Theories of Cosmological Origins: Are They Science?

Ok, let me try to take a stab at this.You wrote

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Anything at and everything prior to T=10-43 has to be believed by faith.

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From what I know of physics (and I am a college physics and chem major), nothing about prior to T=10^-43 is known except that our current model just doesn't apply there. Unless you're including "I don't know" in the faith catagory, I simply don't know how you could describe this part of science as faith.

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If the singularity is a mathematical equation and not physical then it can not be the universe.

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You're right that the singularity is not the universe. I don't think anyone is going to dispute with you here. The singularity is a description of a state of unknown that so far science has been unable to describe or model. If you have trouble comprehending this, simply replace the word "singularity" with "absolute unknown". Nothing we know about the universe can help us understand the singularity. About the only thing we know about it right now is none of our theories and mathematical models work in such condition.Again, if you want to place the "I don't know" in the faith catagory, then I guess we are in agreement.

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The only way that universe can be there is to believe it is there by "FAITH" there is no evidence for it being there.

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Sure, there is. Based on our mathematical model of such an early universe, it had to be very dense and very hot. In other words, the whole universe back then had to be glowing hot. If the universe expanded to its current size from this very small pea size, the prediction under the mathematical model was that there must be an after glow of this very dense, very hot condition. What's more, this after glow should be seen just about evenly throughout the universe everywhere no matter what direction we look. Sure enough, the cosmic background radiation was discovered. This cosmic background radiation is found everywhere we look at in the universe. It is just about evenly distributed throughout the cosmos. About the only thing that we can possibly imagine that could have placed this cosmic background radiation this evenly everywhere in the universe is if the universe started out as a very small, very dense, very hot thing.

ICANT writes

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Why did it have to be so hot?

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Several reasons, actually. When things are compacted, they tend to heat up. This is pretty much the same for everything we know of. But another thing is it had to be very hot in order to leave a foot print as prevalent and homogeneous as the cosmic background radiation.

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Why could it just not exist?

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I suppose you could see it that way also.

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You say this point which is a mathamatical equation can't tell us anything.

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So without faith how do we know anything is there.

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That's just it. We don't know anything was there. Human intuition, however, tells us that since there was something there a little bit later, there probably must have been something there right before that point.Suppose you are walking along in a forest. On your path is a fallen tree. From the look of it, it probably was very recent that the tree fell. Burnt marks indicate that lightning was the cause. I'm pretty sure it's reasonable to assume from the burnt marks that it was very hot when the lightning struck the tree. Sure, we could also assume that the tree simply poofed into existence fallen and with burnt marks. But ask yourself which assumption out of the two is more feasible?

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You do know other predicted the CMB before Gamow and did a better job and they did not use the Big Bang Model.

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If you're referring to the old "tired light" concept where the combined light of the fixed stars in the heavens contributed a calculable temperature of space, I don't know where you got the "better job" part from. Those theories assumed that the stars in our galaxy were all there was and there was no external galaxies. If anything, those scientists back then lacked sufficient data so they worked with whatever they had available.If you are referring to something else, please let me know. I've done extensive research into this matter in the past for a project.

ICANT writes

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You should have seen how these guys pounded me when I mentioned before in another thread.

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I've skimmed through that thread. From what I was able to glean from it, they pounded you because of your persistence to treat the word "singularity" as a thing rather than a mathematical description of a state of complete unknown.

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If I am in a forest I would expect trees to be there.

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Well, ok. Scratch the forest part. Suppose you're walking in a desert or an arid environment. The analogy stands.

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If I am looking nothing I expect nothing to be there. And since science can tell me nothing I have to guess. Add an assumption, or just have faith that something was there.

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I think this is where other people might have a problem with the way you are presenting this.Many, if not most, people would agree that not all assumptions are faith based. Barrack Obama appears racially black to me so I assume that at some point in the past his ancestors must have originated from Africa. This assumption is not faith based at all. It is based on intuition from my previous experiences.From our previous experiences, if we've seen something at, say, point B and it is also moving toward point C, we could safely assume that at some point in the past the thing was at point A. This is not faith. This is simply an assumption based on human intuition that is derived from past experiences.From the evidence, we know that at very near T=0, the universe was very dense and very hot. Human intuition that is derived from past experiences would suggest that there must have been something right before this point that is very near T=0.Please do not confuse this type of assumption to faith based assumption. An example of faith based assumption is the belief in angels. There has been absolutely no physical evidence of the existence of angels. While some people have claimed to have seen angels, most have not. The belief in them, however, persist. This assumption of their existence is faith based.

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But if it was, where did it come from?

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Your guess is as good as mine.

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You call it anything you want too.

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Well, not really.

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As I have stated throughout the only way it can be there is if I believe it is there and that is faith.

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I must say that you have a very odd perception of what the word faith means.Perhaps this will clear it up. Many, if not most, people would agree with me that if I come across a fallen tree with burnt marks, especially after a stormy night, that my believing that lightning struck that tree down is not a faith based assumption. Do you dispute this?

ICANT writes

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What would happen if we could find something to make Max Born a little more of a prophet?

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Discovery of H2, in Space Explains Dark Matter and Redshift
Published in 21st CENTURY Science & Technology, Spring 2000

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Could you provide a link?

