Are you talking about the website or the book? The website appears to be little more than an advertisement for the book.

And in their "book preview" page, they state... "One of the most difficult challenges facing independent researchers is the "peer review" system of scientific and educational institutions and media." Forgetting for the moment that peer review is probably NOT the most difficult challenge facing independent researchers, we notice that the authors of this book make this statement apparently to justify their complete avoidance of the peer review system. The claim that peer reviewers only accept views that coincide with their own really seems to be the refuge of researchers whose research program have simply failed.

If their theory was so "well researched and intelligently presented", they wouldn't have to tip-toe around the scientific community and inject their ideas into the lay community. And what's their point in doing this? Book sales? To gather fans from the gullible, lay community does little to validate the science, methinks.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

There are basically 3 possibilities here:

1. The "experts" (with the exception of a tiny minority) are right (or, at least, pretty close).
2. The "experts" (with the exception of a tiny minority) are wrong, but believe they are right.
3. The "experts" (with the exception of a tiny minority) are wrong, know it, and are actively covering it up.

#2 requires that laymen can be smarter/more knowledgeable than most experts. As a layman and someone who respects the fact that guys like the BA have studied this for decades, I consider that possibility preposterous, pretentious, and arrogant.

#3 requires a vast, global conspiracy among mainstream scientists and is equally preposterous.

The problem, as I see it, is that laymen are too often tricked by things that sound straightforward and fit their common sense (your words). Newtonian gravity is straightforward, while Relativity requires suspending preconcieved notions of what "makes sense." As a result, a lot of people never accept Relativity because just reading the description doesn't show you that it must be true. I'm a moderator of a Physics bulletin board (the engineering section) and I see this all the time. And the other moderators who are actually physicists get irritated with laymens' books like "A Brief History of Time" because they don't show the inner-workings of the theory - all a layman can do is choose to believe it or not. Generally, in a laymans' book, that depends on how well its presented for laymen's ears.

Arp, I believe, truly believes in his work, presents it well (and thus gains that little following of laymen), and is simply mistaken.

Not sure about that. But nevertheless, the CMB DOES demonstrate a hotter one. And if the universe is expanding today, then I think it would be hard to deny that it must have been smaller yesterday.

This is the observation that led the two supernova search teams to conclude that the expansion of the universe must be accelerating. [Edit to add:] The Sne Ia are actually farther away than we would expect by assuming the universe is not accelerating. They're 25% dimmer because they're farther away.

Debatable. Not sure where your data is coming from.

Not according to what I've read. Distant supernova Ia have longer light curves in direct proportion to Einstein's formulae for time dilation.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I thought history shows that most major changes in paradigm fall into category #2, including Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Big Bang theory. Originally most people thought they were wrong (scientists and leymen alike), but the new ideas turned out to be right-ish.

And as for a conspiracy, the evidence speaks for itself, see:

• British scientists exclude 'maverick' colleagues, says report
• Rejecting Nobel class articles and resisting Nobel class discoveries
• Publication Prejudices: An Experimental Study of Confirmatory Bias in the Peer Review System
• Trial by peers comes up short
• Archaeological Cover-ups, A Plot to Control History?

Fortunately most scientists are honourable, impartial and objective individuals, but it's easy to see how one can become a little cynical.

Regards,
Ian Tresman[/list]

dgruss23, thanks for the great information. Not only the details of Red Shift (which was explained in simple and understandable terms), but also on how to distinguish between an empirical model and a theoretical model. And most especially on how no matter how good the evidence, there will always be conflicting conclusions of what the evidence imply.

As I said in an earlier reply, I don't believe in any conspiracy, but I do tend to lean towards iantresman views. iantresman thank you for the links, I'll look over them to determine whether there seems to be a debilitating territorial aspect in the science community which may not exclude differing views, but does make differing views difficult to accept. With corporate finanacing of research, the territorial aspects may be getting worse. or not?

