Cocktail! The Fingers of God are pointing at you

jlafan2001: Re your 11: The eternity of the world is not incompatible with theism. You need to read Thomas Aquinas. (Oh, I forgot: you refuse to read great thinkers, as a matter of policy.) Timaeus

It also occurs to me that there could be at least three, rather than two poles in an argument: one strongly pro, one strongly anti, and one strongly not sure, that resists commitment for lack of data. -Q Querius

selvaRajan noted

Yes! So we don’t waste time understanding why a physicist’s pet conjecture of an isolated phenomenon (based on ignoring the basics, or in case of Dr.Brynjolfsson (@36),his Plasma redshift) should not give him the right to replace entire General relativity!

In my view, the challenge faced in astrophysics is enormous: there's a complexity of factors and trying to determine to what degree each factor affects the observed result is difficult. Consequently, a lot of arguments seem circular because they do depend on each other to a degree. I always felt it's like building a ship in a dirty bottle when the bottle is across the street and the wind is blowing dust. It's amazing what we have been able to come up with. It also means that our reasoning and conclusions are of necessity fragile. Halton Arp seems to have discounted Peculiar stellar velocities to explain the fingers of God effect---whether it's due in part to intergalactic reddening (yes, I know), gravitational red shift, trinary orbits (binary system plus a planetary star), or streaming (centrifugal) versus rotational velocities---in his argument challenging the inflationary model of the universe. It's been a long time since I read his book, so I don't remember whether his objections were due primarily to the apparent interaction of galaxies with widely differing cosmological red shifts, or whether it had more to do with the characteristics of quasars. However, I wouldn't be as ungenerous as to assume that he ignored other data in support of his own "pet theory." Having said this, let me reiterate that I still prefer the inflationary theory, but am willing to consider the merits other ideas. Besides, pet theories are soft and adorable. ;-) -Q Querius

Fortunately expansion proof doesn’t relay on quasars. We have other evidence from the same host galaxy – eg The time dilation of supernova.

Brynjolfsson refutes the time dilation argument quite well in his paper pointing out the Malquist bias and other factors. Plasma red shift is a superior explanation and the lack of time dilation in deeply redshifted quasars is a serious problem. Bryjolfsson, Demjanov, Shtyrkov, Galaeev etc. have good experiments worth pursuing which is more than I can say for the advocates of Dark Energy. scordova

JGuy, Yes! So we don't waste time understanding why a physicist's pet conjecture of an isolated phenomenon (based on ignoring the basics, or in case of Dr.Brynjolfsson (@36),his Plasma redshift) should not give him the right to replace entire General relativity! selvaRajan

selvaRajan: "Fortunately"? JGuy

Sal @25,

Circular reasoning! We see a quasar with redshift 7, and objects with redshift 7 therefore we observe it at 25.8 Giga light years

Adsorption line of quasars have redshift less than quasar emission line redshift. In case of gravitational lensing too the redshift is less than the redshift of lensed object, so Quasars can't be near objects.

...jet just like a flashlight has to be precisely aimed at Earth from billions of light years

True. It won't work if you assume quasars are near objects. You will find dispersed light source instead. Sal @26,

This could mean several things. It could be a sign that the universe is not expanding.

Fortunately expansion proof doesn't relay on quasars. We have other evidence from the same host galaxy - eg The time dilation of supernova. A super nova with z=1 will be observed to decay in 40 days instead of the actual decay of 20 days. I will wait for paper by another physicist. Hawkin conveniently ignores basics-like ignoring lamda-observed = lamda-emitted(z+1), or measuring using a fixed wavelength of 4400 in his previous paper. selvaRajan

In my opinion, nobody can explain the anomalous redshifts because an essential piece of the puzzle is missing. What is lacking is a fundamental understanding of motion. Unless and until we can explain the cause of motion, i.e., why a body in inertial motion remains in motion, we will never understand why light loses energy over great distances. In this case, we need to explain why photons move and why they move at C. Of course, as in everything else having to do with energy and motion, the redshift is the result of nature correcting a violation of the energy conservation principle. In my view, based on my private understanding of motion, the brighter or the more energetic the source of the light, the more pronounced will the redshift be. That being said, distance is the primary factor. Mapou

What's the best explanation of the Finger's of God. Ok, I could be totally wrong, but I like Brynjolfsson's the best. It's a brutally difficult read. Of note however is Figure 4 on page 28 which compares redshifts in the sun as predicted by Einstein and those actually measured and then compared with the alternate theory of redshift known as plasma redshift. Here's the paper by Brynjolfsson. http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0401420v3.pdf Here is Brynjolfsson's background. It was impressive: http://plasmaredshift.org/Curriculum_Vitae.html The paper was comprehensive. To understand it, you'll need some background in : 1. quantum mechanics 2. general relativity 3. plasma physics 4. astrophysics 5. electro magnetics It didn't look at all like a BS paper, it was well conceived and researched. scordova

JGuy:

I wonder in what other time periods people exclaimed ‘these are interesting times’…or some variant of it..b/c such seems to be commonly spoke these days.

