Electric Universe

[2thePoint]

I need to clarify that, other than at extreme redshift values, redshift is not used to determine distance. Otherwise your own statement wouldn't make sense: "the object with higher redshift is nearer than the object with the lower redshift"? I hope you'll agree with me that you can't meaningfully say that unless you have some independent, non-redshift way of measuring the distance.

Forgive my failure once again to adhere to academic rigor worthy of a doctoral thesis. This is a casual conversation among non-experts (AFAIK) and I have made no claim to being any kind of scientist or cosmologist. Yet in your following paragraph you do explain this independent measurement method. And if redshift is not used, albeit partially, to determine distance, then it's a meaningless factor upon which to claim that the universe is expanding. So I think you're actually trying to be too precise in terminology here.

What happens, rather, is that astronomers measured the distance to celestial objects,

How, exactly?

and then independently measured the redshift,

Again, exactly how?

and found that in most cases they were linearly correlated - Hubble's Law. But if you have any evidence that shows that they aren't, such as those cases you're talking about with a high-z source in front of a low-z source, I'm very interested to look at them.

So two arbitrary assumptions verify each other? And if the first, unspecified method is the "gold standard", who needs the second? Of what purpose is red-shift in telling us anything about distance or movement when we already have a verifiable, scientifically rigorous method of measuring such distances?

FWIW, here is a video that mentions some of the anomalies: ‪BigBangFraud‬‏ - YouTube

(It should also be noted that in recent years the importance of red-shift as evidence for the Big Bang has been overtaken by the cosmic microwave background, of which we now have very good measurements using satellite microwave telescopes. But we'll settle one thing at a time.)

Yet another reason to discount red-shift as a meaningful indicator of distance or movement. But this too is contested and heavily dependent upon underlying presumptions.

As I've said, the standard (Hoyle's) steady state model imagines a universe where new matter is continually being created throughout empty space. This resolves the problem since you can get both stuff flying outwards continually, and the density of matter remaining constant - meaning to say that density doesn't decrease running forwards in time, and also that it doesn't increase running backwards in time, and therefore there is no singularity and so no Big Bang.

But this is still not steady state; it is a continually changing universe that in essence is a giant perpetual motion machine. Where does the new matter come from, is it magic? Things can't cause themselves to exist, and having a beginning (required by the word "new") eliminates an eternal existence--- unless another fudge factor is added, that being "it came from somewhere else"... and into an endless, unobservable regression. (I haven't watched the move Inception, but it sounds like this.) Even with all this, there must be some source or point of origin where all this stuff is coming from, and thus a kind of singularity, bang or not. (Expansion is expansion regardless of the speed.)

Also note that the Electric Universe, if I recall correctly, does not have continuous matter creation - and so you can't have both at the same time.

This is going back to more of what I had in mind with the term "steady state"; what we see now is what it has been and will be.

Simply because GR gives you the mathematics that tells you, given a certain redshift, how fast this redshifted object is going. If that relationship is wrong, then GR is wrong.

Sounds like a classic tautology to me, but then, I'm no expert in GR.

Let me ask you two questions. Firstly, when have we ever seen any other science behave like this?

It seems to be a modern, western phenomenon. Climategate, anyone? And a quick google search will turn up many testimonies of blacklisting, though you may have to drill down a bit, because such embarrassments to science's reputation of impartiality and love of fact over theory are frowned upon. The pharmaceuticals industry is apparently rife with political and corporate coverups, and surely you acknowledge the many frauds that have been uncovered about alleged missing links in biology. Astronomy is no less political and cosmologists are no less human. It happens.

Indeed, Bohr subsequently fought hard to champion the new physics, and Einstein fought hard against it. We remember them both as legendary physicists: which only goes to show that your career won't get thrown into the trash bin just because you support new science, or don't support new science. (Einstein's lesser-known colleagues Podolsky and Rosen also became well-known for working together on the EPR paradox, too, so this doesn't just apply to people who had strong reputations to start with.)

Agree that disputes have happened of course. But careers can, have, and do get trashed if there is sufficient control by one side. Remember Galileo, the case anti-theists love to trot out all the time? He was not against religion but the science of his day, and the problem was that the church was marching lockstep with science at the time. His career, even his very life, depended on conformity to the will of the powerful majority. But today the peer pressure is much more pervasive, as told in the Cosmology Statement.

Don't confuse this with the well-known (and unfortunate) fact that non-standard cosmologies don't get enough telescope time. People like Halton Arp keep complaining about being shut out of major institutes: they conveniently forget that about 80% of experimental proposals from standard cosmology are also rejected.

I don't have the means to either confirm or deny this.

