- #36
Nereid
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I think it's important to distinguish between cosmology models and observational data.zforgetaboutit said:Inferred is the operational word here. I'll bet it was fudged just enough to agree with the concordance model.
http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:astro-ph/0306088 is an obvious example of concordance cosmological model fudging.
I'm not outright dismissing the results, but we have to be aware of the shadowy assumptions made to "make the data/theory fit".
I don't have a problem with this strategy, but I can't yet accept it as obvious fact either because of the fudging.
For the CMBR, the data are now very good, and with the second year of WMAP results expected out soon (and Planck in a few years' time), will be much better. In summary, the CMBR:
- has a near perfect black-body spectrum, T ~= 2.725 K
- has a dipole, of 0.00335 K
- has smaller-scale temperature fluctuations, <~0.0005K
- has a detailed angular power spectrum, observed to +/-% to l~several hundred
- has specific, well constrained polarisation characteristics.
Any theory - cosmological or otherwise - needs to account for the observational data.
As to whether the observations I referred to were 'fudged', I'll let you read the PR (it has a reference to the paper) - once you've done so, please tell us how you think the conclusion is fudged. http://www.eso.org/outreach/press-rel/pr-2000/pr-27-00.html
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