Quote:
If material is in thermal equilibrium, it should give a blackbody spectrum.
Laughably wrong.
http://www.mi.infm.it/manini/dida/BlackBody.notes.html "a perfectly "black" surface ... snip ... kept at a given temperature emits the spectrum RB of electromagnetic fields in thermal equilibrium. This explains the name black-body radiation."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A270037 "A black body is in thermal equilibrium with its surroundings."
http://eo.ucar.edu/skymath/tmp2.html "equilibrium thermal radiation is therefore called black body radiation."
http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr162/lect/light/radiation.html "Generally, blackbody conditions apply when the radiator has very weak interaction with the surrounding environment and can be considered to be in a state of equilibrium. ... snip ... Blackbody radiation corresponds to radiation from bodies in thermal equilibrium."
Quote:
Space filled with filaments and whiskers could create such an equilibrium.
I thought you were opposed to the idea of deducing the existence of things we cannot directly observe. That's your entire objection to dark matter.
Wrong. Plasma filaments are not deduced. We actually do observe them everywhere we look in space and around us ... at all scales.
We also know that iron whiskers exist. We can create them in our labs. For your info ...
http://www.newscientist.com/article...ld-take-another-look-at-the-alternatives.html "Recent work on cosmic grains-small particles of iron, carbon and the like found in interstellar space-has turned up a promising candidate: an iron whisker about 1 millimetre long and 1 micrometre wide. Laboratory experiments show that slowly cooled metallic vapours do condense into such whiskers. Because metals are expected to be ejected in supernova explosions, such whiskers could very well form in theexpanding envelopes of supernovae. Significantly, the spectrum of the Crab Nebula pulsar (which is the relic of a supernova) shows a dip in the range of wavelengths from 30 micrometres to 10 centimetres, which are just the wavelengths where we would expect iron whiskers to absorb radiation. Once produced in supernovae in galaxies, these whiskers would (in a reasonably short time compared with cosmological time scales of 10 billion years) ultimately be pushed out into the intergalactic space by radiation pressure. Calculations show that such particles could very efficiently wipe out any underlying unevenness in radiation from stars and galaxies."
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/Jan02/CanisMajoris.bpf.html "About 5,000 light years away across our Milky Way galaxy, a highly brilliant star called VY Canis Majoris has long been thought to have smoke in its eyes because most of its light is blacked out by a cloud. ... snip ... Using the European Space Agency's Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), Harwit and his colleagues have found that this smoke consists of tiny particles of two dominant kinds: one made up of grains of iron in a highly elongated form called "whiskers" ... "
http://www.springerlink.com/content/r74xt634n1803256/ "It is shown that ~ 10
2 M of iron in the form of long slender whiskers, expelled from supernovae, can explain an observed deficit of line emission in the 157.7µm C II line and in the 205µm N II line from the galactic centre region."
The objection I have to the majority of what must constitute dark matter (and dark energy) is that it must consist of a form that has not been observed at all (despite 30 years of looking) and which has characteristics such that it's only interaction is via gravity, making it most unusual.
Once again: they did not predict that the background radiation would be a blackbody spectrum.
And mainstream theorists didn't predict that the universe would be filamentary in structure. So we are even.
Quote:
The fact that Gamow got the temperature so wrong might suggest the mechanisms he postulated for creating that energy might be wrong too. Don't you think?
Or it might not. People are fallible.
And so are theories. Does redshift always equate to distance? Let's just be honest for once. You don't really know. But you are acting like you do and your whole cosmological model depends on the relationship being absolute. Because if it's not ...
Quote:
They postulate that galaxy and star formation proceed very readily when hydrogen is condensed on grains but not when it is gaseous, and the universal microwave background temperature is that associated with galaxy formation. The solution for the black-body emission shape might be the special properties of the particles, which are not normal dust particles".
Once again, you're inventing properties of matter to fit the theory.
