Was Halton Arp hard done by? Need some clarification. some pictures

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Some time ago Halton Arp made a prediction that big red shifted galaxies are connected to smaller red shifted galaxies. Does anybody know what exactly was his prediction.

Anyway so NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team tried to discredit him using this image:

RBWHO.jpg



But look what happens when you invert that image:

V9FdO.jpg



The same thing from a different source and correct me if i am wrong, measuring the redshift.

KkkLal.jpg


This is the same thing via an Xray.

dS0yh.jpg


I hear he got "lepered" in Germany. I am curious as to what Arp did that was so wrong?

Mentor Note: Please size pictures to no larger than 650 x 490.
 
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Arp argued that redshift was not an absolute indicator of cosmological distance and recession, but there was some component of redshift that is intrinsic to the objects being observed. Such a view was heresy, and as a result, the time allocation committee cut off his observation time at Palomar, then at the telescope in Chile. An observational astronomer with no access to telescopes... not good!
 
Yesifeed said:
Anyway so NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team tried to discredit him using this image:
Surely you mean "tried to refute his theory"?

But look what happens when you invert that image:
So?

I hear he got "lepered" in Germany.
:confused:

I am curious as to what Arp did that was so wrong?
:confused:


turbo-1 said:
Such a view was heresy
Surely you're just trying to be humorous rather than trolling for a response, right?
 
Wasn't (isn't?) Arp a creationist - or at least one who occasionally alludes to "God"? Perhaps this would tend to partially explain why he is shunned by more respectable academics and institutions?

Respectfully submitted,
Steve
 
Hurkyl said:
Surely you're just trying to be humorous rather than trolling for a response, right?
Not in the least. Even Edwin Hubble was not convinced that redshift was proof of recession/cosmological expansion. In private correspondence a few weeks after the 1988 "Cosmology in Retrospect" symposium, Arp told me that in Hubble's old papers, Hubble always said "if redshift means velocity", and mentioned that in a paper published in 1953 after his death, Hubble said "c x z = velocity is not formally correct".

Halton Arp, the Burbidges, et al may be quite wrong in invoking intrinsic redshifts. They have dug up many examples of apparently-interacting objects with discordant redshifts. My collaborators and I assembled a large catalog of M-51-type galaxy associations, and published that paper in a Springer journal. The smaller companions are overwhelmingly redshifted WRT their host galaxies. This may be entirely an artifact of chance projection, though it is hard to make such a case when the spiral arm connecting to the companion is distorted and/or asymmetrical.
 
I apologize for the large pictures, i will resize but it will take a 1/4 of an hour or so.

Do i need to resize the original 2 images?





Surely you mean "tried to refute his theory"?

I think maybe "tried to discredit his prediction" as in "put into doubt" is more accurate, i am not sure that you can really "refute" something like this with a single picture.


So?

You can't see the faint gaseuos bridge?
 
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Yesifeed said:
You can't see the faint gaseuos bridge?
There's no bridge there. At least that is the scientific consensus.

Think of it this way. You're driving down the road and see a radio tower in the distance that just happens to look like it is coming out of the top of a nearby building. The tower of course is not coming out of the top of the building. It just happens to look like it is.

Another way to look at it: People have grouped stars into constellations since before written history. Many of those stars that we see as being close together are in fact very, very far apart. When we see two stars as being close to one another, what we are seeing is a small angular separation from the perspective of our particular location in the galaxy. The perspective from some other location might well be something quite different.

Arp spent his time looking for objects that appeared to be close together. Some of the objects he found truly are close together but others are not. NGC 4319 and Markarian 205 are in the latter category.
 
turbo-1 said:
Not in the least.
(Irrelevant words snipped) Then care to provide a reference for your assertion that he was cut off for heretical views?

(note: arguing whether his theories are right or wrong is completely irrelevant for your assertion)
 
  • #10
turbo-1 said:
My collaborators and I assembled a large catalog of M-51-type galaxy associations, and published that paper in a Springer journal. The smaller companions are overwhelmingly redshifted WRT their host galaxies.

Your claim that the smaller companions are "overwhelmingly redshifted" has been previously examined and the evidence has been shown to be rather underwhelming. See the following post:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2397153&postcount=41"
 
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  • #11
Thanks for the input. I read that link you gave George Jones. Interesting. They say the issue is debateable but as more and more images are gotten the less likely that it is the case.
 
  • #12
Yesifeed said:
You can't see the faint gaseuos bridge?
No. I see a small fuzzy circle near to a large fuzzy ellipse.

While I can see what you are making out to be a "faint gaseous bridge", it simply doesn't look to me like anything other than a small fuzzy circle next to a large fuzzy ellipse.

I know some of the sorts of artifacts that can appear in this sort of image to give a misleading appearance -- but I don't even see those artifacts here. You are only seeing a bridge because you want to see one, or are possibly suffering an optical illusion.

I really don't trust eyes and brains for doing this sort of image classification.



I decided to have a fun image-making experiment. The pictures below contain two disks. Nothing else -- just two disks.

I processed the image by smearing them out (to make a fringe), applying a threshold value for white and black, and interpolating between the thresholds with shades of gray.

Here is the image.
attachment.php?attachmentid=36059&stc=1&d=1306800803.png

There's the clear appearance of a faint bridge, despite such a thing simply not existing in the underlying picture.


I moved the circles a bit closer and did the same process.
attachment.php?attachmentid=36060&stc=1&d=1306800789.png

It doesn't even look like a bridge anymore -- they look actually connected!


Here is the unprocessed image. (for the second case of the circles being slightly closer)
attachment.php?attachmentid=36061&stc=1&d=1306801036.png
 

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  • #13
Thanks it does seem i was suffering an optical illusion, i looked at it again after reading what you wrote it seems less connected. But what of the other 2 images?
 
  • #14
Yesifeed said:
Thanks it does seem i was suffering an optical illusion, i looked at it again after reading what you wrote it seems less connected. But what of the other 2 images?
Your third image could very well be the sort of processing artifact I made a sample of.

The difference between red and green looks very steep to the human eye, but I have absolutely no idea how the colors correspond to actual data, or otherwise what processing was done on the image.

I don't have the expertise to tell the difference between an actual object and an artifact -- especially since I have no clue as to the underlying data.