I'm sure its use is more common during times of upheavals or of strange events immediately preceding upheavals. Mapou

Mapou I wonder in what other time periods people exclaimed 'these are interesting times'...or some variant of it..b/c such seems to be commonly spoke these days. JGuy

Super mind blowing surprises perhaps!

Yes. Big enough to blow everybody's socks off, scientists and laymen alike. And not just in physics and cosmology, mind you. We can also expect fundamental disruptions in history, religion, biology, neuroscience and artificial intelligence. We live in interesting times. Mapou

Surprises are in store, I have no doubt.

Big surprises, I would add. Huge inconvenient surprises.

Super mind blowing surprises perhaps! JGuy

Super mind blowing surprises perhaps! JGuy

Surprises are in store, I have no doubt.

Big surprises, I would add. Huge inconvenient surprises. Mapou

No body in astronomy uses the same method for all distance calculation(refer cosmic distance ladder).Average luminosity can’t be reliably used for quasars, nor can the standard light method because the furthest known supernova has z=1.7.

You aren't understanding van Flandern's point, it has to do with necessary evolution of the quasars over time if redshift actually defines distance. You're misinterpreting it as something to do with distance ladders! scordova

"Or, it could indicate that quasars are not really what we think they are. "

Hehe. My money is on that. Quasars seem to be to the standard model cosmology what black body radiation was to Newtonian physics. The more I learn about of standard cosmology, the more I think something is grandly, delightfully and deliciously amiss in standard cosmology. Same for the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis. Surprises are in store, I have no doubt. CentralScrutinizer

Intrinsic redshift can’t explain Lyman alpha forest which appears in every red-shifted quasars.

Invoking lyman alpha is a two edged sword: Dr. Worraker points out:

(2) the metallicity of the Lyman alpha absorbers associated with quasars varies remarkably little with redshift;55,56 this is to be expected in a ‘local’ model for quasars, but is very puzzling if quasar redshifts are cosmological since the assumed intervening galaxies should evolve chemically with time. http://creation.com/high-redshift-quasars-produce-more-big-bang-surprises#endRef55

scordova

Absence of time dilation in high red shifted quasars :-) http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/no-time-dilation-for-distant-quasars.htm

Mike Hawkins from the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh searched for, and did not find evidence for, so-called time dilation in distant quasars. Time dilation is a counter-intuitive, yet actual, feature of Einstein's special relativity in which time slows down for an object that is in motion relative to another. Since the universe is expanding — and the distant quasars are racing away from us — a clock placed in one of these distant galaxies should be running more slowly than a clock we have on Earth. Therefore, the effects of time dilation for distant objects can be measured if we can observe the ticking clock in the distant galaxy. HowStuffWorks: Does time change speed? Time dilation explained. Hawkins took advantage of the fact that quasars blink. This blinking, or variability, can be viewed as the "ticking clock." He used data from quasar monitoring programs stored on photographic plates to measure the timescale of of the blinking. Looking at the timescales for two groups of quasars, one distant and the other even farther away, there was no measurable difference. That meant no time dilation: meaning that for both groups of quasars, the clocks were the same. This could mean several things. It could be a sign that the universe is not expanding. Or, it could indicate that quasars are not really what we think they are. However, for either of these scenarios to be true, you'd have to explain away or disprove mountains of evidence in favor of these models.

scordova

To know why it is brighter than 100 times, you just have to read the wiki article that you citied :

Hundreds of times brighter than an entire GALAXY. And for this to work, an energy jet just like a flashlight has to be precisely aimed at Earth from billions of light years away, just like the fingers of God.

We can see z=7 quasar which is 25.8 Gly (The observable universe is 47 billion light years) and has luminosity of 6 x 10^13 Msun. With a 10^9 solar mass, it can easily reach that Eddington luminosity. It should be noted that light curves is the best way to calculate the unambiguous quasar distance.

