I have to go back to the lab so I'll probably drop out during the week. However a short answer on the He measurements from stars and galaxies. There is no contradiction. The galaxy measurements go down to a Z(in this context metallicity) of about 0.02. The stellar measurements go all the way down to 0.001. You'll see that there is a break in the curve at about 0.014, where the slope steepens. That can't be observed in the galaxy data as yet since there are no galaxies with He data that have that low Z. The newer stellar data (since about 2007) show a contradiction to BBN not evident in the older galaxy data because the stellar data probes to lower metallicity--earlier in time.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Please give citations for primordial He using galaxies at various z
I am saying that you remain ignorant about the primary source of data - HII regions in dwarf galaxies.
I am saying that you seem to have a fantasy about He being measured in arbitrary galaxies because you provide no citations.
Eric L: Please give citations for the measurement of primordial He mass faction using galaxies at various z.
We are saying that there are plenty of papers from astronomers who know what they are doing that show that the calculated primordial He mass faction matches that from the Big Bang (~25%).
On the other hand we have you with one diagram from a paper that agrees with those astronomers! Portinari, Casagrande, Flynn (2010)
Assuming that your figure is Figure 5 which is likely but needs confrming, as Z (metal mass fraction) goes to zero, X (He mass fraction) goes to ~0.09. As noted in a extensively cited paper this is a problem for stellar models not the Big Bang.
The helium abundance and DeltaY/DeltaZ in lower main-sequence stars; Casagrande, et. al (2007)
29 February 2016 Eric L: Why are all of the published calculations of primordial He mass faction wrong?
No one is saying that there is a contradiction.
I am saying that you remain ignorant about the primary source of data - HII regions in dwarf galaxies.
I am saying that you seem to have a fantasy about He being measured in arbitrary galaxies because you provide no citations.
Eric L: Please give citations for the measurement of primordial He mass faction using galaxies at various z.
We are saying that there are plenty of papers from astronomers who know what they are doing that show that the calculated primordial He mass faction matches that from the Big Bang (~25%).
On the other hand we have you with one diagram from a paper that agrees with those astronomers! Portinari, Casagrande, Flynn (2010)
Assuming that your figure is Figure 5 which is likely but needs confrming, as Z (metal mass fraction) goes to zero, X (He mass fraction) goes to ~0.09. As noted in a extensively cited paper this is a problem for stellar models not the Big Bang.
The helium abundance and DeltaY/DeltaZ in lower main-sequence stars; Casagrande, et. al (2007)
This is invalidates your unsupported assertion of "models of stellar structure, but these models have been very well verified...", Eric L.
29 February 2016 Eric L: Why are all of the published calculations of primordial He mass faction wrong?
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Anyway, Eric, I am not sure how long you have been working on your oddball "mathematical description" of tired light.
Anyway, here is the trivial experimental disproof. Your equation, which you seem to have pulled out of a hat, is a "mathematical description" only in the sense that, after you learned that the data looked like y = y0/(1 + x), you were able to cook up a differential equation whose solution was y = y0/(1+x), surprising no one.
The equation you found is exactly the sort of thing that distinguishes physicists from mathematicians---your equation strictly implies that photons behave in certain ways, and those implications are so incredibly unphysical that---well, they make "dark energy" look like a quiet day in the paradigm factory. I presume you invented the phrase "this is not a mechanism" to try to get people to accept the equation without thinking about it.
In this case, the problem isn't the *mechanism*---there is no non-borked mechanism for ANY tired light theory---the problem is the math. Your math describes every photon behaving differently depending on its origin. In your model (I'll stick with c=H=1), a photon emitted at Earth will lose half of its energy on its way to d=1. A photon of the same energy, passing by from a source d=1 in the other direction, will lose only a third of its energy on the next d=1 of its trip.
I can hardly begin to describe how poorly that equation (the equation you fished out of a hat solely because its solutions transform into straight lines in d(z), straight lines which interest you for some reason despite their statistically-significant deviations from the data) looks like an equation that a physical theory could ever produce. But we don't have to philosophize about it! We have direct disproof.
Eric, your equation says that redshifts should disagree when measured in emission spectra than in absorption spectra. For example: suppose we see a distant quasar at distance D0 emitting broadband white light. Suppose we see that the quasar's light passes through the halo of a galaxy at distance D1 and encounter a atomic absorption line. This galaxy may also emit light, including emission lines.