I can't figure out what the fourth image is showing.
 
  • #15
Fair enough. The 4th image is of Markian 205 as well apparently and the bridge is to the top right for some reason.

EDIT: The third image was of the image measuring redshift, i am not aware that other post processing was done.
 
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  • #16
matt.o said:
Your claim that the smaller companions are "overwhelmingly redshifted" has been previously examined and the evidence has been shown to be rather underwhelming. See the following post:

https://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?p=2397153&postcount=41"

There is the data. "underwhelming" may be your caricaturisation, but we can't pick and choose in observational astronomy. Either the universe follows some rules, or it's Katy Bar The Door.
 
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  • #17
turbo-1 said:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0805.1492

There is the data. "underwhelming" may be your caricaturisation, but we can't pick and choose in observational astronomy. Either the universe follows some rules, or it's Katy Bar The Door.

Thanks for the link to the paper. Keen readers (i.e., those that bothered to read the post I linked to) will note that those were the data used in the linked post above.
 
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  • #18
It is always sad when a formerly-good scientist goes down the road of complete crackpot. Arp is one of the more prominent examples, though there are so many others. His primary offense is that he stopped paying attention to anybody else's arguments, and more importantly stopped paying attention to the evidence, and continued to parrot his theories anyway. That is a heresy that science cannot abide: the heresy of divorcing yourself from reason and evidence.

In this particular case, Arp never presented a compelling argument for how this redshift might be "intrinsic". Also bear in mind that today we have correlated redshift with a number of different distance measures across an obscene range of distance (many billions of light years). We have also been able to resolve the host galaxies of many quasars, such as in this image above (Arp believed that quasars were objects ejected from galaxies, instead of just being the cores of active galaxies).
 
  • #19
turbo-1 said:
Such a view was heresy, and as a result, the time allocation committee cut off his observation time at Palomar, then at the telescope in Chile.

Telescope time is an extremely precious commodity, and giving time to him means taking it away from someone else.

Also, if we are *that* wrong about quasars, then you should be able to think of some way of showing that with telescope time that is less in demand.
 
  • #20
Chalnoth said:
That is a heresy that science cannot abide: the heresy of divorcing yourself from reason and evidence.

And note that no one is burning him at the stake or anything like that.

If you have a weird unconventional theory, that's fine. If you have a weird and unconventional theory and something to prove it, then you have a problem. If you want to look for the Loch Ness monster, that's fine, but if you want to use my boat and have me pay for your expenses, then you have a problem.

In this particular case, Arp never presented a compelling argument for how this redshift might be "intrinsic".

And this poses a problem because telescope time in large telescopes is too precious to use for fishing expeditions.

Arp believed that quasars were objects ejected from galaxies, instead of just being the cores of active galaxies.

And note that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to believe in 1970. The problem is that during the 1970's, people came up with more and more reasons to think that quasars are distant objects, so Arp just got left behind as the crowd moved forward.

Also, every physicist has some crackpot ideas, but one trick you have to learn in being a productive crackpot is how not to look like a crackpot. My *real* motivation might be to look for the Loch Ness monster, but to get the boat and the crew I just tell everyone that I'm interested in studying the effect of greenhouse gases and pollution on Scottish lakes. If I'm in charge of environmental protection in Scotland, I don't really care if you are looking for the Loch Ness monster, as long as I get my numbers.

Arp isn't the only one that has to do this. Scientists generally have to sell their research priorities to funders and telescope allocation committees, and I don't see that this is a bad way of dividing up scarce resources.
 
  • #21
twofish-quant said:
Also, every physicist has some crackpot ideas,
Really, no idea is crackpot. It's the mindset that goes with the idea that can be crackpot. One can very easily be a crackpot pushing an idea that is actually correct, as well as being a perfectly professional scientist pursuing an idea that is wrong, (or likely to be so).
 
  • #22
Hurkyl said:
Really, no idea is crackpot. It's the mindset that goes with the idea that can be crackpot.

That doesn't quite fit what I've seen. There are a lot of examples of extremely productive and brilliant scientists that have had totally weird ideas (Robert Penrose and neuroscience , Fred Hoyle and cosmology, is another, Thomas Gold and natural gas, Newton and Einstein about a lot of things).

There is a Nobel Prize winner that people knew never to mention black holes around, because the second you did, you'd get this long rant about how they didn't exist. There is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences that has some very unconventional ideas on galactic jets (he doesn't believe they exist).

One thing that is interesting is that what makes someone a totally brilliant scientist can also make them a crackpot. A crackpot is someone that holds on to an idea despite all evidence to the contrary, and sometimes that person can be totally brilliant if he is lucky and right. Sometimes someone can be wrong about one thing, but no one cares because they are brilliant in something else (Penrose).

One can very easily be a crackpot pushing an idea that is actually correct, as well as being a perfectly professional scientist pursuing an idea that is wrong, (or likely to be so).

A crackpot that pushes an idea that turns out to be correct wins the Nobel Prize. Something about "productive crackpots" is that they are often working on several weird ideas. The one that works gets them the world fame. The ones that don't, people forget about.

There are a lot of professional scientists that are crackpots about some things. Personally, I don't think that you can be a productive scientist without being a semi-crackpot.

I think the difference is not having weird ideas or even being irrationally transfixed with ideas. I think the difference is whether you have a sense of humor and aren't annoying to be around. The astrophysicist that I know who has weird ideas about galactic jets, is actually quite nice, and he started his talk with "Yes, I know everyone thinks I'm nuts, but since you asked me to talk about what I think about galactic jets..." It also helps to have a dozen different ideas. If you have irrational ideas about a dozen things, then you might get ultra-lucky with one of them.

If you go around telling about how "they are trying to get you" then people stop wanting to talk to you, especially if you happen to be "them."
 
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  • #23
twofish-quant said:
That doesn't quite fit what I've seen. There are a lot of examples of extremely productive and brilliant scientists that have had totally weird ideas (Robert Penrose and neuroscience , Fred Hoyle and cosmology, is another, Thomas Gold and natural gas, Newton and Einstein about a lot of things).

There is a Nobel Prize winner that people knew never to mention black holes around, because the second you did, you'd get this long rant about how they didn't exist. There is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences that has some very unconventional ideas on galactic jets (he doesn't believe they exist).

