BB Theory - Popular Myth Or Scientific Fact

[Shadowy Man]

Here is one of several recent YouTubes claiming that, at least according to some cosmologists, recent observations do not match the predictions of the Big Bang Theory.

I am not qualified to comment on the topic.

I started to watch this, but likely won't go through the whole thing. They immediately claim that the universe is not expanding and say they will now share the evidence. They do mention one scientist by name at the beginning and going to his webpage and looking at his publication list I don't see anything that suggests he doesn't believe in the Big Bang theory. He's probing the limits of our understanding of cosmology, but I would suspect that a discovery that the universe isn't expanding would be high on his list of important publications.

Then they talk about the abundance of lithium in early stars. They state, correctly, that the Big Bang theory makes predictions about the amount of the light elements should have been produced in the early universe, through a process called Big Bang nucleosynthesis. They state, without citation, that the amount of lithium in early stars doesn't match that of BBN predictions. I believe that that might be partly true, but is explained by what's called stellar astration. Lithium is actually destroyed in stars, so we wouldn't expect stellar atmospheres to show the same abundance pattern as predicted by BBN.

They propose an alternative theory, and mention someone named Eric Lerner, who proposes that helium and lithium were made in stars, not in BBN. He apparently put in an abstract to the January 2020 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, in which he claims but he has written no paper on the subject since. He's one of the plasma cosmology proponents. I would be interested in how his talk at the AAS went over with the crowd. If there were merit to his science he should have published it in a peer-reviewed astronomical journal.

Anyway, I won't proceed because I don't have time and I'm not an expert in cosmology, so refuting the claims in the video would take additional research and time.

 

[Swammerdami]

The "several YouTubes" I mentioned are not crackpottery, but are narrated by trained physicists reporting on the work of expert and peer-reviewed cosmologists. I think such YouTubes are much more accessible to most laymen than are journal articles.

Generally any video that says one observation has disproved something big can be readily discarded as established theories or understandings don't get trashed because of one observation.

The particular YouTube I linked to — which I chose because it is only 9 minutes or so — listed SEVERAL observations that differ from BB predictions. It does not claim that expansion is faster than expected.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

A further confusion are the inconsistencies that the usual BB model encounters when it tries to extrapolate back to before the first quintillionth of the first femtosecond. The universe is smoother than expected, so cosmologists have postulated an "inflationary epoch" for which there is no model or other evidence. Was there an actual singularity at the beginning of the BB? Or did the universe begin in some alternate way, e.g. Penrose's Cyclic Conformal Cosmology? AFAIK, "the jury is still out."

 

[Shadowy Man]

The particular YouTube I linked to — which I chose because it is only 9 minutes or so — listed SEVERAL observations that differ from BB predictions. It does not claim that expansion is faster than expected.

As you saw in my earlier post, I looked at about half of that video and it does not list several observations that differ from BB predictions, because there are no citations for any of the claims it makes nor for the claims that the BB theory makes. So there's no way to verify that anything said in that video is true. It makes *claims* but does not list credible observations.

Also, saying "according to some cosmologists", is misleading because the first person they mention as a proponent of the no-big bang theory is not actually a cosmologist, at least not a professional one. I would say that presented as you stated would imply professionals. I'd like to know which professional cosmologists don't believe in the Big Bang theory.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I probably could name a couple cosmetologists.

 

[bilby]

I probably could name a couple cosmetologists.

Yeah, but they've probably gone rouge.

 

[steve_bank]

I am not questioning that the model does provide a genesis for what we see today from partcles to galxies. I watcged a shiw that shied a BB simulation. It led to crude galaxy like objects.

I am asking why believe it as truth based on a theoretical set of initial conditions for which there are no explanations. and which can nver be demons-ted experimentally?

A predictibe model does not have to reflect reality. Simple set ups were used to timeping when the sun shied trough a window and hit a spot on the floor.

In a Earth centered cosmology position of planets can be predicted mathematically. From relativity there is no absolute inertial frame, motion is all relative to a frame.

