Ned Wright's TBBNH Page (A3)

This post continues the discussion of 'Ned' Wright's website "Errors in The
Big Bang Never Happened."

Several people have independently pointed me to Ned Wright's website "Errors
in The Big Bang Never Happened." One of those was the sci.physics.research
moderator -- who used this website as justification for refusing any mention
of TBBNH -- or any references contained therein. The crank.dot.net site
lists "Ed (sic) Wright's invaluable page detailing the errors in ... Eric
Lerner's arguments from The Big Bang Never Happened." So I guess it's time
to discuss "Ned Wright's TBBNH Page. Last modified 4-May-2000, © 1997-2000"
http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/lerner_errors.html


Ned separated his site into three sections:

A: Errors in Lerner's Criticism of the Big Bang
B: Errors in Lerner's Alternative to the Big Bang
C: Miscellaneous Errors

Ned Wright's site begins as follows:

================================================
"Eric Lerner starts his book "The Big Bang Never Happened" (hereafter BBNH)
with the "errors" that he thinks invalidate the Big Bang. These are

"1.The existence of superclusters of galaxies and structures like the "Great
Wall" which would take too long to form from the 'perfectly homogeneous' Big
Bang.
"2.The need for dark matter and observations showing no dark matter.
"3.The FIRAS CMB spectrum is a "too perfect" blackbody.

"Are these criticisms correct? No, and they were known to be incorrect in
1991 when Lerner wrote his book."
=============================================== =

This post deals only with 'Big Bang' item A3, above (The perfection of the
CMB) :

================================================
Is the CMB spectrum "too perfect"?

Lerner claims that the CMB spectrum presented by Mather in 1990 was "too
perfect", and that it made it impossible for large scale structure to be
formed. However, the perfect fit to the blackbody only ruled out explosive
structure formation scenarios like the Ostriker and Cowie model (1981, ApJL,
243, L127). The limits on distortion of the CMB spectrum away from a
blackbody are now* about 100 times better, and these tighter limits are
easily met by models which form large scale structure by gravitational
perturbations acting on dark matter. Models which act via electromagnetic
interactions, like the explosive structure formation scenario or the plasma
Universe have a much harder time meeting the constraints imposed by the
FIRAS observations of the CMB spectrum.
=============================================== =
* Ned Wright apparently wrote this in 2000. Nine years after TBBNH was
published.

Let us look at what Lerner actually stated in TBBNH, regarding a 'too
perfect' CMBR (p 29-32). Please bear with me, but it wasn't just the simple
statement that Ned makes it out to be.

"After the discovery of the background radiation , astronomers used radio
telescopes to measure its spectrum at shorter and shorter wavelengths. In
every case the measurements fit the black-body curve predicted by the
theory. This was considered a great confirmation of the Big Bang."

"But, as the problem of large-scale structure became evident, cosmologists
hoped that as short wavelengths the observed spectrum would differ slightly
from a black-body. They predicted that it would have a little bump
indicating the release of energy after the Big Bang -- the energy needed to
both start and stop large-scale motions. Sicne the Earth's atmosphere
absorbs the shorter-wavelength microwaves, radio telescopes would have to be
lifted above the atmosphere in balloons, rockets, or satellites. In 1987 a
Japanese rocket bearing an American instrument designed by Paul Richards and
his colleaugues at Berkeley finally succeeded in measuring the
short-wavelength spectrum at three frequencies, and indeed they detected an
excess of radiation over the predicted black-body. The catch was that the
excess was too much of a good thing. It was SO big, one-tenth of the total
energy of the background, that it could not be accounted for by the slowing
down of matter or by anything else. Instead of helping Big Bang theory, the
new data just brought another headache to the theoreticians."

"As a result, cosmologists eagerly awaited the first results from the Cosmic
Background Explorer (COBE) satellite. COBE, launched by a NASA Delta rocket
in November of 1989, carried three extremely sensitive instruments. An
infrared spectrometer was expected to produce definitive results on the
spectrum of the background, since it would measure it at over one hundred
wavelengths between one hundred microns and ten millimeters, with 1 percent
accuracy. Theorists hoped that COBE wold find a smaller excess radiation,
perhaps one-third of what Richards had found."

"But again they were disappointed. Preliminary results from COBE were
announced in January of 1990*** at the American Astronomical Society
meeting: to everyone's surprise, the instrument detected NO variation from a
black-body spectrum (Fig. 1.6). There was NO release of energy in excess of
about 1 percent of the energy in the background itself, no more than
one-tenth of that measured by Richards. Since the COBE instruments are
highly sensitive and carry their own calibrations with them, it seemed clear
that Richards' results were simply wrong."

*** Mather(?)

"Now initially the cosmologists though that this was just great -- the
black-body curve predicted by the Big Bang was exactly right. When the
results were announced at an Astronomical society meeting, theer was actual
cheering (not a common event a scientific conferences!). But after a few
hours, theorists realized that this was actually bad news. If the excess
radiation observed by Richards was too hot for the Big Bang, the lack of ANY
excess observed by COBE is too cold. Since there is no variation from a
balck-body spectrum, there is no eneretic process vigorous enough either to
create, in twenty billion years, the large-scale structures astronomers have
observed or to stop their headlong motion once they were created."

