The Static Universe—A Book Report
I have started a series of posts about why I think the Big Bang Theory won't survive. I am reading quite a number of books on the topic, but I just finished this one and I thought those of you who might want to delve deeper into the topic might like to read, so, a report.
Please realize I am a science guy, but my training and degrees are in chemistry which has little to do with cosmology and theories like the Big Bang Theory (hereafter the BBT). I was a bit of an amateur astronomer in my youth but I was more interested in building telescopes than in using them, so there is that.
If you have an interest in this topic, you should be able to wade through this book, skipping over the too dense bits, which were few.
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The Static Universe by Hilton Ratcliffe
The author, Hilton Ratcliffe is an experimentalist and a common thread woven into discussions between experimentalists and theorists is that the experimentalists think that theorists tend to ignore data, especially data conflicting with the theorist's current lines of thought. You will see this over and over in this book, obviously from an experimentalist's viewpoint.
The BBT got its launch in the 1920's from the work of Edwin Hubble. Hubble famously established that a star he measured (actually estimated) the distance to was too far away (way too far) to be considered local. At that time the Milky Way was thought to be the entire galaxy and that the fuzzy objects in view, called nebulae, were mysterious objects yet to be characterized. We now know them to be other galaxies, of which it is estimated that there are two trillion in number. The universe is a much, much (much!) bigger place than we ever thought it was 100 years ago.
Edwin Hubble contributed to the false beginnings of the BBT with his discovery of red-shifts. When the light from stars was run through prisms (and later bounced off more sensitive diffraction gratings) the lights spread out were at very particular colors. These were studied in detail through the means of atoms giving off light and it turned out that atoms have the equivalent of fingerprints in the small set of different colors of light they give off (called their atomic spectrum). But when Hubble ran starlight through such devices, the colors were slightly different, they were more red. This the red-shift was born.
Since atoms give off pure lights of their very specific frequencies/colors, people speculated on the reason(s) behind the starlights being shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. Hubble and others thought it was due to the Doppler Effect, the same effect that has the sound of moving objects change pitch depending upon whether they are moving toward you or away (and how fast). The most common examples fire engine sirens or, back then, a steam train's whistle.
So, the red shifts were seen as an indicator that other stars were moving away (there were shifts toward the blue, but they were few in number in comparison) and how fast they were moving.
The BBT took this idea and ran with it. Based upon theoretical concerns (including Einstein's Gravitational Theory) it was assumed that the universe needed to be expanding or contracting. This made sense on the surface. If the universe were "static" as Einstein originally thought, gravity would still act pulling things together and the universe would shrink and then collapse in upon itself. These were reasonable suppositions.
But, there are just a few problems. Hubble himself, reconsidered the conclusion that because of the pattern of red-shifts, that the universe was expanding and rejected the cause of the Doppler Effect. Here is what he said in 1947 ". . . it seems likely that the red-shifts may not be due to an expanding Universe, and much of the current speculation on the structure of the Universe may require re-examination." Respect for our elders aside, if you look up any popular explanation for red-shifts, you will find the Doppler Effect explanation . . . alone. In this book, there is a table (p. 83) containing 32 alternative explanations as to why light might be shifted toward the red end of the spectrum. I would suggest that most are superior to the Doppler Shift explanation.
The subtitle on this book is "Exploding the Myth of Cosmic Expansion" and it did just that for me. And this address just one segment of the data that does not support the BBT and the expansion of the universe.
The number of objections to the BBT is manifold. If I may quote Dr. Glenn Borchardt
Table 4 Falsifications, contradictions, and paradoxes disproving the Big Bang Theory
• The Big Bang Theory predicts that we should observe only young cosmological objects at great distances. Instead, we see elderly galaxies and galaxy clusters at the limit of observation.
• Cosmological objects often collide. In actual explosions, objects are scattered in all directions and do not collide.
• The opinion that the universe is expanding is dependent on the "Untired Light Theory," which assumes that light can travel great distances without losing energy. Nothing we know of can travel from one place to another without losing energy.
• The explosion of the universe out of nothing is a contradiction of the First Law of Thermodynamics, otherwise known as the conservation of energy.
• The Doppler Effect, considered responsible for the Cosmological redshift and the interpretation that most galaxies are receding from us, only occurs in a medium. Einstein's corpuscular theory of light, denies the necessary presence of a medium.
• Einstein's objectification of time is invalid. Time is not an object; time is motion. The space-time concept, as used in General Relativity Theory and Big Bang Theory, assumes time to be a dimension, which it is not. The universe is 3-dimensional, just like everything we observe. "Time dilation" and other Einsteinian fantasies are products of aether denial.
• The Big Bang Theory is based on the assumption of finity. The most plausible assumption is infinity. There are over two trillion galaxies in the observable universe with no end in sight. An Infinite Universe cannot expand, because it is already full.
• The existence of the universe implies that nonexistence (empty space) is impossible. There is no definitive evidence for perfectly empty space. Infinity implies the existence of aether.
(Source: Borchardt, Glenn. Infinite Universe Theory: Glenn Borchardt (p. 64). Progressive Science Institute. Kindle Edition.)
And this is not a complete list by any means.
If you are interested in the Big Bang Theory or cosmology, this is an excellent start on learning about the data and what they really are. We have gotten carried away with a particular interpretation of the data and the result is an ever expanding list of incoherent "fixes" needed to make the theory work: the expansion of space, cosmic inflation, the expansion of space is accelerating, dark energy, dark matter, etc. None of these have support in data and the shear absurdity of these things (matter that interacts gravitationally but not in any other way, energy that acts completely opposite to any we have ever described, the expansion of space as if it were a thing that could expand, etc.) is telling. Usually these are signs that we had gone astray and need to go back to see where and find another path starting from there.
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