29 October 2006
Nobel Prize for Big Bang is a Fizzer
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"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe them." —George Orwell
"Consensus discourages dissent... It is the enemy of science, just as it is the triumph of politics. A theory accepted by 99 percent of scientists may be wrong. Committees... that decide which projects shall be funded are inevitably run by scientists who are at peace with the dominant theory. Changing the consensus on cosmology will be an arduous task, like turning a supertanker with a broken rudder.
...the competition of theories has been the driving force behind scientific progress. Isolated individuals and private companies have been the most fruitful sources of this advance.”
—paraphrasing Tom Bethell from his book,
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 was shared between John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background [CMB] radiation."
>> This map of the ancient sky shows the minute variations in temperature and density discovered by the team led by astrophysicist George Smoot. Over billions of years, gravity magnified these small differences into the clusters of galaxies we observe today. (COBE Project)
They announced in 1992 the discovery of residual heat from the big bang, as well as minute variations in temperature across the sky that indicated the beginnings of structure in the early universe that evolved into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. "Those measurements really confirmed our picture of the Big Bang," Smoot said. "By studying the fluctuations in the microwave background, we found a tool that allowed us to explore the early universe, to see how it evolved and what it's made of."
>> "Human beings have had the audacity to conceive a theory of creation and now, we are able to test that theory." -George F. Smoot
>> NASA Scientist Dr. John C. Mather shows some of the earliest data from the NASA Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) Satellite during a press conference.
The results from COBE were "the greatest discovery of the century, if not all times," the British physicist Stephen Hawking has said.
"These measurements... marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science," the Nobel jury said in its citation.
Dissenting voices
David Suzuki in a recent interview made the practical observation that ideas considered "red-hot" when he left university are now considered laughable. Science advances by incremental steps, he said. Our mistake is to place too much emphasis on those steps when they occur. By doing so we may be missing the bigger picture.
This highlights a problem faced by the Nobel Prize committee. If an award is granted too soon after one of science's incremental steps their decision may shortly prove to be an embarrassment.
I predict that the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2006 will have some present committee members red-faced because the "Big Bang" theory it rewards is already dead! Technically, the Big Bang is not even a theory. It is a hypothesis that, despite the Nobel committee's imprimatur, remains devoid of real experimental and descriptive verification.
Strictly, theories are hypotheses that have been tested and found valid. The Big Bang is a highly adaptable hypothesis that has been repeatedly modified after failing tests. Some of those modifications are incredible, involving the invention of "dark" matter that responds to gravity but not to electromagnetic radiation. There is no known matter that does not involve electric charge and/or magnetism, so how is this possible? More recently, "dark energy" has been added to the Bang because it is perceived that it is accelerating. The Big Bang is, by scientific standards, an execrable hypothesis that defies the principles of physics and common sense. Future historians of science will judge this era insane.
Dennis Overbye described the situation in an essay in the NY Times, "You might wonder just exactly what kind of triumph "precision cosmology" represents when 96 percent of the universe is unknown dark stuff. Stars and people we know about. But the best guess for dark matter is that it is some kind of subatomic particle that will be discovered someday.
Dark energy was a complete surprise. How often do you toss a handful of gravel into the air and the rocks speed up as they leave your hand and disappear into the sky? The leading contender for an explanation is a fudge factor representing the repulsive force of empty space that Einstein danced in and out of his equations 75 or so years ago. But no one really knows."
The observation that saved the Big Bang theory from the trash in 1991 was the discovery honoured by this Nobel Prize. However, it remains a bold assumption that the COBE results can be interpreted as the afterglow of a Big Bang.
The truth is, as one might expect, much simpler. At the heart of the Big Bang hypothesis is the interpretation of the redshift of faint distant objects as proof that the universe is expanding.
Now called the "Hubble expansion," it is an interpretation that was not supported by Hubble. History has been rewritten. As my sadly missed colleague, Amy Acheson, wrote in 2003: "The disproof of the Big Bang is already nearly 40 years old. Halton Arp's first major paper on discordant redshifts was submitted to the The Astrophysical Journal in 1966, at a time when he had just finished his Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies and was listed by the Association of Astronomical Professionals as 'most outstanding young astronomer' and among the top 20 astronomers in the world. The editor, Chandrasekhar, rejected that paper because of its subject, without even being submitted to peer review.
>> Amy Acheson
Concerning M87, 2C273, and M49, one of several aligned configurations discussed in that first paper, Arp said, (Seeing Red, 1998) 'Perhaps even more convincing is the common-sense question: Is it significant that the brightest quasar in the sky falls in the dominant cluster in the sky -- and forms a pair with the brightest radio galaxy in the cluster, almost exactly aligned across the brightest galaxy in the center of the cluster?' ... It is incomprehensible to me how astronomers could have continued believing that quasars were at their redshift distance after even this one single result. More than 30 years ago astronomy took a gamble, against odds of a million to one, that this observation was an accident. Arp was squeezed out of his Palomar telescope assignment because the allotment committee would not permit telescope time to any non-Big Bang project.
Of course, Amy was not the only one to have sounded a warning. Carl Sagan wrote in his book COSMOS in 1980, "If Arp is right, the exotic mechanisms proposed to explain the energy source of the distant quasars—supernova chain reactions, super-massive black holes and the like—would be unnecessary. Quasars need not then be very distant."
29 October 2006
Nobel Prize for Big Bang is a Fizzer
And in New Scientist of May 22, 2004, an
"Open Letter to the Scientific Community" was published. It has now been signed by hundreds of researchers around the globe. The letter notes: "the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centred cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles."
01 March 2010
Our Misunderstood Sun
When we assign names to theories — Newton’s law of gravity, Einstein’s theories of relativity— we impede progress by attaching ideas to celebrities. To question these theories is seen as an attack on the celebrity, with all of the attendant visceral responses to such an ‘intrusion.’ But the history of science shows that it is often an intruder’s fresh ideas that eventually trigger the biggest advances. Dr. Bernard Newgrosh calls such intruders “eminent outsiders.” His favorite example is none other than the astronomer William Herschel (1738-1822),
“who was born in Hanover, joined a regimental band at 14, went to England at 21 and worked as a musician and composer. He also instructed himself in mathematics and astronomy and constructing his own reflecting telescopes.” Another was Michael Faraday (1791-1867), who
“was born in Surrey, apprenticed to a book-binder and was largely self-educated.”
Newgrosh notes,
“how easy it used to be even for entirely self-taught outsiders and part-time amateurs to break into mainstream academia... Not only does this not happen in the modern world, where academia is distrustful of outsiders and its publications are by and large closed to non-members of the academic elite but the general perception is that if you have no academic qualification you cannot be recognized as having any expertise.” The Royal Society is a club that would reject a Herschel or Faraday today.
