The Age of the Universe

[Loudmouth]

It is also immature and silly to act as if your ignorance of God is just as good as the knowledge of people who spent a lifetime on that field.

What evidence do those supposedly knowledgeable people have to present?

Actually, you are supporting my previous claim -- A lot of the scientific claims made in these forums are based on trust/faith in the words of men, just as our religious claims are based on trust/faith in the words of God.

Science is based on repeatable observations that anyone can verify with the proper equipment and training.

 

[Michael]

Science is based on repeatable observations that anyone can verify with the proper equipment and training.

Except they didn't work out at LHC, LUX, PandaX, or the electron roundness "tests" in spite of billion/million dollar equipment, and lot of Phd's.

 

[Doveaman]

Science is based on repeatable observations that anyone can verify with the proper equipment and training.

Christianity is based on repeatable observations that anyone can verify with the proper equipment and training.

 

[BukiRob]

What evidence do those supposedly knowledgeable people have to present?



Science is based on repeatable observations that anyone can verify with the proper equipment and training.

Yet science constantly is changing its "view" So it is no where near as iron clad in its position as you present it to be. The key to your sentence is OBSERVATIONS. If your observation is incomplete (meaning you don't see all) then you are almost assured to come to a faulty conclusion.

The fact that you attempt to present things as "well this is accepted the as truth by all" is absurd. There are MANY scientist with impeccable qualifications who come have come very different conclusions... I've posted several in this thread. The idea that some how we have the facts and its decided is such a wild misrepresentation of the data that its absurd that one would even attempt to pass off such an idea.

 

[The Cadet]

Everything we already know had to be interpreted in order to arrive at a conclusion. That is how the human mind works.

And yet, somehow, some interpretations are seen as more valid than others, to the point where we can trust these interpretations enough to lock people up based on them. This is anti-scientific sophistry at best.

The Big Bang is still an open question for many scientists:

An Open Letter to the Scientific Community

This letter is fairly typical of letters that deny a broadly-accepted scientific theory, in that it is written and signed by cranks and full of errors. Martymer81, a physics professor, notes numerous significant errors therein, and Sean Carroll did a more comprehensive job of shredding both the letter and its signatories. Such open letters, petitions, and the like are commonly the tools of "mavericks" who have attempted and failed to promote their own theories in the scientific literature. Calling "conspiracy" is a whole lot easier than actually presenting convincing evidence for your hypothesis, particularly when your hypothesis is bunk and you're awful at physics or science in general (as the signatories of this letter clearly are).

 

[BukiRob]

And yet, somehow, some interpretations are seen as more valid than others, to the point where we can trust these interpretations enough to lock people up based on them. This is anti-scientific sophistry at best.



This letter is fairly typical of letters that deny a broadly-accepted scientific theory, in that it is written and signed by cranks and full of errors. Martymer81, a physics professor, notes numerous significant errors therein, and Sean Carroll did a more comprehensive job of shredding both the letter and its signatories. Such open letters, petitions, and the like are commonly the tools of "mavericks" who have attempted and failed to promote their own theories in the scientific literature. Calling "conspiracy" is a whole lot easier than actually presenting convincing evidence for your hypothesis, particularly when your hypothesis is bunk and you're awful at physics or science in general (as the signatories of this letter clearly are).

I see absolutely no issue what so ever with the Big Bang... I take great exception and think that the present argument put forward regarding causality to the Big Bang are tremendously problematic in nature.

 

[Doveaman]

And yet, somehow, some interpretations are seen as more valid than others, to the point where we can trust these interpretations enough to lock people up based on them.

Until those same people are later found to be innocent and released based on a new interpretation of the evidence or based on the interpretation of new evidence.

 

[Doveaman]

.

 

[RealityCheck01]

The universe is only 6000 years old.

Sorry, zardak, but any one who can count can see that statement is false.
We have 10,000 years of tree rings.
We have ~30,000 years of varves.
We have ~800,000 years of ice core layers.
The physical evidence that the Earth is ~4.6 billion years needs a willingness to learn more than counting though!

An unsupported claim that the Earth has been dated to 6000 years needs a citation t the scientific literature for that claim.

Snipped lots of non-science text.

 

[RealityCheck01]

Why just Compton scattering?

