- #36
turbo
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That's me! :rofl:jcsd said:Turbo-1, the 'naive' in this context usually means 'over-simplistic'
That's me! :rofl:jcsd said:Turbo-1, the 'naive' in this context usually means 'over-simplistic'
turbo-1 said:If current trends continue (discovery of even more highly redshifted quasars with solar and super-solar metallicities), what does that tell us about the Universe?
Possibilities include:...
4) There never was a Big Bang. We live in a steady-state universe in which even the most distant things we can ever see are roughly equivalent in metallicity to stars in own neighborhood. "Cosmological" redshift is not due to expansion of the universe, but to energy loss as EM interacts with the fields through which it propagates. The more distance EM has to travel, the more it is redshifted. Another "third rail" idea that can kill the career of an astronomer, but what if it's true?
There are lots more possibilites, including VSL, and perhaps some mix-and-match combinations of the above, but you can see where this is going. Standard-model cosmology has a lot of problems, requiring the invention of non-baryonic dark matter, dark energy, inflation, etc, to keep it afloat. It is impossible to refute all these epicycles, just as it is impossible to refute any ideas that are taken on faith. The observed high metallicities of high-redshift quasars WILL cause all these ideas to be challenged, though. It is just a matter of time. When Webb comes on-line, or when the LBT is fully operational and some spunky graduate student measures super-solar metallicity in a quasar at z~7-8 or so, the 13.7Gy Big Bang universe will be absolutely untenable. Hopefully, the standard model will be seriously re-evaluated and not just patched with another epicycle or two. The next several years will be an interesting time.
The vast majority of scientists believe the BB is in excellent health.brightstar2005 said:Obviously from what turbo-1 said the BB is in deep crisis.
SpaceTiger said:You guys should do like badastronomy and make a separate board for this "fringe" stuff. Casual readers might get the impression that the scientific community actually takes it seriously. Besides, it's annoying having to wade through it looking for something of scientific merit.
selfAdjoint said:We have to be strong monitors because of the concern you cite, but we are not high priests of some fixed and invariable Truth.
SpaceTiger said:Anything seriously challenging traditional theories without being widely accepted by the scientific community seems obviously fringe to me.
Garth said:Would you not allow an intelligent and informed questionning of the 'traditional theories'? To my way of thinking such questions are the 'stuff' of good science.
SpaceTiger said:Anything seriously challenging traditional theories without being widely accepted by the scientific community seems obviously fringe to me.
That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's as I say, "fringe." This includes MOND, anti-big bang, anti-relativity, anti-dark matter, etc. Scanning the forum, I can see posts on MOND, "leaking gravity", crisis in cosmology...almost half of them.
This has nothing to do with absolute "truth", just the current state of science. If these boards weren't magnets for crackpots, these discussions could be conducted on more even ground, but unfortunately it's the extremists that tend to be on the internet hawking their ideas, not the serious scientists. There was even a talk about this at the last American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting. People who don't gain acceptance by the scientific community have a tendency to fight a propaganda war instead. Part of the reason so many people believe the BS is that the BSers are so much more aggressive about selling to the public.
ohwilleke said:Almost by definition the interesting parts of science, the ones people want to discuss, are those where traditional theories are being seriously challenged. There aren't a lot of new and interesting things be said about Newtonian mechanics in situations where neither quantum mechanics or general relativity apply.
I would define "fringe" to mean challenges to traditional theories which are not serious. The people who simply say "God did it",
or rather than looking for possible flaws in redshift methodology simply deny that red shift is being observed
There is a big difference between a minority view, which is based on evidence and an effort to apply a novel hypothesis using the scientific method, and a fringe view, which rejects the scientific method.
The American Astronomical Society would be better served by being aggressive in selling widely accepted theories, and by better discussing in communication directed to the public the basis for the widely accepted theories.
SpaceTiger said:First of all, I disagree. I think most of the work that's going on now is extremely interesting and only a very small fraction of it challenges tradition/majority in any serious way. Second of all, this isn't a university, it's a message board. Let's be honest with ourselves, serious scientific progress is probably not going to be made here. Educating the forum-goers about Kepler's Laws and relativity is, in my opinion, a much more valuable pursuit than speculating about MOND.
Anybody who even questions the cosmological interpretation of redshift is fringe. Even most of these questioners would probably admit that.
And there's a big difference between speculation about MOND and leaking gravity (scientific or not) and discussion about planet-finding methods. The first is definitely "fringe", as I understand the word.
This paper presents a brief review of the evidence for dark matter in the Universe on the scales of galaxies. In the interests of critically and objectively testing the dark matter paradigm on these scales, this evidence is weighed against that from the only other game in town, modified Newtonian dynamics. The verdict is not as clear cut as one might have hoped.
I agree, but try finding a serious scientist who wants to spend their time doing that. It's harder than you might think.
A person who doesn't ask questions is a fundamentalist, in religious belief or science; theologians ask questions.ohwilleke said:Anyone who doesn't ask questions is not a scientist at all. He is a theologian.
ohwilleke said:We certainly disagree there. Education is primarily a function of a university.