How long has it taken to make any sort of paradigm shift? A few centuries for Galeleo's view of the cosmos? a few decades for Newtonion Mechanics? a few years for Einstiens theory of relativity? At least it seems to be getting better. What is the next paradigm shift?

In my opinion, the Big Bang will be replaced by a version of the Electric Universe (plasma based), that will also help our understanding of ancient history and the human body (see Bruce Lipton's explanation of the cell in electromagnetic terms).

I'm aware of some research that will be published (in a peer reviewed journal), that is going to put the plasma/electric universe firmly on the map.

The evidence for currents in space is overwhelming. Background radiation in space has an electric field strength of about 3E-6 N/C, Earth's atmosphere about 150 N/C, the cell membrane 10E7 N/C, and the Solar Wind about 1-10 mV/m. Current flows in the Earth's aurorae, in sprites and elves from the Earth's upper atmosphere into space, between Jupiter and Io, in the Sun-centered current sheet, between galaxies in Birkeland currents, and provide an (alternative) mechanism for their formation that can be duplicated in the lab.

Electric currents also produce magnetic fields and microwave radiation without the need for invisible black holes and invisible dark matter.

References:

• The Evidence For Electrical Currents in Cosmic Plasma, A. L. Peratt, IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci. 18, p.26 (1990) [PDF]
• Immense Flows of Charged Particles Discovered Between The Stars, referencing the paper Interstellar Neutral Hydrogen Filaments at High Galactic Latitudes and the Bennett Pinch, G. L. Verschuur, Astrophys. Space Sci. 227, pp. 187-198, 1995 [PDF]

Regards,
Ian Tresman

Thanks everyone for your responses.

Just to follow up, the author has posted another article on the big bang. He argues that the whole Doppler interpretaition is thrown into doubt because when it's applied, it produces the illusion of galaxies stretched along lines radiating from the earth, despite the fact that no believes that the earth is the "center of the universe."

Here a link to the article:

http://www.rense.com/general58/bbang.htm

Any comments would be much appreciated.

Michael Goodspeed is very unlikely to be right when discussing science.

On this page, also on Rense's site, he rails against me, using extraordinarily bad logic, and leaps broadly to unsupported conclusions. He also toes James McCanney's party line about comets, which is laughably bad and in many cases trivially easy to show to be grossly wrong.

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Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

Just for clarification, how have you come to that conclusion? Is it that you're accepting the majority view? Or is it that you've seen evidence that demonstrates Arp is mistaken? If the latter, what would that evidence be that has convinced you Arp's empirical model must be wrong?

Good grief - his characterization of you is as absurd as the characterization he offered on the original article linked to at the start of this thread. He actually says that you take the approach that a pseudoscientist is anyone that disagrees with you. This is clearly an individual that is not to be taken seriously.

My comment is that you should waste no further time reading that website. He doesn't even do a respectable job of explaining the "fingers of god" effect in an article in which he claims it refutes the Big Bang. If you want to discuss the evidence for Arp's or other against the mainstream theories there are plenty of people here that can give you the various views.

Only if one assumes the ONLY possible cause of the CMB is a big bang. There is also an infrared peak, an IR continuum out there that has a shape and power function similar to the CMB – where did it come from? Cosmologist make a big deal out of the fact that the CMB is exclusively primal, but they do not have an equally convincing argument for where the IR background came from. To insist that the CMB is a keystone evidence of a Big Bang, and then push the IR background under the rug because it does not fit in the picture, is a major incongruency.
YES IT SHOULD, and we should be able to clearly see that smaller, more dense, lower heavy metal, more primal universe in deep field surveys. We can’t. I don’t think it is there.

Galama, Nomato, and Iamoto have reported SN 1998bw is the brightest supernova ever seen in the 'local' universe (redshift z = 0.0085). It also has the longest blue light curve, dimming less than one magnitude in more than 28 days, and although it has many of the attributes of a Ia, it has been classified as a core-collapse supernova or hypernova.

