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Why is there so much crackpot physics?

Dark matter comprises approximately 25% of the mass energy of the universe, dark energy approximately 70%.

Gravity may be the weakest force but it's the only one that both acts on every kind of particle and acts over potentially infinite distances.
 
Dark matter comprises approximately 25% of the mass energy of the universe, dark energy approximately 70%.

Gravity may be the weakest force but it's the only one that both acts on every kind of particle and acts over potentially infinite distances.


An infinity of nothings is nothing. If you scale our system so that the radius of Pluto's orbit is about one yard, then at that scale, the sun is about the diameter of a human hair and Alpha Centauri, the nearest other star, is a bit more than four miles out yonder. Asking gravity to hold our galaxy together is basically the same thing as asking gravity to hold two dust motes together from four miles distance.
 
If those two dust motes were the only objects in the universe gravity would eventually bring them together, no matter how far apart they were to begin with.
 
If those two dust motes were the only objects in the universe gravity would eventually bring them together, no matter how far apart they were to begin with.

Glad you believe that. I've never heard of anybody else who does.
 
If those two dust motes were the only objects in the universe gravity would eventually bring them together, no matter how far apart they were to begin with.

In fact if that were the case, then the mass of the universe should be clumped together in one general spot.
 
Plenty of people discussing other bits of your posts, so I'll just pop in for a couple of points here.
For his troubles, Arp was banned from observatories in the US and subsequently picked up by the Max Planck Institute, sort of like the story of the "Ugly Duckling" which children read.
There is no one place called 'the Max Planck Institute'. There's loads of them. There are no fewer than 9 in astronomy and astrophysics.
Arp ended up at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. This is currently home to some extremely fine minds working hard on big bang cosmology and dark matter, and is very much at the forefront of this sort of research. It's not exactly a home to maverick minds going against the mainstream. I think you'll find at least a large percentage of the staff there have a view of this stuff connecting low redshift galaxies to high redshift quasars that is not dissimilar to mine and Ben M's (that is to say 'errr... no').

Claiming that DM fixes the problem at 95 - 5 is like saying "Hey, if we only require the two dust motes to bind via gravity from 1/5 mile, that fixes i! That's plainly idiotic. Gravity is by 40 orders of magnitude the weakest force in nature. It is NOT what holds galaxies together.
That's not plainly idiotic. What if I told you systems exist where the typical distance between stars was about a light year but that required no dark matter to gravitationally bind them? Is that also 'plainly idiotic'?
 
Glad you believe that. I've never heard of anybody else who does.
Anybody who knows anything at all about physics does.

In fact if that were the case, then the mass of the universe should be clumped together in one general spot.
It the universe were not expanding that would indeed be the case. In fact if the universe ever ceased expanding (once considered a real possibility, though less so since the discovery of dark energy) that would eventually happen. See Big Crunch.
More fun reading for those wishing to escape from wallow in their ignorance...

http://bigbangneverhappened.org
FTFY.
 
The "Big Bang(TM)" idea. BB should have been rejected on day one on purely philosophical grounds.
Really? On "philosophical grounds"? What does the ramblings of "philosophers" have to do with real science?
:rolleyes:

Having all the mas of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that.
You really are grossly ignorant aren't you? Perhaps before you criticise the theory you could do some research rather than relying on your opinions.

BB was never based on anything other than an interpretation of cosmic redshift as distance and velocity,
Untrue.

Halton Arp has shown examples of very high and very low redhift objects which are very clearly part and parcel of the same things, often with obvious connecting material between them. For his troubles, Arp was banned from observatories in the US and subsequently picked up by the Max Planck Institute, sort of like the story of the "Ugly Duckling" which children read.
Rubbish. Arp's "intrinsic redshift" theory has been disproved by forty years of better observations about QSOs.

Dark Matter. Invented by scientists with hyperactive imaginations to try to salvage the failed idea of a gravity-only cosmology,
Again, before pontificating on subjects you clearly don't understand you should do the research. It'd help you avoid looking like an ignorant fool.

Gravity is by 40 orders of magnitude the weakest force in nature.
Wrong.

It is NOT what holds galaxies together.
Really? You have some evidence for this rant? Or just your opinion?

