On May 14, 6:19*pm, Thomas Smid wrote:
On May 13, 7:21*am, Craig Markwardt wrote:

Mr. Smid has known about these issues for over five years now, so it's
dismaying to see him advocating the same misconceptions today, as if
he completely forgot about past history.

I am advocating whatever I consider appropriate and correct. And no, I
have not forgotten about the past discussion, but on the contrary
drawn from it. And whereas I don't see any reason to change my
previous position in view of the new measurements (in fact they are
very much consistent with it), hopefully you learn something new from
this thread.(but may be you don't want to learn)..

In a free society, you are certainly able to consider whatever you
wish to be appropriate or correct. However, in a scientific society,
one needs to substantiate one's considerations with observations and
other evidence, which you did not do five years ago, nor today. What
I learned from this thread is that you are still advancing erroneous
misconceptions at a quite fundamental level. Let's consider:

FIVE YEARS AGO you claimed erroneously that there was no evidence of
T=2.73 in the local universe. Your assertion is incorrect because
temperatures *are* measured in the local universe using the same
techniques (McKellar 1940, McKellar 1941; Hertzberg 1950; Thaddeus &
Clauser 1966; Thaddeus 1972; Roth et al 1993) as well as different
techniques (ground-based: Penzias & Wilson 1965; space-based: COBE and
balloon measurements), the results of which are all consistent.
TODAY, you still make the same erroneous claim.

FIVE YEARS AGO you claimed erroneously that it was possible to use a
constant T=8K temperature for the microwave background at all
redshifts. You justified this presupposition by assuming that you
could discard the COBE temperature measurement, or any other single
measurement. Even if this assumption were valid - it's not -
discarding one measurement at low redshift still leaves many
measurements at low redshift which anchor the plot at T=2.73K.
TODAY, you advance the same erroneous canard about fitting a constant
T=8K.

FIVE YEARS AGO, you claimed erroneously that the theoretical work
assumed a simplistic Boltzmann (equilibrium) distribution for
radiative transfer, without explicit excitation rate calculations, and
were thus unreliable. Your assertion is incorrect because numerous
analyses *actually do* treat a full detailed balance with excitation
calculations (Meyer et al 1986; Molaro et al 2002; Silva & Viegas 2002
etc). The Silva & Viegas paper actually provided verification source
code, which you could have investigated but did not.
TODAY, you are making the same erroneous claim about Boltzmann
distributions.

FIVE YEARS AGO, you claimed that redshift was due to some kind of
refractive effect, but would not elaborate on its precise properties
(and indeed you confused refraction and diffraction, and also confused
chromatic and achromatic effects).
TODAY, nothing has changed; no new enlightenment of how your proposed
mechanism actually works.

FIVE YEARS AGO, you criticized refereed papers because you felt that
they "ride on a lot of empirical
approximations, assumptions and estimates and offer little in the way
of a coherent physical argument." And yet, you could not offer a
coherent physical argument of your own theory, and could not
substantiate it based on observational data. Your own
"estimates" (the ones I have seen) are often based on toy assumptions.
TODAY, nothing has changed; no new evidence, no new justification of
assumptions.

I learned a lot when I debated you six years ago, and because of my
literature searches, I appreciated the extensive observational and
theoretical underpinnings of research into the cosmic microwave
background. Based on the presentation above, I would argue that the
same could not be said of yourself.

CM

References
(I apologize for not updating with more references since the
mid-2000s, but even these references are sufficient to support my
argument)
Herzberg, G. 1950, *Molecular Spectra and Molecular Structure*,
* v. 1, 2nd Ed., (van Nostrand: Princeton, NJ) *-- p. 496
McKellar, A. 1940 PASP 52, 187
McKellar, A. 1941, Publ Dominion Astrophys. Obs., Victoria, BC, 7,
251
Molaro, P., et al. 2002, A&A, 381, L64
Meyer et al 1986, ApJL 308, L37
Penzias & Wilson 1965, ApJ, 142, 419
Roth, Meyer & Hawkins 1993, ApJL 413 L67
Silva, A. I. & Viegas, S. M. 2002 MNRAS, 329, 135
Srianand, R. Petitjean, P. & Ledoux, C. 2000, Nature, 408, 931
Thaddeus & Clauser, 1966, PRL, 16, 819
Thaddeus, P. 1972, Ann. Rev. Ast. Ap., 10, 305