heusdens --

You have a lot of misconceptions that need to be cleared up pronto.

You need to be a bit clearer on your definition of terms. "Matter" is something that is defined as an object that has a non-zero restmass. This is indeed something that need not be conserved given the proper interactions. A perfect example of this is radioactive decay. If you take all the products of a radioactive decay and find their masses, you'll find that they are not as massive (have less MATTER) than when you started. This mass-energy has been lost in order to impart a momentum energy on the decay products. It indeed is a REAL loss of matter and not one that is "borrowed" or has to be eventually "paid back".

In the local frame, energy is conserved, you're right about that. All of the interactions you document in a local frame have to have the same amount of energy (when including mass-energy) in the products as in the reactants. However, on a global frame in GR, this doesn't need to be true. Energy is only conserved locally as, for example, a photon can lose energy to a gravitational redshift (and thus not have the same amount of energy as when it started).

You see, it is all much more nuanced than you make it out to be.

Indeed, you can define your reference coordinates in GR to be anything you wish (with or without "motion"). This is what allows us to do gravitational cosmology. We can switch from a moving reference frame to a comoving reference frame by a simple conformal mapping. Likewise, if I assume a static universe, I can transform myself into a moving universe simply by transforming my coordinates into a moving reference frame. This is analogous to standing on a train and looking out a window. Who is moving? The world or you? Relativity tells us there is no way for us to give a meaningful answer to that question. All motion is relative, without qualifications.

This is a popular urban legend about physics. It is actually untrue. Time doesn't care whether matter is there or not. Indeed, one of the more informative solutions to the Einstein Equations involves an empty (Milne) universe. Time doesn't care that nothing is in there, it just keeps marching on.

You need to get past thinking of time in the classical sense. It is actually a dimension that is caught up with the other three, but we are confined to move in only that dimension. You would never say that space requires matter to define it, for we know that empty space has just as much "space" as does space that has something in it. Likewise empty time is just as much "time" as time that has something in it.

But as I explained earlier there is no theoretical model that has been presented that works with this interpretation. The manner in which you are presenting your idea is analogous to the way in which the geocentrists present their viewpoint. They deny that there is any evidence that says the world moves. Well, we point out to them that retrograde motion is explained, that Keplerian dynamics naturally follow from a Copernican universe, that Newtonian dynamics is hard to satisfy if massive bodies orbit less massive bodies. Somehow, none of this sways them, they say there must be "another" explanation without providing one. This is what you are doing, heusdens. You admit that there is a redshift distance relationship. You admit that the Doppler Effect is a viable cause of redshift. Yet somehow you don't seem willing to put two and two together.

There are other confirmations for an expanding universe as well. Those I outlined in a previous post. The Big Bang model is embraced because it attacks so many different problems from so many different angles. You have no mechanism for nuclear abundances. You have no explanation for the CMB that explains it as well as the Big Bang explains it. There are numerous other small effects (Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, for one) that you cannot explain. You don't have a reasonable alternative to the current model.

But you haven't given me this mechanism, only posited that it exists. I will tell you EXACTLY what the mechanism is: it is the finite amount of time that the universe has been expanding from a very, very small size. You can calculate what effects you would expect from such a mechanism and without fail, we see those effects. For example, we can actually see the CMB cooling off. Some processes are in thermal equilibrium with the background radiation and we can measure the temperature of the radiation at their given epoch. If you do that, you find that the CMB radiation temperature scales with time just as the Big Bang model predicts it should. A steady-state idea cannot explain this effect unless stars are somehow getting cooler over the ages.

[quote]In my perspective you need a form of photon - matter interaction, that causes the photon to loose energy proportional to distance, without the photons becoming "diffuse".[quote]

This is only part of the problem. You also need it to be uniform and homogeneous on all scales (the universe is not) and you need it to somehow have a mechanism that has been unobserved in the lab since the energy scales are much greater than those processes we currently know about. You are talking about inventing new physics, which may be an okay thing to think about, but is much more problematic from the point of view that your "theory" needs to explain all the other observational evidence I pointed out as well. You can't just attack this one piece and expect your idea to work. You need to formulate an entirely new paradigm. And you need to do it with the rigor that the Big Bang has been presented with. Looking at the content and the quality of some of your posts, I would say you are probably not up to the task.

This is all pie-in-the-sky speculation until you tie yourself down to the numbers. There are books that actually do this game and the conclusion is that any force you care to name is not strong enough to effect these streaming photons on the scales we're talking about except for gravity. You have been romanced by certain voices on this board who have said otherwise. Unfortunately, they have all been shown to be full of hot air and worse, haven't admitted their errors.

