On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 05:10:34AM -0800, Edgar L. Owen wrote:
> All, More FYI for discussion, not because I believe it. Best, Edgar
>
>
> *Eric Lerner*
> *Big Bang Never Happened*
> http://bigbangneverhappened.org/
> *Home Page and Summary*
>
...
Is the Big Bang a Bust?
The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of
the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe. By
Eric Lerner New York: Random House, 1991, 466 pp. Cloth,
$21.95.
Victor J. Stenger
Published in Skeptical Inquirer 16, 412, Summer 1992.
Normally the refutation of a dominant scientific
theory takes place on the pages of a scientific journal.
But strange things are happening in science these days,
as a Nobel laureate admits to publishing falsified data,
great research universities are accused of misspending,
and wacky claims like cold fusion are announced by press
conference. News magazines proclaim that science is in
trouble, so it must be so. The scientific establishment
has been smug and complacent for too long. It's high
time it was pulled down from its pedestal and told
who's boss in a democratic society.
The big-bang theory is the standard framework
within which most cosmologists operate, having assumed
the same position held by evolution for biologists and
quantum mechanics for physicists. Eric Lerner wishes to
pull down not only that framework, but also what he
perceives as the outdated mentality that built it.
Lerner's case against the big bang is composed
of several different lines of argument. The first is
conventional scientific criticism: The big-bang
conjecture is said to be invalidated by the data.
Cosmologists have a theory, the big bang, that makes
specific quantitative and qualitative predictions that are
tested against observations. They claim success for a
significant majority of these tests, far exceeding all
alternatives. The recent highly-publicized results from
the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) provide
further evidence for the validity of the big-bang model.
While admitting that a detailed, satisfactory explanation
of several phenomena, notably large-scale structure
formation, is yet to be provided, big-bang cosmologists
do not see this as fatal. Lerner, however, argues that
these deficiencies are so severe as to invalidate the
whole notion of a universe finite in time and space.
The big bang may be wrong, but Lerner can't
seriously expect to prove it in a popular book. The issue
is hardly likely to be settled without the technical
detail, careful reasoning, and expert critical review of
the conventional scientific paper or monograph, which
this is not. Lerner attempts to go over the heads of
cosmologists to the general public. Despite current
criticism of science, I see no sign that the public is
demanding suffrage in the determination of scientific
truth.
The author does not limit himself to a scientific
critique of big-bang cosmology, but has a larger agenda.
His goal is to refute not just the big bang, but the very
thought processes of conventional science as well. He
argues that the hypothesis-testing procedure is a
throwback to Platonism, a product of theological rather
than scientific thinking and antithetic to the essence of
the scientific revolution.
According to the author, the equations used in big-
bang calculations are treated by the science elite as the
ultimate reality of the universe - like Plato's forms.
Even after these equations are shown to disagree with
observational facts, as Lerner claims they have been,
they are retained by big bangers because of an irrational
prejudice that the theory must be correct regardless of
the facts. Rather than discard the big-bang theory,
cosmologists invent new unobserved phenomena, such as
cosmic strings and invisible dark matter, to "save the
phenomena."
The big bang is promoted, in Lerner's view,
because science has sacrificed its soul to theology. The
theory confirms the theological notion of creation _ex
nihilo_: The universe is finite, having a definite
beginning, created with a fixed design, and gradually
winding down under the inexorable effect of the second
law of thermodynamics.
Lerner argues that this picture disintegrates on
exposure to observed facts, not just those gathered with
telescopes but common experience as well. From
everyday observations, the universe is growing and
evolving to a state of increasing order. The second law
is simply wrong, or wrongfully interpreted.
The curved space and black holes predicted by
general relativity are likewise not common experience,
but the result of abstruse mathematics. Lerner says we
should believe what our eyes tell us, not some
fashionable mathematical equation.
Finally, Lerner finds within this cosmotheological
conspiracy the source of most of the evils of society.
The slavery of the past and the continued
authoritarianism of the present somehow arise from the
idea that the universe came into being at an explosive
instant and is headed toward ultimate decay. He says the
big bang is a convenient paradigm employed by an unholy
alliance between church and state to subjugate humanity.
In their view, the material world came from nothing and
is next to nothing, transient and meaningless in the face
of the eternal, limitless power of God.
Lerner's alternative universe is based on the
matter-antimatter symmetric plasma cosmology
promoted for years by Nobel laureate Hannes AlfvŽn.
Most conventional cosmologists insist that plasma
cosmology is inconsistent with observational data. In
particular, AlfvŽn's universe is half matter and half
antimatter; yet no more than one part in a billion of
antimatter is observed anywhere in the universe.
