What kind of science is cosmology

[ben m]

And your gross misrepresentation of Lerner is based on what?

Lerner plots a comparison between his model and *one* aspect of a 1992 CMB measurement. Show me where he plots a comparison to the subsequent (and much better) WMAP-1, WMAP-3, WMAP-7, ACBAR, CBI, DASI, Boomerang, SZA, and the SPT data.

Every alternative cosmology in the business has been keeping up with those comparisons.

 

[sol invictus]

Surely, knowledge provided by cosmological modeling cannot be as explicative and secure as knowledge gained by laboratory physics or analytical chemistry.

Knowledge attained by virtue of cosmological inferences based purely on EM data can not rival laboratory physics and other Earth bound natural sciences in its veracity and predictive power.

Agree/Disagree?

I do agree with that, but with a caveat: there are many things that cannot be tested in a lab on earth that can be studied using astrophysics or cosmology. You cannot create a solar-mass black hole on earth, create magnetic fields like those of a magnetar, or study energies anywhere near those that seeded the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background.

So astrophysics has a unique and important role to play in physics in its pure sense - understanding the fundamental laws of nature.

 

[Ziggurat]

Longest sentence in JREF history?

I've been in a good number of these plasma cosmology threads, starting many years ago when I first joined JREF when I was still a student and living in a different state than I'm living in now, and they all end up repeating themselves with essentially the same content about how important plasma is since most of the universe is plasma and electromagnetism is stronger than gravity by something like 30 orders of magnitude, but that's only true if you compare the gravitational vs. Coulomb attraction of a single electron and a single proton, but once you collect large numbers of protons and electrons you never end up with only electrons or only protons and the interaction between large masses can very easily be dominated by gravity, ironically because electromagnetism is so strong that large charge separation never occurs on big scales so electromagnetism is mostly screened, unlike gravity which can't be screened but only gets stronger the more mass you add, so gravity can easily dominate the interactions even between bodies of plasma, so the basic premise usually appealed to is false and specific models such as van Alfven's have been falsified because they can't explain fundamental observational features of the universe like the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant and the simulations which are often pointed to as confirming the electromagnetic nature of galaxy structure and formation require magnetic fields far larger than are observed, so plasma cosmology doesn't really explain much of anything on a quantitative level, it's mostly just a desperate attempt to do away with the requirement for dark matter which is a direct result of the combination of general relativity and observations of galactic rotation curves and gravitational lensing, but the plasma cosmology advocates can't come to terms with general relativity so they effectively pretend it doesn't exist, when ironically there are other possibilities which could achieve their goals, but it requires directly addressing and supplanting general relativity with something else, and that alternative isn't MOND (or Modified Newtonian Dynamics), but it might be nonlocal gravity, which is sort of like an integral formulation of general relativity, similar to how Feynman's formalism is an integral formulation of quantum mechanics, where the standard formulation of both GR and quantum mechanics is a differential formulation, but nonlocal gravity isn't equivalent to GR but does reduce to GR at shorter length scales like the size of a solar system, which is what we want since any replacement for GR needs to produce essentially the same results in the regime where we can directly test it, but it produces different results at large length scales including explaining galactic rotation curves without dark matter, so there are other possibilities that don't require dark matter but you can only get them by addressing GR which plasma cosmology doesn't do and there's no sign that getting rid of dark matter will do away with the big bang.

 

[Perpetual Student]

[qimg]http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTwtDPIcL9mhI8wu5_YcQhtkFM2IEAJpMQ6I736BLElSEazpek0[/qimg]

