Big Bang Proof Turns To Dust


Dust peppers outer space, around the enormous Milky Way galaxy. The Milky Way is much more massive than any other galaxy in the fifty galaxy strong Local Group (only the giant Andromeda has a comparable mass). So, naturally, it has a lot of dust. The dimly radiating dust grains are aligned with our galaxy’s magnetic field. The galactic magnetic field’s swirling gives a polarization to the dust glow, just as a crystal’s alignment polarizes reflected light.

Last March, cosmic inflation enthusiasts claimed to have seen ripples at the origin of time. They claimed to have used a telescope that was sensitive enough. Yet they used a sort of postcard lifted from the European telescope Planck, to evaluate how much galactic dust there was, polarizing the light. That was, at best amateurish, or scientific fraud, and, at worst, a scam on the tax paying public, who wants to be enlightened, not defrauded.

We Fraud, Therefore We Sink. How Inflation > Cosmic Polarization

We Fraud, Therefore We Sink. How Inflation > Cosmic Polarization

[That was the hope from Harvard’s Kovac; it just bit the dust. At least the picture is pretty.]

The Planck researchers were flabbergasted by the behavior of their American colleagues. They knew the dust could mimic the predicted signal from the Big Bang. No doubt the “Publish Or Perish” syndrome was at work again: say whatever to become a celebrity, being a celebrity is what a career is about. Damn careful thinking. Many a Harvard professor has appeared to believe that, whatever they say, whatever they do, it will be accepted. Unfortunately, they have often been proven right. And not just in physics, but economics, finance, politics, morality, philosophy. That makes Harvard the keystone of plutocratic propaganda.

Now, it turns out that this swirling pattern touted as evidence of primordial gravitational waves — ripples in space and time from the universe’s explosive birth — could all come from magnetically aligned Milky Way dust. A new analysis of data from the Planck space telescope concludes that the tiny silicate and carbonate particles of interstellar space could account for as much as 100 percent of the signal detected by the BICEP2 telescope and announced to big light and great banging this spring.

Do we need Cosmic Inflation, and its many absurdities? Of course not:

***

NO NEED FOR INFLATION: DARK ENERGY IMPLIES 100 BILLION YEAR UNIVERSE:

Now that we have Dark Energy (or Phantom Energy), we simply do not need Inflation Theory.

Dark Energy is a fact. Inflation theory a far-fetched stream of ideas which leads to universes exploding in every way, all the time, all over the place, a blatant absurdity, if there ever was one.

Indeed, having an uncountable number of universes on every pinhead is even more incredible than having to count how many angels sit on a pinhead, as some Medieval naïve religious types used to ponder.

In the scenario of the Big Bang we have now, space expansion accelerates in an hyper exponential way for a while (“inflation”), then decelerates until close to the present era, before re-accelerating from Dark Energy. This is weird, and logically contrived.

The most logically economical theory, from the barest known facts, is that cosmic expansion is completely due to Dark Energy. In that case, the universe is more like 100 billion years old. Nuclear synthesis of helium, lithium, etc. are generally rolled out to claim the Big Bang had to have synthesized them. However, those light elements could have been created thanks to some of the energetic phenomena observed since the Big Bang theory was elaborated (such as galactic core Black Holes).

The 3 degree K radiation could be due, in part to other phenomena than cosmic expansion. However, expanding for 100 billion years could be enough of an explanation.

Here we are faced with two theories explaining just as much. However, one uses an axiom (inflation) that is not a fact, but a fancy idea… And which is not even needed. Clearly Occam Razor ought to be applied, and Inflation and its Big Bang, decapitated.

***

And why does all this matter, for broader thinkers? First there is the poetry of it all. That enormous galaxy, our home, makes hearts melt with the possibilities, and perspectives.

The old name for galaxies was “island universes”. Kant worked on that for his thesis. The size of the Milky Way is baffling. It contains stars which are 13.6 billion years old (just 6,000 light years away, and uncomfortably close, if you ask me, to the presumed birth of the universe according to the Big Bang. It’s like a Freudian slip: ’Oh, and our Milky Way is old as the universe…’).

Secondly, and more importantly, scientists are supposed to roll out the most impressive, innovative, yet rigorous thinking. Yet, from Unobservable Strings, to Wishful Supersymmetry, to much Crazy Cosmology, there is a bad smell, and a poor show out there. Of course, the degradation of public logic suits the plutocracy just fine.

Thus, although it does not look like it, much the over-excitement in some areas of extremely speculative physics has much to do, you guessed it, with the fancy multiverses in finance, gouging We The People. Namely, if we learn to tolerate irrationality in physics, so will we, all over, as physics is supposed to be the shining example on a hill.