Relativity (deformable time). What could be stupider than claiming that when two Volkswagens pass each other at light speed (or at any other speed for that matter...), time for each slows down WRT the other??
Well there's the numerous experimental proofs for one.......
:rolleyes:

Aside from every other problem with Relativity, there is the fact that when Dayton Miller reran the MM experiment with much better equipment and at higher altitude, it did not fail...
:rolleyes: You're sixty yeas late. Shankland showed Millers data (which is from 1933 remember) was indicative of nothing other than sloppy experimental procedure.
In the eighty years since Miller's errors there have been a host of experimental proofs of Relativity.
 
Again gravity is by 40 orders of magnitude th eweaket force in nature. Asking gravity to hold galaxies together is like wanting the littlest kid in the school to compete in the power-lifting event.

Actually, no.

It's more like the realization that the biggest/strongest kid in class, no matter how strong, can't lift more than the 40 smallest/weakest working together.

By it's nature, the electromagnetic force works against itself. Any large conglomeration of matter is, unless being acted on by something else, electrically nuetral. Anything that isn't increaseingly attracts opposite particles, in proportion to how far off neutral it is, until it becomes nuetral (simplified, but I don't think we're ready for intricacies at this point, considering the mistakes you're making at the basics).

Gravity, on the other hand, has a small attraction. But each time that force pulls things together, it's attraction gets stronger. It builds. Gravity dominates precisely because it's always attractive, and builds on itself.

A good analogy is the old chinese(?) tale about the man asking for grains of rice on a chessboard as a reward.
 
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Halton Arp showed examples of high redshift and low redshift galaxiesdoing this.
I visited that link -- lots of pictures of people having line-of-sight fun with the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

About Halton Arp, many of his supporters consider him a martyr because he got denied telescope time or something like that. But being martyred is not evidence for the truth of one's theories.

(icebear on relativity...)
What icebear mentioned is a version of the Twin Paradox. The solution involves a counterintuitive feature of relativity. It's that the time between two space-time points is relative, in the way that their spatial separation is relative. That relativity of time is VERY tiny by ordinary standards, but it can get large in elementary-particle experiments.

The usual claim is 95%. Claiming 25% would be much worse, i.e. it would make the person making the claim look much dopier.
That's about 25% dark matter and 70% dark energy.

Dark matter and dark energy are two very different sorts of entities. We only know them from their gravitational effects, but that's enough to find their equations of state.

Dark matter: (pressure) ~ 10-6 * (density)*c2Dark energy: (pressure) ~ - (density)*c2
The dark-matter pressure is from its velocity dispersion.
The dark-energy pressure would be an exact equality for the cosmological constant.

Again gravity is by 40 orders of magnitude th eweaket force in nature. Asking gravity to hold galaxies together is like wanting the littlest kid in the school to compete in the power-lifting event.
Between individual elementary particles, yes. But gravity has an edge over all other known interactions: its "charge" is always positive, and its range is effectively infinite. That makes it cumulative and long-distance.

One can test gravity over the sizes of the Earth and the Sun by doing structure calculations with estimated compositions. They do reasonably well at predicting various observed features, so we can be confident that one can extrapolate from laboratory scales to the Earth's and the Sun's sizes.

For larger size scales, one watches the planets and smaller objects, and sends out spacecraft. One finds that one can extrapolate gravity to the size of the Solar System.

One doesn't have as much data on other stars, but their structure calculations also work. Also, binary stars have Keplerian orbits, like many Solar-System objects, Keplerian orbits with Solar-System size scales.

Going to larger scales is more difficult, though the density profiles of star clusters could give some hints on the behavior of gravity at their size scales.


Electromagnetism is much like gravity, except that its charges can be zero and negative as well as positive. In our Universe, neutrons have zero charge to high accuracy and protons and electrons opposite charges to high accuracy. Furthermore, the Universe is electrically neutral, as far as we can determine.

The relative charges of the electron, proton, and neutron are likely a consequence of some Grand Unified Theory, and that gives us a hint as to why the Universe is neutral. If the Universe originated as a quantum fluctuation, it likely originated as a GUT gauge singlet. This means:

(Gauge-symmetry generators).(Universe) = 0

The electric charge is the only surviving low-energy one, so

(Electric charge).(Universe) = 0

The other interactions have very short ranges, due to confinement (QCD) or symmetry breaking (electroweak, SUSY?, GUT?, TOE?).
 