One thing that is interesting is that what makes someone a totally brilliant scientist can also make them a crackpot. A crackpot is someone that holds on to an idea despite all evidence to the contrary, and sometimes that person can be totally brilliant if he is lucky and right. Sometimes someone can be wrong about one thing, but no one cares because they are brilliant in something else (Penrose).



A crackpot that pushes an idea that turns out to be correct wins the Nobel Prize. Something about "productive crackpots" is that they are often working on several weird ideas. The one that works gets them the world fame. The ones that don't, people forget about.

There are a lot of professional scientists that are crackpots about some things. Personally, I don't think that you can be a productive scientist without being a semi-crackpot.

I think the difference is not having weird ideas or even being irrationally transfixed with ideas. I think the difference is whether you have a sense of humor and aren't annoying to be around. The astrophysicist that I know who has weird ideas about galactic jets, is actually quite nice, and he started his talk with "Yes, I know everyone thinks I'm nuts, but since you asked me to talk about what I think about galactic jets..." It also helps to have a dozen different ideas. If you have irrational ideas about a dozen things, then you might get ultra-lucky with one of them.

If you go around telling about how "they are trying to get you" then people stop wanting to talk to you, especially if you happen to be "them."

I'm not totally sure this picture is correct, but I would like to think it is.

In the end the key point is: no matter how crackpot an idea may be, does it work? and another very important point , does it fit in the general working model in cosmology?
The specific problem in cosmology is that many hypothesis can be neither experimentally tested nor directly observed, so basically there is not really a good way to know if they work or not, so the default mode is to declare valid only those ideas that fit in the general working model (that is known to be working within some limitations like too many tweakable fudge parameters but that's another story).
This is the logical way to act if you want to be practical, and being practical is very important in science.
In this sense probably the way Arp carried himself about his insights on quasars and redshift was not very clever, he might have kept his telescope time just by being more diplomatic and first and foremost he should have developed a general model that worked in order to fit in his "observations".
The reality is that Arp's pictures can be explained in different ways and the most practical thing to do is picking the interpretations that fit in the general working model.
 
  • #24
TrickyDicky said:
In the end the key point is: no matter how crackpot an idea may be, does it work? and another very important point , does it fit in the general working model in cosmology?

The latter isn't very important. The standard model could be very wrong in some areas. It's not that astrophysicists are against weird ideas in general, but people have a strong reaction to particular weird ideas because they just don't match what people see.

It's fine to say that the Loch Ness monster exists, but you will get some strange looks if you insist that it lives in Times Square.

The specific problem in cosmology is that many hypothesis can be neither experimentally tested nor directly observed, so basically there is not really a good way to know if they work or not.

That's not a problem, and one of the big misconceptions is that we are in the dark. We have tons and tons and tons of observations. One reason almost no one believes that quasars are nearby is that we can use VLBI observations to zoom in on them and see what they are, and they appear to be massive black holes.

People look at quasars every day. They aren't mysterious objects.

The default mode is to declare valid only those ideas that fit in the general working model

Not true. If you insist that general relativity is wrong, then no one is going to think that you are weird.

In this sense probably the way Arp carried himself about his insights on quasars and redshift was not very clever, he might have kept his telescope time just by being more diplomatic and first and foremost he should have developed a general model that worked in order to fit in his "observations".

The problem is that Arp's views weren't that unusual for 1965, and they are quite reasonable if you limit yourself to what was known about quasars in 1965. Part of the problem is that in 1965, no one could come up with a way of generating the type of energy that you need to power them. The current idea of gas falling into a black hole works nicely. Trouble is that the idea of a black hole was invented in 1968.

Also people somehow assume that Arp is some creative genius when in fact what has happened is that he has stuck to some old ideas long, long, long after the data convinced pretty much everyone else that those ideas were wrong. People will cut you a lot of slack for coming up with nutty ideas if they are *new* nutty ideas. Arp's ideas aren't.

The reality is that Arp's pictures can be explained in different ways and the most practical thing to do is picking the interpretations that fit in the general working model.

No. That's not true.

The problem is that if I show you a blurry picture of Times Square, then I can't prove that this isn't the Loch Ness monster. The reason I don't think the Loch Ness monster lives in Times Square is that people pass there every day, and there ain't no monster.

The sad thing is that if you are obsessed with looking for the Loch Ness monster, you'll miss the UFO and Bigfoot that was there. I'm pretty sure that if you put me into a time machine and traveled back to 1965 and had me a debate with Arp based only on the evidence that existed in 1965, I'd lose badly, and people there would think that I'm was a lunatic.

Q: So what powers these quasars?

Me: Black holes.

Q: What's a black hole?

Me: Well there are these million solar mass objects which are so massive that light can't escape...

Q: Oh... And what evidence do you have that these so called "black holes" can exist?

Me: Well, if you point a VLBI, oh... Hasn't been invented yet. Well if you take space based gamma ray... Oh... Hasn't been invented either... Well they are like pulsars... But people haven't seen those... Well, you can simulated them with supercomputers that ... Oh. You don't have supercomputers... Ummmm...
 
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  • #25
twofish-quant said:
The latter isn't very important. The standard model could be very wrong in some areas. It's not that astrophysicists are against weird ideas in general, but people have a strong reaction to particular weird ideas because they just don't match what people see.

It's fine to say that the Loch Ness monster exists, but you will get some strange looks if you insist that it lives in Times Square.



That's not a problem, and one of the big misconceptions is that we are in the dark. We have tons and tons and tons of observations. One reason almost no one believes that quasars are nearby is that we can use VLBI observations to zoom in on them and see what they are, and they appear to be massive black holes.

People look at quasars every day. They aren't mysterious objects.



Not true. If you insist that general relativity is wrong, then no one is going to think that you are weird.



The problem is that Arp's views weren't that unusual for 1965, and they are quite reasonable if you limit yourself to what was known about quasars in 1965. Part of the problem is that in 1965, no one could come up with a way of generating the type of energy that you need to power them. The current idea of gas falling into a black hole works nicely. Trouble is that the idea of a black hole was invented in 1968.

Also people somehow assume that Arp is some creative genius when in fact what has happened is that he has stuck to some old ideas long, long, long after the data convinced pretty much everyone else that those ideas were wrong. People will cut you a lot of slack for coming up with nutty ideas if they are *new* nutty ideas. Arp's ideas aren't.