"Dissipating the energy from the Great Wall's formation in twenty billion
years would create a 1 percent distortion in the background spectrum. For
Tully's structures* 2 percent would be needed, and for the structure
discovered by Koo and colleagues,* 5 percent of the energy in the background
would be needed. The microwave spectrum is 'too perfect.' The close
correspondence to the black-body curve, seen as confirmation of the Big Bang
theory, at the same time rules out any way of forming the large-scale
structure of the universe from the Big Bang."

*Discussed in thread (A1) of this series of posts.

"The structure could not have formed BEFORE the epoch of the microwave
background either. According to Big Bang theory, andy concentration of
matter present at that time would show up as hotter and brighter spots in
the intensity of the background radiation. But even prior to COBE,
ground-based observation had ruled out fluctuations from point to point of
more than one part in thirty thousand.** COBE confirmed these results. If
the large-scale structures existed before the background formed, major
fluctuations at least a thousand times larger should have been observed."

** Now claimed to have been found at 1 part in 100,000 level, after computer
enhancement of COBE data (years after publication of TBBNH).

"Again, this smooth perfection of the background, the same in all
directions, has been cited as key evidence of the Big Bang and the
homogeneity of the early universe. Yet this very perfection makes it
impossible for the theory to explain how today's clumpy universe could have
come to be. So there is simply no way to form these objects in twenty
billion years."

"Nor can the Big Bang be moved back in time. The estimate that the Big Bang
occurred ten or twenty billion years ago is based on measuring galaxies'
distance from us, and the speed at which galaxies appear to be receding from
one another. If galaxies receding at half the speed of light appear to be
about five or ten billion light-years away now, cosmologists reason, they
were all much closer ten or twenty billion years ago. So to move the Big
Bang back hundreds of billions of years, cosmologists must hypothesize a
bizarre two-step expansion: an initial explosion to get things going, a
pause of a few hundred billion years to allow time for large objects to
form, and a resumed explosion to get things going again, so that they only
APPEAR to have started twenty billion years ago."

"Here the questions multiply like rabbits. But the underlying problem is
basic to science. A theory is tested by comparing predictions derived from
it with observations. If a theorist merely introduces some new and
arbitrary modification in his theory to fit the new observations, like the
epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmos, scientific method is abandoned."

"Yet the Big Bang theory is supported in great part by arbitrary
hypothetical entities, such as cosmic strings. As Tully puts it, 'It's
disturbing to see that there is a new theory every time there's a new
observation.'"

"Despite the many new hypotheses, there remains no way to begin with the
perfect universe of the Big Bang and arrive at the complex, structured
universe of teday in twenty billion years. As one COBE scientist, George
Smoot of the University of California at Berkeley, put it, "Using the forces
we now know, you can't make the universe we know now.'"


So we see that Lerner has looked at several possible 'outs' for the Big Bang
in his analysis (epoch prior to CMB decoupling, giving more time for motion,
two step processes). Lerner has not simply stated that the CMBR is 'too
perfect' and left it at that -- which was Ned Wright's implication.

Ned acknowledges that Lerner's identification of a problem is (or was) quite
valid in 1991. "Explosive structure formation scenarios" (i.e. exactly what
cosmologists were discussing in 1991) are ruled out.

Ned's response to the Lerner and the historical problems, above is simple.
Ned invokes 'dark matter' in arbitrary quantities, and he uses unnamed
studies that were not available in 1991, when TBBNH was published. This
point -- at least -- is contrary to Ned's initial statements on his page,
"Are (Lerner's) criticisms correct? No, and they were known to be incorrect
in 1991 when Lerner wrote his book." So in no way can Lerner be faulted for
not knowing that the cosmologists were once again going to invoke arbitrary
amounts of dark matter in arbitrary distributions to avoid this particular
problem.

Of course, Lerner's position in TBBNH is that 'dark matter' is
observationally disproved (see #A2 in this series). 'Non-baryonic dark
matter', was invented to save the Big Bang. Thus, it is not a separate line
of reasoning, it is a prior 'epicycle.' However, Lerner certainly
identified the process of adding ever-new ad hoc assumptions to the Big Bang
theoretical structure.

So, if dark matter is observationally excluded (see thread #A2), then the
Big Bang is dead. But the Big Bang was already dead without dark matter, as
omega is observationally only .02 or .03, and dark matter was needed to
bring omega up to 1.00. (The BB *was* not dead earlier if Ned's prior point
about omega=1 being just a theoretical 'preference'.)

So, 'dark matter' is the only ammunition Ned Wright has for his complaint
about Lerner's criticism of the Big Bang theory. Without 'dark matter',
Ned's argument evaporates. But since Lerner's point already was made that
dark matter can't exist, Ned's claim that TBBNH was in 'error' on the CMB is
spurious.


See "Ned Wright's TBBNH Page (#2) for Lerner's alternative to the Big Bang.

A courtesy copy of this post is provided to Ned Wright.

greywolf42
ubi dubium ibi libertas