As you pointed out to me, core collapse supernova are thought to be more likely to occur in the early universe, and a bright supernova or hypernova like 1998 bw should be easier to find than a type Ia at high redshift. Where are the damn things? You have not found any published papers asking these questions. Have you ask yourself why?

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

No, thats a very, very common misconception (perpetuated by crackpots and picked up on by laymen). Einstein is the typical example of a layman (just a lowly patent clerk) overcoming the dogma of the establishment to revolutionize physics. The reality is quite different: he was an educated, accomplished physicist tackling a well-known problem with the existing theory and his work was quickly seen for what it was: correct.

Newton won a contest to derive gravity. His work was well recieved in his time.

Galileo's work was not generally well recieved, but there is a reason for that: there were few actual scientists to recieve it! The people who persecuted him all did so on a religious, not scientific basis. Scientists, on the other hand, did recognize Galileo's work.

The BBT is the logical conclusion arrived at from what was, at the time, a startling discovery. Those two sentences contradict each other - and that evidence doesn't in any way imply a vast, global conspiracy (especially in light of the second sentence there...). In general, they are relatively fast: a good theory stands up on its own in front of good scientists. All of your examples were relatively fast paradigm shifts. It must be remembered that it often takes a decade to develop a new theory: Relativity, for example was accepted in part (SR) before it was even completed. The Galileo caveat has to be emphasized: his work was well-recieved by his contemporaries. At 28, he was a university department-head. When he built his telescope and scientists looked through it, they did comprehend what they saw.

The problem was simply that very few laymen knew anything at all of science (since it was in its infancy) and then there was the Catholic church... I cannot emphasize enough that the people who persecuted Galileo were not scientists.

More good info on Galileo - http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/galileo/ He needs to learn some basic geometry. The BBT does, in fact make every point in the universe look to itself like its at the center of the universe. Largely the first reason, but with some of the second (or rather, a third, similar reason): I'm inclined to cede to the experts because they are and I'm not. I'm smart enough to evaluate evidence and come to my own conclusion, but I'm no longer arrogant enough (you should have seen me in high school arguing with my teachers...) to believe that I know better than people who really are experts.

My basic problem with Arp's model is it is an ad- hoc model that assumes the existence of something for which there is no evidence - it assumes the existence of the very thing it purports to prove. It will always require one more assumption than BBT, and that makes it generally inferior.

Possibly faulty reasoning but, if the universe is expanding then shouldn't we be observing galaxies poping up in places where they weren't before or haven't we mapped enough of the visible universe to be sure that it isn't our new technology that's making it possible to see them.

Secondly, if we looked at lower wavelengths shouldn't we see galaxies well beyond the age of the universe as predicted by the BB if the any of the non-expanding universe theories are correct? 8-[

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MrObvious

A little thing about Galileo Galilei.

He got in trouble with the Church because he refuted the primacy of theology and philosophy over science.

Basically he said:
"Theology and philosophy have no business telling physicists whether their theories are right or wrong."
By doing so he challenged the authority of the Church, becoming an heretic. He was not an heretic because he was right.
To the Church officials it did not really matter whether he was right.

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papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

"...because the logic of the lines traced from reality is as poor of aesthetic value as it is strict in consistency. " - Paolo Bozzi (Naive Physics - free translation)

I'd say a lot of people take this approach - and there is nothing wrong with that. But at the same time people are capable of evaluating the evidence for themselves independent of the prevailing opinion. If they come to the conclusion that the mainstream position is mistaken re Arp, that does not mean they have been misled by clever writing on Arp's part.


This isn't right. Arp's model is not "assuming" intrinsic redshifts exists. Its pretty straightforward. He's found evidence that some high redshift objects are associated with nearby low redshift objects (eg NGC 7603, NEQ3 ...). Since the redshift discrepancy is too large to be the result of any current mainstream processes(gravitational redshifts, peculiar motions ...) he has interpreted the observations to mean that these objects have an intrinsic redshift component.