[qimg]http://www.discordancyreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/ngc7603_rband.jpg[/qimg]
Hmm, "z=0.029", "z=0.030", "z=0.057", "z=0.243", "z=0.391" ... What do you think these numbers are, icebear? How were they worked out? What do they mean?

Don't get me wrong... It's not like there isn't crackpottery on the fringe or anything like that; just that much of the last century's worth of mainstream science isn't much better.

A few Example:


  • [snip]
  • Relativity (deformable time). What could be stupider than claiming that when two Volkswagens pass each other at light speed (or at any other speed for that matter...), time for each slows down WRT the other?? Aside from every other problem with Relativity, [snip]

OK, so if "Relativity (deformable time)" is crackpottery, what are those numbers, icebear? Well, as Halton Arp will tell you - if you dare ask him - they are derived from an analysis of the spectrum of those objects (the fact that that analysis involves a fair bit of mathematics doesn't cause you any problems, does it?). For that analysis to yield consistent results - the same "z" number for an object, no matter which "lines" in its spectrum you choose to analyze - you will need to accept the validity of a large part of contemporary atomic physics.

Do you know, icebear, what's at the heart of that bit of physics?

Did you guess "Relativity (deformable time)"?

So what does that mean, icebear? If you think "Relativity (deformable time)" is crackpottery, how is it that Arp - and other astronomers - can get a consistent value for "z", from a (mathematical) analysis of the spectrum of a point of light in the night sky? And what do those "z's" even mean, if "Relativity (deformable time)" is crackpottery?
 
Anybody who knows anything at all about physics does.


It the universe were not expanding that would indeed be the case.


Face it: The universe is not expanding. That is the entire point of what Arp has demonstrated. Moreover, the entire notion of a "Big Bang" was never based on anything other than this wrong idea of an expanding universe.

That also says that the universe, like God, is basically eternal and that the power of gravity to affect anything does in fact die out past a certain distance, because we do NOT see the mass of the universe all clumped together.

Galaxies are held together by electromagnetic forces and not gravity. In some cases that's not totally obvious, in others it's very obvious:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/9905/ngc6872_vlt.jpg

Edited by LashL: 
Changed hotlinked image to regular link. Please see Rule 5, and do not hotlink images unless the site specifically permits such a practice.


The arms, particularly the upper arm, show material being held in a straight line until some point at which the field breaks down, after which material very quickly trails away and dissipates. Gravity and inertia cannot do things like that.
 
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Face it: The universe is not expanding. That is the entire point of what Arp has demonstrated.

Figure 20, Anderson et al.

Why do the distances between galaxies at different redshifts* match those expected if the universe were expanding in a way as suggested from measurements of the microwave background? If the universe is not expanding, why are the galaxies apparently moving apart - not just as measured by luminosity and redshift, but by transverse separation across the sky?

Good luck explaining that.

*edit: to clarify, you look for a typical distance between a set of galaxies at the same redshift, and do the same for another set of galaxies at another redshift and compare.
 
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Face it: The universe is not expanding. That is the entire point of what Arp has demonstrated.

Well, he failed - rather spectacularly - to demonstrate that.

But, suppose that you accept that he did; do you, icebear, know how he demonstrated that?

More to the point, given your very black-and-white stance on relativity, can you - icebear - show us how Arp's demonstration works, without assuming the validity of relativity?

I'm quite confident that you can't. But - unlike you - I have an open mind; I'm more than willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Care to try?

Moreover, the entire notion of a "Big Bang" was never based on anything other than this wrong idea of an expanding universe.
It was?

And you know this because ...?

[snip]

Galaxies are held together by electromagnetic forces and not gravity. In some cases that's not totally obvious, in others it's very obvious:

[qimg]http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/9905/ngc6872_vlt.jpg[/qimg]

The arms, particularly the upper arm, show material being held in a straight line until some point at which the field breaks down, after which material very quickly trails away and dissipates.
OK, you seem to be saying that you, icebear, can look at an image like this, and can tell - simply by looking at it (no analysis using any mathematics :jaw-dropp) - that "material" is "being held in a straight line until some point at which the field breaks down".