Circular reasoning! We see a quasar with redshift 7, and objects with redshift 7 therefore we observe it at 25.8 Giga light years , we know it is 25.8 light years away because objects with redhift 7 are observed from 25.8 Giga light years. Circular reasoning! scordova

Hi Sal,

This quasar’s luminosity is, therefore, about 4 trillion (4 × 10^12) times that of our sun

The Quasars light comes from the accretion disk and this makes a typical quasar about 100 times brighter(which is below the Eddington limit of the Quasar) than the host galaxy. To know why it is brighter than 100 times, you just have to read the wiki article that you citied :

However, this assumes the quasar is radiating energy in all directions. In a universe containing hundreds of billions of galaxies, most of which had active nuclei billions of years ago but only seen today, it is statistically certain that thousands of energy jets should be pointed toward us, some more directly than others. In many cases it is likely that the brighter the quasar, the more directly its jet is aimed at us.

another example also in the same wiki article that you cited:

The hyperluminous quasar APM 08279+5255 was, when discovered in 1998, given an absolute magnitude of -32.2. High resolution imaging with the Hubble Space Telescope and the 10 m Keck Telescope revealed that this system is gravitationally lensed. A study of the gravitational lensing of this system suggests that it has been magnified by a factor of ~10.

So the great power of quasars could be an illusion if indeed the quasars are simply closer to us!

Quasars are the most distant object, which is precisely the reason they are used in absorption spectroscopy. If Quasar's were nearer, you wouldn't observe the Lyman line shift.

the quasar PHL 1033, LB 8956 and LB 8991 lie within a few hundred parsecs from the sun

The quasars distance can be best found by their light curves -which are independent of the brightness-distance relationship. Also that data is from late 1970s from the POSS-II survey. Why don't you check at least the year 2000 SDSS-DR9 ?

I got a distance of observation on the order of 10 GIGA Light years!!! So why the heck can we even see a quasar at that distance?

We can see z=7 quasar which is 25.8 Gly (The observable universe is 47 billion light years) and has luminosity of 6 x 10^13 Msun. With a 10^9 solar mass, it can easily reach that Eddington luminosity. It should be noted that light curves is the best way to calculate the unambiguous quasar distance.

The average luminosity of quasars must decrease with time in just the right way so that their average apparent brightness is the same at all redshifts, which is exceedingly unlikely

No body in astronomy uses the same method for all distance calculation(refer cosmic distance ladder).Average luminosity can't be reliably used for quasars, nor can the standard light method because the furthest known supernova has z=1.7. The quasars distance can be best found by their light curves -which are independent of the brightness-distance relationship.(a list with z value - redshift value- is available at MACHO project site http://www.astro.yale.edu/mgeha/MACHO/)

In [20], Arp shows great quantities of evidence that large quasar redshifts are a combination of a cosmological factor and an intrinsic factor, with the latter dominant in most cases.

Intrinsic redshift can't explain Lyman alpha forest which appears in every red-shifted quasars. selvaRajan

I guess there is some truth to that. Though, 5% still seems pretty significant... with maybe enough maybe you'd be doing moon jumps on earth. http://www.newscientist.com/blog/space/2008/08/researchers-test-for-dips-in-gravity.html JGuy

From the post with Thackers page linked. "The evidence now in appears to show that an eclipse increases the gravitational field by up to 5% while the sun is behind the moon, but has no effect outside the path of the eclipse." http://www.deceptiveuniverse.com/Sun%20as%20a%20pulsar.htm I've never heard of this. Seems like it would be common knowledge cute bit of knowledge, much like water draining in opposite directions in opposing polar hemispheres. Airplanes would suffer sudden shifts in weight as they flew under an eclipse... or am I just misunderstanding what is being said here. JGuy

LOL! Sal wrote: '[...] just like Star Wars is a beautiful story' JGuy

Sal, Interesting stuff. Did you know that van Flandern is considered a crackpot by the physics establishment because he dared postulate that gravity propagates much faster than the speed of light, thereby contradicting Albert Einstein and general relativity? Mapou

Here is a description of a quasar from wiki. Tell me if you believe such objects really exist or are an optical illusion due to equating distance with redshift:

This quasar's luminosity is, therefore, about 4 trillion (4 × 10^12) times that of our sun, or about 100 times that of the total light of giant galaxies like our Milky Way. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasar

