One of our favourite physicists on this recent claim at Nautilus:
All that Hans-Jörg Fahr wants is for someone to prove him wrong. A professor of astrophysics at the University of Bonn in Germany, he has taken a stand against nearly the entire field of cosmology by claiming that the diffuse glow of background microwave radiation which bathes the sky is not, as is commonly believed, a distant echo of the Big Bang, the universe’s fiery moment of creation. The idea held by the cosmology community that tiny temperature fluctuations in this microwave background tell us about the clumpiness of the early universe, he says, is wrong. The rank and file cosmologist may as well be doing Rorschach tests.
Understandably, his ideas have met with skepticism among many. Glenn Starkman, a professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University, puts it this way: “If you seek to replace a successful theory with an alternative, then [you] must demonstrate that your alternative explains a similarly full range of phenomena… In this task [Fahr and his colleagues] have not done due diligence.” But at the same time, Fahr’s ideas are rooted in physics that has already been proven in other systems, and they make falsifiable predictions. Pressed to defend his controversial position, the unorthodox theorist stands his ground. Whether he likes it or not, Fahr has become a cosmological iconoclast.
First, cosmologists have been trying to falsify the Big Bang for decades. Many admit that they do not like it because of its theistic implications. One cannot interpret the story intelligibly without knowing that background. The passion for claims about a multiverse is incomprehensible apart from that background.
Anyway, Rob Sheldon writes, by way of assessment of this latest buzz,
While I am not a big fan of several accreted aspects of the Big Bang model–namely, inflation, multiverse, dark matter, cosmological constant, baryon-acoustic-oscillations, and big-bang-nucleosynthesis–nevertheless, I am a fan of a beginning to space and time. This article is about a resurrection of the steady-state universe model, one which attracts a small number of dedicated materialists the way Darwinism attracts angry atheists.
But none of his objections carry much weight. The cosmic-ray microwave background radiation doesn’t have Lyman alpha line spectra because it isn’t created by hot hydrogen–its created by lonesome electrons. Conversely, the CMBR isn’t smeared out by the vacuum because we *do* have Lyman alpha from quasars that are not smeared out, and the difference between 13.7 billion ly of smearing (CMBR) and 12 billion ly (quasars) of smearing shouldn’t be all that great unless the vacuum keeps changing its properties–but then it wouldn’t be steady-state any more.
So whether he’s a genius or not I can’t tell from this article, but he doesn’t sound serious.
See also: Big Bang exterminator wanted, will train
and The Science Fictions series at your fingertips (cosmology) for why naturalist atheists are pretty much forced to try to disprove the Big Bang.
Just a small technical point on headline writing.
There’s a significant difference between “we have the big bang theory all wrong” and “the big bang theory has it all wrong”.
What’s wrong with dark matter? Isn’t it necessary one way or another in order for galaxies to have enough mass to not spin apart?
The Big Bang, dark matter, dark energy, gravitational waves, Darwinian evolution, etc., like almost everything else we are taught in this world, are just a worthless pile of BS propaganda. 😀
what Mapou said
A few minor quibbles:
1. “The cosmic-ray microwave background radiation” – I assume cosmic-*ray* is a typo. The article is about the cosmic microwave background radiation.
2. “it isn’t created by hot hydrogen–its created by lonesome electrons”.
It’s *scattered* by lonesome electrons. The photons in the CMB are created during matter-antimatter annihilation in the very early universe. They outnumber baryons by about a billion to one.
Later, when the matter in the universe recombines into neutral atoms, and the CMB is last scattered, recombination will produce Lyman series photons. On average, 2 Lyman alpha photons are emitted for every three combinations. And so, CMB photons outnumber Lyman series photons by about a billion to one.
3. Not a fan of baryon-acoustic-oscillations? They’ve been observed: http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2862 . You might as well say you’re not a fan of galaxies.