No. That's not true.

The problem is that if I show you a blurry picture of Times Square, then I can't prove that this isn't the Loch Ness monster. The reason I don't think the Loch Ness monster lives in Times Square is that people pass there every day, and there ain't no monster.

The sad thing is that if you are obsessed with looking for the Loch Ness monster, you'll miss the UFO and Bigfoot that was there. I'm pretty sure that if you put me into a time machine and traveled back to 1965 and had me a debate with Arp based only on the evidence that existed in 1965, I'd lose badly, and people there would think that I'm was a lunatic.

Q: So what powers these quasars?

Me: Black holes.

Q: What's a black hole?

Me: Well there are these million solar mass objects which are so massive that light can't escape...

Q: Oh... And what evidence do you have that these so called "black holes" can exist?

Me: Well, if you point a VLBI, oh... Hasn't been invented yet. Well if you take space based gamma ray... Oh... Hasn't been invented either... Well they are like pulsars... But people haven't seen those... Well, you can simulated them with supercomputers that ... Oh. You don't have supercomputers... Ummmm...
I don't now what all those "Not true" are about whent after saying it you go on to either explain the same thing I meant with different words or just miss completely the point of what I was referring to.
My post was agreeing with your previous post about crackpots ideas, I guess you debate for the sake of debating, I bet you have great arguments with yourself.
Not a single one of my statements is untrue, in the general ones I'm not referring to quasars specifically but to cosmology in general, and when I speak about Arp's pictures, I'm acknowledging that with the current knowledge the mainstream explanation is the most likely to be true, among the possible mechanisms that the pictures by themselves allow.
When I say that no matter how crackpot an idea sounds, if it fits in the cosmological model (LCDM)(previously modified to fit it in) then it will be accepted, I think of ideas like Dark matter, inflation or worm holes. Not strictly referring to GR since this theory admits a high number of different solutions that can be applied to differnt settings (from FRW solutions for cosmological redshift to static solutions for solar system problems, etc).
Are you denying that cosmology is still a highly speculative science? I'm not saying we are in the dark, sure we have many observations, but are you denying that in cosmology experiment is harder that in the rest of the physical science and that some objects can't be directly observed (say black holes) or that there are hypothesis that can't be verified and have to rely on theory dependent interpretations? This is all basic stuff, IMHO.
 
  • #26
TrickyDicky said:
I don't now what all those "Not true" are about whent after saying it you go on to either explain the same thing I meant with different words or just miss completely the point of what I was referring to.

I think you put too much brief in the standard model of cosmology, and you vastly underestimate the amount of data that is available.

I'm pretty sure that there are significant parts of the standard model that are wrong, and we've found major bits wrong in the last ten years. It's just that I don't think that it is wrong in the way that Arp thinks that it is.

I'm acknowledging that with the current knowledge the mainstream explanation is the most likely to be true, among the possible mechanisms that the pictures by themselves allow.

I'm pretty sure we have several significant things wrong. It will be interesting to see what they are.

When I say that no matter how crackpot an idea sounds, if it fits in the cosmological model (LCDM)(previously modified to fit it in) then it will be accepted, I think of ideas like Dark matter, inflation or worm holes.

One should note here that Arp's idea that quasars are local doesn't contradict LCDM.

Ultimately LCDM just produces a curve. It turns out that curve precisely fits observations. If it turns out that we've messed up something, then LCDM is out the window. Before 1998, CDM was the model. People added L when CDM wouldn't work. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we start talking about xLCDM.

Also it depends on what you mean by "accepted." Most of the ideas that are flying around are mutually exclusive, if it is X then it can't be Y.

Not strictly referring to GR since this theory admits a high number of different solutions that can be applied to differnt settings (from FRW solutions for cosmological redshift to static solutions for solar system problems, etc).

It's been seriously proposed that at large scales, GR is wrong. There is an industry producing alternative gravity models to explain acceleration.

Are you denying that cosmology is still a highly speculative science?

Yes, I am. Cosmology is no more speculative than planetary science, and we know a lot more about the cosmic microwave background than hot Jupiters or monetary policy.

Pre-inflationary stuff is weird and speculative, but anything that happens after that is no more speculative than atoms or lunar physics.

I'm not saying we are in the dark, sure we have many observations, but are you denying that in cosmology experiment is harder that in the rest of the physical science and that some objects can't be directly observed (say black holes)

Yes I am. Black holes are not much harder to observe than atoms, and easier to observe than small exo-planets. And you can directly observe black holes. We have some nice pictures of them.

There are hypothesis that can't be verified and have to rely on theory dependent interpretations? This is all basic stuff, IMHO.

You can get into deep philosophical questions about the nature of scientific evidence, but cosmology is no worse at having unverifiable hypothesis and theory dependent interpretations than oceanography or botany, and the philosophical issues that you have in cosmology are much less bad than in economics or sociology.

Yes this is basic stuff, which is why I'm peeve when popular science works get it wrong.
 
  • #27
twofish-quant said:
The problem is that Arp's views weren't that unusual for 1965, and they are quite reasonable if you limit yourself to what was known about quasars in 1965. Part of the problem is that in 1965, no one could come up with a way of generating the type of energy that you need to power them. The current idea of gas falling into a black hole works nicely. Trouble is that the idea of a black hole was invented in 1968.
I'm pretty sure that his idea that these objects were ejected from galaxy cores was pretty nonsensical from the start, because not only was there no model whatsoever for what they actually were within Arp's idea, but they also had spectra of the quasars at that time. With no known physical method for producing such large redshifts except by either large recession velocities or gravitational redshift, Arp's idea that these redshifts were "intrinsic" was nutty from the start.
 
  • #28
twofish-quant said:
I'm pretty sure that there are significant parts of the standard model that are wrong, and we've found major bits wrong in the last ten years. It's just that I don't think that it is wrong in the way that Arp thinks that it is.
We agreed on this all along.

twofish-quant said:
One should note here that Arp's idea that quasars are local doesn't contradict LCDM.

Ultimately LCDM just produces a curve. It turns out that curve precisely fits observations. If it turns out that we've messed up something, then LCDM is out the window. Before 1998, CDM was the model. People added L when CDM wouldn't work. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we start talking about xLCDM.