Hence the desire to impose the greatest rationality, and the strictest probity in physics, from the most general philosophical point of view. And for those who want to insure a sustainable civilization, and enough of the biosphere to survive to make it so.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: the essence of the preceding scientific ideas was sent to several popular physics and science sites. None of the sites published it. I was witness, in the past, of reviewers stealing ideas during the peer review process, or suppressing ideas which showed them to be wrong. This systemic censorship could be somewhat related.

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28 Responses to “Big Bang Proof Turns To Dust”

  1. ianmillerblog Says:

    For any subset of observations, there are often more than one possible explanation, and the smaller the subset, the greater the probability of wrong explanations. As for me, I am not even convinced of the existence of dark energy. The reason for it seems to be that there is an otherwise inexplicable acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, based on the fact that very distant 1 A supernovae are dimmer than expected based on red shift. The problem here is that it is assumed that because 1A supernovae seem to have constant luminosity in our part of the Universe (i.e. NOW), they always have. In fact there has been a recent paper that showed the luminosity is a function of the metallicity of the partner star that is providing the outer shell. Now, in the early Universe, stars had less metallicity. I asked an astrophysicist about this and got the put-down response, “That has all been taken into consideration.” My question is, how did you take into consideration something you knew nothing about? (When asked, I got no response.)

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Dear Ian:
      Agreed 100%… With the caveat that more-than-linear expansion is not a new story: it dates from the 1960s (Segal and Al.) Apparently, there are many independent observations of it now.
      I was always an aging-of-light partisan, BTW, for Quantum reasons. As Feynman told me: “If your theory is right, it would change everything.”
      But, anyway, that’s besides the point. Here I assumed Dark/Phantom Energy to be a fact.

      BTW a nasty way to look at BICEP2 was to say they claim a curve… from just one point… .

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      • ianmillerblog Says:

        Interesting. I was once an advocate of “tired light” too. Now I concede I just don’t know. What it depends on is the requirement that the Universe is different now from what it was then, and I suppose it is in many ways, but is “space” different? It depends on what “space” is, and that is what I am unclear on.

        As for dark energy, I once went to a talk by a mathematician who specialises in strange relativistic applications, and he analysed the data for the dark energy hypothesis. What he pointed out was that the data were very scattered (the astronomical measurements are very difficult) and actually the accelerating expansion is somewhat questionable, even if you assume the standard candle. His final summing up was, well, do you believe it?

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        • Patrice Ayme Says:

          Well, I was skeptical about DE too. Much of the data gets thrown out, thanks to “outlier” theory. Yet, things have changed. Independent measurements have piled up recently. Lots depends upon Supernovas theory, which is wobbly. Hyper stars with 600 solar masses seem to exist. They ought to make Hypernovas, which also seem to exist.

          From what I have seen, that may change nucleosynthesis theory along the lines I suggested (non BB light elements creation). God knows how hot those hypernovas get.

          In any case, I find telling that objects more than 13.8 billion year old are found in the super gigantic Via Lactea. That basically says, if the Big Bangers banged right, that the Big bang created the Milky Way. It’s also perhaps significantly more massive than gigantic Andromeda… Another poetical hint that the Via Lactea may be lonely in harboring intelligent life, as I have more or less argued in:

          40 BILLION EARTHS? Yes & NO.

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          • ianmillerblog Says:

            I think life may be more common than you do. I have posted on your other blog, but I shall write my own blog, explain why, and post it on Thursday, all going well.

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          • Patrice Ayme Says:

            I think bacterial life maybe fairly common. Once evolved, it’s amazingly resistant. Up to 50 million dollars are spent to sterilize mars probes, and even so, not perfectly.
            However, animals, especially very intelligent, sentient animals (“us”) I would well believe, may exists only on Earth. So 40 billion inhabitable planets, just one with civilization: it seems likely to me. All the more as civilization is nearly impossible to sustain without a galactic empire.

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  2. Alexi Says:

    The ongoing controversy is what is great about science. Our understanding of the Universe is in its infancy. No theory can be accepted with religious certainty, Patrice. Not even your own theories.

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Gee Alexi, nice to see you again, I have been missing you. Assuredly a sign from the gods.
      The greatest thing about science is that it allows those who have it to eat raw those who have only religion. At least the coalition against Daech/Caliphate is going to try to demonstrate that.

      On a more serious note, the cosmology I propose is just that, a proposal.

