Re: SSM Plebiscite
Reply #603 –
This debate is littered with cherry-picked clauses, deliberate misquoting and any other number of dogmatic practices.
Typical warning signs of quackery comes in statements like;
Let me give you my understanding of this cosmological boob job that we're discussing.
The idea that the amount of matter and energy is conserved is originally a theological and philosophical idea, from the Ancient Greek materialist philosophers, who like their modern counterparts were atheists, and thus had no need for God. In their eyes, there was no mystery, no funny buggers, no weird forces, everything was just matter. This idea was taken up in the 17th Century scientific revolution, when it was proposed that the Universe was made up of a fixed amount of matter, put there by God at the beginning, and therefore unchanging. As for energy, the idea was that God basically started the whole universe going by pressing the start button and so all movement that we observe and all energy is unchanging because it is divine and god given. There is in fact no evidence anywhere that matter and energy in the universe does not change. This is an assumption. This assumption is just a part of science and is not really questioned.
Nobody claimed there was, you've imposed an ancient world descriptions on modern science, ancient philosophy also knew the world was flat and the heavens above rotated on crystal spheres, that is a belief or faith based conclusion in the absence of and explanation or other evidence.
Science makes no claim that there is some grand ledger for energy and matter in the observable universe. Science doesn't even claim that the observable universe is the limit, it's just the observable limit.
Physics however can claim the conservation of energy as part of general relativity, which should not be mashed up with anything else as it appears to have been! All ideas that were hypothesised, tested and explained after Shapley and Curtis had conducted their famous Island Universe debate, before that era nebula were clouds in our solar system. Hubble eventually proved otherwise, that the nebula or Island Universes courtesy of their spectrums and the contained doppler effects were way beyond our galaxy. Yet even Hubble still made light of some ideas that the universe might be expanding from a singularity, and other associates like Hoyle cynically labelled it the Big Bang because they had a vested interest in the Steady State model, a model that required the creation of energy and matter contradicting your earlier claims that scientists believed energy and matter do not change.
Around the same time that your Ancient Greeks allegedly made their Energy and Matter hypothesis, Gods, or at least one of the Gods, threw Lightning Bolts while other demons apparently lured sailors to their death. Whatever happened to those ideas?
In the 1980's, it was noticed that the stars of certain galaxies were revolving around the centres of those galaxies much too quickly based on the amount of matter within them, and certain galaxies were attracting each other far too strongly for the amount of matter present. AT this point there are two options :
1. the theory of gravity / galaxies is wrong and there may be other explanations
2. there must be some other extra matter there that we can't detect i.e dark matter.
Why was the first option never investigated ?
Firstly, you've latched onto 1980, it's misinformation and plain error. Nothing was noticed in 1980s that hadn't already been observed, the measurements and experiments conducted in the late 80s confirmed much earlier hypothesis based on even earlier observations, they 80s observations were conducted based on results of those earlier observations not in blind faith or speculation, they were not throwing 1980s darts at a board in the 1980s dark.
If you could make a cursory effort on doing some background research you'd know about MOND and how it was proven wrong, more than once including again very recently, you wouldn't have posted point No.1.
The extra matter is detected in a wide range of effects, not just the orbital velocity of stars, the strongest evidence is gravitational lensing and the filamentary structure of the galaxy clusters and the acceleration of galaxy clusters, as they move towards or away from each other! Something that can be measured with extreme precision, made easier by all that matter, the more there is the more sensitive the measurement becomes!
Following on from this, now that we have all this extra matter in the universe, it follows that the forces of gravitation must also be much stronger. According to the calcs, this extra gravity meant that firstly the rate of the expansion of the universe should slow down, and then once its stops expanding it starts to contract and becomes smaller and smaller and eventually ends up as the big Crunch. Around the year 2000, it was discovered that galaxies at the edge of our universe were not slowing down as the model expected, the rate of expansion was in fact speeding up. So once again, rather than looking at alternative explanations for this mismatch, physicists said there must be some form of energy that is pushing against all this extra mass to keep the universe expanding, and we'll call it dark energy. Once again, no evidence for this at all.
No wrong again.
A big crunch was one hypothesis which guess what, was proven wrong. How we weigh the universe and determine if it could be expanding or contracting depends on many factors, not just how much matter but the relative velocities of the matter. At some point velocity becomes the dominant factor and you can have as much matter as you like it will never clump. A term known as the Hubble constant determines this and it is measured continuously to ever increasing accuracy, in plain language if you are far enough away you are leaving and never coming back. In fact if you are far enough away you're receding faster than the speed of light.
In 2000 the observations we made to confirm the earlier discoveries, not the discovery itself. The observations to settle this debate were not conducted on a whim, a beleif or blind faith. They were observations to confirm the data.
The evidence for the expansion of the universe is present in doppler shift and a skilled 6th grader can measure it with a backyard telescope or even hire time on a professional device hosted on the internet(You can too!) With minimal training you can be taking spectra and measuring redshifts, or using the occulation of Jupiters moons to measure the speed of light. But how far is Jupiter, isn't that important, well ask Pythagoras and just be patient!
The evidence for the accelerated expansion of the universe was confirmed independently by measurements from Schmidt, Perlmutter, et. al., back in 2000 at the end of their Type 1A Supernova observing runs. Prior to their work there was evidence for or against, the earlier measurements were not accurate or sensitive enough to reduce the errors bars to a single conclusion. Now they have, and the upper and lower limits of the Hubble Constant are defined.
As you know the speed of the light is finite, so when we look further away we look back in time, for certain events we get to see them as they appeared in the past and we can also see them evolve. Even more fortuitously, with the help of whatever dark matter is, we can use gravitational lensing to watch the same event happening multiple times like a universal rewind button. We get to see a single star explode more than once! Those people that you quote wrongly as the "discoverers" of the expansion back in 2000, Perlmutter and Schmidt, well and truly put the sword to a lot of the dogmatic ideas you seem to be clinging to.
I can tell you, in all honesty, I really want there to be dark matter and dark energy, because if it's true it means that the universe has a deep dark subconscious that controls the bits we can see, just like us. An idea that I find incredibly appealing.
"Give us one free miracle, and we'll explain the rest."
So dogamitic mysticism rules for you, your living with it already you don't need proof.