You made this up. There is no such effect that has ever been measured. I can't even think of what kind of experiment you got confused with to make this statement. It really is not physically sound.

Except, that effect will not look like the CMB we observe. It will not be nearly uniform enough.

Make sure you understand that there are theoretical extensions to the paradigm and then there is the paradigm itself. Inflation is just beginning to gather observational evidence to support it as a mechanism. It is still extremely early in the age of the universe. If you look at the universe some fraction of a second after this proposed period you will find a Big Bang universe that matches observations in any case. There are speculative theories that are presented all the time, but they are necessarily tied at the late end (a few seconds into the life of the universe) to the standard Big Bang model. This is the direction of cosmology today.

[quote]And you somehow assume that Nature at one time decided to pop up with a number of particles/energy that was sufficient to have this universe emerge? Remember though, this energy is only on borrow, someday it will have to be payed back![quote]

I have assumed no such thing. That is only one possible explanation for the universe. One. It is not embraced by all cosmologists nor should it be. We don't have any observational evidence for this, all we know is that the model seems to work for the physical laws we can derive to the energy scales we're dealing with.

I am trying to patiently explain to you where your physics is going awry, heusdens. One place is in your understanding of quantum mechanics. You seem to think that there is some kind of borrow/payback mechanism in quantum mechanics that is akin to the rule about conserving energy. This is only an analogy that is used in the popular literature to get the general public to understand concepts like quantum tunneling. In reality, the story is much more mundane than that. All this tunneling is is a mathematical expression of the idea that there is a finite non-zero probability to have part of you particle's wavefunction in a classically forbidden energy region. This is a well-documented phenomenon that is responsible for such things as radioactive decay. In fact, once you pass the potential barrier, there is no problem, you have succeeded in passing through the wall, so to speak. There is no "payback" mechanism other than the fact there is a ridiculously small probability that you might tunnel back to where you were before. However, you can surpress this probability with the appropriate conditions so that it is nearly an impossibility. Of course, if you are dealing with the universe and a (fiducial) infinite amount of time that "nearly" an impossibility becomes something you worry about. Thus the appeal to the borrow/payback analogy. It is not, however, useful to consider this as an actual mechanism in physics (it is not). It is only an illustrative tool.

Let me give you another example. Let's say two electrons tunnel out of nonexistence and then annihilate each other. This creates two high-energy photons that zip off in opposite directions. Where did these photons come from? The only explanation is they came from the vacuum, the part of space that doesn't have any photons or electrons in it. This may seem to be a contradiction, but it is a very real phenomenon. It is actually something that we must take into consideration when we monitor high-energy particle physics. If your system has enough energy, you can end up creating virtual particle pairs that can remain real since your system has enough energy to interact with them. If the vacuum has an energy density (and there is good evidence to say it does) then we expect these particles to be creating themselves in many different places... NO PAYBACK REQUIRED!

Now this is just plain bad physics. If I put two masses at a distance r from each other, they will exert a force on each other. They will begin, by Newton's laws, to accelerate. Where did this motion come from? It came from the dynamical instability of matter in the universe. However, if I sit on one of these masses and look out, what do I see? Well, I see myself just sitting still while the other mass comes racing towards me. This is how motion can be seen to be relative.

Again, you need to tell us motion in relation to what? To each other? Consider the following thought experiment: I can put two masses at infinite distances from each other travelling at very high speeds and they will not measure a motion relative to each other. They will say the other mass is fixed with respect to them. Now, if I create a universe with just these two masses, I still have a perfectly fine universe, but I have no motion. Time is still marching forward at one-second-per-second in any local reference frame and space is behaving the way it should depending upon the sign of the curvature term. Matter exists, but it is not in motion. Therefore I disproved your statement.

The only problem you outlined that has any merit is the so-called "singularity" problem or the primal cause problem. Indeed, this is a troubling problem in cosmology, but it does not invalidate the Big Bang. It simply allows us to further ask the question. The Big Bang stands on its own without referring to such a beast. It has observational evidence that can be modelled well using the tools of General Relativity, particle physics, and an expanding universe that is influenced by various effects as the universe ages through various epochs. This is the success of the Big Bang and has not been addressed by you other than to say that "scientists embrace it". Well, you are free to embrace whatever you like, but you should at least have the decency to try to understand why scientists embrace it.

Be discerning in your choice of sources. There are plenty of crackpots out there.

Or not as the case may be. We have no evidence to show this one way or the other. Einstein thought as you did, that it should be assumed. He later said that that assumption led him to his greatest blunder (which actually has been a useful modification to his theory of GR that we use today). If he hadn't assumed that, he could have a priori derived the expanding universe from his equations before Hubble. That would have been a truly impressive acheivement.

