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Author Topic:   The Big Bang is NOT Scientific
Sylas
Member (Idle past 5260 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 19 of 301 (203199)
04-27-2005 10:55 PM
Reply to: Message 14 by lost-apathy
04-27-2005 10:12 PM


Re: Cranky mode
lost-apathy writes:
quote:
How do you explain the michelson-morley experiment? What about the time dilation effect on the GPS satellites? Read this link.
This was written by Jorge Pullin.
"Jorge Pullin is the Horace Hearne Chair in theoretical Physics." -physicsdaily.com - physicsdaily Resources and Information.
Theory - abstract thought : SPECULATION
Dictionary by Merriam-Webster: America's most-trusted online dictionary
Careful, lost-apathy. The request to behave applies to you also. If you start being deliberately troublesome, you will incur my official wrath in my admin role.
You have appealed to a dictionary to justify an ad hominem against Professor Pullin and as an excuse for avoiding a good question. The definition of theory in the Merriam-Webster that you have cited has six alternatives. You have quoted number 2 only, which is not the one used in science. The proper definition in this context, and in the context of Professor Pullin's profession, is number 5, which reads as follows:
quote:
5 : a plausible or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena (wave theory of light)
That is, Professor Pullin is well placed to EXPLAIN observed phenomenon. It is part of his job description.
The Michelson-Morley experiment was performed in 1887, and lead to Michelson winning the Nobel prize in 1907. It is a real phenomenon, and the explanation is special relativity; and indeed the Michelson-Morley experiment is good evidence for relativity, since Newtonian physics is unable to explain it.
The link you were given by Troy, and written by Pullin, was in relation to the question about the modern Global Positioning System, and this also stands as good evidence for relativity.
The question for you is, since you reject relativity, how do YOU explain these observed phenomenon; this evidence?
Cheers -- Sylas

This message is a reply to:
 Message 14 by lost-apathy, posted 04-27-2005 10:12 PM lost-apathy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 23 by lost-apathy, posted 04-28-2005 6:27 PM Sylas has not replied

Sylas
Member (Idle past 5260 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 35 of 301 (203489)
04-28-2005 8:51 PM
Reply to: Message 25 by lost-apathy
04-28-2005 6:47 PM


Tests of relativity
lost-apathy writes:
As for the one article you linked me I read it and it is quite interesting.
Here's a quote from that same article.
"At present one cannot easily perform tests of relativity with the system because the SV clocks are actively steered to be within 1 microsecond of Universal Coordinated Time (USNO).
Several relativistic effects are too small to affect the system at current accuracy levels, but may become important as the system is improved; these include gravitational time delays, frequency shifts of clocks in satellites due to earth's quadrupole potential, and space curvature."
From what i get from reading this is that currently our technology is not precise enough to measure to such a degree. He said it in his own words. "At present one cannot easily perform tests of relativity." Now if you cannot test it how can it be science? Science is based on ACCURATE tests and many observations.
You’ve misunderstood what the quoted extracts are saying, and you've ignored the bits of the article that explicitly contradict your other assertions.
Relativity can be tested just fine. Professor Pullin is explaining that it is hard to use the GPS system to perform such tests because of the way it is designed. You need to set up your own experiments; such as were described plainly in the article.
Many extremely accurate tests were performed nearly thirty years ago, which confirmed with considerable precision and accuracy the relativistic effects that impact upon the GPS system. Engineers of the modern GPS system therefore took this well confirmed scientific model into account, and actively adjust the clocks to track time at ground level. As a result, those clocks are not measuring observable time for the satellites. They are designed to be used for locating positions on the Earth’s surface; they are not designed to perform tests of relativity.
Anyone with the appropriate resources can still put an atomic clock in orbit and measure time properly, to perform the same tests that have been performed previously. Other tests can be performed as well, and more easily. The real hard observations you have yet to explain are the experiments and observations described that confirm relativistic physics and the need for special engineering of the GPS system.
Immediately before the paragraph you quoted, there is a description of the NTS-2 satellite in 1977, as follows:
quote:
At the time of launch of the first NTS-2 satellite (June 1977), which contained the first Cesium clock to be placed in orbit, there were some who doubted that relativistic effects were real. A frequency synthesizer was built into the satellite clock system so that after launch, if in fact the rate of the clock in its final orbit was that predicted by GR, then the synthesizer could be turned on bringing the clock to the coordinate rate necessary for operation. The atomic clock was first operated for about 20 days to measure its clock rate before turning on the synthesizer. The frequency measured during that interval was +442.5 parts in 10^12 faster than clocks on the ground; if left uncorrected this would have resulted in timing errors of about 38,000 nanoseconds per day. The difference between predicted and measured values of the frequency shift was only 3.97 parts in 10^12, well within the accuracy capabilities of the orbiting clock. This then gave about a 1% validation of the combined motional and gravitational shifts for a clock at 4.2 earth radii.
That is one of the many accurate and repeatable scientific tests on which modern physics is based.
The second comment you quoted observes that there are still other aspects of relativity that do not substantially affect the GPS system at its current levels of precision. Some of those effects are well tested also, by other means, and if more accuracy is required in the GPS system than it may need to be reengineered to take those into account as well.
General relativity continues to be subject to new and more stringent tests, as our technology improves and as we gain the capacity to perform those tests. For example, in October last year, a confirmation of the frame-dragging effect was made from analysis of the orbits of the LAGEOS and LAGEOS II satellites, with an accuracy of about 1%, and with systematic error limited to 10% of the observed effect. There is at present another experiment in operation, called Gravity-Probe B, which is making an even more accurate determination of the effect, in order to give a new test of relativity. The effect is too small to make a difference to GPS systems; but it is testable by scientists who design experiments to explore the observable universe and guide the development of scientific models capable of explaining their observations.
Cheers -- Sylas

