"Gene Ward Smith" wrote in message
oups.com...

Sound of Trumpet wrote:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities,
things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark
energy are the most prominent examples.

If they are needed to explain observations, then why doesn't that count
as being observed?

Without them, there would be a
fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and
the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics
would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted
as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation.

Sure, physicists never come up with stuff like the neutrino. Dumbass.

But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors.
Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict
the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed,
because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now
more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature
and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation.

Of course, if God did it you wouldn't need inflation to do it.

Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on
Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes
contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe.

Um, we've observed dark matter, sorry.

What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative
predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation.

Such as the cosmic background radiation? Expansion of the universe?
Primordial abundence of the light elements?


Don't forget the small fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background
Radiation. These were predicted long before the first observations by the
COBE satellite; the only question was the actual amplitude of the
fluctuations, which would then fix previously unmeasured parameters such as
how close the Universe was to critical density.

Dumbass.

Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding
the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state
model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end.

Which, however, don't fit the observational data.

Allocating funding to investigations into the big bang's validity, and
its alternatives, would allow the scientific process to determine our
most accurate model of the history of the universe.

Right. We have some ideas which don't seem to work, so let's fund them.


--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove "pants" spamblock to send e-mail)