It is said at any point in the universe everything is moving away from each other. What that may mean is open to interpenetration. Space is expanding. Space is not exnding but space time is changing. On one show I heard it said the intial conditions were not a single point but a hot denseeverywhere condition whuch suddenly exploded.

To me philosophy, religion, and science converge on cosmology. I call the BB mathematical philosophy.

 

[bilby]

I am asking why believe it as truth

Who here is "believing it as truth"?

That's the sort of nonsensical assumption that creationists make - they start with an unshakable belief, so they erroneously assume that everyone else does too.

This whole thread looks like a response to creationist propaganda about "what atheists believe", rather than an attempt to discuss the actual scientific understanding of reality that leads to the Big Bang theory as today's leading source of cosmological models.

 

[Shadowy Man]

I am not questioning that the model does provide a genesis for what we see today from partcles to galxies. I watcged a shiw that shied a BB simulation. It led to crude galaxy like objects.

I am asking why believe it as truth based on a theoretical set of initial conditions for which there are no explanations. and which can nver be demons-ted experimentally?

A predictibe model does not have to reflect reality. Simple set ups were used to timeping when the sun shied trough a window and hit a spot on the floor.

In a Earth centered cosmology position of planets can be predicted mathematically. From relativity there is no absolute inertial frame, motion is all relative to a frame.

It is said at any point in the universe everything is moving away from each other. What that may mean is open to interpenetration. Space is expanding. Space is not exnding but space time is changing. On one show I heard it said the intial conditions were not a single point but a hot denseeverywhere condition whuch suddenly exploded.

To me philosophy, religion, and science converge on cosmology. I call the BB mathematical philosophy.

It's still not clear to me based on what you're writing that you know the actual science of cosmology. Just listening to what you hear "on shows" is not the best source of information. It's unfortunate, but science is very often misrepresented in popular media. I've seen science get mangled in articles written by so-called science journalists.

It is believed as truth because it's the best theory we have right now and there are many observations that agree with its predictions. It gives an explanatory framework within which we can understand the evolution of the universe. Are there aspects of it still to be figured out? Yes. Does it explain everything we see completely? No. Are we going to need new physics to understand the state of the universe at the "t=0" condition? Yes.

You're free to not believe in it. But until there's something that does better, it's what we have.

 

[Jarhyn]

initial conditions for which there are no explanations.

Thats the issue: There are numerous explanations available for the initial condition of our system. All of them are equally valid.

All one has to do to understand this is to look at a family of systems bearing quantum properties. My go-to for this is computer based cellular automata systems.

There is no explanation "within" a system of cellular automata for why their initial state is as it is. Indeed, different "parent Cosmologies" implement the same emulated system.

If I open up Dwarf Fortress and present it with seed 0, default configurations, I get the same system as you do if you do those things. The same initial condition then arises from very different situations in very different locations of our universe.

As such that universe of mathematical process has no singular cosmology. It has multiple equally valid explanations: (insert name here) started a system up with default settings.

Indeed, in the infinite expanse of our cosmos, a Boltzmann Brain somewhere will give rise randomly to itself and it will happen to contain an implementation of that same system on accident.

If there are other mathematical processes executing differently from the one that gives rise to what we perceive as reality which themselves allow the rise of randomly occuring Boltzmann Brain type objects capable of switching among an infinite expanse of variation this dwarfy universe does not even rely on our universe's specific existence to be given instantiation.

We have numerous Cosmologies which have been described which may contain and instantiate this universe, and the fact is that unless something allows us to break out of isolation into a reified host system, this will continue to be the case. It will be simultaneously all of these and none of them, until it is the case that it can only be one, and we can't possibly ascertain which, if any, of the Cosmologies we have identified is in fact going to be seen on the other side of that event.

If we cannot so break out, it is such that "there is only the text, absent any real context at all".

 

[steve_bank]

Well.

QM is routin

That can not be doe with the BB. eely used to design solid state elctrinics. That the theroeis are accurate and predictve is demonsted by building and testing a trasistor.