Let's say the quasar is at d=2, the galaxy is at d=1, and the atomic absorption feature is at 1 eV. From the galaxy's perspective, the quasar is at d=1. Therefore, when the galaxy is absorbing 1 eV photons out of the quasar spectrum, it's removing photons which were emitted at 2 eV. However, the quasar photons are all said to be redshifting down to z=2 on their way to Earth. We'll therefore see a quasar spectrum with an absorption line whose energy at arrival is 0.66 eV. In other words, this quasar has an absorption-line spectrum indicating an intervening z=0.5 galaxy.
But the galaxy is actually at d=1. All of its emission features are at z=1.
Your "mathematical description" of redshift, Eric, includes a specific prediction: if photons obey that redshift-distance relation, then absorption-line redshifts and emission-line redshifts should differ hugely. They don't. There is a huge literature that studies galactic gas halos by collecting galaxy samples that happen to lie on a quasar line-of-sight. There are huge samples with both absorption-line and emission-line (and photometric, for that matter) redshifts. Google for "MgII line of sight" to get into this literature. Even discounting for "people weren't actively looking for >10^5 km/s redshift anomalies", I see no room whatsoever for ubiquitous 10^5 km/s redshift anomalies.
Sorry, Eric, your "mathematical description" of redshift cannot be a real mathematical description of redshift, or even a rough approximation to it, in the real world. Like most attempts to guess what the laws of physics are doing, your guess was wrong out-of-the-box.
Anyway, here is the trivial experimental disproof. Your equation, which you seem to have pulled out of a hat, is a "mathematical description" only in the sense that, after you learned that the data looked like y = y0/(1 + x), you were able to cook up a differential equation whose solution was y = y0/(1+x), surprising no one.
The equation you found is exactly the sort of thing that distinguishes physicists from mathematicians---your equation strictly implies that photons behave in certain ways, and those implications are so incredibly unphysical that---well, they make "dark energy" look like a quiet day in the paradigm factory. I presume you invented the phrase "this is not a mechanism" to try to get people to accept the equation without thinking about it.
In this case, the problem isn't the *mechanism*---there is no non-borked mechanism for ANY tired light theory---the problem is the math. Your math describes every photon behaving differently depending on its origin. In your model (I'll stick with c=H=1), a photon emitted at Earth will lose half of its energy on its way to d=1. A photon of the same energy, passing by from a source d=1 in the other direction, will lose only a third of its energy on the next d=1 of its trip.
I can hardly begin to describe how poorly that equation (the equation you fished out of a hat solely because its solutions transform into straight lines in d(z), straight lines which interest you for some reason despite their statistically-significant deviations from the data) looks like an equation that a physical theory could ever produce. But we don't have to philosophize about it! We have direct disproof.
Eric, your equation says that redshifts should disagree when measured in emission spectra than in absorption spectra. For example: suppose we see a distant quasar at distance D0 emitting broadband white light. Suppose we see that the quasar's light passes through the halo of a galaxy at distance D1 and encounter a atomic absorption line. This galaxy may also emit light, including emission lines.
Let's say the quasar is at d=2, the galaxy is at d=1, and the atomic absorption feature is at 1 eV. From the galaxy's perspective, the quasar is at d=1. Therefore, when the galaxy is absorbing 1 eV photons out of the quasar spectrum, it's removing photons which were emitted at 2 eV. However, the quasar photons are all said to be redshifting down to z=2 on their way to Earth. We'll therefore see a quasar spectrum with an absorption line whose energy at arrival is 0.66 eV. In other words, this quasar has an absorption-line spectrum indicating an intervening z=0.5 galaxy.
But the galaxy is actually at d=1. All of its emission features are at z=1.
Your "mathematical description" of redshift, Eric, includes a specific prediction: if photons obey that redshift-distance relation, then absorption-line redshifts and emission-line redshifts should differ hugely. They don't. There is a huge literature that studies galactic gas halos by collecting galaxy samples that happen to lie on a quasar line-of-sight. There are huge samples with both absorption-line and emission-line (and photometric, for that matter) redshifts. Google for "MgII line of sight" to get into this literature. Even discounting for "people weren't actively looking for >10^5 km/s redshift anomalies", I see no room whatsoever for ubiquitous 10^5 km/s redshift anomalies.