I've been in a good number of these plasma cosmology threads, starting many years ago when I first joined JREF when I was still a student and living in a different state than I'm living in now, and they all end up repeating themselves with essentially the same content about how important plasma is since most of the universe is plasma and electromagnetism is stronger than gravity by something like 30 orders of magnitude, but that's only true if you compare the gravitational vs. Coulomb attraction of a single electron and a single proton, but once you collect large numbers of protons and electrons you never end up with only electrons or only protons and the interaction between large masses can very easily be dominated by gravity, ironically because electromagnetism is so strong that large charge separation never occurs on big scales so electromagnetism is mostly screened, unlike gravity which can't be screened but only gets stronger the more mass you add, so gravity can easily dominate the interactions even between bodies of plasma, so the basic premise usually appealed to is false and specific models such as van Alfven's have been falsified because they can't explain fundamental observational features of the universe like the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant and the simulations which are often pointed to as confirming the electromagnetic nature of galaxy structure and formation require magnetic fields far larger than are observed, so plasma cosmology doesn't really explain much of anything on a quantitative level, it's mostly just a desperate attempt to do away with the requirement for dark matter which is a direct result of the combination of general relativity and observations of galactic rotation curves and gravitational lensing, but the plasma cosmology advocates can't come to terms with general relativity so they effectively pretend it doesn't exist, when ironically there are other possibilities which could achieve their goals, but it requires directly addressing and supplanting general relativity with something else, and that alternative isn't MOND (or Modified Newtonian Dynamics), but it might be nonlocal gravity, which is sort of like an integral formulation of general relativity, similar to how Feynman's formalism is an integral formulation of quantum mechanics, where the standard formulation of both GR and quantum mechanics is a differential formulation, but nonlocal gravity isn't equivalent to GR but does reduce to GR at shorter length scales like the size of a solar system, which is what we want since any replacement for GR needs to produce essentially the same results in the regime where we can directly test it, but it produces different results at large length scales including explaining galactic rotation curves without dark matter, so there are other possibilities that don't require dark matter but you can only get them by addressing GR which plasma cosmology doesn't do and there's no sign that getting rid of dark matter will do away with the big bang.

Winner and new champion!

 

[ben m]

To paraphrase wikipedia, Mr Lerner was not sitting around, this gives a more concise timeline of his activities than your strange misrepresentation.

Lerner received a BA in physics from Columbia University[4] and started as a graduate student in physics at the University of Maryland, but left after a year due, he said, to his dissatisfaction with the mathematical rather than experimental approach there.[5][6] He then pursued a career in popular science writing.
In 1984, he began studying plasma phenomena and laboratory fusion devices ...

I did not mean Lerner has been sitting on a sofa eating Cheetos for twenty years. I meant he has not made progress on his plasma-CMB hypothesis in 20 years, and he's skipped 20 years of opportunities to compare his hypothesis to ever-more-powerful data. Heck, he hasn't finished comparing his hypothesis to the COBE data.

You think there's something else to it? Heck, Zeuzzz, you are the one who linked to this crappy 1995 paper. If there were followup, you would have linked to that. THERE IS NO FOLLOWUP. Here are Lerner's papers (link) and I can vouch that exactly zero of them contain a CMB data comparison of any sort. Flat nothing. Zero.

 

[Tubbythin]

[qimg]http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTwtDPIcL9mhI8wu5_YcQhtkFM2IEAJpMQ6I736BLElSEazpek0[/qimg]

I've been in a good number of these plasma cosmology threads, starting many years ago when I first joined JREF when I was still a student and living in a different state than I'm living in now, and they all end up repeating themselves with essentially the same content about how important plasma is since most of the universe is plasma and electromagnetism is stronger than gravity by something like 30 orders of magnitude, but that's only true if you compare the gravitational vs. Coulomb attraction of a single electron and a single proton, but once you collect large numbers of protons and electrons you never end up with only electrons or only protons and the interaction between large masses can very easily be dominated by gravity, ironically because electromagnetism is so strong that large charge separation never occurs on big scales so electromagnetism is mostly screened, unlike gravity which can't be screened but only gets stronger the more mass you add, so gravity can easily dominate the interactions even between bodies of plasma, so the basic premise usually appealed to is false and specific models such as van Alfven's have been falsified because they can't explain fundamental observational features of the universe like the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant and the simulations which are often pointed to as confirming the electromagnetic nature of galaxy structure and formation require magnetic fields far larger than are observed, so plasma cosmology doesn't really explain much of anything on a quantitative level, it's mostly just a desperate attempt to do away with the requirement for dark matter which is a direct result of the combination of general relativity and observations of galactic rotation curves and gravitational lensing, but the plasma cosmology advocates can't come to terms with general relativity so they effectively pretend it doesn't exist, when ironically there are other possibilities which could achieve their goals, but it requires directly addressing and supplanting general relativity with something else, and that alternative isn't MOND (or Modified Newtonian Dynamics), but it might be nonlocal gravity, which is sort of like an integral formulation of general relativity, similar to how Feynman's formalism is an integral formulation of quantum mechanics, where the standard formulation of both GR and quantum mechanics is a differential formulation, but nonlocal gravity isn't equivalent to GR but does reduce to GR at shorter length scales like the size of a solar system, which is what we want since any replacement for GR needs to produce essentially the same results in the regime where we can directly test it, but it produces different results at large length scales including explaining galactic rotation curves without dark matter, so there are other possibilities that don't require dark matter but you can only get them by addressing GR which plasma cosmology doesn't do and there's no sign that getting rid of dark matter will do away with the big bang.