My car's headlights look brighter to me than any galaxy if I'm just a few feet away from the headlights. :-) So the great power of quasars could be an illusion if indeed the quasars are simply closer to us! These question could be settled by future observation with better parallax from space probes, which I hope Gaia will settle provided the powers that be will actually do the measurements. I fear political pressure will avoid doing certain measurements.... I have a summary of a paper published in 1980: http://laserstars.org/V1982/photographic.html

the quasar PHL 1033, LB 8956 and LB 8991 lie within a few hundred parsecs from the sun

:shock: LB 8956 has a redshift of 1.8 according to Table 2 in the original paper. Using Ned Wrights calculator, and plugging in Z = 1.8, I got a distance of observation on the order of 10 GIGA Light years!!! http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CosmoCalc.html So why the heck can we even see a quasar at that distance? We could say it's because it's a buzillion times as bright as a galaxy (and there is no known mechanism to create such power) or the object is hundreds of light years away not 10 billion of light years away. This would also be consistent with the parallax measurement. But of course, data that is sitting before our eyes can't be trusted by the mainstream when it grates against a certain narrative that pays lots of mortgages and has a certain aesthetic appeal (the Big Bang is a beautiful theory, just like Star Wars is a beautiful story). The original paper was: Original Paper I'll be cautionary about all this because we simply don't have the necessary data, but hopefully that situation will improve in the next few years. van Flandern made the observation which I sympathize with: "(5) The average luminosity of quasars must decrease with time in just the right way so that their average apparent brightness is the same at all redshifts, which is exceedingly unlikely. According to the Big Bang theory, a quasar at a redshift of 1 is roughly ten times as far away as one at a redshift of 0.1. (The redshift-distance relation is not quite linear, but this is a fair approximation.) If the two quasars were intrinsically similar, the high redshift one would be about 100 times fainter because of the inverse square law. But it is, on average, of comparable apparent brightness. This must be explained as quasars “evolving” their intrinsic properties so that they get smaller and fainter as the universe evolves. That way, the quasar at redshift 1 can be intrinsically 100 times brighter than the one at 0.1, explaining why they appear (on average) to be comparably bright. It isn’t as if the Big Bang has a reason why quasars should evolve in just this magical way. But that is required to explain the observations using the Big Bang interpretation of the redshift of quasars as a measure of cosmological distance. See [[19],[20]]. By contrast, the relation between apparent magnitude and distance for quasars is a simple, inverse-square law in alternative cosmologies. In [20], Arp shows great quantities of evidence that large quasar redshifts are a combination of a cosmological factor and an intrinsic factor, with the latter dominant in most cases. Most large quasar redshifts (e.g., z > 1) therefore have little correlation with distance. " scordova

I am not sure I understood you but you know Mass(interior mass of a radius R of galaxy) = v^2*R/G so you easily get a speed of 200 to 300 Km/Sec.(Yes Per second) selvaRajan

Hmmm. I wonder how important the Peculiar velocity is to the total in general. No, I hadn't heard the term before. Arp's objection focused on non-spiral galaxies that presumably have a small rotational component and an axis of rotation likely to be not parallel to ours (thus, a trigonometrically reduced relative velocity). However, the effect that Arp noticed seems dramatic---Arp called them sausage-shaped, and noted that all galaxies produced this effect, presumably even those with an inflationary component nearing the speed of light. Those galaxies would have to be spinning at merry-go-round-gone-mad velocities to make their Peculiar velocities even noticeable! Or am I missing something? -Q Querius

JGuy, Here's the Jastrow quote you were asking about:

"At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries." - God and the Astronomers (1978 edition, p. 116; 1992 edition, p. 107)

Cheers. vjtorley

To calculate the receding velocity of a galaxy cluster, we have to take the 'Peculiar velocity'(yes, it is a word in cosmology) into consideration. Peculiar velocity is the total velocity vectors of local flow + the velocity of galaxy moving inside its cluster due to gravity. Vtotal = Hubble x Distance + Vpeculiar Imagine that you want to calculate the velocity of river flow by observing boat on the river. If the boat has zero velocity, the speed of boat = speed of river flow. However, if the boat has a velocity and there is a side wind from say, the west direction, you have to take the vector of wind speed, the vector of boat speed and then subtract that from the total observed speed to get the velocity of river. This is what needs to be done to get the true Hubble speed. Galaxies have different speeds within their cluster, which when translated to redshift will show a stretched redshift space.Since the position in sky is same, the redshift stretching occurs only radially, so we get a 'finger' effect. You can say it is like a Doppler shift of local velocities. selvaRajan

JLAFan2001

Can someone clarify somethings for me please? If the big bang didn’t happen wouldn’t that make the universe eternal as materialists have said before? Wouldn’t the Kalam argument be defeated and theists would lose another argument?

