From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Mon Jul 07 2003 - 22:19:31 MDT
[bricoleur] I would appreciate any comments as to how I may begin to pry open the theories advocated in the above links… anyone?
[Hermit] Start by understanding the consensus model for the field in question (if there is one)*. What it says, and as importantly, what it does not say. This allows you to better comprehend the challenges to it. Often "weird theories" arise when challenges are issued to "resolve" a problem seen by the originater, which is not really a component of a model (a strawman in debating terms).
[Hermit] We have good reasons (well tested, receives the bulk of attention) for liking "consensus models." When you see a challenge to them, it is worthwhile evaluating the credentials of the challenger - and when they are working "out of field" it is worth being extremely cautious, even if simply because they are unlikely to know about all of the previous challenges, or indeed, the capabilities and limitations of the models they attempt to address.
[Hermit] A good starting point when evaluating any technical article is to look for those terms which appear to have come from elsewhere, and if not familiar with them, google for them, in order to determine how "in field" researchers have dealt with the issues raised.
[Hermit] Refuting an hypothesis is a lot of work, particularly when the reasons why an hypothesis should be evaluated are not clearly articulated. Even when they are, when the hypothesis in question attempts to base itself on "problems" with a concensus model, be very, very, suspicious. This would fall into the area where strong evidence should be required before accepting the authors position, as the likelihood is that an evaluation would require a vast amount of background information to make a meaningful assessment. Unless you are an "in field" expert, or can find support for the hypothesis under evaluation by "in field" experts, it is likely that no matter how much time you devote to evaluating a hypothesis, that the evaluation will not be particularly meaningful.
[Hermit] When an article is to be found only on the Internet, it is time to tread even more warily. The Internet is full of pseudoscience which is terribly difficult to evaluate meaningfully.
[Hermit] When an article is punctuated by exclaimation points, or peppered with capitalized text, it is a good reason to be deeply suspicious of the credentials of the author. Academic writing tends to avoid such artifacts.
[Hermit] Hope you find this is helpful. Here follows a brief glimpse at the URLs you provided, assessing them according to the above criteria.
[hr]http://www.polaris.net/~ksn/beta.htm
Hermit opines - "Very unlikely."
The Broadhurst et al. (Nature 343, 726-728 '90) very deep 1-D "pencil-beam" galactic red-shift survey has revealed galaxies clustered at regular intervals of 128 h-1 Mpc, in phase along both north and south galactic poles. This very large scale regular structure, extending to the limit of the survey, over a range exceeding 2.5 h-1Gpc - a quarter of the way across a Big-Bang universe - is fundamentally incompatible with the Big-Bang theory!
Not true. I think we can safely assume that this is somebody working "out of field," as Bahcall, working from observation, in a publication made the following year (Ref http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu./cgi-bin/nph-ex_refcode?refcode=1991ApJ...376...43B), showed that the perceived distribution noted by Broadhurst were artifacts of the observation methodology, while the origin of the apparent non-periodic distribution is merely the tail-end of large scale superclusters. As a primary "evidence" proposed by this site appears invalidated, I have not addressed the site's arguments further.
[hr]http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cosmology-02c.html
Hermit opines - "Quite possible, but not, on its face, sufficiently persuasive to overturn the BB model - and not appearing to make useful predictions which could be used to evaluate the goodness of the model."
I think I'm with Steinhart on this oneThe new theory provides possible answers to several longstanding problems with the big bang model, which has dominated the field of cosmology for decades. It addresses, for example, the nagging question of what might have triggered or come "before" the beginning of time.Unlike Steinhart, I see the "standard theory" as having provided us with a number of falsifiable predictions - some of which have been validated (Refer e.g. Hermit, Age of the Universe, 2003-07-04 (http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=5;action=display;threadid=28792)). As for this "new theory", which is not, I think, particularly new, I see it as interesting speculation, although it seems to me that it conflicts with our reluctant (but general) acceptance that Omega appears more and more likely to be less than 1 (i.e. the Universe will keep expanding). Against this, Science is peer reviewed, and thus it is probable that the article is well reasoned and does not contain any major contradictions wi
th known evidence. Ask me again in 20 years.
[hr]http://www.calresco.org/cosmic.htm
Hermit opines - "Better than the first, yet still very unlikely."
Ummm. Again we have somebody working "out of field" and again making numerous assertions about "problems" with the Big Bang that appear to me to be less than sound, including the "problem" identified in the first provided url and the assertion (without provided evidence) of a problem with "old galaxies" - a problem which appears to me to be less than likely (i.e. I don't see the need for more than about 7 billion years for any known galactic structure to have formed using existing understanding of gravity (at c), expansion and "simple" newtonian motion).
I don't say that the author's theory is "wrong", merely that at this time it appears that the necessity for a new theory which he appears to be identifying seems less than necessary to me, and for now, I can live with the consensus model which while quite possibly wrong, is receiving the bulk of analysis.
[hr]
*I recommend Steven Weinberg's The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465024378/thechurchofvirusA)
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