Sorry, Eric, your "mathematical description" of redshift cannot be a real mathematical description of redshift, or even a rough approximation to it, in the real world. Like most attempts to guess what the laws of physics are doing, your guess was wrong out-of-the-box.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
A continuation of thinking about stellar models. What is really of interest for He abundance would be the models of stellar composition. I suspect that these would be poorly verified for the simple reason that we cannot send probes into the interior of stars to verify the models!
For example look at the Sun. The photosphere happens to have a composition that includes 25% He by mass (matches the BB abundance but I suspect this is a coincidence). We can see that the surface is very convective with a layer of granules (tops of convection cells). There are probably super-granules mixing things up further down. So does the measured convection verify the models?
Convection in the Sun is Slower than We Thought
Not very well in 2012!
The result hints at a lot less mixing than expected and a potential for more He at depth than measured at the photosphere.
Thanks Eric L.
In your EWASS 2015 presentation, at ~21 minutes in, there is a slide with the title "LSS at all scales predicted by non-expanding plasma theory, 1986". Which of your papers (1986?) is this from?
That may be so (though I myself seriously doubt it).
However, your paper explicitly says "The fit to the actual supernovae data is statistically indistinguishable between the two formulae".
Yet you publish neither the data nor any statistic showing goodness-of-fit.
For me, this shows either really sloppy work (on the part of you and your co-authors) and/or really lax refereeing.
I can only wonder if any of the people you and your colleagues have shown it to are astronomers/astrophysicists with many years' of research in cosmology and/or extragalactic objects. My guess is few, if any.
Um, no. Just no.
Figure 2 in your paper references both Riess+ (2004) and Astier+ (2006). A careful reading of both strongly points to the conclusion that their data are not consistent with "SEU model". Perhaps the (or a) problem is "The assumed absolute magnitude of the supernovae is M= -19.25." Both papers you cited were at great pains calibrate the SNIa light-curves.
Perhaps you could publish the data you used to create Figure 2? That way any reader could - independently - check your assumptions, etc.
Actually, it's not anywhere near as bad as you portray it (other than the confusion of "flux" and "flux density", which you'll find in many fields of physics, not just astronomy).
Astronomers need to go beyond just 'power per square metre', because they measure the input energy in (or at) particular wavebands (wavelengths). Hence two units, 'power per square metre per unit frequency', and 'power per square metre per unit wavelength'. They are also very careful to specify the zero point for either (yes, the zero points do differ somewhat, between magnitude systems).
While I have not yet finished reading your paper in detail, I do note that you seem rather sloppy in how you treat the distinction between absolute magnitudes (which are, by definition, independent of wavebands) and magnitudes in different filters (which is what is actually observed).
(my bold)
As has already been pointed out by others, you seem to have either not read very much of the appropriate literature, and/or seriously misunderstood (or misinterpreted) what you did read.
For example, PCF10 has quite a discussion on just how far from complete stellar evolution models are, re inclusion of physical processes already known to be important; for example:
They go on to briefly mention five: mixing lengths, Diffusion+non-LTE effects, Boundary conditions, Convection, and Opacity (it is interesting to note that this last one was, until very recently, a challenge even for solar models, and today there is still some tension between the models and observations).
Again, you seem to be unfamiliar with the relevant literature.
Perhaps you were oversimplifying, but what you've cited - and what's generally found in the relevant papers - is that observed metallicity of a star reflects the abundance of the relevant elements in the gas/dust from which it formed (with some very important caveats). However, the age of a star is inferred from its position on an HR (or CM) diagram and stellar evolution models (yes, this is a simplification). There are stars which are very young yet have low metallicity, and old ones with high metallicity.
And this is true in our own galaxy too (albeit the range is considerably lower than among stars observed in globular clusters, stellar streams, and other galaxies).
I want to quote something from Lerner's 2003 IEEE article.
(Please note that IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science is not a cosmology journal, it's a journal for an audience of experimental plasma physicists and engineers. Literally 100% of its cosmology content (go ahead, do a search) is anti-Big-Bang plasma cosmology or electric universe.)
(Please note that IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science is not a cosmology journal, it's a journal for an audience of experimental plasma physicists and engineers. Literally 100% of its cosmology content (go ahead, do a search) is anti-Big-Bang plasma cosmology or electric universe.)