Stick with sources that tie themselves closely to observational evidence and address the theory with proper tools. Don't just fall into the Arp-admirer trap of picking and choosing your evidence and presenting your counterargument that way. Look at the current explorations into the large scale structure, into redshift catologing (2df, Sloan), into CMB exploration (DASI, COBE, MAP), into nuclear abundances, and look into the particle physics theories and unification ideas but keep in mind that they are mostly not as tied to observation as the other parts of the story. If you do this, I am sure you will be able to provide an adequate critique of the Big Bang model.

Use resources from .edu especially (if you use the web). Avoid ICR nonsense and generally anything that is published on a free webpage. Also, try hardbound texts found in your local library about cosmology. Read more than one in case you get stuck with a particularly off-the-wall one. There is consensus and it is discoverable. Also, Phil has put up a link to an excellent Cosmology FAQ on this page. Do read through it. I haven't found any errors in it to date.

And Copernicus believed that the Earth was the center of the universe... he just wanted to create a more convenient "system". Yeah, yeah, we've heard all this before. It's meaningless. Friedmann didn't have access to the data we know have. If he did, that would have been all the more impetus to develop his model. He didn't make a statement one-way or the other about the universe. He just presented the solution as it was in an "isn't that interesting" manner. It took Hubble's observations of other "island universes" and his establishing the redshifts (and blueshifts) inherent in these places to give us a good understanding of how the universe may actually be expanding.

Well, I'll remember not to ask you for your opinions in the future. But in all seriousness, do you know how ludicruous this sounds to someone who deals with this every day? Any galaxy I look at has a measureable shift in its spectrum. Any one. If I do a simple plot on the sky, I see a scatter around a linear progression. If I then try to match this data to a best fit I get the Hubble Law. Regardless of whether you believe the velocities are "real" or not, that's what the evidence is telling us... that there is a relationship between distance and redshift.

Furthermore, I see deviation from this law at higher redshifts. This is due to the so-called "deceleration" factor which is what you have to deal with because either you have dark-energy pushing you outward or you have gravity pulling you inward. I also can see cosmological effects of the Hubble Flow in Large Scale Structure measurement. If you look at the size of the largest bound structures in the universe (clusters), you will find that that's the size you get if the you allow for normal gravitational infall over the period of the universe's growth (H^-1). More than that, you find that structures are actually evolving in time. We also see that metalicity evolves in time which is predicted from the fact that the earliest universe had far fewer heavier elements than today due to the fact that no stars had a chance to produce the heavy nuclides. We also can look at timescales and we find that the oldest stars are actually on the same order in age as what we calculate for teh universe. This is a completely independent measurement observation that has no sensitivity to the age of the universe, other than the fact that we posit an age to the universe. If we'd have measured the age of globular clusters to be 30 billion years, then there'd be a contradiction. As it is, they lie somewhere in the ballpark of a dozen billion years which gives us further confirmation that we're getting the timescales right.

These are only a smattering of the observational evidences behind the Big Bang, which is why you should believe it.

This is the problem of nonlocality. You can't expect to have a photon behave the same way in the same reference frame simply because the photon behaves the same way no matter where it is locally. That means if your two reference frames are moving with respect to one another you get different observations for the same photon. There's no mystery in this, though, a similar effect is seen in special relativity and measuring time dilation or length contraction.

Well, you need to look much more closely at the theory because this is perfectly allowed for by the Freidmann Equations and is a natural outcome of the fact that we see a Hubble relationship at all. We could have looked out into space and seen no relationship at all. This would have been consistent with your model of the universe. There wouldn't be a need for expansion, only peculiar velocities of the galaxies. If we were to make a plot in that way, we'd see that the further we went out, there would be no redshift-distance correllation. That isn't what we see though, and saying that you have some mysterious mechanism to explain this phenomenon because you simply don't like or can't understand the expansion of space-time is, in my mind, a rather arrogant and stubborn way to go about educating oneself.

This is all idle speculation on your part. Have you read the papers they published? I have and it is clear that 1) Hubble believed that the galaxies were moving away from us and 2) Freidmann believed that his model of the universe was a solution to Einstein's field equations. It is a typical device for detractors to say that the developers of the theories themselves didn't believe in their theories. A similar thing is done with evolution and Charles Darwin. It just is not the case, though. You may be able to point to a passage or two that is made in response to a detractor in regards to Hubble's development of the observational evidence for an expanding universe. This is just a typical scientific cautionary exchange. There is no doubt if you actually read what Hubble wrote that he was firmly convinced that his observations showed a relationship between the velocities of the galaxies away from us and their distances.

Then tell us, where is your replacement paradigm?