We simply don't have enough telescopes to go around, and we'll have even less telescopes if after five years of free rein with the Hubble telescope Arp decides "I was completely off-base after all, sorry folks, now who was next in line?".

Didn't he miraculously find that scope time in Europe?

But this could all be solved in a very simple way: get the creationist folks with the deep pockets to just build a telescope complex for non-standard cosmology. Then they'd get all the telescope time they wanted. (The fact that they'd rather build a dino museum and a faux ark tells you where their true priorities lie, by the way.)

DEEP... POCKETS. Creation scientists aren't going to get taxpayer help anytime soon either. But I'm rather disappointed that you'd take this opportunity to engage in petty flaming against people who aren't here to defend themselves.

But from a theoretical point of view, there's no problem with believing that the universe is made of plasma, or rubber duckies all the way down for that matter.

Oh please. Plasma theory is on the level of rubber duckies now? My background is in electronics, and one thing we know without doubt is that everything in the universe is made of atoms, each of which is a little, powerful electromagnet. That the universe should exhibit electrical properties then comes as no surprise but a very reasonable deduction from what we observe about electromagnetism. Nothing rubber, or petty, about that.

I'm sorry, but when someone resorts to such tactics, further effort at civilized discussion is futile. But I thank you for the good parts.

 

[shernren]

Oh please. Plasma theory is on the level of rubber duckies now? My background is in electronics, and one thing we know without doubt is that everything in the universe is made of atoms, each of which is a little, powerful electromagnet. That the universe should exhibit electrical properties then comes as no surprise but a very reasonable deduction from what we observe about electromagnetism. Nothing rubber, or petty, about that.

I'm sorry, but when someone resorts to such tactics, further effort at civilized discussion is futile. But I thank you for the good parts.

Great. So you're telling me that you have not looked up standard candles and the distance ladder, and you have not looked up what redshift actually is, and suddenly I'm the one using dubious tactics when I was just trying to inject a little humor into the discussion?

Seriously.

Let me cut to the chase of what's wrong with plasma cosmology: if your background is in electronics you should know that, in the absence of a very large potential difference, positive and negative charges will recombine to form a neutral aggregate. The length scale on which this happens is far smaller than the size of the observable universe. Therefore, the universe as a whole is electrically neutral, meaning that electromagnetic forces play no role in the long-range ordering of the universe. QED.

Let me also say that I did not take any courses in cosmology in university. (Yes, I did a GR course with a project on the causal structure of the universe. That's not a cosmology course, because I didn't do any academic study on the observational side of things.) But I have a general background in physics and I've spent years understanding the evidence in origins discussions.

When we first started discussing, you asked for an expert opinion. I tried my best to give you a good introduction to the issues, and then you think I'm trying to adhere to "academic rigor worthy of a doctoral thesis". Fact is I'm not. (A doctoral thesis is far more rigorous than this.) But I do expect you to try to learn at the very least how astronomical distance measurements and redshift measurements work.

Or is my opinion only worth your time if it happens to strengthen what you believe in?

How, exactly?

Again, exactly how?

So two arbitrary assumptions verify each other? And if the first, unspecified method is the "gold standard", who needs the second? Of what purpose is red-shift in telling us anything about distance or movement when we already have a verifiable, scientifically rigorous method of measuring such distances?

Firstly, there is plenty of information available on how both astronomical distances and redshifts are measured. (Of course, if you limit yourself only to sites and videos that tell you how to bash the Big Bang, you will find yourself missing much of this information.)

Secondly, Hubble's Law (that further objects have redshifts) is something we find from the data. When we match up distance measurements to redshift measurements, we find that, for most objects, the further away their distance measurements are, the higher their redshift measurements are. For an example of such a measurement, see here: [astro-ph/0012376] Final Results from the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project to Measure the Hubble Constant (download the PDFs, the graph on page 75 is a good one to see).

I'll get to the video at the end of the post.

But this is still not steady state; it is a continually changing universe that in essence is a giant perpetual motion machine. Where does the new matter come from, is it magic? Things can't cause themselves to exist, and having a beginning (required by the word "new") eliminates an eternal existence--- unless another fudge factor is added, that being "it came from somewhere else"... and into an endless, unobservable regression. (I haven't watched the move Inception, but it sounds like this.) Even with all this, there must be some source or point of origin where all this stuff is coming from, and thus a kind of singularity, bang or not. (Expansion is expansion regardless of the speed.)