Nice.

 

[Reality Check]

http://cosmologystatement.org/

This is just a letter in a non-peer reviewed magazine and so has no scientific impact on cosmology.

Most of the letter though is scientific woo, e.g. the author and signers seem to think that theories should not be changed, e.g. the BB theory should not include inflation because inflation explains what we observe about the universe !
The bias that allows them to ignore the science is obvious in their sipport of debunked theories:

• Plasma Cosmology has been shown to be invalid (and "plasma cosmology" does not even exist!).
• The Steady State theories had problems before the CMB wasa discovered (where are the local quasars?). And talk about the pot calling the kettle black - SS includes a creation field that cannot be detected!
• Lies about the predictions of Plasma Cosmology and Steady State theories.

 

[Reality Check]

Whereas I will likely be able to find one that shows the exact same data is evidence against it.

Intergalactic Radio Absorption and the COBE Data,

And then you do the logical fallacy of false dichotomy!
Read The Abstract that you quoted, if you would be so kind:

The COBE data on cosmic Background radiation (CBR) isotropy and spectrum are generally considered to be explicable only in the context of the Big Bang theory and to be confirmation of that theory. However, this data can also be explained by an alternative, non-Big Bang model which hypothesizes an intergalactic radio-absorbing and scattering medium. A simple, inhomogenous model of such an absorbing medium can reproduce both the isotropy and spectrum of the CBR within the limits observed by COBE, and in fact gives a better to fit to the spectrum observations than does a pure blackbody. Such a model does not contradict any other observations, such as the existence of distant radio sources.

This is about an alternative, outdated and wrong theory about the CMB from the COBE data from that well known "astronomer" Eric Lerner!

 

[Reality Check]

Even though based on the amazingly limited (pretty much non existant) funding they have got they have actually had more experimental sucess with experimental ideas derived from plasma cosmology based ideas.

That is really wrong of you, Zeuzzz.
Eric Lerner is a plasma physisist. The devces he has constructed have nothing to to with any cosmology. They are based on plasma physics.
However there are people out there who are ignorant of plasma physics and trying to apply it to cosmological scales when that is obviously wrong.

So much for the LHCs real world practical applications and other BBT based experiments that have been so experimentally unfruitful...

That is a really ignorant: Ever heard of of Hubble? What about WMAP? Chandra?
Those are the "BBT experiments" that have been very experimentally fruitful.

I do hope that this is not the delusion that we see from pc/EU proponents - that only things that can be experimented on in labs here on Earth are real. This is what I call the "we do not have stars in labs and so stars do not exist" fallacy.

There is no expectation for the LHC to have real world practical applications (other then the advances in computing and other technology needed to implement it). It is a scientific experiment. It may find proposed candidates for dark matter (SUSY particles). It may reveal more mechanisms to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter.

 

[Zeuzzz]

[qimg]http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTwtDPIcL9mhI8wu5_YcQhtkFM2IEAJpMQ6I736BLElSEazpek0[/qimg]

