In a message dated 5/6/2006 2:08:28 P.M. Central Daylight Time, wikipedia@philwelch.net writes:
I'll be square with you: we tend to be dismissive of people who offer complaint #2 because most of them are kooks. Proving you're not a kook requires calmness, civility, and refraining from being as much of a prick as you're being right now.
Hi Phil;
In my preceding letter I presented the requisite evidence that Hubble did not discover/believe/endorse/support the assumption that redshift means expansion. I presume that the necessary corrections will be made in Wikipedia and other publications which depend on Wikipedia research.
Being regarded a prick in this situation is an honor. Thank you for that. Very often there is a fine line between a kook and a visionary. This is especially evident in cosmology witness Galileo, who was blocked from the church and Bruno who was burned at the stake for harboring views which have since been accepted. Keep in mind that Ptolemy was once regarded as the supreme authority on cosmology, and at that time all others were considered kooks. Indeed science is replete with visionaries who when they first presented their ideas were regarded as kooks.
The big bang cosmological model is extremely important as it forms the basis of a vast amount of scientific research in the Western world. But, as stated therein, and supported by the observations of Thomas Kuhn in his book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions", the viewpoint is based on fear of retribution rather than pure science. The details are in the letter.
I would just like to add something not mentioned in the letter, or Wikipedia for that matter. While the entire scenario of the big bang depends on a Doppler interpretation of the redshifted light coming from galaxies, the observation of periodicity or quantized (jumps) light is definitive evidence falsifying the Doppler interpretation. Much if not alll science depends on interpretations. In many cases there are two interpretions available to explain an observation. In the case of jumping light (my simple word) one interpretation is that the earth is at the center of the Universe, and the galaxies are spaced in layers much like an onion. Believe it or not this interpretation is often used by the Creationists. The other interpretation is that the redshift is an intrinsic property of the photon/medium. As I stated earlier, expansion, if it existed, would blur out these jumps, and the fact that they can be detected is observational evidence that expansion is not a fact. And without expansion, there is not need for a big bang, no need for a beginning coming from nowhere, no need for an Inflation that suspends the laws of physics, no need for the yet to be seen Dark Energy, Dark Matter and Black holes.
And I do realize that the impact on Western science would be profound, Professors would lose their jobs, texts would have to be rewritten, and in general science would have to be retaught. Not to mention Wikipedia would have to be corrected...
I present here an excerpt from the letter to be found at _http://www.cosmologystatement.org/_ (http://www.cosmologystatement.org/)
An Open Letter to the Scientific Community cosmologystatement.org (Published in New Scientist, May 22, 2004) The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory. But the big bang theory can't survive without these fudge factors. Without the hypothetical inflation field, the big bang does not predict the smooth, isotropic cosmic background radiation that is observed, because there would be no way for parts of the universe that are now more than a few degrees away in the sky to come to the same temperature and thus emit the same amount of microwave radiation. Without some kind of dark matter, unlike any that we have observed on Earth despite 20 years of experiments, big-bang theory makes contradictory predictions for the density of matter in the universe. Inflation requires a density 20 times larger than that implied by big bang nucleosynthesis, the theory's explanation of the origin of the light elements. And without dark energy, the theory predicts that the universe is only about 8 billion years old, which is billions of years younger than the age of many stars in our galaxy. What is more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles. Yet the big bang is not the only framework available for understanding the history of the universe. Plasma cosmology and the steady-state model both hypothesize an evolving universe without beginning or end. These and other alternative approaches can also explain the basic phenomena of the cosmos, including the abundances of light elements, the generation of large-scale structure, the cosmic background radiation, and how the redshift of far-away galaxies increases with distance. They have even predicted new phenomena that were subsequently observed, something the big bang has failed to do. Supporters of the big bang theory may retort that these theories do not exp lain every cosmological observation. But that is scarcely surprising, as their development has been severely hampered by a complete lack of funding. Indeed, such questions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that "science is the culture of doubt", in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding. Even observations are now interpreted through this biased filter, judged right or wrong depending on whether or not they support the big bang. So discordant data on red shifts, lithium and helium abundances, and galaxy distribution, among other topics, are ignored or ridiculed. This reflects a growing dogmatic mindset that is alien to the spirit of free scientific inquiry.
The letter has been signed by over five hundred (500) parties.
I am not the only one...
tommy mandel