4. Not a fan of big-bang-nucleosynthesis? What part of prediction confirmed by observation is not to like?
lukebarnes,
Do you understand why a particle in inertial motion stay in motion? Don’t tell me. I’m just kidding. I know you don’t. If physicists are clueless as to the nature of something as fundamental as motion, how can we trust them about the beginning of the universe?
the thunderbolts project has shown our errors of understanding
e.g. see this video: ‘ big shock for big bang ‘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c9M33FLH40
Young-earth creationists have long refused the Big Bang. In this they are joined by materialists who don’t like a universe with a beginning. Seems to me that both are driven by philosophic prejudice, rather than either good science or good theology.
Leodp:
Who said that materialists have a problem with the big bang theory?
Fred Hoyle, for one. That’s why he came up with the Steady State theory.
Einstein, for another. That’s why he made what he later called “the biggest mistake of my career”, proposing a cosmological constant fudge factor to be added to his equations so that a beginning could be avoided.
Most of the advocates of a multiverse, for another. If one and only one universe exists, how to explain the fine tuning of the initial conditions, constants, and physical laws without letting a Divine Foot into the door?
OT: Antoine Suarez has a new video lecture up:
A few semi-related notes to the lecture:
Kurt Godel, who proved you cannot have a mathematical ‘Theory of Everything’, without allowing God to bring completeness to the ‘Theory of Everything’, also had this to say:
At the 9:40 minute mark of the following video, C.S. Lewis comments on God ‘playing the role of a person’:
Moreover, as would be expected if General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics/Special Relativity (QED) were truly unified in the resurrection of Christ from death, the image on the shroud is found to be formed by a quantum process. The image was not formed by a ‘classical’ process::
verse and music
Mapou
“Do you understand why a particle in inertial motion stay in motion?”
Because Galilean spacetime contains an affine structure, according to which trajectories can be characterised as straight or curved but not assigned an absolute velocity. There is no fact about whether a given particle is stationary or in motion – velocities are relative.
“If physicists are clueless as to the nature of something as fundamental as motion, how can we trust them about the beginning of the universe?”
Because, when we make hypotheses about the universe, we then go to all the bother of actually checking whether the facts are consistent with our hypotheses.
lukebarnes:
Showing off does not help you, man. I hesitate to continue, seeing that you don’t understand that relative motion is abstract by definition and that therefore, it does not exist physically, and that this leaves us with absolute motion as the only possibility. So, given your obvious handicap, let me rephrase the question thus: What causes two particles in relative inertial motion to remain in motion. Hint: neither words nor mathematics keep them in relative motion.
Oh, by the way. Did you know that nothing can move in spacetime? Apparently not. I sense that I’m wasting my time here.
Yeah, right. Let’s see now. How many “scientific” hypotheses have not been tested? Hell, can they even be tested? Examples: continuity, time dimension (which makes motion impossible, surprise!), space (which can be easily shown to be abstract and equally non-existent), Big Bang, multiple universes, dark matter, dark energy, cats that are both dead and alive, life arising from dirt all by itself, microbes turning into elephants over billions of years, etc. I could go on but I suspect the pain must be unbearable by now.
Mapou:
Thank you, Mapou, for your compassion toward poor handicapped Luke Barnes. He just isn’t capable of understanding physics the way you do.
leodp 8 August 6, 2014 at 9:25 am
“Young-earth creationists have long refused the Big Bang. In this they are joined by materialists who don’t like a universe with a beginning. Seems to me that both are driven by philosophic prejudice, rather than either good science or good theology.”
leodp, I think there are two reasons YECs dislike the Big Bang.
One, of course, is that they think it gives enough time for evolution to really work. They have far more faith in evolution than people commonly assume!
Second is that they misunderstand the Big Bang as a causal theory. Basically they feel that one can either believe God created the Universe, or the Big Bang did it. They are almost uniformly shocked when I tell them that materialists are the ones who oppose the Big Bang precisely because of its theistic implications.
R0bb:
I’m sure you are mistaken. 🙂 I have no compassion toward lukebarnes, whoever he is.
Check out this write up on recent cosmological discoveries that may double the number of stars in space!!
From
crev.info/2014/11/astronomers-missed-half-the-visible-universe/#sthash.wd3R6P2O.dpuf