No. BTW: Your question implies you understand that the theist still have the winning argument.

On the other hand, it seems that some think that an eternal universe is absurd based on some science and philosophy. Which is it? Did it have a beginning or not? If not, how can one measure it’s age if it is eternal? what would be the alternative model to the big bang if one does hold to a beginning?

Seems pretty absurd to me. If time in the past is infinite, then how did the universe arrive to today? Another model is that the universe had a beginning. One example where we find such a model is... specially created. Whattayaknow! :) Reminds me of the Jastrow quote...but can't recall the exact wording. The moral of the story, theologians have been waiting for "science" to catch up. :P JGuy

Dang, Mapou. I was hoping a materialist wabbit would step into the entropy trap! Be vewy vewy quiet . . . ;-) -Q Querius

Can someone clarify somethings for me please? If the big bang didn’t happen wouldn’t that make the universe eternal as materialists have said before? Wouldn’t the Kalam argument be defeated and theists would lose another argument?

This is exactly the kind of conclusion a materialist would draw but it's false before it's even born. Entropy would have turned the universe into a chaotic nothing ages ago. Of course, you have the infinite regress of eternity to deal with and that's always fun too. So "ages ago" should be translated as "an infinite number of years in the past". But you can always count on materialists to tie their shoelaces together and fall on their faces by their own stupidity. Mapou

Can someone clarify somethings for me please? If the big bang didn't happen wouldn't that make the universe eternal as materialists have said before? Wouldn't the Kalam argument be defeated and theists would lose another argument? On the other hand, it seems that some think that an eternal universe is absurd based on some science and philosophy. Which is it? Did it have a beginning or not? If not, how can one measure it's age if it is eternal? what would be the alternative model to the big bang if one does hold to a beginning? JLAfan2001

Heh, love it! And here's where Arp went wrong. He should have gone the OTHER way around and announced that he had actually discovered the "Fingers of God," that they are pointing at us, and thus WE must be very special indeed! Arp would have caused a stampede of astronomers screaming and running away from Hubble's Law! ;-) For estimating distances, we still have the Cepheid variables (used to about 60-100 million light years) and maybe type Ia supernovae. A reasonable summary of how this actually works is available here: http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/MilkyWay/cepheid.html Perhaps Hubble's Constant isn't, but I wonder whether poking it with a stick might still get some kind of correlation between red shift and distance that doesn't result in sausages. -Q Querius

This might be of some interest on this thread: Is there a violation of the Copernican principle in radio sky?

Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR) observations from the WMAP satellite have shown some unexpected anisotropies, which surprisingly seem to be aligned with the ecliptic\cite {20,16,15}. The latest data from the Planck satellite have confirmed the presence of these anisotropies\cite {17}. Here we report even larger anisotropies in the sky distributions of powerful extended quasars and some other sub-classes of radio galaxies in the 3CRR catalogue, one of the oldest and most intensively studies sample of strong radio sources\cite{21,22,3}. The anisotropies lie about a plane passing through the two equinoxes and the north celestial pole (NCP). We can rule out at a 99.995% confidence level the hypothesis that these asymmetries are merely due to statistical fluctuations. Further, even the distribution of observed radio sizes of quasars and radio galaxies show large systematic differences between these two sky regions. The redshift distribution appear to be very similar in both regions of sky for all sources, which rules out any local effects to be the cause of these anomalies. Two pertinent questions then arise. First, why should there be such large anisotropies present in the sky distribution of some of the most distant discrete sources implying inhomogeneities in the universe at very large scales (covering a fraction of the universe)? What is intriguing even further is why such anisotropies should lie about a great circle decided purely by the orientation of earth's rotation axis and/or the axis of its revolution around the sun? It looks as if these axes have a preferential placement in the larger scheme of things, implying an apparent breakdown of the Copernican principle or its more generalization, cosmological principle, upon which all modern cosmological theories are based upon.