And this only goes to show that when you have a model that can be made to accommodate anything just by adding one more letter to its acronym, their proponents might just be either fooling themselves or pulling your leg.



twofish-quant said:
It's been seriously proposed that at large scales, GR is wrong. There is an industry producing alternative gravity models to explain acceleration.

Maybe it's not GR that is wrong but the specific solutions with problems at large scales.




twofish-quant said:
Yes I am. Black holes are not much harder to observe than atoms, and easier to observe than small exo-planets. And you can directly observe black holes. We have some nice pictures of them.
Are you serious? Atoms are currently easy to observe. Can't you make the distinction between indirect and direct observation?
Show me a picture of a BH, not that something that could also reasonably be a different thing. By definition, you can't directly observe a black hole.
 
  • #29
TrickyDicky said:
And this only goes to show that when you have a model that can be made to accommodate anything just by adding one more letter to its acronym, their proponents might just be either fooling themselves or pulling your leg.
Now that is a rather asinine mischaracterization. The cosmological constant absolutely, positively does not allow the standard cosmological model to "accommodate anything". Quite the opposite in fact: many other alternative explanations have already been shown to be false, while the cosmological constant has so far proven to be the best explanation for the observed acceleration.

Finally, if you think that one extra free parameter can ever explain "anything", then you've lost your mind.

TrickyDicky said:
Maybe it's not GR that is wrong but the specific solutions with problems at large scales.
Except that it is at large scales that our solutions are the most under control.
 
  • #30
Chalnoth said:
Now that is a rather asinine mischaracterization. The cosmological constant absolutely, positively does not allow the standard cosmological model to "accommodate anything". Quite the opposite in fact: many other alternative explanations have already been shown to be false, while the cosmological constant has so far proven to be the best explanation for the observed acceleration.

Finally, if you think that one extra free parameter can ever explain "anything", then you've lost your mind.

Wow, when you have to recur to such ofensive expressions as asinine and "you've lost your mind" I might be on the right track.
Anyway I was developing what Twofish-quant posted:"If it turns out that we've messed up something, then LCDM is out the window. Before 1998, CDM was the model. People added L when CDM wouldn't work. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we start talking about xLCDM."
is his characteization also asinine and is he out of his mind or is it just me? :biggrin:
 
  • #31
TrickyDicky said:
Wow, when you have to recur to such ofensive expressions as asinine and "you've lost your mind" I might be on the right track.
Or you could just learn a little bit.

In cosmology, the primary effect of dark energy is on the rate of expansion. So what we're fitting for is a function H(z). To date, we have a tremendous number of individual observations, from supernovae to galaxy distributions to the CMB, which all provide separate, independent constraints on this function. It is a fundamental impossibility for the addition of a single parameter to fit any potential H(z). It cannot be done.

TrickyDicky said:
Anyway I was developing what Twofish-quant posted:"If it turns out that we've messed up something, then LCDM is out the window. Before 1998, CDM was the model. People added L when CDM wouldn't work. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we start talking about xLCDM."
is his characteization also asinine and is he out of his mind or is it just me? :biggrin:
No, his statement was perfectly reasonable. Yours was asinine, because it claimed something completely and utterly false, while at the same time being insulting.
 
  • #32
I'll say it again, you tell me where the insulting part is: when you have a model that can be made to accommodate anything just by adding one more letter to its acronym (this was referring to this words by twofish-quant:"I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we start talking about xLCDM") their proponents might just be either fooling themselves or pulling your leg.
 
  • #33
Chalnoth said:
I'm pretty sure that his idea that these objects were ejected from galaxy cores was pretty nonsensical from the start, because not only was there no model whatsoever for what they actually were within Arp's idea, but they also had spectra of the quasars at that time. With no known physical method for producing such large redshifts except by either large recession velocities or gravitational redshift, Arp's idea that these redshifts were "intrinsic" was nutty from the start.
Well, put yourself in their shoes. (Arp, Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, et al). Yes, quasars have some pretty impressive redshifts. Logically, though, their redshifts can't possibly originate from the peculiar motions of quasars, since that would place the Earth in a very special place in the universe, with each and every quasar receding from us. It was not such a leap to consider that quasars may have some property(ies) such that their redshifts are intrinsic. It's easy to call such an idea "nutty" in retrospect, but look back a few decades, and try to imagine a better reason for the redshifts.
 
  • #34
TrickyDicky said:
I'll say it again, you tell me where the insulting part is: when you have a model that can be made to accommodate anything just by adding one more letter to its acronym
This is the insulting part, because it just isn't the case. I'll say it again: many other proposed models of the observed acceleration have failed. LCDM has survived because it fits the data better.
 
  • #35
Chalnoth said:
This is the insulting part, because it just isn't the case. I'll say it again: many other proposed models of the observed acceleration have failed. LCDM has survived because it fits the data better.

And that sentence in no way contradicts what you claim here, other models just don't have the plasticity or malleability to adapt to observations like supernovae Ia light curves. I don't know how that can be insulting, unless it is insulting only when I say it, I'm precisely highlighting that property of the concordance model, its ability to survive any observation.
 
  • #36
TrickyDicky said:
And that sentence in no way contradicts what you claim here, other models just don't have the plasticity or malleability to adapt to observations like supernovae Ia light curves.
The amount of placticity/malleability is set by the number of parameters. Adding one single additional parameter to the CDM model is a simple as you can possibly get and still explain the observations. And what's more, the particular parameter that is "added" was in the theory all along, it was just assumed to be zero because simple arguments showed it had to be very small. Nobody, however, has ever found a convincing way to set it to zero, so in a sense, it was never added in the first place. Instead it had been taken out previously for no good reason.

TrickyDicky said:
I don't know how that can be insulting, unless it is insulting only when I say it, I'm precisely highlighting that property of the concordance model, its ability to survive any observation.
Except it isn't able to survive any observation. If the CMB wasn't there, or if the cosmological parameters derived from CMB observations didn't match the cosmological parameters from baryon acoustic oscillations or supernova, then the theory would have basically been falsified. It is very very easy to come up with potential observations that wouldn't fit. But this just isn't the case.
 
  • #37
TrickyDicky said:
And this only goes to show that when you have a model that can be made to accommodate anything just by adding one more letter to its acronym, their proponents might just be either fooling themselves or pulling your leg.

