Static or Expanding Universe? Grand Inquest

View 773 Wednesday, May 08, 2013

I posted a mixed bag mailbag earlier today. It has some interesting items and comments.

I’m trying to catch up. In theory this ought to be pledge week – KUSC is having their Spring Pledge Drive, which means that I sort of do the same. This site operates on the Public Radio model: it’s free to all but if not enough subscribe to support it, then it will go away. I don’t spend much time bugging you about this, but whenever KUSC, the Los Angeles classical music station, does a pledge week I do the same. But since I didn’t have much going in the first part of the week, I decided not to inflict the pledge drive on you. If you haven’t subscribed, this would be a good time to do it. If you haven’t renewed your subscription in a while this would be a good time to do that.

The news today is dominated by the recovery of the three young women kidnapped a decade ago and kept in slavery in a house in Cleveland. I expect we’ll have to comment on that at some point, but mostly I am reminded of the conclusions Possony and I reached many years ago: societies deep in decadence and subject to revolutions tend to have a massive increase in bizarre crimes as harbinger.  Of course as the population grows the absolute number of all crimes increases, but still, we do seem to have a lot of the bizarre…

The other story of the day is that the Congress is acting as The Grand Inquest of the Nation in looking at the Benghazi Affair. This is a necessary and proper power of the Congress and has been known from the earliest days. It should not be a simple political witch hunt. And it is important to understand just who ordered the C-130 with the rescue teams about to take off from Tripoli to stand down. Who issued the order, and why? And there may be very legitimate reasons for that: it’s one reason I don’t want to play with breaking news. But I am glad to see Congress acting properly here.

 

Continuing the discussion of The Static Universe by South African astronomer Hilton Ratcliffe. Radcliffe’s style can be irritating, and one definitely has to read his book twice because he assumes you know things he won’t get to until two chapters later; but he does a fair job of raising doubts about the Standard Cosmology Theory with its Expanding Universe, Big Bang, Dark Matter, Dark Energy, massive Black Holes, and other constructs necessary for the Theory but which have not been observed, and in some cases can’t be observed from here. The Standard Theory seemed rather simple when I learned it in high school, and seemed confirmed by the discovery of the 3◦ microwave background radiation by a pair of Bell Labs radio engineers. True, it was about 20 times smaller than the background radiation Gamow had calculated, (and was very similar to the background temperature expected by the static universe theorists well before the Big Bang was postulated); but there it was, a universal background, the temperature left over from the Big Bang. I remember the headlines. I was involved in missiles and space analysis at the time and didn’t have much time to appreciate it, but I remember being impressed.

Ratcliffe devotes the largest chapter of his book to this radiation and possible causes of it, and if you ignore the snarky language, he does make a pretty good point: it’s predicted by many theories, and it’s smaller than the Expanding Universe Standard Theory expected it to be.

: Did you C that? —

OK, I’m definitely out of my league in this group on this subject, but someone here surely knows something about this.

As Mr. Beaufils pointed out, much of cosmology is based on assumptions. Assumptions should be re-examined from time to time to see if they still hold water (or whatever it is they are supposed to hold). You will be familiar with this notion since you have been exposed to Korzybski.

So, what about the speed of light? We assume that it is constant not only in space but in time. That is, it was the same yesterday as it is today, on back through the eons. But is it? Googling reveals that there are those who don’t think so and they can point to the fact (which I am not equipped to check) that every time we measure C, it gets smaller. Not by a lot, but one would expect that errors in accuracy would be random – some smaller and some greater. But with C, it’s always smaller, apparently.

The implications are non-trivial. If C were significantly larger in the past, then objects are not nearly as far away as we think.

As you are wont to say, “it may well be that the universe is not only queerer than you imagine, but queerer than you can imagine.”

Richard White

Austin, Texas

I am convinced that it is queerer than we can imagine; QED convinces me of that. But that doesn’t mean it has to be so complicated that it takes tensors to explain it. I am prepared to believe that the speed of light is different in different media – few dispute that – and that there is no vacuum: space is never empty. As to what medium light waves in (if any) I consider that still an open question. One thing is certain. If we don’t know how far away things are it’s hard to tell how long light took to get here from there, and what objects or media pools it had to go through to get here.