Not at all. You just misunderstand what they wrote. We know the properties of whiskers and filaments. We know such things actually exist. And we know they scatter radiation. The above just states that the solution for the black-body emission shape might only depend on those properties ... not on a Big Bang. And calculations published in peer reviewed journals and books by renowned scientists (some of which I linked above) conclude that such known properties could indeed explain the CMB spectrum. Just as known electromagnetic effects could explain the rotation curves of galaxies. Dark matter isn't needed.
Quote:
This source notes that "the quasi-steady state model argues that there is a distribution of whiskers"
Whiskers of what? Perfectly black material?
Iron. And they don't have to be perfectly black. They just have to scatter radiation. Which we know iron whiskers can do.
Quote:
Opaqueness is required only in a finite universe, an infinite universe can achieve thermodynamic equilibrium even if transparent out to very large distances".
What a joke. You can't reach thermodynamic equilibrium unless everything is the same temperature. But since the CMB is rather obviously not at the same temperature as stars are, we're clearly NOT in thermal equilibrium. Which is also why a steady-state model is laughably wrong.
Well I can see it's hopeless trying to make you understand what they are talking about. You don't want to understand. Because you know you (and your gnomes) are right.
And by the way, I'm not promoting the "steady-state" model. Nor is Hoyle and company any longer. Their model is now called the "Quasi-Continuous Creation Cosmology" or "Quasi-Steady State Cosmology".
Quote:
The source then describes a second alternative ... Eric Lerner's proposed solution, which is that "electrons in intergalactic magnetic fields emit and absorb microwave radiation.
Not in a blackbody spectrum, they don't.
Not after a single interaction, but after many such interactions, they produce a field of matter in thermal equilibrium and thus a blackbody spectrum. I've provided some sources proving this phenomena. Here:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/iel1/27/1720/00045502.pdf "Prediction of the submillimeter spectrum of the cosmic background radiation by a plasma model"
http://www.springerlink.com/content/n4673j2438430733/ " Confirmation of radio absorption by the intergalactic medium"
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cach...bsorb+cmb+filaments&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=18&gl=us "Observational Cosmology: caveats and open questions in the standard model ... snip ... May 16, 2006 ... snip ... In the fifties, it was pointed out that if the observed abundance of He was obtained by hydrogen burning in stars, there must have been a phase in the history of the Universe when the radiation density was much higher than the energy density of starlight today. ... snip ... If this energy is thermalized, the black body temperature turns out to be T = 2.76 K, very close to the observed temperature for the CMBR. Hence, there is a likely explanation of the energy of the microwave radiation in terms of straightforward astrophysics involving hydrogen burning in stars."
http://www.earthtech.org/publications/ibison_ccci.pdf "Thermalization of Starlight in the Steady-State Cosmology"
Quote:
This prediction agrees with the fact that the number of radio sources increases much more slowly than the number of optical sources with distance;
But this statement requires that we accept redshift = distance
No it doesn't. But nice try.
Steady-state models violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. They can be dismissed out of hand for that alone.
The model currently proposed by Gold, Bondi, Hoyle, Narlikar, Burbidge and others is not a "steady-state" model in the sense you want to imply. It's a continuous creation model (quasi-steady state) based on a different solution to the equation of general relativity ... one that didn't ASSUME the mass of the universe is a constant. Why did we have to assume that? It allows for the creation of matter even now under certain circumstances (which follow from the solution equations). Think of it as an ongoing string of mini-bangs without all the problems of the Big Bang model ... i.e., the need for inflation, dark matter, dark energy, black holes, etc.
There is also the Self Creation Cosmology (SCC) model (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-creation_cosmology ) which also allows for ongoing creation of matter and avoids the need for your numerous gnomes. Neither approach seems to violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics ... no more than the Big Bang cosmology did in the beginning.
If the steady state universe was right, the intergallactic medium shouldn't thermalize to 2.7K, it should thermalize to the same temperature as stars. The night sky would be white, and earth would boil to a crisp.
You presume to know everything about the universe. But you forget that the universe is expanding, even in the quasi-steady state (and old steady state) models.