I've been in a good number of these plasma cosmology threads, starting many years ago when I first joined JREF when I was still a student and living in a different state than I'm living in now, and they all end up repeating themselves with essentially the same content about how important plasma is since most of the universe is plasma and electromagnetism is stronger than gravity by something like 30 orders of magnitude, but that's only true if you compare the gravitational vs. Coulomb attraction of a single electron and a single proton, but once you collect large numbers of protons and electrons you never end up with only electrons or only protons and the interaction between large masses can very easily be dominated by gravity, ironically because electromagnetism is so strong that large charge separation never occurs on big scales so electromagnetism is mostly screened, unlike gravity which can't be screened but only gets stronger the more mass you add, so gravity can easily dominate the interactions even between bodies of plasma, so the basic premise usually appealed to is false and specific models such as van Alfven's have been falsified because they can't explain fundamental observational features of the universe like the cosmic microwave background or the Hubble constant and the simulations which are often pointed to as confirming the electromagnetic nature of galaxy structure and formation require magnetic fields far larger than are observed, so plasma cosmology doesn't really explain much of anything on a quantitative level, it's mostly just a desperate attempt to do away with the requirement for dark matter which is a direct result of the combination of general relativity and observations of galactic rotation curves and gravitational lensing, but the plasma cosmology advocates can't come to terms with general relativity so they effectively pretend it doesn't exist, when ironically there are other possibilities which could achieve their goals, but it requires directly addressing and supplanting general relativity with something else, and that alternative isn't MOND (or Modified Newtonian Dynamics), but it might be nonlocal gravity, which is sort of like an integral formulation of general relativity, similar to how Feynman's formalism is an integral formulation of quantum mechanics, where the standard formulation of both GR and quantum mechanics is a differential formulation, but nonlocal gravity isn't equivalent to GR but does reduce to GR at shorter length scales like the size of a solar system, which is what we want since any replacement for GR needs to produce essentially the same results in the regime where we can directly test it, but it produces different results at large length scales including explaining galactic rotation curves without dark matter, so there are other possibilities that don't require dark matter but you can only get them by addressing GR which plasma cosmology doesn't do and there's no sign that getting rid of dark matter will do away with the big bang.

Will it get nommed?

I clicked the button, but could not really justify the language part, even if the content is very true and funny in its context.

The final phrase after the last comma was however a straw man, which illustrates the whole point of this thread, which kind of put me off too.

 

[GeeMack]

The final phrase after the last comma was also a straw man which illustrates the whole point of this thread, which kind of put me off too.

Isn't the whole point of this thread to complain about the failure of various plasma cosmology conjectures to satisfy the requirements of legitimate science?

 

[Zeuzzz]

Isn't the whole point of this thread to complain about the failure of various plasma cosmology conjectures to satisfy the requirements of legitimate science?

No that was the subject that it was hijacked to.

The whole point of the thread is in the title.

Someone said I lacked alternative theories. So I stated one, showed how the same data used to prove the Big Bang can be used to prove other theories by linking to a paper, and then corrected the misrepresentations and generalisations people made subsequently, on a more reactionary basis than an on topic one.

This is more the subject of the thread:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0009020.pdf

Abstract:It is argued that some of the recent claims for cosmology are grossly overblown. Cosmology rests on a very small database: it suffers from many fundamental difficulties as a science (if it is a science at all) whilst observations of distant phenomena are difficult to make and harder to interpret. It is suggested that cosmological inferences should be tentatively made and sceptically received

[.......]

7 COSMOLOGY IN PERSPECTIVE

Of course we would all love to know of the fate of the Universe, just as we’d love to know if God exists. If we expect science to provide the answers though, we may have to be very patient - and literally wait for eternity. Alas professional cosmologists cannot afford to wait that long. For that reason the word ‘cosmologist’ should be expunged from the scientific dictionary and returned to the priesthood where it properly belongs.

I’m not suggesting that cosmology itself should be abandoned. Mostly by accident it has made some fascinating, if faltering progress over the centuries. And if we are patient and build our instruments to explore the Universe in all the crevices of parameter space, new clues will surely come to hand, as they have in the past, largely by accident. But we should not spend too many of our astronomical resources in trying to answer grandiose questions which may, in all probability, be unanswerable. For instance we must not build the Next Generation Space Telescope as if it was solely a cosmological machine. We should only do that if we are confident of converging on “the truth”. If we build it to look through many windows we may yet find the surprising clues which lead us off on a new path along the way.

Above all we must not overclaim for this fascinating subject which, it can be argued, is not a proper science at all. Rutherford for instance said “Don’t let me hear anyone use the word ‘Universe’ in my department”. Shouldn’t we scientists be saying something like this to the general public:

“It is not likely that we primates gazing through bits of glass for a century or
two will dissemble the architecture and history of infinity. But if we don’t try
we won’t get anywhere. Therefore we professionals do the best we can to fit the
odd clues we have into some kind of plausible story. That is how science works,
and that is the spirit in which our cosmological speculations should be treated.
Don’t be impressed by our complex machines or our arcane mathematics. They
have been used to build plausible cosmic stories before - which we had to discard
afterwards in the face of improving evidence. The likelihood must be that such
revisions will have to occur again and again and again.”