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  3. gmax Says:

    Physics sites refuse to publish you? Why would they? They will look really stupid when what you say, that Dark Energy can do it all, all what’s observed, and inflation and its BB are not needed, is viewed as completely obvious.

    As it is. So they want to delay the inevitable.

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    • ianmillerblog Says:

      It is quite easy for journals to refuse to publish your paper for no good reason. I have had to accept this several times. I had a review rejected because it was a logic analysis. One journal refused it because they did not publish logic analyses, one rejected it because the case was closed (my review gave over 60 different types of observations that falsified the standard position) and one journal rejected it (after originally being enthused) because there were too many mathematics! In another journal, where I had published about 30 papers, there was a change of editor (and one who I had rejected one of his papers previously because the results were clearly misinterpreted) and I was told not to submit as long as I continued to use discrete mathematics. I submitted my argument that the rotating polariser experiments do NOT show deviations from Bell’s Inequality (because there are insufficient variables in the treatment) and this was generally rejected by editors claiming it was of insufficient interest for their journal, and by one that actually managed a review, wherein the reviewer said, “This is wrong. The mathematics are trivial.” No clue where he thought it was wrong, and no example of where the mathematics were wrong. Trivial, maybe, but if correct, why does that matter? I had another paper on chemical bonding rejected on the grounds that “95% of our readers would not be interested”. The material was that there is a so-far ignored additional quantum effect, but apparently that is unimportant. (If it were accepted, ALL the computations, other than those of hydrogen, would have to be revisited, and who wants all those papers they have published to be put to one side?) I know there is a certain amount of of rubbish also submitted (and I have seen some while peer reviewing) but rejecting should always be accompanied by sound reasons. Only too often, it is not.

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      • Patrice Ayme Says:

        It seems that in some areas of biology, around 50% of (“peer-reviewed”) papers are… false. I was talking over the weekend of the problem with a top scientist. He agreed to my opinion, which is that all too much of scientists find themselves like overcrowded rats on a sinking ship. If there was less risk to perish, one would publish only when one had really something to say (Friedrich Gauss’ famous position).

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        • ianmillerblog Says:

          I think the problem is the fixation with measurement. Nothing wrong with measuring physical things, but with scientific publications there seems to be no way to gauge quality, so they go for quantity. When your funding is always on a knife-edge, and some clown awards it based on the number of publications, or the number of citations, you publish as frequently as possible and get all your friends and relations to cite your work in return for you citing theirs. There is even the habit of forming into groups of about 40, and each puts the name of the other 39 on their papers. The net result is that in some cases even authors have no real idea what is in the paper. As for peer review, I have reviewed a number of papers, and while I can back myself to find logic mistakes, there is no way to find fraudulent findings. If a scientist says, “I observed this,” the reviewer usually has to take his or her word.

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          • Patrice Ayme Says:

            Agreed 100%, Ian!
            The fundamental problem is that the research budget ought to be 20% instead of 2%: everybody remotely capable of contributing to research ought to be financed. More in an independent comment (soon).

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Scientific truth can be suppressed for centuries, and, sometimes, millennia.

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  4. Lovell Says:

    Is the 73% dark energy composition evenly distributed in the universe? Do we encounter dark energy in the streets of California?

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Hi Lovell:
      The answer to both questions is unknown. It is not even known if we are dealing with “Dark Energy” or “Phantom Energy”. DE shows as a Cosmological Constant in Einstein Equation. Call it CC. Whether it varies in space is not known: is it just CC, or is it a function of space: CC(x)?

      I don’t have too many ideas on the matter. For Dark Matter, though, I have a theory. DM is (mostly) not in the streets. My theory cunningly puts Dark Matter where it is observed, in outlying regions.

      As I have a rather fertile imagination, what stops me mostly about DE is that too little is known about it. In a funny way, it’s close to Hoyle’ Continuous Creation. By “funny”, I mean philosophically: continuous creation of expending energy is equivalent to continuous creation of matter. I wonder why nobody talks about THAT. (I am the first one to do so, to my knowledge! Although the observation is rather trivial… Thus obviously correct…)

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    • Lovell Says:

      Is the universe expanding uniformly?

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      • Patrice Ayme Says:

        Not really. Debatable. Obscure. Some look at the same picture, and say it’s very uniform. I look at it, and see lack of uniformity.

        It was just announced this summer that the Milky Way Local Group is part of a super giant structure: Laniakea.
        http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140910.html

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        • ianmillerblog Says:

          A more interesting question is, given you cannot see the edges, how can you tell whether it is expanding uniformly. The argument seems to be that the microwave background is uniform, apart from a certain patchiness. It is probably considered to be uniform because anything else would lead to all sorts of conceptual problems.

