for distant future generations And your discussion of better and better parallax measurements (larger and larger base-lines) is precisely one way in which we will get a clearer picture of the universe by direct measurement. There are already plans to send a telescope to the edge of Solar System for precisely such a purpose. Hipparchus was the small scale version of this, using an orbiting telescope.I don't think anyone has said that all measurements of light are off-limits: it's just the interpretation of the red-shift that nwr is questioning. And we aren't stuck with studying one object such as M33; we are interested in the global effect, so we can take entire distributions of measurements and use them to our advantage.

OK guys. Rocking while reading all your messages does bring back a few memories (helped by the few naps resulting from the combination of both) . Maniacs have a tendency to save everything in case that it might be needed at a later time. Texans have a habit of using these stored items.About 40 years ago I wrote and article that I entitled “Logical Reanalysis fo the Michelson-Morley Experimental Results to Establish the Correlation Between Gravity and Electromagnetism”. After I’d written it, I filed it. I just ran across it a few weeks ago. After re-reading it, I realized that I’d been full of myself in those days. But, it does answer some of the questions about why I should think the way I do today.The article is too long to copy here. I could start another thread with it but, I haven’t been too luck in that department either. It’s either too long, too controversial, too crazy, etc.What the heck, lets strike a happy ”medium’ and write a condensed version here.The experiment was run time and time again with the same result. No discernable ether or medium for our light-wave propagation. There were sad wave theorists and happy corpuscular theorists in those days. I, for one, could not junk the medium. I had to redefine it to explain the apparently negative result. The original idea is that the medium or ether had to be a fixed or nonmoving medium, and had to be completely permeable so that matter could pass directly through it without creating even a ripple. I contended that the experimental results had to mean that the medium’s original specifications were faulty.Our medium has only one requirement. It must be so constructed so that it permits electromagnetic intercourse between each and every body in the universe. This medium must be perfectly elastic, that is, it must allow itself to be dragged about in each and every direction at the exact velocity of each body in the universe. Such a medium would produce negative results in the experiment no matter which of the bodies or combination of bodies were used.If we look around, we find that there is something that fits the requirements of this perfectly elastic medium. What does every body in the universe drag about with it that is related to every other body in such a manner. Why couldn’t light be propagated in or on the gravitational force that interrelates each and every body in the universe. Why not? It wouldn’t be the only force field that does so. The electrostatic field between the plates of a capacitor acts as a medium for the conduction of signal intelligence.The change in the gravitational force as bodies move relative to each other would cause the frequency changes we know as the Doppler effect. The corpuscular nature of light is still maintained because light is produced and propagated in pulses which appear corpuscular when they strike an object.This is one of the basic reasons why my thinking could seem a little strange to you. Isn’t it amazing that a man like Einstein could arrive ar relativity by completely bypassing the one step that was absolutely necessary to its logical deduction and paradoxically that this step (the unified field theory) was the one he tried to take after he had already unconsciously taken it? The logical progression for his determination could have be: (1) the establishment of gravity as the ether which provides a unified field theory, and (2) deduction of the side effects of this unified field theory which includes relativistic phenomenaSorry for this extended yakkin.

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baloneydetector#zero

Hey, some great thoughts there! And very close to reality. The gravitational field isn't the electromagnetic aether but it is remarkably similar.Each of the forces we know has its own "aether-like" field - gravitation, eletromagnetism , weak nuclear, and strong nuclear. The search for the unified field theory (that dominated Einstein's later life) has already met with great success. The EM and Weak fields have been shown to be aspects of one field: the electro-weak field. We have the unproven but highly-suggested Grand Unified Theory (GUT) which brings EM, weak and strong together as one Grand field.The problem has always been getting Gravitation and the other fields to work together. The problem is quantum mechanics. We have no complete quantum theory of gravitation yet, and there are no classical theories of Weak and Strong. However, we can look at the Maxwell's classical (original) theory of EM and combine that with Gravitation. This was done the best part of a century ago, though it was little noticed at the time.What you do is imagine space-time as being five dimensional, not four. There is an extra space dimension. And we look at the theory of General Relativity (gravitation) in this five dimensional universe. We then roll up the extra dimension, so that it appears as a little loop (by little I mean as far below the atomic scale as the atomic scale is from us). So the universe looks four dimensional (3 space plus time) but each point is not a point but actually a little loop, and you have to specify where on the loop you are looking, and this extra positional number is the fifth dimension. Ok, the universe looks just like ours with normal gravitation. BUT there is something extra! There is also electromagnetism. It wasn't there in the 5d theory before we rolled up that extra dimension, but the bit of gravitation that got rolled up now appears in our effective 4d theory as electromagnetism!!! So electromagnetism IS gravitation.Now this is far from proved, but this principle lies at the heart of some of our advanced theoretical ideas about the universe: String Theory, M Theory and SuperGravity. It is also key to why we LIKE extra dimensions in our theories, rather than viewing them as problems. Extra dimensions are one way of getting unification.

Thank you for the positive feedback. It is so seldom seen in these forums. Been trying to assimilate your 5th dimension. Learning something new at my age requires a lot of rocking time. Hope you had a good thankgiving.