You can't accommodate everything. If the primordial helium abundance goes below 20%, we have serious problems. There are a lot of things that we *could* have observed that would have tossed out the LCDM, but we didn't observe them.

The thing about LCDM is that it fits the vast amount of data that we have, so we are pretty sure that whatever the right answer is, it has to be close enough to LCDM to explain what LCDM explains. Just like it may be that GR and Newtonian physics may be wrong, but we know that at some levels it's close to what is going on.

Maybe it's not GR that is wrong but the specific solutions with problems at large scales.

GR gives specific predictions for what happens at large scales. If the actual universe deviates from those predictions then GR is wrong. There is an industry that in f(R) models in which you invent a theory of gravity that looks like GR at small scales, but is different at large scales. The reason you need things to agree with GR at small scales is that we have a lot of small scale experiments that puts limits on how far you can move from GR.

Are you serious? Atoms are currently easy to observe. Can't you make the distinction between indirect and direct observation?

And black holes are not that much more difficult to observe than atoms. Also, I'm not sure what the difference is between direct and indirect observation or how we see black holes less indirectly than atoms.

Show me a picture of a BH, not that something that could also reasonably be a different thing.

I can show you a picture of a black hole. If you insist that it's not really a black hole that's something different, but you can also play that game with atoms. Show me a picture of a atom that can't possibly be something other than an atom.

By definition, you can't directly observe a black hole.

Yes you can for a reasonable definition of "directly observe." You can come up with a silly definition of "directly observe" but it's really hard to come up with a definition by which black holes cannot be directly observed and the cup in front of me can be. Black holes don't directly emit light, but neither does the cup in front of me. I can see the cup in front of me because the cup reflects and distorts light from other sources. Same for black holes.

Black holes are black. So is my winter overcoat, and it's easy to spot something that is black if it happens to be in the middle of a white room.

Yes you can play lots of philosophical word games, but what I'm saying is that black holes are easier to observe than exo-planets or ocean currents and cosmology is no more speculative than botany, chemistry, or oceanography. It's actually a lot *less* speculative than economics or sociology.
 
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  • #38
Chalnoth said:
I'm pretty sure that his idea that these objects were ejected from galaxy cores was pretty nonsensical from the start, because not only was there no model whatsoever for what they actually were within Arp's idea, but they also had spectra of the quasars at that time.

I'd argue that in 1965, it was not as nutty as assuming that quasars were at cosmological distances.

With no known physical method for producing such large redshifts except by either large recession velocities or gravitational redshift, Arp's idea that these redshifts were "intrinsic" was nutty from the start.

However it was known from the start that if quasars were at cosmological redshifts, then it required an energy source that was vastly more efficient than nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion only convert a few percent of mass energy into energy, whereas quasars require 50% of mc^2 to get converted into energy.

One thing that is cool is that you read the textbooks from 1965, and you have supporters of distant quasars coming up with very weird and unconvincing models of how quasars are so energetic. The two ideas that people were using was that somehow there was antimatter in quasars or chain reactions of supernova. Both these ideas have serious problems.

It wasn't until the 1970's that people figured out that you could get the energy from dropping matter into a black hole, and that nicely explained why there were no nearly quasars. Black hole eats up all the gas. No gas. No quasar.

It's fun to read old textbooks, and watch people try to figure out a mystery.
 
  • #39
TrickyDicky said:
Wow, when you have to recur to such ofensive expressions as asinine and "you've lost your mind" I might be on the right track.

That's a heuristic, but often not a good one.

Anyway I was developing what Twofish-quant posted:"If it turns out that we've messed up something, then LCDM is out the window. Before 1998, CDM was the model. People added L when CDM wouldn't work. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if we start talking about xLCDM."
is his characteization also asinine and is he out of his mind or is it just me? :biggrin:

The reason I wouldn't be surprised is that while we do have very good data for the rate of universe expansion at recent eras, we are still in the process of getting that information for early eras. That information is rapidly coming in from WMAP. Once we have expansion rates for the early universe, we can see if it fits into a cosmological constant scenario. It wouldn't surprise me if we found that it doesn't and we have to add another parameter to characterize the expansion. On the other hand, it wouldn't surprise me if we didn't.

However that's a very different thing from saying that anything fits.
 
  • #40
twofish-quant said:
I'd argue that in 1965, it was not as nutty as assuming that quasars were at cosmological distances.



However it was known from the start that if quasars were at cosmological redshifts, then it required an energy source that was vastly more efficient than nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion only convert a few percent of mass energy into energy, whereas quasars require 50% of mc^2 to get converted into energy.

One thing that is cool is that you read the textbooks from 1965, and you have supporters of distant quasars coming up with very weird and unconvincing models of how quasars are so energetic. The two ideas that people were using was that somehow there was antimatter in quasars or chain reactions of supernova. Both these ideas have serious problems.

It wasn't until the 1970's that people figured out that you could get the energy from dropping matter into a black hole, and that nicely explained why there were no nearly quasars. Black hole eats up all the gas. No gas. No quasar.

It's fun to read old textbooks, and watch people try to figure out a mystery.
Right, but my point was that the spectra of quasars that they had starting in 1962 were extremely strong evidence that they were at cosmological redshifts. These other ideas were pretty crazy, but they definitely aren't as obviously wrong as Arp's idea.
 
  • #41
TrickyDicky said:
And that sentence in no way contradicts what you claim here, other models just don't have the plasticity or malleability to adapt to observations like supernovae Ia light curves.

Which is why they are considered to be wrong.

Where Chalnoth and I very strongly disagree with you is the idea that LCDM can fit *anything*. It can't. If the supernova Ia light curves were something very different from what we observed, then you couldn't tweak LCDM to fit it. The expansion rates, deuterium abundances, helium abundances, CMB spectrum, galaxy correlation functions, yadda, yadda, yadda are such that we can tweak LCDM to match the data. If we observed something *very* different, then LCDM wouldn't work.

There are things that LCDM doesn't quite fit, but right now those things are not big enough to suggest that we got something basically wrong.

I don't know how that can be insulting, unless it is insulting only when I say it, I'm precisely highlighting that property of the concordance model, its ability to survive any observation.