Mike Flynn, sometime collaborator and statistical inference expert who dabbles in philosophy says

Medieval science and logical positivism

Jerry,

You quote Feynman as saying "It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest laws." This is only partly correct. The whole process as described by Grosseteste was a loop. The Aristotelians held that all knowledge begins in the senses (which may be why mathematics has always flirted with Plato!) But they would have been puzzled by the suggestion that inanimate "observations" could ever "suggest" anything. From the quia, or particulars, the natural philosopher derived a propter quid, or rationale, by inductive reasoning, a la the Posterior Analytics. Then using this propter quid and deductive reasoning, a la the Prior Analytics, conclude to the quia. But Grosseteste emphasized two things.

1. The deductive phase ought to conclude to quia that were not part of the formation of the propter quid. Otherwise the reasoning would be circular. In modern terms, the theory ought to predict facts that were not included in the original reasoning.

2. Between the inductive and deductive phases, the philosopher must perform the "work of the intellect" (negotiatio intellectus). That is, he must consider all the various explanations of the phenomena under examination and determine which of them is truer to the facts. For example, in concluding from the phases of the Moon that the Moon <i>must</i> be a sphere, the philosopher would consider all sorts of other geometric shapes: a plate seen flat-on, a cylinder seen base-on, etc., and show how each of them fails in some manner. This is a work that many Late Moderns, even scientists, now neglect. Publish-or-perish does not permit measured reflection, and one usually goes with some bright notion, never considering other possible explanations. Feynman was being very Feyerabendian because he recognized that facts do not explain themselves. There is always more than one theory that can explain the same set of facts.

But it is also the case, as Einstein told Heisenberg, that theory determines what can be observed. That is, our prior beliefs will not only condition how we see the observations, but also determine what observations we consider important to make. Keep in mind that all astronomical observations for more than two millennia were adequately explained by Ptolemaic models. Right up to the discovery of the phases of Venus. The Ptolemaic model predicted Venerian phases, too; but not the same phases as were seen. Whereupon, astronomers abandoned Ptolemy for… (wait for it) … the Tychonic and Ursine models. Tycho’s system was mathematically equivalent to the Copernican and matched it, prediction for prediction. It was up to physics, not astronomy, to cast the deciding ballot: ca. 1800, with the measurement of actual Coriolis effects and parallax in the fixed stars. (And somewhat earlier, but less surely, of stellar aberration.)

In all this it is well to keep in mind something Aristotle said:

We are far away from the things we are trying to inquire into, not only in place but more so in that we have sensation of exceedingly few of their accidents.” – De Caelo, 2.3.286a5-7

and further:

It is good to inquire about these things and so to deepen our understanding, although we have little to go on and we are situated at such a great distance from the attributes of these things. Nevertheless, from contemplating such things nothing [we infer] should seem to be unreasonable, holding them now as fraught with difficulties.
– De Caelo, 2.12.292a14-18

Thomas Aquinas also appreciated the work of the intellect. He noted on his Commentary on the Physics as well as en passant in:

“The theory of eccentrics and epicycles is considered as established because thereby the sensible appearances of the heavenly movements can be explained; not, however, as if this proof were sufficient, forasmuch as some other theory might explain them.”

– Summa theologica, I, q.32, a.1, ad. 2

Which led Pope Urban to comment to Cardinal Zollern (who then wrote Galileo in a personal letter) that “the Church had not condemned nor was about to condemn Copernicanism as heretical but that the theory was rash and that, furthermore, astronomical theories were of such a kind that they could never be shown to be necessarily true.” So Pope beat Popper by 300 years. (This BTW was the comment that Galileo mocked in the Dialogue and got himself into deep kimchee.)

Anyhow, the medieval method can be found explained from a modern perspective here:

http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/c02001.htm#10

and continuing through #11

MikeF

 

 

Superluminal motion

Hi Jerry.

The phenomenon of certain astronomical objects travelling faster than the speed of light is known as Superluminal motion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superluminal_motion

and can often be easily described as an optical illusion from material travelling at relativistic speeds. Of course, whether that describes everything that is observed is another question. I’ve done some work on one of these objects (M87), and for this particular object I’d be surprised if another explanation came to light. I don’t know about other objects.

