Turbot said:
Blackbodies are classical examples of heat-sinks (EM-sinks) that can absorb any wavelength of EM and will emit EM with a curve appropriate to their temperatures. Pretty basic. The area under the BB curve is dependent on the temperature of the emitting body and the shape of the curve is very well-defined. We do not have to worry about whether empty space can exhibit black-body behavior. "Empty" (non-radiating with respect to us) space is a pure black body.
If it's not radiating or absorbing, it isn't a blackbody. That follows from what you said above.
As for the CMB, why might we believe that the echo of the big bang can express itself as a black body, since the "echo" should express itself over a fairly large redshift span and over a large span of temperatures?
Because a redshifted blackbody spectrum retains its blackbody shape. That's all there is to it. I'd prove it to you, but you don't know any math.
I was pointing out that the night sky is a powerful heat sink. Any astonomer can explain this to you. A telescope pointed at the dark sky will cool far more rapidly that you would expect by considering the ambient temperature alone. This is pretty basic.
This is pretty wrong. The "night sky", as you're describing it, does not absorb radiation from the telescope, the telescope just
emits the radiation and gets no feedback from its environment. In this sense, the night sky is not a heat sink, but rather the lack of a heat source. Any object left to itself will cool with time because it radiates its energy away. If, at the same time, the environment is giving feedback in the form of radiation, then the cooling process will be slower. That's why your telescope cools more slowly when pointed at a radiating source.
Not true. The EM need only be absorbed once and emitted once to produce a black-body spectrum based on the temperature of the emitter. An object can exhibit a black-body spectrum at one temperature, and then can exhibit a different (based on its temperature) black-body spectrum after being heated or cooled to a different temperature.
I think you need to pick up a good book on statistical mechanics. Equilibrium is not obtained as a result of one event, but is instead the end result of the many complicated interactions in a body (photon absorptions, collisions, etc.). An electromagnetic wave that is emitted from, say, the sun, will impact on the surface of a body (for example, you) and deliver energy to your surface. The particles on your surface will then have higher energies than the particles in your interior. However, because of collisions, vibrations, photon exchanges, etc., the energy will be redistributed throughout your body. A process like this can take a split second, a year, a millenium, or it might not occur at all. We can, however, calculate the approximate time for this process to occur and determine that the early universe should have had no trouble obtaining thermal equilibrium.
I am not predicting "statistically" significant inconsistencies of gross effects. I predict gross inconsistencies at small angles between WMAP1 and WMAP2.
If I understand you, you're saying that the anisotropy on one part of the sky will be inconsistent with the anisotropy on the same part of sky when viewed by a different experiment. However, I'm asking why you're singling out WMAP1 and WMAP2 when the CMB has already been observed at small angles by multiple experiments. For example, you can look at the CMB maps from COBE and WMAP:
http://qonos.princeton.edu/nbond/wmap_cobe.jpg"
Notice how the anisotropies are the same (not just one average) on the scales resolved by COBE. The same is true of the other experiments (such as BOOMERANG) that go to smaller angles.
If the same probe cannot give OOM-consistent temperatures on angular resolutions of a degree or so (again, I think I'm being very generous), we must admit that the CMB is local and not cosmological. We need to compare WMAP1 and WMAP2 to settle this. We cannot compare results from probes with different altitudes, different sensors, or even different stabilization techniques.
Why? If your theory is correct (that the anisotropies are due to movements of the instrument), then these different probes should give different anisotropies for exactly the reasons that you've cited. If the anisotropies aren't different, then your theory is wrong.
If the small-angle anisotropies of WMAP2 do not agree with those observed in WMAP1, there is no possible way (absent instrument error) that the CMB can be cosmological. Huge portions of the Universe that are non-causally-connected cannot possible conspire to change together over a period of one Earth-year.
This is true, and it'll only be about another month before we see this data. However, I don't see any reason why you feel the need to wait. Your theory is already disproven.
) resulting from the dominant gross movement of our galaxy or group. The remaining anisotropies will be more and more difficult to quantify, as errors in the process of subtracting the major ones multiply, but I firmly believe that they will ultimately be proven to arise from the complex movements of our probes in relation to local space.