The BB can not be experimentally tested. So I accept it as a good theory, but not validated. I accept QM as validated.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

But you can test the results and observe the results... literally at the time they happened... thanks to the speed limit of light. It is how we went from no universe, to a static universe, to a dynamic expanding universe. And that understanding will likely expand as well. Some could be determined ultimately wrong, but it really feels more like a fine tuning. We seem to be more uncertain about where things are headed... mainly due to the lack of first hand knowledge of universal destruction, I mean other than the Atlanta Falcons collapse in Super Bowl LI. Cosmologists learned a lot about our universe from that collapse.

 

[Jarhyn]

But you can test the results and observe the results... literally at the time they happened... thanks to the speed limit of light. It is how we went from no universe, to a static universe, to a dynamic expanding universe. And that understanding will likely expand as well. Some could be determined ultimately wrong, but it really feels more like a fine tuning. We seem to be more uncertain about where things are headed... mainly due to the lack of first hand knowledge of universal destruction, I mean other than the Atlanta Falcons collapse in Super Bowl LI. Cosmologists learned a lot about our universe from that collapse.

In some respects I feel like these probabilistic algebras and rings are just... Epicycles for something we aren't seeing clearly.

I would in fact really like to see what it looks like when an environment inside a life simulator, or cellular automata model, is usd rather than our immediate QM process, to figure out "cosmology" for such isolated systems as we emulate.

We would probably figure out a transform between the probabilistics of a system and it's truth tables, such that we could transform the equations and models of our own probabilistics into a model of it's underlying systemic truths, or a family of truth tables which could describe it's underlying function, at any rate.

 

[James Brown]

I Was a Big Bang Skeptic
Richard Carrier, 2002

The current Big Bang Theory should be thought of as having two distinct elements. The first part is a theory about the origin (or at least the early evolution) of the observed universe. The second part is a theory about how that came about. By confusing these two aspects of the theory I and others were easily led astray in our assessments of the evidence. The first element of the Big Bang theory now has about as firm an evidential foundation as anyone could reasonably expect of it. There is no good reason to doubt that the observable universe had its origin in a small, superheated state about 14 billion years ago, from which it expanded and cooled, condensing into the cosmos we now see.

The second element of the Big Bang Theory is another story. Hardly anyone can agree on the details, and evidence for or against any particular position is scarce and indecisive. But even if we had no clue at all as to why the universe began in a small, superheated state, this would not detract from the evidence that it did. And as it happens, we have more than a clue about the why. The basic outlines of Inflation theory account for the Big Bang and other observations fairly well. They do not have enough specifics to fit or explain all the facts that we observe, and both are largely undetailed and untested as far as theories go. So this element remains highly contentious and speculative, and much in need of more fact-finding. But it is the best game in town, and it makes a lot of sense.

(Emphasis mine)

"I don't know how something started so maybe it never happened at all," is a fallacious argument.

 

[Jarhyn]

I Was a Big Bang Skeptic
Richard Carrier, 2002

The current Big Bang Theory should be thought of as having two distinct elements. The first part is a theory about the origin (or at least the early evolution) of the observed universe. The second part is a theory about how that came about. By confusing these two aspects of the theory I and others were easily led astray in our assessments of the evidence. The first element of the Big Bang theory now has about as firm an evidential foundation as anyone could reasonably expect of it. There is no good reason to doubt that the observable universe had its origin in a small, superheated state about 14 billion years ago, from which it expanded and cooled, condensing into the cosmos we now see.

The second element of the Big Bang Theory is another story. Hardly anyone can agree on the details, and evidence for or against any particular position is scarce and indecisive. But even if we had no clue at all as to why the universe began in a small, superheated state, this would not detract from the evidence that it did. And as it happens, we have more than a clue about the why. The basic outlines of Inflation theory account for the Big Bang and other observations fairly well. They do not have enough specifics to fit or explain all the facts that we observe, and both are largely undetailed and untested as far as theories go. So this element remains highly contentious and speculative, and much in need of more fact-finding. But it is the best game in town, and it makes a lot of sense.

