Summations Only

Every single one of your objections is false: The issue over the quadrupole moment is how large it is (the measurements have large errors and there are data analysis issues) and what exactly it implies about the long term development of the universe and early development of matter. However it has nothing to do with the occurrence of the Big Bang, since the Cosmic Microwave Background, in which the quadrupole anomaly exists is a prediction of the Big Bang. Again nothing to do with the Big Bang itself, rather why do certain parameters have values that result in a flat universe. It's still a flat Big Bang universe though, as the parameters are the parameters of the Big Bang model. Explained a while ago now. It is due to CP violation, symmetry relating matter and antimatter. The laws of physics do treat matter and antimatter differently. Currently however that would leave us with a galaxy worth of matter rather than the vast amount of matter we see today. So we know there are probably particle physics effects which increase this asymmetry. A major issue of course, but one for particle physics and not the Big Bang. The expansion of space has no speed, this is a nonsensical objection. It is best to think of the expansion of space as the creation of new empty space, so for every meter cubed, a new micrometer cubed is produced. This can cause the whole universe to inflate in size "faster than light", but nothing is actually moving. It's silly to say it is missing when the experiments to detect it have just begun. If if it is missing isn't this a particle physics issue and not cosmological? You can't list everything physicists don't know as somehow being evidence against the Big Bang. I don't know what you have been reading, but those are two of the best matches between experiment and theory that the Big Bang possesses. Again, how is this a problem. We've detected dark matter indirectly by measuring how much it distorts spacetime and the measurements match the theory exactly. Dark Energy is not a thing, but only a name for a non-zero cosmological constant. This is not an issue for the Big Bang, the Big Bang can have a non-zero cosmological constant.Anyway I'm not going to go through your whole list. If you choose to respond to this, please use papers citing evidence against the claims above, not an opinion piece in the Detroit Metro or something similar.

That's not remotely true. The Higgs mechanism has no role to play in the formation of mass in the Big Bang theory. It explains how the Electroweak Force became the Electromagnetic and Weak Nuclear Forces. It certainly does not play a primary role in the Big Bang theory as the Higgs was first proposed decades after the Big Bang model.

Actually I do. Currently we know that something generates an electroweak charge in empty space that essentially splits the electroweak force in two (into the weak force and the electromagnetic force). The Higgs is nothing more than the simplest mechanism for doing this. So, if it isn't found, we begin looking at the other mechanisms. Nothing will happen to the Big Bang model.

I don't need to wonder about this as it has been experimentally refuted. There is an electroweak force. There are different predictions between a theory where the two forces are separate and theories where they come from one force. The second type of theories match experiment, the first don't. Also electroweak contributions to the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) have been observed. If there was no electroweak force, the Big Bang would be pretty much the same but with a slightly different CMB. This CMB has not been observed, but the CMB for an electroweak force has been. The theory would give somewhat different predictions. Those predictions have been falsified and Dark Matter has been observed. Dark Energy is not a "thing" in the same sense as Dark Matter, but again it gives you a slightly different Big Bang, CMB and galaxy evolution. All of which have been observed.

One of the people I work with has been working on one of the alternatives to the Higgs boson (known as Technicolor). In this model all of this electroweak epoch physics works out the same.This is because the Higgs is only a proposal for what provided the electroweak charge in empty space that split the force into two seperate forces (electromagnetic and weak nuclear). However as far as the physics of the electroweak epoch goes, what did it doesn't matter what provided the charge. All the different ideas of what provided that charge (Higgs, Technicolor, e.t.c.) give you the same physics in the electroweak era, particularly as far as the Big Bang is concerned.There is no debate on this. If you write down a quantum field theory to describe the electroweak force, the parts of it that relate to the electroweak epoch are unaffected by the mechanism of what eventually split the force in two. This is completely false. The quantum field theories which contain W and Z particles give very precise predictions for angles of emission, momenta and energies of particles that come out of the bubble chambers. This predictions match what is seen incredibly well.An example:
In the graph here, the vertical axis represents the number of electron pairs which rebound of each other and into a detector at the Tevatron. The horizontal axis is the energy (basically from their speed) of the electron pair.The blue line is the prediction of the Electroweak quantum field theory. The red dots with errors bars are the number actually detected at the Tevatron. Notice not only do the predictions and experiment match, but the theory predicts a spike at the Z-boson mass, around 90 GeV, which we see here. We see the same spike in several other such graphs (for other pairs of particles).We do not simply look at bubble chamber graphs and assume we see a Z-boson. We see exactly what the electroweak theory predicts and every single graph which is predicted to have the Z-boson spike displays exactly that spike.