Why persist with a fantasy that inelastic scattering can produce cosmological redshift when you do not cite the scientific literature where scientists state that inelastic scattering can produce cosmological redshift, Michael?
For example: 2 December 2012 Michael: Compton scattering is ignored in Lambda-CDM because it is incapable of causing cosmological redshift!

Why cite good science about a better developed spiral galaxy than expected as if a single observation invalidated the observation that galaxies look younger with distance, Michael?

Why cite a unpublished pre-print from 2006 eek from the crank Ari Brynjolfsson with his tired light (and so invalid) "plasma-redshift cosmology", Michael?

Why cite the PDF upload site vixra.org rather than the scientific literature, Michael?

 

[RealityCheck01]

No you won't:

So let us make that statement a lie, Michael:
3 March 2015 Michael: A flaw in the Lerner et al paper is that it does not use multiple bands as a self-check on their analysis.
15 June 2015 Michael: The Lerner et al paper is "flawed" enough so that astronomers have not cited it since it was published a year ago.
Galaxies evolve and their surface brightness changes with time. Any paper that does not address this issue will have incorrect conclusions.

• 18 June 2015 Michael: The Lerner et al paper is flawed because it ignores changes in surface brightness as galaxies evolve.
• 18 June 2015 Michael: A nitpick for the Lerner et al paper is that this is the first paper that the authors have written on the subject of the Tolman surface brightness test - they have no published expertise in this complex subject.
  The Tolman surface brightness test is complex enough that Sandage and Lubin had to split it up into five papers in 2001!

And a question for you to ponder, Michael: Where is the Lerner et al analysis of the new datasets using the Sandage and Lubin methodology?

What we have is a
* comprehensive Tolman surface brightness test by
* experts in the field that has
* some citations (not many because this is a specialist field) and
* published in a high impact journal (Astronomical Journal established in 1849!)
against an obscure paper
* that is much simpler by
* non-experts that has
* no citations and
* published in a lower impact journal (International Journal of Modern Physics D)

 

[Michael]

Why persist with a fantasy that inelastic scattering can produce cosmological redshift when you do not cite the scientific literature where scientists state that inelastic scattering can produce cosmological redshift, Michael?

I've produced *many* such papers RC. It's a real pity that you never read them, just like you *refuse* read a textbook on MHD theory.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...2000A&A...353.1134R&db_key=AST&data_type=HTML
http://iopscience.iop.org/0034-4885/59/6/002
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...Y&data_type=HTML&format=&high=42ca922c9c28155
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0401529
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/n...1987Natur.326..363W&db_key=AST&data_type=HTML

 

[Michael]

So let us make that statement a lie, Michael:

When might that ever happen RC? You didn't pick out any mathematical errors in his work as required to make my statement a "lie". All you did is cite *yourself* and not a single math formula, just like you always do.

When are you going to admit that you lied when you claimed that electrical discharges are impossible in plasma RC? When might you produce a published paper to support that claim RC? Never!

 

[RealityCheck01]

Einstein once said you don't really know what you are talking about until you can explain it to your grandmother.

Which has nothing to so with actual science, Doveaman - basically a joke about a person's knowledge of the subject.
There are millions of people who claim that the universe is expanding because of the overwhelming evidence that it is expanding, e.g.

• The darkness of the night sky - Olbers' paradox.
• Hubble's Law.
• CMB existence.
• CMB temperature.
• CMB perfect black body spectrum alone shows that the universe used to be in a hot dense state.
• CMB power spectrum.
• Variation of the CMB temperature with distance.
• Time dilation in supernova light curves.
• Radio source and quasar counts vs. flux. These show that the Universe has evolved.
• Deuterium, 3He, 4He, and 7Li abundances.
• Lyman-alpha forest (increasing neutral H with distance shows galaxies did not always exist).
• Tolman surface brightness test (ignoring the obscure Lerner paper ).

The lack of any detection of infinitely or even > 13.8 billion year old objects is more evidence against an eternal, static universe than for an expanding universe.

 

[RealityCheck01]

..rant that has nothing to do with what I posted...

These points make the statement that I will not look at the flaws in Lerner et al papera lie, Michael:
3 March 2015 Michael: A flaw in the Lerner et al paper is that it does not use multiple bands as a self-check on their analysis.
15 June 2015 Michael: The Lerner et al paper is "flawed" enough so that astronomers have not cited it since it was published a year ago.
18 June 2015 Michael: The Lerner et al paper is flawed because it ignores changes in surface brightness as galaxies evolve.
18 June 2015 Michael: A nitpick for the Lerner et al paper is that this is the first paper that the authors have written on the subject of the Tolman surface brightness test - they have no published expertise in this complex subject. The Tolman surface brightness test is complex enough that Sandage and Lubin had to split it up into five papers in 2001!