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      • Lovell Says:

        Gorgeous image.

        I wonder if there’s a working theory as to what attracting force propels those galaxies to move towards the center.

        Additionally I thought that dark energy, being more dominant or abundant, generates movement of galaxies away from each other. Why are they forming superclusters instead?

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  5. Patrice Ayme Says:

    It has long been known that the very large scale structure of the set of all galactic clusters is NOT homogenous, but forms filaments, walls, and voids.

    This Lanaikea structure is a torrent of superclusters. I have no idea how it connects to Dark Energy. But then no one knows for sure if it’s Dark, or Phantom energy.

    My conclusion is that there is not enough money going towards fundamental research.

    See my broadside against Aristotle… Which does not even mention the problem he had with women…

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    • Lovell Says:

      My guess is that it could be a concentration of dark matter that attracts galaxies to gravitate towards the center because of its pulling or attractive force as opposed to the repulsive nature of dark energy.

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      • Patrice Ayme Says:

        That’s indeed totally imaginable. My theory on Dark Matter predicts that DM will be found NEXT to where visible matter is, but not quite where it is. DM shows up a sort of aura around matter from incomplete Quantum interactions.

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  6. Patrice Ayme Says:

    Nota Bene: A very short, and to the point, version of this essay was censored by Quanta Magazine. Is it because I am anti-plutocratic? Quanta is financed by the Simons Foundation. Simons is a mathematician who made more than 100 BILLION (yes, with a B, as in billion) dollars in high frequency trading.

    (Some stupid comments were allowed, so it’s not like the standards are too high.)

    He also worked with his adviser Chern who also created Yau. (Chern-Simons Class.)

    Anyway, it will be interesting to see if I keep on being systematically censored there. The age of computers is also that of unethical behavior (see how Mr. Simons made his fortune) rendered particularly easy to implement.

    Anyway Nathalie W gets my contempt.

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  7. nonamenonames Says:

    Hi Patrice,
    I really enjoy your blog & how you topple the Idols you write about with so much love & disdain- it’s milk to my fishmonger’s hoi polloi soul…

    So you write: “Indeed, having an uncountable number of universes on every pinhead is even more incredible than having to count how many angels sit on a pinhead, as some Medieval naïve religious types used to ponder.”

    My comment is a cosmic distance off the subject of your post, but my quibble is just to point out that the “counting how many angels can stand on the head of a pin” comes from Erasmus in his (hilarious) anti-scholastic book, The Praise of Folly; he was parodying the philosophy of John Duns Scotus (the unfortunate Doctor who lives on in posterity through our word “dunce”).

    Then you go on to a cursory citation of one of the other medieval pinheads, “…Clearly Occam (sic) Razor ought to be applied, and Inflation and its Big Bang, decapitated….”

    It’s curious that the nominalism of Ockham- Scotus’ junior by not much- only lives on in the modern hatchet-job formulation of his so-called Razor, while Scotus wears the ass’s ears on account of Erasmus and the 15th century “humanists” (a la Petrarch, Erasmus, the Reformers, &c.) who abused him and everything Aristotle to elevate Cicero, et.al., to the status of deitys on the grounds of “refined style”… a rather ironic comment on the priorities of the Renaissance and, consequently, our brave & shiny 21st century pseudo-scientific mindset!!

    Long live the oligarchs and plutocrats, and Keep up the fantastic job Patrice! ☆☆☆☆

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    • Patrice Ayme Says:

      Hi Nonamenonames and thanks for the encouragement! I didn’t know “The Praise of Folly” considered angels. Thomas of Aquinas and his ilk were full of them. Wikipedia: “Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, written c. 1270, includes discussion of several questions regarding angels such as, “Can several angels be in the same place?”[2]” Aquinas was vaguely trying to do what Abelard had done (ask questions), but he was a Judeo-Christian fanatic, and vastly inferior to Abelard or Eloise, and several of their associates, although he has been lionized since. I would not be surprised that some US physicist, reading his question, claims Aquinas discovered SuperSymmetry (as he asks questions on fermions or bosons…)

      I know little about the classics of the Middle Age/Renaissance, as my focus was always on when the new ideas appeared. So the re-naissance which interests me is that of the rebirth of the machinery to create really new ideas. So the authors thinking really new thought interest me more than the perroquets savants (I disagree with Pascal’s Tout est dit et l’on vient trop tard depuis qu’il y a des hommes et qui pensent…)

      Therefore you comment above is all the more appreciated, as it helps fill by ignorance gap…

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