Hey, don't take it up with me. Remember Halton Arp? The guy with the weird quasar from the video? Here's what he thinks about creation ex nihilo:

But the Oscar for egocentricity goes to the currently dominant theory of the universe. Everything created instantly out of nothing. ... God in the image of contemporary man.​

Yeah, bet he'd love Genesis 1:1. And his own theory is:

As the variable mass theory requires, the emergence of new matter near m = 0 requires speeds of pure energy near c. As the particle masses grow they slow down in order to conserve momentum in the extragalactic rest frame. That means the elementary particles cool. Together with the increasing gravity the growing matter condenses into a proto quasar/galaxy. (No dark matter needed!) When atoms form they at first radiate weak, high redshifted photons. The redshift then decreases with time as it evolves into a more normal galaxy. The variable mass theory requires the younger galaxies to have intrinsic redshifts which diminish as they evolve.​

- Is Physics Slowly Changing? - Halton Arp's official website

So I genuinely don't have an answer for your question. Remember: I'm not a steady state cosmologist. I accept the Big Bang, and I believe Genesis 1:1 as literally written. The guys out there who reject the Big Bang - they're the ones who think matter continually poofs out of nothing, all the time, everywhere.

Sounds like a classic tautology to me, but then, I'm no expert in GR.

It's not a tautology.

GR predicts no intrinsic redshift;
therefore, if there is intrinsic redshift, then GR is wrong.

Simple as that.

It seems to be a modern, western phenomenon. Climategate, anyone? And a quick google search will turn up many testimonies of blacklisting, though you may have to drill down a bit, because such embarrassments to science's reputation of impartiality and love of fact over theory are frowned upon. The pharmaceuticals industry is apparently rife with political and corporate coverups, and surely you acknowledge the many frauds that have been uncovered about alleged missing links in biology.

I take exception to the "alleged missing links in biology", but I'll accept that climate science and pharmaceutical science are dodgy - precisely because so much money hangs on them.

By comparison, the Hubble Space Telescope has cost at most US$6 billion to run for nearly 20 years now. At about US$300 million a year, that's just over a tenth of a percent of what you guys pay for Medicare. I can see how someone could make a huge buck off saying the Earth is warming or not warming. But how much money could I make telling you that the Hubble constant is 80 (km/s)/Mpc instead of 75?

Astronomy is no less political and cosmologists are no less human. It happens.

They're also paid far less.

Agree that disputes have happened of course. But careers can, have, and do get trashed if there is sufficient control by one side. Remember Galileo, the case anti-theists love to trot out all the time? He was not against religion but the science of his day, and the problem was that the church was marching lockstep with science at the time. His career, even his very life, depended on conformity to the will of the powerful majority. But today the peer pressure is much more pervasive, as told in the Cosmology Statement.

And as far as I can tell not a single one of those guys who has signed the Cosmology Statement has gotten fired despite their public allegiance to this "heresy" against the evil cabal of astronomy that somehow controls "virtually all financial and experimental resources in astronomy".

By the way, you may be interested in what the guy hosting the Cosmology Statement believes:

Genesis Continuous sets out to create a foundation for the existence of an eternal universe:-
1. - Where space exists as an infinite entity in time and expanse.
2. - Where conservation of mass/energy is eternal, and always has been.
3. - Where there are foundational laws that permit a continuous recycling of mass/energy.
4. - Where expansion is a normal characteristic of planet - star - galaxy - continuous separation. I prefer the word 'separation'.
5. - The purpose, then, of this work is not to step above the foundation issues into the uncertain 'fudge'-zone, but to utilize observational certainty with probability, within a framework that has all the basic links required in a recyclable environment.
​

He denies the Big Bang, he believes the universe's existence is eternal, he believes that matter is constantly being re-created from energy. Sound familiar?

The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.

I don't have the means to either confirm or deny this.

Didn't he miraculously find that scope time in Europe?

Here's a transcript from an excellent series of open lectures from Yale about current controversies in astronomy. Search for the line where a student asks "Do people ever lie about what they're going to observe?" and read the professor's reply.

Here's what he says about the whole evil astronomy cabal deal:

You're always looking for ways to trash other people's proposals, because you've got seven times more--in the case of the space telescope, you've got seven times more proposals than you can grant, of which only a small handful are not worth doing. And so, any opportunity you have to say, you know, these guys are bozos--you definitely take that opportunity, because otherwise you have way too many good proposals left over.

So, there's a kind of internal control that isn't explicit on this sort of thing. And after a while, you know, if people keep getting up in public and saying, you know, quasars are sources of mass energy creation and therefore support the "steady state"--even if they're a great big quasar expert, you start to get a little bit queasy about giving them large amounts of telescope time that might be more profitably used by someone else. [This is an obvious portrait of Arp.]