That is not an "assumption". It is an inference/conclusion derived from observational results. There is nothing ad-hoc about it. And his early papers show that. He considered more mainstream explanations for the redshift discrepancies (as did others) in the late 60's/early 70's - but all of those explanations failed.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Expansion of the universe is an interpretation of observations, not an observation.

This seems to be a more reasonable discussion of the "Fingers of God" effect.

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

This is true, but needs some elaboration. The scholars of Ptolomey were excellent mathematicians, and the epicycles of Ptolemy worked better than Copernicus’s Sun-centered model. The fact that there was no observable parallax to the stars was an excellent and scientific explanation for the earth-centered model. It wasn’t until Kepler was able to demonstrate elliptical orbits provided a much simpler solution that the ‘modified’ Copernican model became ‘scientifically’ preferable.

My basic problem with General Relativity is that it is an ad-hoc model that does not address or assign causality. It has great predictive powers, but so do epicycles. It was just as rewarding to conceptualize, model and predict events using Ptolemy’s mathematical models as it is with Einstein’s. This does not make them true.

The solutions to the gravimetric and time dilation effects characteristic of general relativity can also be found using wave equations and slowing the speed of light as it enters a high impedance gravitational tensor, rather than warping space and time. This mathematically equivalent solution allows causality to be assigned to relativistic effects. But it also predicts we should see very distant gravitational waves as electromagnetic, rather than seismic events.

It also establishes exact equivalence between inertial and gravitational tensors, and provides a reference pool for the zero point field. Einstein would be very happy to see these holes filled, I think. I don't think he was that in love with his own theory.

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jwj

It's a big universe out there...is it really unwinding, really burning out?

I don’t think this response works well for the intellectually curious. Could you illustrate your point? For instance, I’ve seen plenty of observational data on the Thunderbolts Picture of the Day archive—
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/20...od-archive.htm

Do you dispute the “facts” (observational data) presented?

I can imagine how one might see a “conspiratorial” vision in a couple of the paragraphs, as several folks have stated. That’s not what I saw. The banishing of Halton Arp was not a minor slip in judgment. It suggests a dangerous posture on the part of the scientists involved. Perhaps the real question is: how pervasive is this posture given the very considerations you highlight. (I would also have emphasized the natural human need to be RIGHT. No one who has taught college courses, written books, given public talks, or invested a lifetime of research based on “group think” ideas wants to see these ideas crash and burn.)

I’d like to see this claim discussed. It’s obvious that scientific databases are exploding on the net. On the other hand, every month that goes by I find a larger number of articles and data files that I’m unable to access. I can give you plenty of examples if you’d like, and perhaps you have a password that could help me a little here?

If you're talking about astronomy articles, you can download most recent research articles for free at the Los alamos preprint server. I say "most" in that the articles are posted there at the choice of the author(s).

I would agree with ExpErdmann that "group think" is more prevalent than "conspiracy". For example, earlier russ watters said that he accepts (essentially on authority) the mainstream doubt of Arp's work.

But researchers are highly specialized and no one researcher can be an expert in all areas. Every researcher must at some point trust the work of others upon which some of their own research may rely. So cosmologists these days have seen and trust the results that indicate accelerating expansion. Jerry Jensen is raising some interesting arguments about those results. But how many researchers actually have the specific technical knowledge needed to evaluate Jerry's claims and contrast it with the Supernova researchers claims?

My point is that the mainstream theory at this time is for an accelerating expansion, but that mainstream view that nearly all astronomers hold is based upon trust in the much smaller group of researchers doing the supernova research. I'm not implying in any way that these are unreliable people. I'm merely pointing out how a "group think" could originate.

Here is the opinions of one researcher that has published alternative research. Each person can form their own judgements about it. Unfortunately, the title will probably cause some to become indignant.