What arguments does Lerner use to promote the
plasma universe? Again they fall into the same classes
as his arguments against the big bang. And they possess
the same flaws he purports to find in conventional
cosmological argument.
While castigating big-bang cosmologists for using
hypothesis-testing, Lerner is not beyond claiming
successful tests of the hypotheses of plasma cosmology.
While maligning big bangers for inventing new ad hoc
entities, such as the dark matter, to "save the
phenomena," he introduces unobserved, invisible
"filaments" throughout the universe to scatter the
microwave background and make it isotropic as the data
require. (The big bang requires nothing ad hoc here, and,
in fact, _predicted _ the microwave background.) While
he derides the mathematical equations of general
relativity for being inferred from arguments of
symmetry and elegance, rather than directly from
experiment, Lerner extols the marvels of Maxwell's
equations of electromagnetism - also inferred as much
from arguments of symmetry and elegance as from
observation. And while he criticizes the theological
nature of creation _ex nihilo_, he calls on the equally
mystical ideas of Teilhard de Chardin.
Has Eric Lerner punctured the big-bang balloon so
that its collapse is at hand? I doubt it. The big-bang
theory is in no more trouble than the theory of evolution.
Creationists tried and failed to invalidate evolution by
trumpeting a few of the problems biologists still argue
over. Similarly, Lerner tries and fails to invalidate the
big bang by drawing attention to its current unsolved
problems, declaring them fatal while ignoring the
theory's many successes, unmatched by any
alternative theory.
The first successful test of the big bang occurred
with the discovery of the microwave background in 1964.
Lerner dismisses this prediction, labeling it a failure
because the measured temperature of the radiation was
lower than predicted. But the important result was that
the radiation was there at all. No other theory, including
plasma cosmology, foresaw this. Lerner's argument
here is like someone saying that Columbus failed to prove
that the earth was round since he set foot in the
Americas, rather than East Indies, where he had expected
to land.
Lerner also argues that the universe must be much
older than the 15 to 20 billion years required by standard
big-bang theory. He claims that the large structures
being observed by astronomers ". . . . were just too big
to have formed in the twenty billion years since the big
bang" (p. 23). While current cosmology has yet to
accommodate these structures, Lerner has not
demonstrated that it never will within the big-bang
framework. His calculation is based on the _lengths_ of
the structures, the longest being somewhat less than a
billion light-years. In fact, only their _widths_, tens or
hundreds times smaller, need be explained. In a 15 to 20
billion year-old universe, ample time exists to generate
a structure a billion light-years long and a hundred
million light-years wide. We just do not yet know the
exact mechanism.
The fact is: No observation rules out the big bang
theory at this time. And the big bang theory is
successful in quantitatively explaining many
observations. For example, calculations on the synthesis
of light chemical elements in the big bang give
remarkable agreement with measured abundances.
Lerner uses the kinds of arguments one often hears
in public discourse on science, but rarely among
professional scientists themselves. For example, he
argues that plasma cosmology is in closer agreement
with everyday observation than big-bang cosmology, and
hence is the more sensible. A look through a telescope
reveals spirals and other structures similar to those
observed in the plasma laboratory (and, as cosmologist
Rocky Kolb has remarked, in your bathroom toilet as
well). Following Lerner's line of reasoning, we would
conclude, as people once did, that the earth is flat, that
the sun goes around the earth, and that species are
immutable. The scientific revolution taught us to
question commonsense expectations.
Finally I want to comment on Lerner's
connection of the big bang to the Judeo-Christian concept
of Creation. I agree with the author in condemning the
way the big bang has been exploited by preachers, popes,
and some scientist-authors of popular books, as
providing an imagined link between science and religion,
and even a verification of the existence of a Creator. We
have seen this phenomenon repeated as the recent COBE
results are trumpeted by the media as evidence for
God's presence "shining through" in the design
of the universe. These commentators do not understand
that quite the opposite is the case. No support for
creation by design can be found in the theory of the big
bang.
Complete quantum chaos must have existed at an early
moment of the big bang (the _Planck Time_, 10^-43
second). All we know about the universe is consistent
with a beginning that was a spontaneous quantum
fluctuation, with structure and physical laws developing
by the purely material processes of self-organization.
The uncreated universe does not, as some people think,
require a violation of the first or second law of
thermodynamics, nor any other principle of physics.
Perhaps the big bang did not happen exactly as
currently envisaged, but Lerner does not make much of a
case against it. In fact, a great deal of what he
discusses in his book, like cosmic plasma phenomena, is
perfectly consistent with the big bang. He could have
used the same material had he decided to write "The
Big Bang Happened!"
--
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Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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