On 1 September, 2005, the formation of BAUT was announced, and BAUT itself was launched on 3 September.

There are some 31 pages of ATM section threads which post-date BAUT’s launch¹; at 30 threads per page, that’s nearly 1,000 threads.

Making a generous allowance for moved threads and multiple threads on the same ATM idea (and the restrictive assumption that each ATM thread contains just one ATM idea), BAUT has hosted discussion on at least 500 ATM ideas, in ~18 months.

Clearly there is great enthusiasm for thinking up, posting, discussing, defending, attacking, … ideas which go against the mainstream in astronomy, cosmology, space science, and astrophysics!

Some proponents of the ATM ideas presented have shown great tenacity and huge energy. Much scepticism of mainstream astronomy, physics, and much else has been expressed, sometimes very vigorously indeed.

For many who have posted in this section in the last 18 months or so, or who have just been reading, the ATM section has been a significant learning experience.

All this, and much more, is to be applauded; I congratulate Fraser and Phil for their efforts to establish BAUT, with its ATM section, and to keep it going.

What of Fraser’s goal for the ATM section? How has that fared?

Sadly, I feel, very poorly.

Did anything new emerge, either an otherwise unrecognised hole in some mainstream theory, or a new idea that has legs (leaving aside, for now, the 30 or so threads that were still active on 6 March)?

My personal view is no, nothing like that came to light, even under the most generous interpretation of ‘unrecognised hole’ or legs. The two that came closest are john hunter’s ‘rescaling universe model’², and Ken Nicholson’s model of galaxy rotation curves³. However, the former does not incorporate relativity (so doesn’t, in its current form, have legs), and the latter addresses a problem that it turns out was explored, and run to ground, many decades ago (so is hardly new).

Why so little success?

There are many reasons, I think, but the main ones can be grouped under two headings: ignorance, or misunderstanding, of the nature of astronomy as a science; and lack of familiarity with current results in astronomy and related fields of science.

The second is relatively straight-forward – many, perhaps most, presentations of ATM ideas were apparently blind to easily accessible material directly pertinent to those ideas; someone just didn’t do their homework first.

I have some difficulty understanding this shortcoming; BAUT has an excellent Questions and Answers section, where many friendly, helpful, and very knowledgeable BAUT members are only too keen to help. At a higher level, there are several very powerful web-based databases and search sites that, with a little investment in learning how to use them, one can use to find at least pointers to relevant facts.

In my next post, I’ll reflect on what I see as the most important reason why the ATM section has seen so little success so far in fulfilling Fraser’s hope – ignorance or misunderstanding of what ‘astronomy as a science’ means⁴.

¹though many threads were inherited from either UT or BABB
²the only alternative to the Big Bang theory, presented in the ATM section, that could reasonably claim to have matched at least one of the five key sets of observations
³Nicholson started a thread on this, in UT; it was not live when BAUT began, but TomT started a thread on it, in the Q&A section
⁴I’ll also cover the ~30 threads that were still active on 6 March.