- First of all: this is epistemologically nonsense. To begin with ,it is how physics works. Nature is out there using some complete set (call it Z) of laws of physics. A priori, we don't know what Z is. We construct hypotheses of the form "if the laws were X, the data would be Y". If X does not predict Y, then X != Z and we have to say "we don't know the laws of Nature Z" and we are supposed to keep guessing. All such guesses are extensions of X beyond what you guessed first.
Eric thinks that he knows Z already: the actual laws of Nature have to be (he thinks) the ones observed directly in pre-2016 labs. He thinks astronomers are only allowed to rearrange the "known" ingredients into different sorts of clouds and clusters and streams. This is bizarre. Every physicist since Fermi and Rabi has known that Nature might have huge catalogues of new particles up her sleeve, and that some such particles might be hard or impossible to detect. Everyone except you! You seem to have some inside information telling you that protons, electrons, photons, and neutrinos are the whole story. What information is that?
- Secondly: Eric remains (as of 2003 anyway) confused about whether dark matter and dark energy are overconstrained or not. He thinks we threw four crazy ideas into a Cosmic Microwave Background fit, saw a good chi^2, and started collecting Nobel prizes based on unusually little confirmation. Nonsense. It's terrifically overconstrained. Multiple independent cosmology observables provide cross-predictions for each other. I have said this five times and Eric seems deaf to it.
- Thirdly: In this thread, Eric seems willing look at one isolated cosmological data fit and invent new physics to make sense of it---even at the cost of that "new physics" being apparently Lorentz-violating nonlocal craziness in which otherwise-indistinguishable photons need to remember how far they've traveled so far in order to decide how much they need to stretch in wavelength. (Presumably he holds out some hope that this will turn out to be a plasma-physics phenomenon. I don't know why he expects anyone else to hold out such a hope.)
Small nitpick: at least in his EWASS 2015 presentation, Eric L limited his speculation to some hitherto unknown aspect of electromagnetism, specifically how light propagates over large distances (this is a paraphrase, and I'm going by memory; it's towards the end of the video linked to in the OP).
In his earlier papers etc, Eric L has speculated widely on plasma phenomena, but I don't recall anything specific re a distance-redshift relationship being due to plasmas.
Where you will find such speculations is among EU acolytes; some explicitly claim that the cosmological redshift (i.e. not that due to the Doppler effect, but possibly including gravitational redshift) is due entirely to the kind of 'plasma redshift' effect seen in some Earthly lab experiments; "inelastic scattering" is sometimes mentioned, as is "pulse broadening". Also claimed as causes are Compton scattering (yes, you read that correctly), and the 'plasma redshift' found in various papers in vixra (and, no doubt, other physical causes besides).
However, unlike Eric L - who does at least do some quantitative analyses, using data published in astrophysics/astronomy papers - none of the EU zealots have even attempted to test their 'word salad' ideas, quantitatively (to my knowledge anyway).
Although Eric L has never - to my knowledge - formally dissociated himself from "the EU", I suspect he's embarrassed to read their leading lights saying he is a (core!) member of the "EU/PC community".
Going onward, two of Eric's papers focus on his "discovery" that the intergalactic medium has strong radio absorption.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990ApJ...361...63L
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993Ap&SS.207...17L
Both of these papers are doing the same thing by slightly different methods, and they're both wrong.
First, Eric is taking the (reasonably well known) fact that radio and IR luminosities are tightly correlated. (There is a straightforward understanding of why this should be; they're both tracers of recent star formation history, one via dust production and one via cosmic ray production.) Eric wanted to test whether there is an additional correlation with distance; if the IGM absorbs radio, then you'd find the radio-to-IR ratio dropping with distance.
You'd think that the right way to do this would be to take the ratio of radio flux to IR flux (including, if you're looking at a range of redshift, any necessary band corrections, since you really want to test the rest-frame radio/IR ratio) and plot it as a function of z or distance. If you were worried that different redshifts might be dominated by different galaxy populations, you might do this fit separately on total-luminosity or type-selected galaxies. And this has been done! By mainstream astronomers!
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0011
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011MNRAS.410.1155B
etc., this seems to be a huge field. You know what they all conclude? The observed ratio of radio to IR is basically constant out to the highest redshifts. I'm seeing everyone else getting limits of a fraction-of-a-magnitude radio/IR variation over thousands of Mpc.