Except it doesn't have that property. There are thousands of things that we *could* have observed that would have killed the LCDM. If you find a star with less than 20% helium, then BBN will not work. If the galactic correlation spectrum is something different that what we see, then LCDM won't work. I remember when the first COBE results came out and showed that the CMB was this perfect isotropic blackbody. I remember it because we were talking about the results, and someone pointed out that if we wait another three months and those results *still* show a perfect isotropic blackbody then it means that we got something very seriously wrong, and then a week later COBE released something showing variations in the CMB.

We *could* have observed a thousand things that could have killed LCDM. It just so happens that we didn't.

Two points...

1) One point is that cosmology is data driven. It's not any different from botany or oceanography. Observing the early universe and trying to make sense of the data isn't that different from observing ocean currents or orchids in the Amazon rain forest (and we have better maps of the early universe than we do some parts of the Amazon rain forest).

2) The other point is that theorists really get disappointed when everything matches. It's no fun when there are no mysteries. I remember when a high energy physics theorist said that he was jealous of the cosmologist because there were so many interesting problems in cosmology when in HEP everything matches the standard model. Also one reason I got into supernova theory, is that no one knew exactly how core collapse supernova work, and we still really don't.
 
  • #42
Chalnoth said:
Right, but my point was that the spectra of quasars that they had starting in 1962 were extremely strong evidence that they were at cosmological redshifts.

At which point you had a major problem with energy generation. Now if you assume that quasars are nearby then you also have problems, but as of 1965, it wasn't clear what was nuttier. By 1970, people had observed things that changed the debate, namely CMB and pulsars, and by 1975, people figured out quasar evolution.

You can imagine an alternative universe when by 1970 we'd discovered an "megastar" which is something that produces high enough gravitational fields that causes major gravitational redshift when generating hydrogen and it turns out if you look at the CMB closely it consisted of point sources from ultra z=3000 galaxies that through GR effects caused ultra-redshifting which prevents Olber's paradox from happening.

You can imagine that, but that's not what we ended up seeing.

Also I saw this sort of something similar first hand in the early-1990's when you had the same debate over gamma ray bursters. If you assume that gamma ray bursters are at cosmological distances, then you have problems with energy generation, but it turns out that you can come up with plausible energy generation mechanism and beaming, and I knew people that were involved in that effort.

Now again you could imagine this alternative universe when people tried for a few years to come up with GRB energy generation methods and then found out that nothing worked, and then you take more observations of GRB and find that their position is coorelated with either the ecliptic or the galactic plane.

Again, you can imagine this, but that's not what we ended up seeing.

These other ideas were pretty crazy, but they definitely aren't as obviously wrong as Arp's idea.

Obviously wrong in 1975. Not in 1965. All of the ideas for energy generation in 1965 turned out to be wrong.

One other thing is that in 1965, the big bang still hadn't won (people hadn't seen CMB). One argument against cosmological quasars that would have worked in 1965 is that if you accept cosmological quasars then you have to accept the idea that the universe as a whole was evolving, which gets you problems like "what happens before the BB" that you don't have to answer if you assume the universe was in steady-state.

It's a perfectly good philosophical argument that would likely win if cosmology were about philosophy rather than observation.

But it isn't.

One reason I like science is that you *can't* figure things out from pure thought. At some point you just have to look into the telescope and how you believe how the universe works is based on what you see,
 
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  • #43
Also in addition to red shifts there is a lot of other pretty direct evidence now that quasars are at cosmological distances:

1) you see gravitational lensing of quasars,

2) you see things like the Lyman-alpha forest or the Gunn-Peterson trough. What happens is that if you see a quasar at redshift of say z=1, you'll see a whole bunch of absorption lines from hydrogen clouds at redshifts between z=0 and 1. If the quasar is sufficiently high redshift, then you see a general depression from the un-ionized early universe.

These are thing that you see everyday.
 
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  • #44
twofish-quant said:
However that's a very different thing from saying that anything fits.

twofish-quant said:
Which is why they are considered to be wrong.

Where Chalnoth and I very strongly disagree with you is the idea that LCDM can fit *anything*. It can't. If the supernova Ia light curves were something very different from what we observed, then you couldn't tweak LCDM to fit it. The expansion rates, deuterium abundances, helium abundances, CMB spectrum, galaxy correlation functions, yadda, yadda, yadda are such that we can tweak LCDM to match the data. If we observed something *very* different, then LCDM wouldn't work.

There are things that LCDM doesn't quite fit, but right now those things are not big enough to suggest that we got something basically wrong.
Except it doesn't have that property. There are thousands of things that we *could* have observed that would have killed the LCDM. If you find a star with less than 20% helium, then BBN will not work. If the galactic correlation spectrum is something different that what we see, then LCDM won't work. I remember when the first COBE results came out and showed that the CMB was this perfect isotropic blackbody. I remember it because we were talking about the results, and someone pointed out that if we wait another three months and those results *still* show a perfect isotropic blackbody then it means that we got something very seriously wrong, and then a week later COBE released something showing variations in the CMB.

We *could* have observed a thousand things that could have killed LCDM. It just so happens that we didn't.

Ok, I see where you and Chalnoth are confused about what I wrote:
I was not claiming LCDM can fit anything, since I was not referring to LCDM specifically but to the way of constructing models by adding parameters. When you said that if we find a new observation that the LCDM couldn't fit you wouldn't be terribly surprised if we started talking about xLCDM, that is defining a mechanic, a model producing process, so that when we'd find another observation that would make xLCDM not work we could add a new parameter so that we'd start talking about $xLCDM.
Can't you see the pattern?, it's this pattern that has the plasticity, but you should be able this is the pattern of the ptolemaic epicycles. Nothing wrong with this pattern, in a way it works, it adapts to empirical observations, but eventually it comes to a point where the number of fudge factors is absurdly high, then you have two options: either you come up with a different model that explains observations without the fudge factors,and that probably make you reconsider something you thought it was obvious, or if you don't find the alternative you keep the model with the alphabet soup but with a suspicious rat smell you can't get rid of.
 
  • #45
The other thing about universe expansion is that if you start with the premise that

1) there are no preferred directions or location in the universe
2) GR is more or less right

There aren't that many different ways that the universe can expand.
 
  • #46
twofish-quant said:
The other thing about universe expansion is that if you start with the premise that

1) there are no preferred directions or location in the universe
2) GR is more or less right

There aren't that many different ways that the universe can expand.

