Burbidge's Cosmology: Overcoming Inertia in Science

[turbo]

I do not subscribe to all of his ideas, nor Arp's, but I wholeheartedly encourage the epistemology that is sorely lacking in today's physics. We had to wait a LONG time before Einstein's model of gravitation overtook Newton's (and still NASA can do a pretty nice job using Newtonian gravitation).

http://www.cosmology.info/2005conference/wps/burbidge.pdf

Note: Inertia is not just a hard-to-describe physical property associated with matter, it also a really powerful property infesting academia. How many decades or centuries of scientific progress have we stifled by establishing educational standards that demand the acceptance of "known truths" in science education before the student can be allowed to discover advanced knowledge, while epistemology is disparaged? Can you say "tunnel vision"?

 

[Chronos]

All valid points, turbo. We have mostly been boxed in by observational constraints that say model A and model B cannot both be true. After a large number of such observations, the probability that model A is more likely true than model B has become overwhelming. But only a few bones of model A [mainstream] are so compelling that few seriously consider any alternatives. There is still a lot of wiggle room. And there are still a lot of model A claims that are no better supported than model B. We do get stuck 'inside the box' at times. It's the human condition. Mavericks advance science, conservatives slowly roast them to golden perfection. All in all, I think it's a good combination of checks and balances. It's easy to get impatient [I know I am] because acceptance of new ideas in such a process is inherently slow. At least we don't condone burning people at the stake anymore... albeit they are still popular at barbeque parties.

 

[sd01g]

It seems that G. Burbidge, like many others, is starting to realize that--not only does the emperor have no clothes--there really is not even an emperor. The BB theory is not even a theory which meets the test required by the scientific method. It can never be empirically verified. It should be called the Grand Cosmic Emergence Speculation or some similar nomenclature. But wait, it is not even good speculation. If everywhere one looks, in every direction, as far as one can detect, one finds matter/energy, with new stars and galaxies being formed and matter/energy being redistributed by gigantic gamma bursts found in ever-increasing numbers, then one might better speculate the Universe is too Grand and too Powerful to ever have existed as some bogus quantum bubble or perhaps a Higgs field (if there even is such a thing). The Universe should not be trivialized by a so-called theory which predicts nothing and requires constant changes.

 

[Chronos]

It seems that G. Burbidge, like many others, is starting to realize that--not only does the emperor have no clothes--there really is not even an emperor. The BB theory is not even a theory which meets the test required by the scientific method. It can never be empirically verified. It should be called the Grand Cosmic Emergence Speculation or some similar nomenclature. But wait, it is not even good speculation. If everywhere one looks, in every direction, as far as one can detect, one finds matter/energy, with new stars and galaxies being formed and matter/energy being redistributed by gigantic gamma bursts found in ever-increasing numbers, then one might better speculate the Universe is too Grand and too Powerful to ever have existed as some bogus quantum bubble or perhaps a Higgs field (if there even is such a thing). The Universe should not be trivialized by a so-called theory which predicts nothing and requires constant changes.

It is amazing how so many apparently brilliant people can be deluded by a concept so patently unsupported by observational evidence.

 

[sd01g]

It is amazing how so many apparently brilliant people can be deluded by a concept so patently unsupported by observational evidence.

Equally amazing is how so many apparently brilliant people disregard observational evidence and replace it with the concept of Inflation: The theory which states (with no scientific evidence whatsoever) that the universe underwent an incredible amount of supraliminal expansion at the instant of its birth. Theories based on reverse engineering and which do not serve to predict any future observations are basically worthless.