Lerner reaches a different conclusion. Lerner's thinks he saw galaxies losing one magnitude of radio luminosity per 100 MPc. That's huge! It's utterly discordant with what anyone else is getting for the same observable. What's going on?
Lerner does not attempt to plot the ratio LR/LIR, the radio-to-FIR ratio. Instead, he seems to expect there to be a nonlinear radio/IR relationship, such that LR/LIR^a is constant for some exponent a. He wants to analyze the data in two steps: first doing a regression that uses LR, LIR, and distance(!!!) to find the "correct" exponent, and secondly to plot LR/LIR^a vs. distance to see if it's flat or not.
In the first paper he does something even weirder. He does a regression using LR and LIR and distance to find a. Then he does another regression (??!) in LR and LIR alone to find a different a estimate. He averages these two numbers together (!*&#$) to get a number that he puts into his ratio-vs-distance fit.
This is nuts. If the true relationship is LR*(1 - z*b)/LIR^a = const (or some log-space transform of that) you should just do statistical hypothesis testing on that two-parameter function and see if it's consistent with b=0 or not.
The quantity Lerner is plotting as a function of distance is the follow set of logs of absolute luminosities:
Ia = log(b * LR) - 1.35*log(c * LIR)
where LR and LIR are the distance -corrected absolute luminosities. To show why Lerner's conclusion is so untrustworthy, let's put in his distance-corrections explicitly. With FR and FIR as the observed radio fluxes, Lerner's test statistic is:
Ia = log(b * FR *d^2) - 1.35*log(c * FIR *d^2)
which algebraically rearranges to:
Ia = constants + log(FR) - 1.35*log(FIR) - 0.7*log(d)
Lerner's graph shows Ia as a function of distance and shows that there's nonzero d dependence. With a negative slope, even! Of course there is, Eric. You constructed a function which contains an explicit d-dependence. I believe that what you think you were doing is to put this factor-of-1.35 in there to correct for the possibility of a slope in a luminosity-vs-d plot, which might sneak into a ratio-vs-d plot in the case that a != 0. But you don't appear to have done any or quantified any sanity checks on whether this was working. (There are assertions of agreement between subsamples, but all in the spirit of "trust me, I checked carefully, honest" rather than in the spirit of "here is the evidence". The famous pedagogical example showing that correlation coefficients aren't always things you can safely subtract off from the data, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet ) Also, there are no error bars in any of these papers.
Anyway, whatever the particular pathology of Lerner's local result, it is definitely not the case that radio sources are being extinguished at a rate of one magnitude per 100 Mpc. Nobody sees that locally; nobody sees that over larger scales; Lerner's claim to see it is part of a data-analysis exercise full of red flags.
No, folks, you should not believe Eric's claim that the IGM is known to absorb radio waves.
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1990ApJ...361...63L
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1993Ap&SS.207...17L
Both of these papers are doing the same thing by slightly different methods, and they're both wrong.
First, Eric is taking the (reasonably well known) fact that radio and IR luminosities are tightly correlated. (There is a straightforward understanding of why this should be; they're both tracers of recent star formation history, one via dust production and one via cosmic ray production.) Eric wanted to test whether there is an additional correlation with distance; if the IGM absorbs radio, then you'd find the radio-to-IR ratio dropping with distance.
You'd think that the right way to do this would be to take the ratio of radio flux to IR flux (including, if you're looking at a range of redshift, any necessary band corrections, since you really want to test the rest-frame radio/IR ratio) and plot it as a function of z or distance. If you were worried that different redshifts might be dominated by different galaxy populations, you might do this fit separately on total-luminosity or type-selected galaxies. And this has been done! By mainstream astronomers!
http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.0011
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011MNRAS.410.1155B
etc., this seems to be a huge field. You know what they all conclude? The observed ratio of radio to IR is basically constant out to the highest redshifts. I'm seeing everyone else getting limits of a fraction-of-a-magnitude radio/IR variation over thousands of Mpc.
Lerner reaches a different conclusion. Lerner's thinks he saw galaxies losing one magnitude of radio luminosity per 100 MPc. That's huge! It's utterly discordant with what anyone else is getting for the same observable. What's going on?
