A summer cold, and doubts about Big Bangs

View 773 Monday, May 06, 2013

I woke up, had breakfast, and essentially spent the day in bed accomplishing nothing today. I am not sure what has got me, but I think the day’s rest has got me past it. More tomorrow. Apologies for the weekend funk.

The world continues, with strange stories.

‘The head of a rival kindergarten is reported to have confessed to lacing the yogurt with rat poison because the two schools were both trying to attract children.’

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22378488>

—

Roland Dobbins

Kerbal Space Program (Space Program Simulation Game)

Dr. Pournelle,

After reading the review on Kerbal Space Program that you linked to, I decided to download the demo to try over the weekend. I was quickly hooked and bought the full version the following Monday.

I was expecting a fairly basic "build a rocket and launch it" game. I was wrong. If you design your rocket poorly, expect it to fall over and explode on the launch pad…or lift off and then explode, or lift off and then crash. Through some trial and error, you can make it out of the atmosphere, but then you need to establish a stable orbit.

If you get really ambitious, you can start heading for the moon and further destinations…but you will end up learning a little about orbital mechanics and weight to thrust ratios. Fortunately, even if you are a little dense (like me) there are a lot of tutorials available on Youtube. So far, I’ve managed to reach orbit and even land on the moon and return. I definitely have a new respect for what the folks at NASA were able to do during the 60s.

I am rambling a bit, but I do think that many of your readers would find the game interesting and entertaining.

E. Ashley Howell

The new system I use for this journal, unlike the old Front Page system, makes it much harder to insert bookmarks and links into the text but the link is in https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=13411 about halfway through the mail items. I gather there is considerable material on line about the game and how to play it, with different strategies, and some have used it to design space programs along the lines of those in Niven/Pournelle’s Footfall.

I expect to give it a try myself one of these days.

Last Thursday night at LASFS my friend and colleague John DeChancie brought me a copy of The Static Universe by Hilton Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is a South African Astronomer who rejects the entire notion of the Expanding Universe on the grounds that there is no real evidence for it, and quite a lot of evidence against it. That seems a very bold statement, since the Standard Cosmological Theory asserts that the universe is expanding according to Hubble’s Law, and while there is considerable controversy over the exact size of Hubble’s Constant, there is no real question about its existence. I have been through the book once, and this is the sort of book that an amateur like me must read at least twice, since understanding some of the material in the first part assumes you things that are discussed later in the book. My understanding is not helped by Ratcliffe’s aggressive and sometime mocking style; and he often assumes that his readers are familiar with arguments that most of us have not been taught.

For all of that, it’s an intriguing book. I can recall in high school being taught the Hubble Expanding Universe as the truth established by science. It hadn’t yet been complicated by the insertion of dark matter and dark energy so that most of the universe turns out to be invisible and unobservable by any direct means (or if those concepts were around they hadn’t reached down to Brother Henry at Christian Brothers College High School in Memphis). We were taught that there was plenty of observational evidence for Hubble’s expanding universe, and indeed we read about Hubble’s observations.

Just about everyone in the civilized world understands now that the Milky Way is a galaxy of millions of stars and that we are in it; and that off at great distances there are other “island universes” – galaxies – as large as or larger than our galaxy. At the time of this discovery astronomers were only just discovering how large the universe really was, because there were no reliable means of measuring the distances to stars and other objects outside our solar system. The best method was to measure the angle to the object at different points in the Earth’s orbit. Even before the actual distance of the Earth to the Sun was known with any precision, the angles could be determined to an accuracy of about one second (60 minutes to a degree, sixty seconds to the minute), so that the parsec – the distance to an object with one second of parallax – could be determined in “astronomical units” of the distance of Earth to Sun. When the Au was determined with some accuracy the parsec could be translated into kilometers. Given the accuracy of ground based observations, distances to objects of about 100 parsecs could be determined with reasonable accuracies.

This allowed calculation of distances to stars and objects up to about 300 lightyears. Beyond that no direct measurement was possible. Unfortunately the objects observed as nebulae – island universes – are considerably farther than that. The Magellanic Clouds lie at 160,000 and 200,000 lightyears distance. Measuring distances to the Clouds and other galaxies relies on observation of certain kinds of variable stars whose blink rate correlates exactly with their absolute brightness. Unfortunately the closest of those stars, Polaris, is 433 lightyears, just a bit farther than the limit of accuracy of determination by parallax; a condition that may not last much longer.

Stars that seemed to be Cepheid Variables – ones that blink with a rate proportional to their brightness – were found in the Andromeda Nebula, at 2.5 million lightyears the nearest “island universe” to ours and by the 1920’s it became established that ours is not the only galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy has trillions of stars in it – and it is one of billions of galaxies. Distances to those galaxies can be determined using the Cepheid Variables – but only to a certain distance.

Hubble determined those distance so far as he could. Meanwhile others had observed “red shifts” in the light coming from those galaxies. Hubble thought those red shifts correlated linearly with distance. The Standard Cosmological Theory was born. The red shifts were explained as Doppler effects – those galaxies were moving away from us – and the farther away from us they were the faster they were moving away from us. The Universe Is Expanding. This expanding universe was predicted by General Relativity. All was well.

It then became standard to determine the distance to a very far away object by measuring the red shift of the light from it – there being no other way of determining that. At millions of light years we are far beyond the limits of angular measurement and geometry. But all was well because it all fit.

Then, quietly, the observational component of this theory collapsed: it turns out that the universe is not expanding in our general region, and our local galaxies are not all receding from us at rates proportional to their distance, and the primary data on which the Hubbard theory, and thus the Expanding Universe, and thus the Big Bang theory, were based was an artifact. The Standard Theory was modified to say that the universe is expanding, but we don’t observe it at distances of a few million lightyears.

This is the thesis of the first part of Ratcliffe’s book: that there is no actually observational evidence for the correlation of red shift with distance, and within the sphere in which we can estimate distances by observations – using parallax and Cepheid Variable blink rates – the expanding universe does not hold. Indeed within the sphere where we have some means of determining distances we find not only red shift but blue shift objects. When we get to the regions where we believe the universe is in fact expanding, the only evidences we have for that is the red shifts themselves.

Radcliffe then brings up evidence against the expanding universe and points out that Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies contains several examples that simply cannot be explained by the Standard Expanding Universe. And then there is the phenomenon of Quasars.

At this point I need to read the book again before I will attempt to review his arguments; but it appears that the evidence for the Expanding Universe is based largely on extrapolations from the original Hubble Slipher observations, and stayed in place after those observations were shown not to be complete or accurate, and indeed applied to a region in which Expansion is not taking place; and the evidence for expansion is based on a circular method of estimating distances.

I wish I had Sir Fred around to discuss this with. He never did believe in the Big Bang, and when he was in the proper mood he could explain many of these complexities to people like me who are very much amateurs. I find it astonishing that an entire theory of the cosmos is based on observations now known to be faulty, and I find it hard to believe. I also find it hard to believe that a great part of the universe is made up of matter we can’t see and energy we can’t detect, and more over we can’t find that stuff around here in our neighborhood. All our fundamental theories seem increasingly complex and held up by more and more complex assumptions; are we due for something new?

But it’s late, I am beyond my understanding of this book, and it’s time for bed. With luck I will feel better in the morning.