(Emphasis mine)

"I don't know how something started so maybe it never happened at all," is a fallacious argument.

Moreover, and I cannot stress this enough, we have observable systems existing in our observable universe which can be implemented in different ways: I can represent a life simulator in ARM, or in PPC, or in an OISC model, and all these maths when presenting this system are interchangable. I can in fact transform instruction groups between these representations!

This is a fundamental discovery of Turing in terms of Turing Completion of a system.

As such, the reason why this second problem is so sticky is because people can't seem to grok, for whatever reason, that it has as much of a discrete answer as the question "what is the microstate of the macrostate?"

It's not a single answer, but rather a group of different answers in superposition.

 

[steve_bank]

But you can test the results and observe the results... literally at the time they happened... thanks to the speed limit of light. It is how we went from no universe, to a static universe, to a dynamic expanding universe. And that understanding will likely expand as well. Some could be determined ultimately wrong, but it really feels more like a fine tuning. We seem to be more uncertain about where things are headed... mainly due to the lack of first hand knowledge of universal destruction, I mean other than the Atlanta Falcons collapse in Super Bowl LI. Cosmologists learned a lot about our universe from that collapse.

It would take a long time at the particle level, a simulation could be run based on the theory. The results of the simulation might exactly match what we see today. That still would not prove the BB happened. It would say that gven the theortical initial conditions the model predicts reality today. It is a good theory.

If Ptolemy had a computer but no telescopes he could have simulated an Earth centered universe. The simulation would show the universe revolves around the Earth.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

But you can test the results and observe the results... literally at the time they happened... thanks to the speed limit of light. It is how we went from no universe, to a static universe, to a dynamic expanding universe. And that understanding will likely expand as well. Some could be determined ultimately wrong, but it really feels more like a fine tuning. We seem to be more uncertain about where things are headed... mainly due to the lack of first hand knowledge of universal destruction, I mean other than the Atlanta Falcons collapse in Super Bowl LI. Cosmologists learned a lot about our universe from that collapse.

It would take a long time at the particle level, a simulation could be run based on the theory. The results of the simulation might exactly match what we see today. That still would not prove the BB happened.

Firstly, isn't it more apt to say the BB is "happening"? While not necessarily intuitive, if the universe started expanding, why would it ever stop expanding?

Secondly, the BB theory hypothesized the CMB. That was observed. We then used the CMB to estimate the universe's age to a pretty tight precision. The presence of the CMB is critical, because it helps speak to the size of the universe at one stage and the heat that it contained. It is a stamp that elevates BB from being merely a "theory".

Thirdly, we are able to determine the status of difference stages of the universe's expansion because of scopes and light only being able to travel so fast. So we don't quite need a simulation to determine what could happen in the Big Bang. We can directly measure it in "real" time via tape delay caused by c being a fixed value and slow enough.

 

[Shadowy Man]

The BB can not be experimentally tested. So I accept it as a good theory, but not validated. I accept QM as validated.

Virtually none of astronomy can be *experimentally* tested. It's all about observation and understanding those observations in the context of physics that *can* be experimentally tested.

The universe is the experiment, we are attempting to interpret the results.

 

[Shadowy Man]

Secondly, the BB theory hypothesized the CMB. That was observed. We then used the CMB to estimate the universe's age to a pretty tight precision. The presence of the CMB is critical, because it helps speak to the size of the universe at one stage and the heat that it contained. It is a stamp that elevates BB from being merely a "theory".

Also, the BB theory predicts a specific CMB temperature with time. That has been observationally verified. For example:
Noterdaeme et al. 2010 (I like this paper because they cite some of my work).

 

[steve_bank]

A spectroscopy lab was part of my optics class.

Look at the light from a gas discharge tube through a prism o usng a using distraction grating.

We know from expedient on Earth what the sectrum of materls are.

Its been a while. Balmer comes to mind.

Using emission spectrocopy to assess the composition of stars is based in experiment. Objective conclusions.

Also absorption spectroscopy to assess the composition of gasses in space.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

That barely gets by a Turing test.