 

[Michael]

This letter is fairly typical of letters that deny a broadly-accepted scientific theory, in that it is written and signed by cranks and full of errors.

Hogwash. The first link was pointless, and nothing but name calling, but let's take a look at Sean Carroll's criticisms:

Really? How about acoustic peaks in the power spectrum of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background?

What about them? How about the fact that there are *hemispheric variations* in the CMB revealed by Plank that are *not* supposed to exist? I love how he takes *one* sliver of info, and ignores every other aspect of the failures.

Let's see how they *actually* did in terms of correctly predicting results in Planck data sets with respect to the power spectrum now:

http://sci.esa.int/planck/51555-pla...ctuations-in-the-cosmic-microwave-background/

While the observations on small and intermediate angular scales agree extremely well with the model predictions, the fluctuations detected on large angular scales on the sky – between 90 and six degrees – are about 10 per cent weaker than the best fit of the standard model to Planck data. At angular scales larger than six degrees, there is one data point that falls well outside the range of allowed models. These anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background pattern might challenge the very foundations of cosmology, suggesting that some aspects of the standard model of cosmology may need a rethink.

Bzzzt! Every angular scale larger than six degrees *falsified* their predictions! Epic fail!

And the polarization signal, and its spectrum?

Apparently no body clued him in that the BICEP2 polarization claims turned to *dust* even *before* it got past peer review. So much for that claim too.

And the baryon density as deduced from light-element abundances agreeing with that deduced from the CMB?

Translation: Their elemental abundance figure continues to *require* a magical form of exotic matter which is *exactly* why they keep ignoring all of the *huge errors* that they made in that 2006 lensing dark matter lensing study with respect to accounting for all of the baryonic mass. They made *at least* three *major* errors in the galaxy mass estimates and underestimated the number of stars present by a whopping factor of between 3 and 20 depending on the type of galaxy and the size of the star. It's also why they *must* ignore all the results from LUX, PandaX, LHC and the electron roundness "tests' that they claimed would *vindicate* their beliefs, but instead *falsified* them!

Strike three.

FYI, PC/EU theory is a form of *pure empirical physics*. Right or wrong, it's not a "crank/crackpot" theory. It's pure physics, without all the supernatural "dark" nonsense associated with Lambba-CDM.

Keep in mind that accept the fact that the Earth is ancient, but the universe could be *eternal* for all I know.

 

[Michael]

The darkness of the night sky - Olbers' paradox.

That problem is easily resolved with ordinary *dust*, absorption and scattering, and oh ya, your heroes finally figured out that the universe is *dustier* than they believed it to be:

http://www.space.com/5348-view-universe-suddenly-bright.html

Hubble's Law.

Hubble himself proposed *multiple* solutions to that observation, including tired light.

CMB existence.

• CMB temperature.

Pfft. Eddington not only predicted it's existence based on ordinary starlight and dust, he nailed the actual temperature to within a 1/2 of a degree whereas BB proponents missed it by a whole order of magnitude on their first try.

CMB perfect black body spectrum alone shows that the universe used to be in a hot dense state.

Bzzt! It's not a "prefect" black body, in fact Planck discovered hemispheric variations that shouldn't even be there according to inflation theory.

CMB power spectrum.

Bzzt! At larger angles, that prediction *falsified* their claims too!

http://sci.esa.int/planck/51555-pla...ctuations-in-the-cosmic-microwave-background/

While the observations on small and intermediate angular scales agree extremely well with the model predictions, the fluctuations detected on large angular scales on the sky – between 90 and six degrees – are about 10 per cent weaker than the best fit of the standard model to Planck data. At angular scales larger than six degrees, there is one data point that falls well outside the range of allowed models. These anomalies in the Cosmic Microwave Background pattern might challenge the very foundations of cosmology, suggesting that some aspects of the standard model of cosmology may need a rethink.

• Lyman-alpha forest (increasing neutral H with distance shows galaxies did not always exist).

Pfft. That observation is also more easily explained as *absorption* in the medium over distance. At some point that signal is simply absorbed the plasmas and dust of the medium! Wow. You're just reaching now.