Does this belong to this thread?
 
  • #47
TrickyDicky said:
When you said that if we find a new observation that the LCDM couldn't fit you wouldn't be terribly surprised if we started talking about xLCDM, that is defining a mechanic, a model producing process, so that when we'd find another observation that would make xLCDM not work we could add a new parameter so that we'd start talking about $xLCDM.

That's not what I'm saying. Again it's all about observation, and you have to go into the details of the observations.

Right now we have very good expansion curve observations for relatively late periods, but we don't have that sort of information about the early universe. It so happens given our knowledge about the early universe, we *could* parameterize everything with a single number for lambda and still hit observational constraints. It may turn out that we can't once the observations are better, at which point we have to put in a function for lambda.

Can't you see the pattern?, it's this pattern that has the plasticity, but you should be able this is the pattern of the ptolemaic epicycles. Nothing wrong with this pattern, in a way it works, it adapts to empirical observations, but eventually it comes to a point where the number of fudge factors is absurdly high, then you have two options: either you come up with a different model that explains observations without the fudge factors,and that probably make you reconsider something you thought it was obvious, or if you don't find the alternative you keep the model with the alphabet soup but with a suspicious rat smell you can't get rid of.

Sure but reality is messy. However...

1) If you can figure out something with fewer fudge factors that explains the observations, then people will go gaga over this. The problem is that people can't. It's not that people aren't looking or questioning models. The problem is that if you reduce the number of parameters, you just don't fit the data.

Also once you have something that works with a number of fudge factors, you don't give up. At that point you look at each of the numbers that you put in and ask why that number is that number.

2) The number of parameters in cosmological models really isn't that large. Twelve or so numbers and you've explained the universe. Think of the number of parameters you need to model the aerodynamics of a car or ocean currents. You typical solar model has dozens of parameters.

But these parameters aren't just random numbers. They *mean* something. If you have to set lambda to something to make everything work, then you scratch your head and think about what lambda is. And you can't set those numbers to anything. If you have to set the baryon mass of the universe to -1 to get it to work, then you have a problem.

3) Talking about Ptolemy is interesting because if you look at any model of the solar system, what you end up it quite more complex than anything Ptolemy every came up with, and it turns out that any model of the solar system has a lot of parameters that you have to set to make everything work (and curiously a solar system model has more parameters than a cosmology model).

It turns out that those aren't *free* parameters, but they correspond to physically relevant qualities (namely the mass of all of the planets). Same with LCDM. People aren't putting random numbers into the models. Each of the numbers *means* something, and then you can figure out the implications of the parameters being what they are.

It's not a matter of not looking. If you can get rid of a parameter, great! It's a matter of getting things to work. It's not that people aren't very actively looking for alternatives.

Also more data makes the problem worse. Our solar system models are a lot more complicated than anything that Ptolemy came up but we can predict the location of the planets to within 1 meter and within fractions of seconds, and that's nothing that he was able to do.

Ultimately you have to deal with the data. If you can come up with a simple model to deal with the data, then GREAT! But if you have to come up with something really messy and complex to deal with the data because you can't come up with anything better, than that's the just the universe works. And if the universe turns out to be more complicated than you like, that's something you have to take up with God since I can't help you with that.
 
  • #48
TrickyDicky said:
Can't you see the pattern?, it's this pattern that has the plasticity, but you should be able this is the pattern of the ptolemaic epicycles.
This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

For quite a while now, basically every year we have doubled the amount of astronomical/cosmological data we have obtained. This means that every year we obtain as much new information as in the rest of human history combined. And despite this, the LCDM cosmology remains the most accurate fit to the data.

Since the cosmological constant was suspected by theorists in the early 80's, we have layered on a wide swath of new sorts of observations that all support a cosmological constant, from supernovae to CMB to baryon acoustic oscillations to cluster counts to weak lensing. We have gone, in the last 15 years, from not being able to detect the accelerated expansion at all to nailing down the time variation of dark energy to within a few percent.

One way to see this is to take a simple extension of LCDM, where we allow the pressure of the dark energy to be a constant times its energy density. For a pure cosmological constant, this constant w = -1. The latest combination of WMAP, supernovae, and baryon acoustic oscillations constrains w = -0.999 +/- 0.056 (http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/params/owcdm_sz_lens_wmap7_bao_snconst.cfm ), so it's a cosmological constant to within 5%, and future experiments will nail that down even further.
 
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  • #49
Chalnoth said:
This is just wrong, wrong, wrong.

For quite a while now, basically every year we have doubled the amount of astronomical/cosmological data we have obtained. This means that every year we obtain as much new information as in the rest of human history combined. And despite this, the LCDM cosmology remains the most accurate fit to the data.

Since the cosmological constant was suspected by theorists in the early 80's, we have layered on a wide swath of new sorts of observations that all support a cosmological constant, from supernovae to CMB to baryon acoustic oscillations to cluster counts to weak lensing. We have gone, in the last 15 years, from not being able to detect the accelerated expansion at all to nailing down the time variation of dark energy to within a few percent.

One way to see this is to take a simple extension of LCDM, where we allow the pressure of the dark energy to be a constant times its energy density. For a pure cosmological constant, this constant w = -1. The latest combination of WMAP, supernovae, and baryon acoustic oscillations constrains w = -0.999 +/- 0.056 (http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/current/params/owcdm_sz_lens_wmap7_bao_snconst.cfm ), so it's a cosmological constant to within 5%, and future experiments will nail that down even further.
You are wrong, wrong ,wrong. I'm talking about the pattern, not the specific observations, do you know what a pattern is? It does not depend on the specifics.
You keep answering you prejudiced notions of what you think I'm saying, would you try for a change and respond to what I actually say?
 
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  • #50
Chalnoth said:
For quite a while now, basically every year we have doubled the amount of astronomical/cosmological data we have obtained. This means that every year we obtain as much new information as in the rest of human history combined. And despite this, the LCDM cosmology remains the most accurate fit to the data.

And you can do it with 12 or so parameters. That's pretty damn good as scientific models go.

Standard model of particle physics has about 20. Solar system models have about 20. Solar models and supernova have about 30 parameters. If you put in climatic models and ocean current models, you end up with tons of parameters.
 
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