That's impressive. I mean, really impressive. :D

Would you care to share with us all, icebear, how you can tell - just by looking at an image - the "point at which the field breaks down"? Perhaps you could start with telling us what you mean by "the field" in this case?

Gravity and inertia cannot do things like that.
And you know this because ...?
 
The arms, particularly the upper arm, show material being held in a straight line until some point at which the field breaks down, after which material very quickly trails away and dissipates. Gravity and inertia cannot do things like that.

So, every time you look at a collection of objects, you can infer that the material is "being held" in the configuration you see? Look at this image of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Is there a force is "holding" those objects in a straight line, according to you?
 
An infinity of nothings is nothing. If you scale our system so that the radius of Pluto's orbit is about one yard, then at that scale, the sun is about the diameter of a human hair and Alpha Centauri, the nearest other star, is a bit more than four miles out yonder. Asking gravity to hold our galaxy together is basically the same thing as asking gravity to hold two dust motes together from four miles distance.

Go ahead, Icebear. The force of gravity---which is, yes, very weak---goes as

F = G M m / r^2

Do you know what those letters mean? Do you know how to do arithmetic? Do you know where to look up the relevant numbers (masses, constants, distances?) Go ahead and calculate the force that Alpha Centauri exerts on the Sun. Calculate the force that the inner Milky Way---let's call it 300 billion solar masses, centered 8 kpc away---exerts on the Sun.

Forces cause accelerations. The relevant law here is (look it up)

F = m a

Calculate the Sun's acceleration due to the Milky Way. Calculate the Sun's acceleration due to Alpha Centauri.

In order for gravity to "hold things together", you need that acceleration to apply a centripetal force that can make the Sun move in a circle around the Milky Way. Do you need me to walk you through that?

Anyway: Yes, if you actually use the law of gravity (the actual equation, not your guesswork version of it) you find that gravity IS strong enough to move stars around. Alpha centauri and the Sun, for example? Yes, they exert very small acceleration on one another. This acceleration is so small, it would take 140,000,000 years for Alpha Centauri to orbit the Sun once. But you know what? That's pretty fast by astronomical standards. The Milky Way has been here for 14,000,000,000 years. Ditto for the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way---the Milky Way's gravity exerts a *smallish* force on the Sun, but that force is enough to make the Sun orbit with about the right period.

(By contrast: you've probably read Eric Lerner talking about how electricity might make stars move around. Go ahead and try this. I've done it. There is no way to make the actual laws of electricity and magnetism generate forces this large.)

What did you do wrong, Icebear? Well, you looked at a picture of a gravitational system, guessed that things looked pretty weak and the forces sounded pretty small. You were right, in a limited way, about that---gravitational accelerations usually *are* pretty small compared to the accelerations we're used to on Earth. But you were incorrect to guess (as you did) that this means gravity doesn't do what we see. A small force, acting over a long time, can cause large motions---very large. And cosmology involves things that happen over very, very long times. You looked at the small forces but forgot about the long times.
 
One can test icebear's magnetic-field hypothesis by comparing magnetic-field energy density to kinetic energy density. If magnetic fields were strong enough to control the stars, then the fields would have more energy density than the stars' kinetic-energy density.

From [1302.5663] Magnetic fields in galaxies, average magnetic fields of galaxies are about 10-5 gauss / 10-9 tesla. Using the usual formula of B2/(2*mu0), that gives an energy density of about
4*10-13 J/m3
Let's now calculate that for stars in galaxies.

Stellar Populations - 1 star per cubic parsec is typical of our Galactic disk. The mass of an average star is about 0.3 solar masses, since most stars are red dwarfs. That gives a mass density of about
2*10-20 kg/m3
Galaxy rotation velocities are typically around 200 to 300 km/s, with our Galaxy being between 200 and 250 km/s. That gives a kinetic-energy density of
5*10-10 J/m3
So galactic magnetic fields are at least 1000 times too weak to have much influence.


As to dismissing mathematics as metaphysics, that reminds me of cosmology crackpot Hanns Hoerbiger's favorite response to anyone who pointed out that some numbers did not work out right:

"Calculation can only lead you astray"

A strange attitude for an engineer.
 

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