As for the determination of distances, this is known as the Distance Ladder, of which a reasonable description is given here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_ladder

And Cepheid variables *are* bright enough to determine distances to the nearest galaxies that are subject to cosmological redshift (max distance about 29 Mpc), and thus callibrate that rung of the distance ladder

– that’s how Hubble originally made his discoveries in the first place.

The initial callibration by Hubble at the time was wrong, but it’s drastically improved over the years, although not without many bumps along the way. It was also one of the key missions of the Hubble Space Telescope. The HST observations are given here:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001ApJ…553…47F

I hope this helps!

Cheers,

Mike Casey

 

 

A fair statement of the Standard Theory. Ratcliffe picks holes in that by pointing out that not much of that ladder is based on primary observations, and many observations are cast out as ‘anomalies.’ Of course most Cosmologists believe in the Standard Theory. I tend to glitch at postulating Dark Matter and Dark Energy as the major components of the universe. Why would God play such a trick on us? But of course such questions are way outside science.

The distance ladder depends on accurate measurement of distance to the nearest galaxy, M31, better known as the Andromeda Galaxy. Hubble estimated that it was 900,000 lightyears away. He underestimated the luminosity of the Cepheids and thus greatly underestimated the distance., which we now believe to be nearly 3 million lightyears. Incorrect distances lead to incorrect estimates of the sizes of the galaxies. And triangulation only works out to about a hundred parsecs, and that with a 10% error. We are probably getting better and better at that, and one hopes that we will be able to use some form of triangulation out to a thousand parsecs at some point; but that puts us a very long way from finding the distance to M31 or even to the Magellanic Clouds. The ladder is built heavily on theory, and the theory must make a number of assumptions about light and the media it moves in.

I have no expertise in the accuracy of estimating the absolute magnitude of Cepheid Variables, but I note that Hubble himself was off by a factor of four – and this on fairly close objects in which we can see something of what’s between us and M31. Which doesn’t mean the Standard Theory is wrong, but it does indicate that it’s legitimate to question it, particularly when distance estimates depend on accepting the Standard Expansion Theory, thus making it rather circular after a few hundred million parsecs…

Quasars with a proper motion

I am minded of an article (possibly tongue-in-cheek) by Ben Bova and published in Analog many years back, in which he suggested that quasars might not be the fantastically distant, fantastically huge energy sources they seem, but the flare of Bussard ramjets blasting their way around this neck of the galaxy. Presumably we would see both blue-shifted as well as red-shifted signatures and, depending on distance, proper motion

I do not recall ever seeing any kind of follow-up, whether in fiction or speculative fact. However, the hypothesis should be easily testable, although long-term observation would probably be needed: Do any of the objects display acceleration over time? Do any vanish or appear? Whatever the answer, what will we do with it?

Thanks for all you do. Be well.

Ralph A. Moss

Good story. I vaguely recall it. Niven and I briefly thought about a story with that premise.

Hydrogren Fusion in the Sun

Jerry,

The fusion process in the sun is known as the PPI cycle. It runs like this:

p + p -> 2D + (e+) + v

2D + p -> 3He + (gama ray photon)

3He + 3He -> 4He + 2p

where the numbers to the left of the letters are to be superscripted, the "p" is a proton, the "D" is dueterium, the "(e+)" is a positron, and the "v" is an electron neutrino. You can see that the second step must happen twice in order to supply the required inputs for the third step. What you cannot see is that the predictions that the core of the Sun was too cool to allow this reaction were based upon classical calculations. When quantum effects are taken into account, it is seen that at the temperatures and pressures at the core of the sun, the protons can readily tunnel past the Coulomb barrier your reader from Paris was alluding to. Even with quantum effects taken into considerations, however, this first step is the most difficult to accomplish and drives the rate of the entire reaction and is responsible for the fact that the Sun will take roughly 10 billion years to exhaust its supply of hydrogen.

Kevin L Keegan

There are some other inconsistencies in solar observations. Our Sun’s corona is hotter than the surface under it. That wasn’t expected. Does this change what people on a planet orbiting Tau Ceti see as the temperature and luminosity of our Sun? I confess I don’t know, but then I don’t know a lot about astrophysics of the Sun. I doubt I ever will understand all of it.

subject: "Consensus Theory of Climate Change"

Hi, Doc.

I prefer the term "Climate Creation Science".

Matthew Joseph Harrington

"What occurreth in Gomorrah, stayeth in Gomorrah."