This message is a reply to:
 Message 25 by lost-apathy, posted 04-28-2005 6:47 PM lost-apathy has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 36 by coffee_addict, posted 04-28-2005 8:59 PM Sylas has not replied
 Message 37 by JonF, posted 04-28-2005 9:30 PM Sylas has not replied

Sylas
Member (Idle past 5260 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 55 of 301 (203890)
04-30-2005 3:33 AM
Reply to: Message 53 by lost-apathy
04-30-2005 1:17 AM


Re: Observations, Philosophy, and Lost Apathy
Sorry if this post is long I hope it will still be of some value to you.
lost-apathy writes:
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.
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.
lost-apathy writes:
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.
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:
lost-apathy writes:
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.
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:
In The Meaning of Relativity (1922, p 55), A. Einstein writes:
The principle of inertia, in particular, seems to compel us to ascribe physically objective properties to the space-time continuum.
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.
lost-apathy writes:
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.
That’s not sufficiently coherent to mean anything.
lost-apathy writes:
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?
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 ΩK < 0)
Cheers — Sylas
PS. 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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 53 by lost-apathy, posted 04-30-2005 1:17 AM lost-apathy has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 57 by lost-apathy, posted 04-30-2005 8:06 AM Sylas has replied

Sylas
Member (Idle past 5260 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 58 of 301 (203915)
04-30-2005 8:45 AM
Reply to: Message 57 by lost-apathy
04-30-2005 8:06 AM


Re: Observations, Philosophy, and Lost Apathy
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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 57 by lost-apathy, posted 04-30-2005 8:06 AM lost-apathy has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 60 by Phat, posted 04-30-2005 9:00 AM Sylas has replied

Sylas
Member (Idle past 5260 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 62 of 301 (203923)
04-30-2005 9:37 AM
Reply to: Message 60 by Phat
04-30-2005 9:00 AM


Re: Observations, Philosophy, and Lost Apathy
Phatboy writes:
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.
That's a good way of putting it.
In fact, we can go a step further. By definition, everywhere was the same place. And everything in space was at that same place also, because there was no other place to be. It is space itself that was at one place, not only things in space.
Cheers -- Sylas

This message is a reply to:
 Message 60 by Phat, posted 04-30-2005 9:00 AM Phat has not replied

Sylas
Member (Idle past 5260 days)
Posts: 766
From: Newcastle, Australia
Joined: 11-17-2002


Message 67 of 301 (205144)
05-05-2005 2:30 AM
Reply to: Message 66 by coffee_addict
05-05-2005 2:08 AM


Re: Observations, Philosophy, and Lost Apathy
Beat you to it... see Message 35. It's a good news item, and one worth repeating. Gravity Probe B is right now busy testing the same thing to much greater precision. I suspect lost-apathy has probably learned a few things, and should not be assumed to have the same views as expressed early in the thread.
Cheers -- Sylas
This message has been edited by Sylas, 05-05-2005 02:32 AM

This message is a reply to:
 Message 66 by coffee_addict, posted 05-05-2005 2:08 AM coffee_addict has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 68 by coffee_addict, posted 05-05-2005 5:15 PM Sylas has not replied
 Message 69 by Eta_Carinae, posted 05-05-2005 6:25 PM Sylas has not replied

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