• Tolman surface brightness test (ignoring the obscure Lerner paper ).

Ya, just ignore the man behind the curtain that Lerner exposed at higher redshifts!

Every single claim you made has a natural and logical explanation and/or it actually *falsified* mainstream theory like your power spectrum claims that bit the dust at larger angular scales.

The lack of any detection of infinitely or even > 13.8 billion year old objects is more evidence against an eternal, static universe than for an expanding universe.

Psst: The distance calculation is based on the *theory* that *nothing* can be older than 13.8 billion years, therefore it's *impossible* for *their* calculations to come up with a number that is *greater than* 13.8 billion years. It's a limit of their *calculation*, not a limit of anything else!

 

[Michael]

Actually, there is a field of physics in which energy is not conserved: it’s called general relativity. In an expanding universe, as we have known for many decades, the total energy is not conserved.

That depends entirely on whether or not you subjectively choose to stuff "space expansion" into a GR formula.

 

[Michael]

These points make the statement that I will not look at the flaws in Lerner et al papera lie, Michael:

Your complaints aren't "flaws" RC, they are your own personal opinion about which *third party* materials that you personally *want them* to have included. That's not an error RC, that's your own problem. That's not a valid scientific objection! Go ahead and cite yourself all you like, but that's not an actual scientific flaw RC, it's your own pet peeve!

The Tolman surface brightness test is complex enough that Sandage and Lubin had to split it up into five papers in 2001!

Who cares what *someone else* did RC? Do you understand the concept of a real scientific debate and what a real scientific error might be?

Psst: You're supposed to be *specific* in your objection and pick out the *specific* paragraph, the sentence and/or the math formula where the error occurred. Get it?

 

[msgd1025]

Your complaints aren't "flaws" RC, they are your own personal opinion about which *third party* materials that you personally *want them* to have included. That's not an error RC, that's your own problem. That's not a valid scientific objection! Go ahead and cite yourself all you like, but that's not an actual scientific flaw RC, it's your own pet peeve!



Who cares what *someone else* did RC? Do you understand the concept of a real scientific debate and what a real scientific error might be?

Psst: You're supposed to be *specific* in your objection and pick out the *specific* paragraph, the sentence and/or the math formula where the error occurred. Get it?

Guys, I've been reading this thread and it seems to me like you guys are jumping the gun. One first must show THAT the universe came about via natural causes BEFORE he/she starts explaining the characteristics of the universe using natural explanations.

What do I mean? I mean that IF the universe itself had a supernatural beginning, which it would seem to me that it did, then why are you looking for a natural explanation of how light could cross it? All of this "the universe has to be (x) amount of years old because it takes light that long to cross the distance" is circular reasoning. You are assuming that light has always behaved as it does now, when we have a very good reason to believe otherwise, that reason being the supernatural beginning of all things. I myself do not need a natural explanation to why we can see distant stars. I am good with "because God wanted us to see it, so He made it happen." and as such, it doesn't have a natural explanation, because it did not happen naturally. As a follower of Jesus Christ, miracles are right at home in my worldview

Furthermore, everything you see out past our solar system has an element of illusion to it, which is that it is moving. It is not actually where you think it is. You are seeing where it was when that photon left. So you aren't looking at real-time data. There may or may not be anything actually behind that light, as the star could have, and is, moving. Also, the purpose of the stars is given in the scriptures; they are for signs and seasons and days and years (like a calendar) and to give light on the earth. They ARE NOT for trying to determine the age of the universe, which is where the secular world (and even some believers) have gone astray. You will not find that information via observation and inductive reasoning, but you will succeed in deceiving yourself. It's like trying to explain Jesus resurrection via natural causes, in which case one would be forced to conclude that He didn't rise from the dead. In the same way, when you try to explain features of the creation via natural causes, you wind up denying what Genesis clearly says. Trying to figure the age of the universe based on starlight is circular reasoning, because it assumes a naturalistic description of the characteristics of light. But......when you have good reason to believe a supernatural agent was involved, and especially so when He explicitly says He did this (made stars visible from the earth) why are you hung up on starlight being a problem?

If you use the stars for their stated purpose, then you will be good, but if you start trying to do things with them that they were not intended for, especially based on faulty reasoning, you are going to be out in left field somewhere and you won't even know it.

God bless you all