I apologise for such a highly opinionated attack, but it does appear to me that the pendulum has swung much too far the other way. Surely the ‘burden of proof’ ought to rest squarely on the proponents of what will always be a fascinating but suspect subject.

 

[knowthecosmos]

...So I stated one, showed how the same data used to prove the Big Bang can be used to prove other theories by linking to a paper, and then corrected the misrepresentations and generalisations people made subsequently, on a more reactionary basis than an on topic one.

Alright, so there's a few issues I'd like to address.

There is no data the proves either the Big Bang Theory or your Plasma Cosmology. It is not Proof.

There is, however, much more evidence which supports the big bang theory. I'm not saying that there aren't other cosmologies out there that have evidence to back them up. Most wouldn't be even considered by even the zaniest if there wasn't at least some evidence to support it.

I honestly haven't looked into your links in this thread, but I've seen some of yours in previous threads. As a newcomer here, not to skepticism, your tone and delivery has detracted me from taking anything you say seriously, let alone wander down the rabbit hole you've provided via links.

I can understand you're exasperated that people aren't finding your alternative theories plausible. Nobody enjoys having something that they consider to be "true" to be mocked and ridiculed, regardless of its plausibility.

That being said, the title of this thread is "What kind of science is Cosmology?" and then you go on to state that it's not a science. You claim that it's a misapplication of "precise sciences".

I've already responded to that, but perhaps I should again and pose a different question to you.

What exactly do you consider "precise science"?

Do you understand the known physical limits of observation at this moment? Have you, yourself, participated in the science which "mainstream" or even "alternative" cosmologies are based upon? -- I'm talking spectroscopy, photometry, and the like... doing the math and looking at the outcome?

If you haven't, that's fine. Not everyone has the ability to perform these experiments and do these calculations. However, that'll at least give me a frame of reference as to where you're coming from. If you can't personally verify the evidence that's being given-- to look at the data and truly know what it means, why would you choose one smaller "camp" of a cosmological theory than the largely accepted one, besides the point of it being obscure?
Scientific theories are not for hipsters. If they're solid and have a great foundation of evidence to support it, they go "mainstream". There's got to be some rational explanation as to why your personal theory is not accepted.

I'm all for continuing this discussion, but perhaps we should invoke Wheaton's Law? Let's not be dicks.


Cheers,
KnowTheCosmos

 

[Tubbythin]

This is more the subject of the thread:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0009020.pdf

I haven't got time to go through the whole thing right now. A few comments to start with though...

We believe the most charitable thing that can be said of such statements is that they are naive in the extreme and betray a complete lack of understanding of history, of the huge difference between an observational and an experimental science, and of the peculiar limitations of cosmology as a scientific discipline.

There is no inherent difference between observational and experimental science.
Observational science relies on finding the "best" methodology with the resources and technology available to determine, within limits, the values of numerical quantities (and hopefully draw meaningful conclusion from this data). Controls should be included to ensure the data is as precise and accurate as possible.
Experimental science relies on finding the "best" methodology with the resources and technology available to determine, within limits, the values of numerical quantities (and hopefully draw meaningful conclusion from this data). Controls should be included to ensure the data is as precise and accurate as possible.

It is very questionable whether the study of any phenomenon that is not
repeatable can call itself a science at all.

It is not a requirement of science that the phenomenon being studied be repeatable. If it were then then studying the mass extinction of dinosaurs (to take just one example) could not be considered science. What is important is that the measurements being used to draw conclusions are repeatable. That is clearly the case in cosmology. For example COBE measured aspects of the CMBR. WMAP measured them again.
In fact, because the CMBR will always be there, it makes measurements of its properties more repeatable than any destructive methods used in lab analysis!

The observations which bear on cosmology are, for such a grandiose subject, extremely sparse. I count only about a dozen which probably bear - most of them stumbled upon by accident (see Table 1).