That's exactly right. The way it must go in most faculty meetings in physics, geology and astronomy is something like this. We were all taught theory A is correct and we've all made progess during our careers adding bits to theory A. Now you come along and tell us that theory B is really the correct one, but no one else thinks that way and if we went along with you our department will look bad and we won't get our usual grants to add bits to theory A. So, while we hate to see you go, could you kindly pack up and peddle your wares at the community college 40 miles away from here.

What's missing is real scientific intelligence in the top levels of government. People who are willing to say "Hey, why not spend 2 per cent of our budget on these other ideas that, if true, could change the foundations of science?". The people who get that close to power are all ones who supported theory A. Now, there are lots of areas of science where theory A is the only way to go, and science leaps ahead in those areas. There are just these few basic areas where we've run aground, mostly in physics, astronomy and geology. I'm not aware of too many flaming controversies in chemistry, but maybe I'm just out of the loop there. In biology, it's fantastic right now, one discovery after another.

For me the issue is not Rense.com, which is just one of several sites that have posted the Goodspeed articles. I’m most interested in two things: clarity on the status of the big bang in the wake of Arp’s work; and the reliability of information presented on the thunderbolts.info website, which has consistently supported Arp while going well beyond him in entering unorthodox territory. See in particular their Picture of the Day archive—
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/20...od-archive.htm

I can’t speak for others, but I’d prefer to hear where you dispute things presented as fact, either by Goodspeed or at thunderbolts.info. Goodspeed placed an interesting emphasis on his absence of scientific credentials. His point was that the state of affairs has reached a very revealing juncture. A lay person, who is willing to look at pictures, will have an easier time seeing the obvious than an impeccably trained defender of orthodoxy.

Keep in mind as well that the group behind thunderbolts.info DOES include meticulously scientific investigators. To treat all of them as charlatans and fools is probably the biggest mistake we could make.

I took a look at the thunderbolts website. Their Picture of the day has a few interesting examples of Arp's work.

For those that are interested in evaluating Arp's work for themselves the NGC 7319 example from October 1, 2004 is an excellent opportunity to put both sides of this debate into perspective.

The image speaks for itself. The amount of absorption and reddening that the quasar's light would experience that close to the nucleus of NGC 7319 if it was actually a background object is tremendous. You should not be able to see any background quasars where this quasar is seen. This is clearly an example that supports Arp's model for ejection of quasars. The mainstream claim that all Arp's associations are accidental just doesn't work here. The galaxy is too opaque at the quasar's position to allow background light through.

But then we turn to the thunderbolts description. They claim this example disproves the Big Bang. It doesn't. The universe may still be expanding and these quasar ejections and all other intrinsic redshift phenomenon are superimposed upon the expansion. By superimposed I mean that there could be an underlying expansion rate such as ~60 km s-1 Mpc-1 upon which the intrinsic redshifts are added.

Hopefully this helps those of you that do not simply accept the mainstream position on authority but are interested in judging for yourself the validity of Arp's hypothesis. The observational evidence can be evaluated and questions generated by anybody. The mainstream has no answers for many of Arp's examples. But Arp supporters often overstate the implications of his results for the BBT.

I think you’re misreading the situation. Goodspeed doesn't “toe James McCanney’s party line.” To get a balanced view of the issue, you have to begin with the fact that the electric comet theory is not James McCanney’s. It traces to a fairly common view in the 19th century, and in the 20th century the concept received its first formulations by engineer Ralph Juergens in the early 1970s. I personally know respected plasma scientists and electrical engineers who are now enchanted by the electric model. When they see someone dismiss the electric comet they grimace mightily. See Goodspeed’s own article, “The True Origins of Electric Comet Theory,”—
http://www.rense.com/general54/trueor.htm

Though I’m new here, I’ll presume that following this issue would require a new thread?

What's wrong with this explanation?

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

I think you're looking at it through ATM, Inc. polarized sunglasses or something. I'd have to search the literature, but I think there certainly are findings of lower heavy metal; more dense; smaller, more primal-shaped structures. When you concentrate on a few anomalies, you fail to see the vastness of the forest that is not anomalous.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.