Let me be very explicit about this:The electroweak theory has two compoenents:
1. The electroweak force that interacts with matter, because matter carries an electroweak charge. The basic electroweak force consists of the three A bosons and the single B boson interacting with various matter (fermion) particles.
At some point in the universes history the electroweak force separated into the elecromagnetic force and the weak force. The bosons were than the two W-bosons, the Z-boson and the photon.2. The mechanism for what separated the force. There are several proposed mechanisms. The Higgs is just the simplest mechanism and in fact a lot of physicists do not think it is correct. Even if something like the Higgs is discovered at the LHC, there will be years of analysis to find out if it is the basic Higgs or some of the more complicated versions that have been proposed. The basic idea is that some field (whose particles must have no spin, that's practically the only thing we know for certain), settled down, that is went to zero energy. However, unlike most fields, even at zero energy it still had its charge "switched on", this lead to empty space constantly having an electroweak charge, which separated the electroweak force.Now, only the physics in 1. is relevant to the Big Bang and all of this physics has been matched to experiment. We are currently debating 2., however no matter what is going on, 1. works out the exact same. Quantum field theory does not use Einstein's field equations. The electroweak theory matches the detection rates at the Tevatron and CERN for over 2,000 different particle interactions across huge range of energies. Every single prediction holds at well over the 95% confidence level. How is this a "transient truth". A proposal means nothing on its own and there are several issues with theories that propose such a "deeper level", like Bell's theorem and the Kochen-Specker theorem. Promised simplicity? Who promised this?
What inconveniences do you mean? What unification are you talking about?
Also for clarity there is the:
1. Electroweak theory as discussed above.
2. Quantum Chromodynamic, the theory of the strong nuclear force.
3. The Standard Model is the combination of 1. and 2. with extra terms to join them together. What do you mean? I don't see how the Higgs is a train wreck.

Could I have an example of this discussion, because I certainly haven't heard that anybody is going to announce the discovery of the Higgs at 2.1 sigma as the rest of the physics community would never trust such low confidence results. What is being discussed is combining results from different colliders to get 5 sigma "globally". This wouldn't be the best thing to do, it would be better to obtain two separate 5 sigma results, but it's hardly an Earth-shattering collapse of scientific standards. 5 sigma is the standard.Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.

Luckily the theory matches all the tens of thousands of interactions seen in those bubble chambers.
Can you point out what is wrong with a theory being tested in a collider? You haven't explained what is wrong with this kind of testing. Rather, you have simply asserted that it isn't good enough. That doesn't make any sense. Even if quantum field theory was wrong about the electroweak interaction, it doesn't diminish its success in other areas. The Higgs and other proposals predict a certain amount of photons will be scattered out from a beam of hadrons. So, there is no need for Occam's razor. You just observe the number of photons and see if the theory is correct. Occam's Razor would only be needed if there was some other simpler idea that matched all the data already gathered concerning hadron scattering and might match the photon output data currently being gatherd by the LHC, but there isn't.Your comparisons to the Aether are incorrect. The Higgs field is a quantum field, the Aether was a classical fluid. They are not remotely similar. Let me try this again with an analogy. In crystals, the light reflecting properties of the crystal are not affected by the specific atomic structure of the atoms forming the crystal, but the lattice structure of the crystal itself. This is not a case of ignoring what is going on on the atomic level, it's just a statement of fact.Similarly the exact mechanism that splits the electroweak force does not change the electroweak processes which are relevant to the Big Bang. Of course we are still interested in that mechanism, that is what the LHC is for. Indeed, that is true. The set of particle interactions relevant to the Higgs at the LHC have not been fully analysed, so we cannot conclude anything from them yet. All predictions for the electroweak theory, with the exception of a small number concerning the Higgs have been tested at the 5 sigma level.The photon data has not been analysed yet so we don't know about the Higgs.How is a theory which has thousands of results secured at over five sigma a "transient truth"?More importantly, why do you care so much about the Higgs? It has nothing to do with the Big Bang, you do realise you're criticising an area of particle physics that's not really relevant to cosmology. A proposal. That's just a list of things the standard model doesn't explain. It's not a departure from parsimony. Neither the Standard Model nor the Electroweak theory are T.O.E.s, nor were they ever intended to be. What is unclear about it? I would be happy to explain. You haven't explained why the Higgs is a train wreck. Once again, what do you mean?