Message boards deal with news, the emphasis being on "new" (and analyze it), as they can get the word out faster than traditional journals. If I want to learn about old, settled theory, I'll buy a textbook. I go to message boards (or blogs) to learn about things that aren't yet in print.
Anyone who doesn't ask questions is not a scientist at all. He is a theologian. What distinguishes fringe and not fringe is how you answer questions.
A new planet is news. A general discussion about planet-finding methods is pretty darn dull, until someone challenges those methods and proposes an alternate hypothesis (e.g. what if what you're seeing is stellar dynamics or observational error, rather than a planet?).
Also, considering that almost every university with a graduate physics program in the world has a string theorist on staff, and a large proportion of those have people doing brane theory, which is where leaking gravity comes from, it is hardly fringe.
Much of what you are calling fringe really is a matter of disciplinary rivalry.
Within dark matter theory, suggesting that WIMPZILLAs are dark matter is pretty mainstream. Within quantum physics, WIMPZILLAs are one of many pretty far out there possibilities that are being discussed in the context of a lack of consensus of what physics, if any, undergird the standard model.
Within the GR community, suggesting that there is a non-geometrical explanation for GR is a minority view. Within the QM community, it is the mainstream view.
The matter receives a lot of attention in these forums precisely because there is not a clear cut answer. Gray is more interesting than black and white.
Which is why the task falls to amateurs to some extent. If you feel strongly that there is a scientific consensus and that you have a firm command of it, then perhaps you should defend it, instead of taking a de ex machina approach.
Also, it is worth noting the scientists are less objective in evaluating challenges to traditional theories v. defending them, then you would expect. The best predictor of a scientist's stance on those issues is birth order, i.e. is the scientist an oldest child or a younger one.
Likewise, I would suggest this paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0412059 by Merrifield who is primarily a dark matter (not a MOND) camp phenomenologist to suggest that MOND is less fringe than you suggest.
This forum is followed by lots of young folks, many of whom probably just lurk and do not post questions that are important to them, simply because they do not wish to be stomped flat by "those in the know". These kids are the core of our next generation of physicists, and they should be encouraged to re-evaluate the assumptions behind our commonly-held beliefs and either falsify them or re-affirm them. If these bright young people are told that they have to blindly accept everything that came before them and is commonly accepted, and then "build" upon it, they are being programmed to perpetuate the failures of our generation. (Google on Cargo-Cult Science by Feynman)SpaceTiger said:Anything seriously challenging traditional theories without being widely accepted by the scientific community seems obviously fringe to me. That doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's as I say, "fringe." This includes MOND, anti-big bang, anti-relativity, anti-dark matter, etc. Scanning the forum, I can see posts on MOND, "leaking gravity", crisis in cosmology...almost half of them.
Some regard the "current state of science" as the "absolute truth". Unfortunately to achieve this level of certainty, you might have to enroll in Divinity School, and check your inquisitive nature at the door. There is an old divinity school in central Maine called the Bangor Theological Seminary. I became acquainted with a few of the students at that school after playing chess with them and talking with them on campus, close to where my apartment was, and started privately calling it the "Bangor Teleological Cemetary". The school seemed to be set on killing any inquisitive natures they might have had. Orthodoxy is not going to produce another Feynman, nor another Einstein. Neither of them regarded previous theories as sacred, and both insisted that we must constantly re-examine the assumptions of previous models to avoid repeating mistakes that are handed down to us as "givens". I will gladly link to examples of their writings, if you'd like.SpaceTiger said:This has nothing to do with absolute "truth", just the current state of science. If these boards weren't magnets for crackpots, these discussions could be conducted on more even ground, but unfortunately it's the extremists that tend to be on the internet hawking their ideas, not the serious scientists.
This is not true. It is very easy to popularize science and gain support for its funding. Feynman (a giant in his day) gave public non-technical lectures that were geared toward ordinary people (intelligent non-physicists), that were very successful in conveying his wonderment and satisfaction at learning about simple concepts in the real world. People gravitated to him, and he was a great PR man for science, even when physics was seemingly degenerating into the "non-applicable" field of QFT. Sagan had even more popular commercial success with his Cosmos series, although I'd expect to get more out of an hour of Feynman than out of 4 hours of Sagan.SpaceTiger said:There was even a talk about this at the last American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting. People who don't gain acceptance by the scientific community have a tendency to fight a propaganda war instead. Part of the reason so many people believe the BS is that the BSers are so much more aggressive about selling to the public.
Garth said:A person who doesn't ask questions is a fundamentalist, in religious belief or science; theologians ask questions.
Garth
brightstar2005 said:There are many questions to be answred yet.
I don't think that we will find the answers in the mainstream because nature has to be extremely complex if it can be explained in the standard spacetime framework. Instead I like authors like Stephen Wolfram and Eugene Savov who point toward a fundamental simplicity.
brightstar2005 said:any theory that offers a simple and logical picture of the universe, like for instance the theory of interaction, is worth the effort of learning it.