Lerner does not attempt to plot the ratio LR/LIR, the radio-to-FIR ratio. Instead, he seems to expect there to be a nonlinear radio/IR relationship, such that LR/LIR^a is constant for some exponent a. He wants to analyze the data in two steps: first doing a regression that uses LR, LIR, and distance(!!!) to find the "correct" exponent, and secondly to plot LR/LIR^a vs. distance to see if it's flat or not.
In the first paper he does something even weirder. He does a regression using LR and LIR and distance to find a. Then he does another regression (??!) in LR and LIR alone to find a different a estimate. He averages these two numbers together (!*&#$) to get a number that he puts into his ratio-vs-distance fit.
This is nuts. If the true relationship is LR*(1 - z*b)/LIR^a = const (or some log-space transform of that) you should just do statistical hypothesis testing on that two-parameter function and see if it's consistent with b=0 or not.
The quantity Lerner is plotting as a function of distance is the follow set of logs of absolute luminosities:
Ia = log(b * LR) - 1.35*log(c * LIR)
where LR and LIR are the distance -corrected absolute luminosities. To show why Lerner's conclusion is so untrustworthy, let's put in his distance-corrections explicitly. With FR and FIR as the observed radio fluxes, Lerner's test statistic is:
Ia = log(b * FR *d^2) - 1.35*log(c * FIR *d^2)
which algebraically rearranges to:
Ia = constants + log(FR) - 1.35*log(FIR) - 0.7*log(d)
Lerner's graph shows Ia as a function of distance and shows that there's nonzero d dependence. With a negative slope, even! Of course there is, Eric. You constructed a function which contains an explicit d-dependence. I believe that what you think you were doing is to put this factor-of-1.35 in there to correct for the possibility of a slope in a luminosity-vs-d plot, which might sneak into a ratio-vs-d plot in the case that a != 0. But you don't appear to have done any or quantified any sanity checks on whether this was working. (There are assertions of agreement between subsamples, but all in the spirit of "trust me, I checked carefully, honest" rather than in the spirit of "here is the evidence". The famous pedagogical example showing that correlation coefficients aren't always things you can safely subtract off from the data, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anscombe's_quartet ) Also, there are no error bars in any of these papers.
Anyway, whatever the particular pathology of Lerner's local result, it is definitely not the case that radio sources are being extinguished at a rate of one magnitude per 100 Mpc. Nobody sees that locally; nobody sees that over larger scales; Lerner's claim to see it is part of a data-analysis exercise full of red flags.
No, folks, you should not believe Eric's claim that the IGM is known to absorb radio waves.
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(I meant to link to this too:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.1072v1
which, among other things, (a) does a nice breakdown of R/IR ratios into different radio luminosity bins and (b) does a search for other things that this ratio correlates with, and discusses each such result. The trend Lerner thinks he observed (about one magnitude difference between nearby and farther galaxies) doesn't even fit into the *scatter* in this dataset---i.e., their entire dataset has a standard deviation of 0.25 magnitudes, which is a possible result from a data analysis that failed to account for a huge source of variation. It looks like Lerner's plot is just fitting some trendline he introduced himself, whether from the 0.7log(d) in his weird variable or from his lack of k-correction or whatever.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.1072v1
which, among other things, (a) does a nice breakdown of R/IR ratios into different radio luminosity bins and (b) does a search for other things that this ratio correlates with, and discusses each such result. The trend Lerner thinks he observed (about one magnitude difference between nearby and farther galaxies) doesn't even fit into the *scatter* in this dataset---i.e., their entire dataset has a standard deviation of 0.25 magnitudes, which is a possible result from a data analysis that failed to account for a huge source of variation. It looks like Lerner's plot is just fitting some trendline he introduced himself, whether from the 0.7log(d) in his weird variable or from his lack of k-correction or whatever.
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In reply to Jean: Yes it is certainly true that the papers I cited about low He abundances do NOT conclude this is evidence against concordance cosmology. But let’s look at what is going on here. We have an accumulation of “problems” that, in actual fact, contradict the very fundamental predictions of concordance cosmology. These problems do not go away, despite lots or work to “resolve” them, We have the “lithium problem” --the contradiction between many, many measurements of lithium abundance in stars and the BB predictions. This was evident in the literature in 1991 when the second edition of my book was published. So this “problem” is over 25 years old and counting. Then there is the “helium problem” which Jean has notice references to as early as 1998, so this problem is at least 18 years old. In all those years, the data has gotten much better, the models have gotten much better, and the contradiction has gotten worse—for both lithium and helium. Now, there is the “size problem”—that no physical mechanism explain the evolution in size of both elliptical and disk galaxies required by the concordance model. This is growing over the last 10 years. There are other "problems" , as I outline in the EWASS presentation—and that is not a complete list.