What relevance is that?! Hundreds of significant break throughs in science were discovered by accident. Penicillin, which has saved millions of lives over the last century, was discovered by accident. Should we throw it away because it was discovered by accident?

And they are observations not controlled experiments which therefore means that they cannot compare with the thousands of particle physics experiments upon which the Standard Model is based.

This is just semantic nonsense. Particle physics research relies on observations from experiments. It wouldn't work if there were not control measures in the observation process. Cosmology research relies on observations from experiments. It wouldn't work if there were not control measures in the observation process.

That's just the first two pages.

Also, from the section you quoted:

Rutherford for instance said “Don’t let me hear anyone use the word ‘Universe’ in my department”

Rutherford also said "All science is either physics or stamp collecting". Shortly afterwards he was awarded the Noble prize for stamp collecting chemistry.

 

[Tubbythin]

Just read a bit more and had a moment.

First he says:

When you think that the galaxies at a redshift z of 2 should be
dimmer by (1 + z)4 100, and by another large but uncertain factor for the k-correction [i.e. band-pass shifting], it is more than a wonder to me that we can see anything of them at all. Ordinary galaxies at that redshift should be hundreds of times dimmer per unit area than our sky! It is also sobering to realise that only one per cent of the light in the night sky comes from beyond our Galaxy.

Then he goes on to rant about how inferior cosmology studies are to particle physics. At no point does he make any reference (at least at this stage) to the fact that the cross sections for the discovery of new phenomena in modern particle physics are many many many many relative orders of magnitude smaller than the total cross sections involved (I might find some numbers later). By comparison the non-galaxy signals are massive (hell I can see the CMBR on my tele).

 

[ben m]

Someone said I lacked alternative theories. So I stated one, showed how the same data used to prove the Big Bang can be used to prove other theories by linking to a paper

A "theory that matches one data set but disagrees with all others" is not an alternative theory. It's an already falsified theory. How can an explicitly known-untrue description of the Universe be an "alternative theory"?

Remember the story of the four blind men and the large animal? One man takes data on the nose-end and says "I feel a long prehensile nose, maybe it's a giant anteater". Another man and says "I feel a tufted tail, maybe it's a giraffe." Another man says "I feel a tusk, maybe it's a walrus". Another man says "It has a large, hairless belly, maybe walrus is right". If they meet and try to explain all of this data, they'll agree "It's an elephant."

Once you have all the data, "It's a giraffe" is no longer an alternative hypothesis. Yes, it matches on bit of data. Heck, maybe "the animal has a tufted tail and is a giraffe" is the stated of a 1984 peer-reviewed paper by a Nobel prizewinning blind zoologist. Doesn't help---it's really not a giraffe.

Suppose you wanted to say "It's not an elephant", but didn't know what you thought it was. Would you cite "it's a giraffe" as an example of opposition to the elephant hypothesis? No, that's idiotic. It's known (tusks, nose, belly) not to be a giraffe. There once was a "giraffe" proposal, but that does not provide any support for a generic "I don't want it to be an elephant" position.

Does that mean there are no alternative hypotheses? No, "maybe it's a shaved mammoth", or "a rhinoceros carrying an anteater", are actual alternative hypotheses, explaining all four data points above. They are good hypotheses only insofar as they explain all four data points. They remain so whether or not the (false) Giraffe Hypothesis was ever stated, and whether or not there's an "epistemological approach" which the Giraffe Hypothesis illustrates.

*******

You found a paper that claims to "match" the CMB spectrum. So what? There are hundreds of pre-1980-ish papers that match the low-redshift Hubble curve (with no dark matter or dark energy!) ... but which are proven false elsewhere. There are lots of MOND papers that match galaxy rotation data ... but which are proven false elsewhere. Craig Hogan's post-COBE paper, as I said, matched the CMB anisotropy magnitude ... but was proven false via the sky map. And so on. These are not alternative theories and their existence does not support generic "I don't want the Big Bang to be true" positions.

An alternative theory has to be something that has a *chance* of being actually true. Eric Lerner's is not. Alfven-Klein is not. Michael Mozina's is not. Wal Thornhill's is not.

 

[Farsight]

If you would actually click on the link to cosmology in that passage, you'd see that it leads to metaphysical cosmology (the philosophical sub-discipline), not physical cosmology (the sub-discipline of astrophysics).