ICANT writes

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Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

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Some would argue that this is a useless definition because of its cryptic nature that could be applied to just about anything. From this definition, I could very well say that our knowledge of the aromatic nature of benzene is based on faith.

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That is a normal assumption. But if you did not examine the tree stump and the burn mark because time was too short or for any other reason and went on your merry way believing it was caused by the lightning the night before you would be accepting that fact on faith.

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1 - I did examine the burn marks.
2 - There was a thunder storm last night.
3 - The tree is fallen with no visible sawing mark.

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If you examined the stump and it was a fresh break then you examined the burn mark and found it to be fresh, then you would have pretty good circumstantial evidence.

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And circumstancial evidence for a very dense and very hot early universe as well as the inflationary nature of the universe is exactly what we have.I'm beginning to suspect that you're just being difficult on purpose.

ICANT, I just skimmed through the article. I have to question some of the claims. For example, here is something that caught my eyes.

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We also showed that the presence of large amounts of the hard-to-detect molecular hydrogen in interstellar space could provide an alternative explanation to the Big Bang theory, by explaining the observed redshift as a result of the delayed propagation of light through space, caused by the collision of photons with interstellar matter.

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First of all, what's delayed propagation of light through space? This is just a fancy/deceptive way of saying the light is obscured by space debris. The way this sentence is written is designed to distract us from the fact that such an event doesn't cause a red-shift of the light spectrum.

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Our prediction, based on a critique of many of the commonly held assumptions of cosmology, was the result of a serious study of the molecular structure of hydrogen and of the astronomical observation of atomic hydrogen in space. However, the astrophysicists preferred to ignore H2, and instead to hypothesize the existence of weird objects.

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This paragraph is a dead give away of the joking nature of this article. MACHOS and WIMPS are very real objects. We've observed them and their affects in deep space. They're just normal objects that are very large floating up there in space. Jupiter could be seen as a MACHO. There's really nothing special about these things.With that said, combining all of the visible matter, we're still about 70% short of the necessary mass to account for what we observe. Hence we call the missing mass "dark matter". Dark matter is exactly that, it's stuff that we haven't found yet.Let me ask you this question. Suppose we just found a body. Autopsy reveals that the person was murdered. The authority wants to call the murderer "dark person" simply because right now they have no idea who the murderer is. The author of that article is using deceptive language to trick the reader into believing the authority is implying that a troll or a leprachan did the murder when in fact all the term "dark person" really means is they don't know who did the murder.Dark matter is just that, stuff that we haven't found or thought of yet. Nothing "weird" about them.

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It is generally accepted that atomic hydrogen is by far the most abundant particle in the universe. It is also well established that about 10 times as much molecular hydrogen as atomic hydrogen solves the missing mass problem. Finally, Valentijn adds: "The halo culture that has grown up around the dark matter problem might never have arisen if the ISO results had been known earlier."

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I tend to suspect an article when it starts with "it is generally accepted..." and also "it is well established that..."

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Molecular hydrogen is rarely looked for in space. In most papers in astrophysics, the word hydrogen is mentioned without distinguishing whether it is atomic or molecular. Yet it is a well-known fact of basic chemistry that atomic hydrogen is extremely unstable, and that it reacts violently to produce molecular hydrogen, which is extremely stable. Given a bottle of pure atomic hydrogen, one would expect an immediate energetic explosion, producing molecular hydrogen at a very high temperature.

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This paragraph is simply false. The nebulae clouds that we see are composed almost entirely of hydrogen gas. There's no denying this. The author is using a strawman argument. In fact, now that I think about it, this whole article is based entirely on a strawman argument. Hydrogen gas is the most abundant thing in the universe. Nobody is disputing this. So, what's the argument here?

bluescat48 writes

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To me the wiki second meaning is what it appears that most on here are using.

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Actually, I think most people on here are using both of the wiki definitions of faith you cited.

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1.To trust:
Believing a certain variable will act or has the potential to act a
specific way despite the potential influence and probability of known or unknown change.

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2. To believe without reason:
Believing impulsively, or believing based upon social traditions or personal hopes.

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Both describe a system of belief that does not require consistency.By the way, I've been encountering people's tendency to mix up the words "trust" and "faith" for the last few years. I think there is a quiet movement that is trying to make the two words synonymous in the English language.

ICANT writes

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The dynamical equilibrium model predicted the CMB better than the Big Bang Theory, prior to the prediction of the Big Bang Theory.

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Could you please add some explanations to your assertions?

ICANT writes

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I was pointing out that each had a set of numbers and 11 years later when the CMB was found one set of numbers was better than the other set.

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As I pointed out in an earlier post that you ignored, they had some assumptions that were completely wrong. If they had the available data like we do now and did the same calculations again, their numbers would have been light years away from the correct values.

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Remember all I can know is what I find to read and there is no way for me to prove it right or wrong unless I find someone who has refuted it.

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Noone needs to refute their results because new data after their calculations pretty much proved them wrong. Their entire calculations and predictions were based solely on the assumption that there was no other galaxies beside ours and that the radiation from the stars in our galaxy were enough to give our local space a temperature. But the cosmic background radiation is found not just in our galaxy but also outside of it. It is everywhere no matter where we look. This result fits in perfectly with the prediction of the big bang.I honestly don't know how you can ignore these important facts like this.