As the years go by, more and more of these “problems “ accumulate. But even though, taken together, these “problems” contradict nearly all of the concordance predictions, they are just about never taken in published papers to be contradictions—that is, reasons the concordance model might be wrong. Why? There are two interconnected reasons. First, many astronomers I have talked to who are working on certain of these problems assume that the rest of the concordance theory is very well-verified. So many of them feel: “the rest of theory is so good, so this apparent contradiction must be due to something outside the theory—bad models, bad data, etc.” But if you add up all the problems, no part of the theory is in fact well-verified (the point I was making in EWASS).
Second, unfortunately, the funding for cosmology comes from very few sources, a few government committees which are dominated by theorists who have spent their careers in building up concordance cosmology. This concentration of funding has bad effects. Many scientists, including heads of departments, have told me that even when they thought it to be the case, they would never put in a paper the conclusion that this data seemed to contradict the concordance cosmology because such a paper would never pass a reviewer, and if it did, they would never again get funding for themselves or their grad students.
So we have the sociological phenomena that despite many “problems”, which in total add up to a complete empirical contradiction to the LCDM/Big Bang theory, very few astronomers say in papers that their results are a challenge to the theory. (Not none—there are dozens who do so—it is not just me and my co-authors-- but very few out of thousands of researchers in cosmology.)
So the key question to ask, Jean, is if these problems can be resolved within the BB paradigm, why don’t they get resolved after all these years—and why are there more and more of them, with bigger and bigger contradictions?
As the years go by, more and more of these “problems “ accumulate. But even though, taken together, these “problems” contradict nearly all of the concordance predictions, they are just about never taken in published papers to be contradictions—that is, reasons the concordance model might be wrong. Why? There are two interconnected reasons. First, many astronomers I have talked to who are working on certain of these problems assume that the rest of the concordance theory is very well-verified. So many of them feel: “the rest of theory is so good, so this apparent contradiction must be due to something outside the theory—bad models, bad data, etc.” But if you add up all the problems, no part of the theory is in fact well-verified (the point I was making in EWASS).
Second, unfortunately, the funding for cosmology comes from very few sources, a few government committees which are dominated by theorists who have spent their careers in building up concordance cosmology. This concentration of funding has bad effects. Many scientists, including heads of departments, have told me that even when they thought it to be the case, they would never put in a paper the conclusion that this data seemed to contradict the concordance cosmology because such a paper would never pass a reviewer, and if it did, they would never again get funding for themselves or their grad students.
So we have the sociological phenomena that despite many “problems”, which in total add up to a complete empirical contradiction to the LCDM/Big Bang theory, very few astronomers say in papers that their results are a challenge to the theory. (Not none—there are dozens who do so—it is not just me and my co-authors-- but very few out of thousands of researchers in cosmology.)
So the key question to ask, Jean, is if these problems can be resolved within the BB paradigm, why don’t they get resolved after all these years—and why are there more and more of them, with bigger and bigger contradictions?
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012MSAIS..22..164S
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012JCAP...04..004A
Maybe the problem is that you, Eric, are a biased and unreliable reader of the literature. You are very good at noticing papers that suggest anomalies, and you seem to have a blind spot for noticing resolutions of these suggestions.
The 4He "anomaly" does not exist. (The appearance of too-low-4He stars, which you noticed, appears to have been an artifact of low-quality spectroscopy, which you unnoticed.) The "not enough dark matter" anomaly does not exist. (The local dark matter density lower than average, which you noticed, but people realized this is the expected state of affairs in galaxies as far as we are from a supercluster, which you unnoticed.) The "structures too big to form" anomaly does not exist (it was briefly thought to, which you noticed, and then realized to be a clustering-algorithm artifact, which you unnoticed.) There is no parameter-counting anomaly in LCDM (Mike Disney didn't even say that, and many many authors who might have clarified things for you but you unnoticed them.)
If these things contributed to your mental picture of "more and more" anomalies, please reassess your picture.
<pause, wait for reassessment>
If you used it to convince your fans (fans?) that there are "more and more" anomalies, please apologize to them. If there were really "more and more" anomalies you wouldn't have to pad your list with fake ones.