Garbage. Astrophysics is "star physics". Cosmology is beyond that, just as metaphysics is "beyond physics". Think of it as "super physics" and you won't be far off the mark.

 

[Perpetual Student]

A "theory that matches one data set but disagrees with all others" is not an alternative theory. It's an already falsified theory. How can an explicitly known-untrue description of the Universe be an "alternative theory"?

Remember the story of the four blind men and the large animal? One man takes data on the nose-end and says "I feel a long prehensile nose, maybe it's a giant anteater". Another man and says "I feel a tufted tail, maybe it's a giraffe." Another man says "I feel a tusk, maybe it's a walrus". Another man says "It has a large, hairless belly, maybe walrus is right". If they meet and try to explain all of this data, they'll agree "It's an elephant."

Once you have all the data, "It's a giraffe" is no longer an alternative hypothesis. Yes, it matches on bit of data. Heck, maybe "the animal has a tufted tail and is a giraffe" is the stated of a 1984 peer-reviewed paper by a Nobel prizewinning blind zoologist. Doesn't help---it's really not a giraffe.

Suppose you wanted to say "It's not an elephant", but didn't know what you thought it was. Would you cite "it's a giraffe" as an example of opposition to the elephant hypothesis? No, that's idiotic. It's known (tusks, nose, belly) not to be a giraffe. There once was a "giraffe" proposal, but that does not provide any support for a generic "I don't want it to be an elephant" position.

Does that mean there are no alternative hypotheses? No, "maybe it's a shaved mammoth", or "a rhinoceros carrying an anteater", are actual alternative hypotheses, explaining all four data points above. They are good hypotheses only insofar as they explain all four data points. They remain so whether or not the (false) Giraffe Hypothesis was ever stated, and whether or not there's an "epistemological approach" which the Giraffe Hypothesis illustrates.

*******

You found a paper that claims to "match" the CMB spectrum. So what? There are hundreds of pre-1980-ish papers that match the low-redshift Hubble curve (with no dark matter or dark energy!) ... but which are proven false elsewhere. There are lots of MOND papers that match galaxy rotation data ... but which are proven false elsewhere. Craig Hogan's post-COBE paper, as I said, matched the CMB anisotropy magnitude ... but was proven false via the sky map. And so on. These are not alternative theories and their existence does not support generic "I don't want the Big Bang to be true" positions.

An alternative theory has to be something that has a *chance* of being actually true. Eric Lerner's is not. Alfven-Klein is not. Michael Mozina's is not. Wal Thornhill's is not.

There are many counter-intuitive aspects of modern cosmology and some aspects hang on a very thin thread of evidence. But after the alternatives have been shown to be scientifically falsified, we are left with what we have. Logic leaves us no choice.
So, there is something that continues to baffle me about these alternative cosmology cultists. It is easily and often (on these threads) demonstrated that these alternative conjectures are contradicted by observations and experiment -- yet they persist! What is the problem? Alternative cultists seem to have a real interest in physics and cosmology. Do they not understand the contradictions? Do they not understand the significance of a contradiction in science or mathematics? I once started a thread about "physics crackpots" but I have yet to see a satisfying explanation.
I really don't get it!

 

[ben m]

Garbage. Astrophysics is "star physics". Cosmology is beyond that, just as metaphysics is "beyond physics". Think of it as "super physics" and you won't be far off the mark.

A very, very important fact about stars is, quite frankly, is that the first ones formed from Gaussian random overdensities in an expanding, Universe-filling neutral gas cloud at z=20. Is that astrophysics, or cosmology?

Astrophysics without cosmology would be a bizarre thing. What would you do? Measure a galaxy rotation curve and not care what forces are responsible? Take a photo of an elliptical galaxy and not figure out how it formed? Look at a catalogue of galaxy clusters and not care about its statistics? Look at the statistics and not care that they vary with redshift?

Maybe "cosmology / astrophysics / astronomy" was a reasonable division in 1950, when cosmology didn't have any observables yet, but it's not any more.

 

[dafydd]

Garbage. Astrophysics is "star physics". Cosmology is beyond that, just as metaphysics is "beyond physics". Think of it as "super physics" and you won't be far off the mark.

''Star nature'' if you want to be accurate.