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Old 29-April-2002, 10:43 PM
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Tim Thompson Tim Thompson is offline
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There are legitimate scientists with legitmate arguments in opposition to mainstream "big bang" cosmology. However, they are very much in the minority, and their argumenst are unconvincing. Detailed discussion of such things doubtless belongs over in the "Against the Mainstream" area.

The Institute for Creation Research champions the view of "young earth creationism", which holds that the earth & universe cannot be in excess of 10,000 years old, for strictly Biblical reasons. Despite the "look & feel", their actitivities in no way resemble anything we would call "science". Convinced that their interpretation of the Bible can't be wrong, they are obliged to invent monumental contortions to misrepresent observational data.

Humphreys' "Bumps in the Big Bang" is based on a letter which he submitted to Nature, and was rejected. He complained elsewhere that this was a sign of prejudice against creationism, on the grounds that a similar letter from "evolutionists" was published shortly thereafter. But the other letter actually reported on the results of observations, and Humphreys had no observations to report in his letter. In fact, nothing Humphreys has to say in that piece is original. It was all old news, which is why it was never accepted by Nature.

The Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect (SZE) is the observed result of CMBR photons scattering off of the hot electrons in the tenuous gas environment of a galaxy cluster. Humphreys simply states that the "bumps" in the temperature of the CMB could be caused by the SZE, but you notice that PhD in physics though he is, he never produces a single calculation of the expected amplitude of the effect. In fact, it is much too small to produce the observed bumps. Furthermore, PhD Humphreys overlooks the fact the the SZE distorts the spectrum of the CMB away from thermal. That distortion would be a dead giveaway that the CMB "bumps" are from the SZE and not related to big bang effects. So his "paper" was already invalid before he wrote it, had he bothered to find out what he was going to write about.

The rest of the stuff is of no more value. The ICR is notorious for the extremely poor quality of "science" in their allegedly academic pursuits. One can only wonder that the State of California, last I heard, had accredited the graduate school at ICR.
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