HT: lifepsy Happy new year everyone. Chance Ratcliff

rprado @3, deceptiveuniverse.com was very interesting. If some stars are actually mirages of other stars, wouldn't we be able to detect that? Namely by studying their spectra? Even if some frequencies of light were attenuated by something in one of the paths the light took, the different "images" of a single star should match up and/or vary enough in concert over time for us to detect their single true identity, wouldn't they? EDTA

Thacker makes a potentially devastating point. First Thacker's claim:

There are hundreds of known quasars with redshifts greater than z = 3, presumably moving away from us at over 90% of the speed of light. The energy needed to accelerate such objects to nearly light such speeds staggers the imagination. After 30 years of study, quasars are still as much a mystery as when they were first discovered. Quasar Proper Motions Even more telling is that a number of quasars have been found with proper motion. That is, they are seen to move slowly across the sky over the span of a few years. If they were truly at the distances computed from Hubble’s Law, they could not possibly be seen to move in our lifetime! And yet numerous studies by highly respected astronomers have confirmed proper motion in quasars. Cosmological distances and proper motion are totally incompatible. The validity of using the Hubble Law to determine the distance, and therefore the energy, of quasars is very much suspect.

The paper Thacker was referring to was: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0309826 Look at Figure 2 in MacMillan's paper. :shock: :-) :wink: scordova

While I personally "like" the big bang theory, and I realize that Halton Arp's observations challenge it, the reason that I brought up his book was as Mapou noted. - You make an observation that should be obvious to almost anyone. - The observation challenges the current theories (red shift as a measure of distance, the big bang). - The observer is not honored, but instead is professionally crucified. As noted previously, the result is that your papers are rejected, your access to people and equipment is denied, you might lose your job, your reputation is smeared, and so on. This puts a bad light on the *institution* of Science, although likely no worse than any other human institution. Still, one would like to expect honor and integrity from scientists, not to mention judges, politicians, government officials, religious leaders, business executives, the news media, and so on. What we clearly see is that the lack of personal integrity slows and even blocks Scientific progress. We've seen the tactics of apologists for Darwinism right here. And in case professor Matzke is reading this, yes, integrity cuts both ways! -Q Querius

Also, johnnyb makes this observation regarding how blessed we are to live in this time in he universe given a recent paper by physicist Lawrence Krauss:

In the paper The Return of a Static Universe and the End of Cosmology, [Hat Tip: IDTF] the authors argue that in the (very, very far) future, we will no longer be able to detect the evidences that lead us to the conclusion of the big bang. And, in fact, our observational data would lead us to view the universe as static. IDTF thinks that this is evidence that we live in a privileged place and time in the universe. That may or may not be true, but the theoretical questions that this paper brings are far more interesting. Assuming that the paper is correct (and I certainly don't know enough about cosmology to say anything there), then that means that we know that it is possible for the evidence to indicate a false understanding of the universe. Think about that -- we have a paper that demonstrates that physical evidence can lead to a false understanding of cosmology even if the data is measured 100% accurate. http://baraminology.blogspot.com/2007/04/questions-that-should-be-asked.html

If only to suggest, it is by grace than any of us know anything... scordova

Regarding Thacker, here are astronomy photos that turned my stomach. https://uncommondescent.com/cosmology/quadruple-vodka-examples-of-the-universe-being-deceptive/ scordova

To better understand why there was no Big Bang, please go to Jerrold Thacker's page: http://www.deceptiveuniverse.com/ and, if possible, buy his book: Reinventing the Universe (only $2.99): http://amzn.to/KkAh1q He mentions Halton "Chip" Arp and other astronomers who have been discriminated and, in some cases, fired (like ID scientists) for their new theories about the red shift, that make the Big Bang look like the Darwin's evolution theory: Absurd and obsolete. rprado

One way this can start to have resolution is if we have space probes that can give us very accurate parallax distance measurements out to millions of light years. Right now we can see maybe 350 light years out. What this means is we'll have to put probes out there that are far enough apart that they can triangulate distances based on geometry. If for example we find strongly red shifted quasars that are a few thousand light years out, that will settle the issue pretty decisively. The Gaia probe is over the next five years is supposed to extend our parallax view out to 30,000 or so light years. As of now we're just walking around like blind men perhaps seeing mirages so to speak. As I said, we're rich on speculation, poor on actual data. scordova

This is a very interesting topic because it teaches us a lesson about how science is conducted. Science is much more about preserving the ideology of the good old boy network than it is about reaching conclusions from the evidence. In this case, the evidence clearly falsifies the Big Bang hypothesis and the accelerated expansion of the universe. Happy New Year to all. I predict that 2014 will be a year of major disruptions. Mapou