Well, you indicated that it wasn't clear, what parts of it are confusing to you?

I do not wish to diminish what Shouryya Ray has done, obviously a talented young man, with a strong talent for solving differential equations.The results he found have been known for a long time and are well within the range of classical analysis.More to the point however, there are several "unsolved problems" in physics. There's always more you could ask in several sub-areas. These can remain unsolved since the answers are not a pressing issue.Such small problems, when solved, are not comparable to taking down an entire framework like the Big Bang armed with something any physicist knows inside out, like conservation laws.

The Friedmann—Lematre—Robertson—Walker model does not violate the conservation laws you mentioned. If you know the mathematics this can be checked in a few lines. In fact I could demonstrate that it doesn't violate conservation of momentum in a short enough post if anybody is interested.

Well here goes!The Friedmann—Lematre—Robertson—Walker metric is given as follows: This formula gives you the distance between any two events in space time, but I need to explain the variables it uses: is cosmological time. That is, time measured by somebody at rest with respect to the motion of the homogeneous fluid the universe looks like on large scales. Or, in slightly different words, somebody moving at the average speed of the universe. is the difference time difference between two events as measured by this notion of time. are co-moving coordinates, coordinates that ignore the expansion of the universe.
Imagine if New York was suddenly inflated to be ten times larger, but you gave everything the same address, even though Manhattan is now ten times further away from Brooklyn. The street index would then be a comoving coordinate system. are the differences in the co-moving locations of events.In the distance formula there is the scale factor , this accounts for the fact that the comoving coordinates don't give you the real distance. tells you how big one unit of comoving coordinate really is, at the time So, if you take two events and plug their coordinate differences into the formula above you get how far away the events are from each-other in spacetime.This formula is the metric and describes the expanding universe of the Big Bang model.So, conservation of momentum.
Conservation of momentum is related to spatial translation invariance.Spatial invariance:
This means that if I take some physical system and let it evolve in time, let's say it moves from point a to point b. Then if I took the exact same system and started it off at a point c, two meters from a, then it would end up and a point d, two meters from b.
That is the laws of physics wouldn't care about the particular point you choose to start the system at, the end points will be as far away from each-other as the beginning points, but outside that there is no difference.
How could it not? The systems have the same momentum to start with, so the basic trajectory is the exact same. The only way to make the system evolve differently at the two locations is if it gained or lost momentum over time depending on where you placed it. That is, the laws of physics would have to be different in different places. So,Laws of physics identical in different locations (known as spatial translation symmetry) implies conservation of momentum.So in order to show the Big Bang model conserves momentum we'd have to show it doesn't care about location in space. So lets me take two terms as an example:1. Let's say I move everything in space by some amount of comoving units. Well the time difference between two events is unaffected. So is unaffected.2. I'll just take on of the space terms as they are all the same. is the difference in the x-coordinate between two events. That is: , where is the location of the first event and the second. So if I move everything by units then these locations become: and The difference between the events is then: So, it's exactly the same as before.Hence the whole metric notices no difference between moving everything by some amount "a", there is no difference between different points of space as far as it is concerned.So momentum is conserved.

Energy is not a relativistically invariant notion, so to use it in general in General Relativity is meaningless. You should instead look at Stress-Energy, the relativistic analogue of energy. This is in fact conserved always.Edited by Son Goku, : Changed spelling.

I have to keep communication in mind. A proof of the conservation of four-momentum would be too involved for a forum post as I would first have to prove Noether's theorem. Before I deal with the rest of your post, could you tell me how a "lack of energy conservation defies the materialistic rationalist view of the universe"?Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.

It's always my pleasure to post this stuff, I hope it's useful for others. Indeed and a wee bit of Poitn, I don't even follow football, but my Dad and my wife insisted!Edited by Son Goku, : No reason given.