<pause, wait for apology>
Right, as I've said before, there really is a lithium anomaly worthy of citation and followup. Contrary to your assertion, it is not unfixable. The current status of affairs is that (to quote http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.1408 )
In other words, people have hypotheses for what sort of physics the 7Li anomaly might indicate, both in the "BBN was right at early times, but the later element recycling is funny" and in the "BBN is modified early" senses. Why haven't you heard about the resolution? (Other than "because it's out there and you unnoticed it", which is not true in this case.) Contrary to what you may have expected, astrophysicists do not habitually reify the first hypothesis that pops into their head! There are still many candidate solutions and not enough specific evidence to prefer any one of them. You are welcome to continue calling this an "anomaly" (It is! You read one right! Pat on the back!) but you are not welcome (IMO) to denounce astrophysicists to be slow at declaring victory over it---especially when the rest of your schtik is denouncing astrophysicists for declaring victory too quickly.
Same with CMB alignments. When you see a six-parameter fit to thousands of data points of BAO/LSS/CMB/SNe/BBN/LyA/etc., you're all "ohhhh nooooo you leapt to huge conclusions based on so little!", but when one CMB datapoint surprises someone at the 1% level you're suddenly "well, that's enough evidence for me---time to announce the discovery of Lorentz-violating tired light and the end of electromagnetism."
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
The answer is the the question is wrong and vague, Eric L.
There is no requirement that problems be resolved within the "BB paradigm" when there is enormous direct evidence form the BB and the problems depend on indirect evidence such as the modeling of stars. The problems have to be solved within the scientific paradigm.
As ben m lists: You have cited no actual problems, Eric L, because you do not know about, have have ignored or denied their resolutions
!A bit of paranoia about funding being targeted toward concordance cosmology is bad. If you went looking for actual problems with concordance cosmology then you would find lots of publications.
The fantasy about "no part of the theory is in fact well-verified" is worse. What is the evidence for the Big Bang?
- The existence of the CMB is well verified.
- The temperature of the CMB is well verified.
- The perfection of the black body spectrum of the CMB is well verified.
- The power spectrum of the CMB is well verified.
- Hubble's Law is so well verified that we detected deviation from it!
- Homogeneity is quite well verified.
- Isotropy to 1 part in 100,000 is quite well verified.
- Time dilation in supernova light curves is well verified.
- Radio source and quasar counts vs. flux. These show that the Universe has evolved.
- Radio source and quasar counts vs. flux. These show that the Universe has evolved.
- Existence of the blackbody CMB. This shows that the Universe has evolved from a dense, isothermal state.
- Variation of TCMB with redshift. This is a direct observation of the evolution of the Universe.
- Deuterium, 3He, 4He, and 7Li abundances. These light isotopes are all well fit by predicted reactions occurring in the First Three Minutes. Well verified
! Except 7Li .
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Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Citations please, Eric L, to the growing number of papers during the last 10 years that state there is no "physical mechanism explain the evolution in size of both elliptical and disk galaxies".
FYI: this Alcock-Paczynski cosmological test paper ruled out 4 models leaving only the concordance model and tired light.
P.S.
18th February 2016 Eric L: Please cite the performance of the Tolman surface brightness test against the concordance model in Lerner et. el.
29th February 2016 Eric L: Why are all of the published calculations of primordial He abundance wrong?
29th February 2016 Eric L: Have you read the analysis that shows how Scarpa et. al. (2007) was wrong?
29th February 2016 Eric L: Please give citations for primordial He using galaxies at various z
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jonesdave116
Philosopher
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- Feb 26, 2015
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Some might be surprised that Lerner's latest paper is in MNRAS!
Observations contradict galaxy size and surface brightness predictions that are based on the expanding universe hypothesis
Lerner, E. J.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mnras/sty728/4951333
At least they aren't charging for it.
Observations contradict galaxy size and surface brightness predictions that are based on the expanding universe hypothesis
Lerner, E. J.
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article/doi/10.1093/mnras/sty728/4951333
At least they aren't charging for it.
Reality Check
Penultimate Amazing
Looks like Lerner has been abandoned by his co-authors in the previous paper since he is the only author of this paper.
A quick look suggests that the paper has the mistake of ignoring that galaxies merge and so must more massive and bigger with time.