This, then, gets interpreted by the remnant "steady state" supporters, or whoever the minority idea might be, of a hugely oppressive scientific bureaucracy, you know, not allowing the maverick, wonderful thinker to do their own thing. And that, sometimes, is true, but not often. Most of the time, it's the sane people not allowing the insane people to use the telescopes, and that's actually a much more common thing.​

Seven times more proposals than you can grant = six out of seven proposals being thrown out, the majority of which are by Big Bang advocates, so my original figure of 80% was too low, even.

DEEP... POCKETS. Creation scientists aren't going to get taxpayer help anytime soon either. But I'm rather disappointed that you'd take this opportunity to engage in petty flaming against people who aren't here to defend themselves.

Ain't no flaming. The biggest telescope my alma mater owns, the 3.9m Cassegranian Anglo-Australian Telescope, cost GBP 6 million to build 30 years ago. Answers in Genesis on the other hand has an annual budget of US$20 million (source here). They could have built a telescope every few years and still have more than enough left over for whatever it is they do with that money.

Then again, I suspect they have very little sympathy for steady state cosmology ...

 

[shernren]

Some comments on the Youtube video:

1. No sources, no sources, no sources. How on earth does one check facts if no citations are given?

2. The video discusses Arp's most famous QSO/galaxy connection, the Markarian 205 quasar. Is the filamentous connection real? I really am not sure. Suffice to say that photographic evidence has gone back and forth in terms of whether there is a connection.

But let's put this in perspective: the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has catalogued 200,000 quasars, and has found no correlation (as far as I'm aware) between the positions of quasars and the positions of nearby visible galaxies. Were Arp right, however, and quasars being emitted from galaxies, we would expect to see every quasar accompanied by a galaxy. This clearly isn't the case.

3. Redshift periodicity. Firstly note that three different early studies on redshift periodicity produced three very different results: one said redshifts are bunched in increments of 220km/s; one said they were bunched in increments of 72km/s; and one said they were bunched in increments of 38km/s. Clearly they can't all be true at the same time, can they?

In fact, these early studies only relied on samples of at most 200 galaxies, with statistically dubious results. What happens when you study 800 galaxies at once (Hawkins 2002)? No bunches. What happens when you study 46,400 quasars at once (Bell and McDiarmid 2006; Schneider 2007 - see Wikipedia for citation sources)? No bunches. If the effect were real, you would expect to see a more significant signal the more objects you study at once. The fact that you don't shows that it was a spurious result due to not looking at enough data at once.

4. Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy. The video says that there was only "one thirty-millionth of a degree of difference", and presents that as if it were a problem for the Big Bang theory. Not so. The difference represents one part in a hundred thousand, a result which was obtained in 1992.

Guess what the theoretical prediction was? Early cosmologists Harrison, Peebles, Yu and Zel'dovich had predicted that the fluctuations in the early universe would be anywhere between one part in ten thousand and one part in a hundred thousand, which matches what COBE observed. When did they predict this? Were they fudging this up in 1994? No, they predicted this in the mid-1970s. Isn't it wonderful when an experiment 20 years later confirms a predicted result?

4. Varshni's rings of quasars - this argument I haven't heard before. But it's an impossibly cute argument, simply because most quasar distances are measured using redshifts (unlike other astronomical objects which have independent methods of distance measurements), and the video earlier insists that redshifts are no good for measuring quasar distance - that's what Arp says!

But if Arp is right and redshifts don't measure quasar distance, then Varshni can't possibly know how far any quasar is from the Earth, which certainly means that Varshni can't say that quasars are found in rings of fixed distance from the Earth. So if the first third of the video is correct, then the third quarter of the video is wrong, and vice versa. (Furthermore, the two have mutually contradicting theories of quasar formation, so if you believe Arp that quasars are ejected from the cores of galaxies, you certainly can't believe Varshni that they are in fact "laser stars".)

In fact, Varshni's rings are even stranger than this. The abstract of his relevant article reads:

Probability calculations are performed which demonstrate that 57 groups of redshift coincidences in a set of 384 quasars are real and cannot be attributed to chance. Physical explanations for these coincidences are considered on the assumption that the redshifts are cosmological in origin. It is found that the cosmological redshift hypothesis leads to a situation wherein the 57 groups of quasars are arranged on spherical shells with earth at the center. It is concluded that either earth is indeed the center of the Universe or the cosmological redshift interpretation is not correct.​

If the cosmological redshift interpretation is not correct (i.e. Arp is right), then the earth is not indeed the center of the Universe - namely, the video is wrong!

Isn't science via Youtube wonderful? It amazes me how many self-contradictions an earnest effort can pack into a fifteen-minute video.