I am beginning to think that establishing a serious alternative to BB cosmology must 1st somehow find away past a catch 22.

The EU model has been dismissed on the grounds that it is more of a set of ideas than a propper theory. But you are extremely unlikely to be granted the right to study EU under any scientific establishment that has the requisite facilities to turn these ideas into something more substantial. And until these ideas are turned into something more substantial, it is going to be hard to argue the case that study time and research money be spent on an alternative to the BB (particularly when, according to cosmologystatement.org, 'funding comes from only a few sources, and supporters of BB dominate all the peer-review committees that control the funds').

Is this not a case of no access to requisite facilities until ideas are substantiated/ no substantiation of ideas until access to requisite facilities are granted?

A catch 22 in other words.

It certainly sounds like all the bean counters are in one camp, and they all have the same sign. Fortunately, you don't need a license to think. If mankind waited for funding to accomplish every single thing, we would be chopping trees with sharp rocks and eating berries in season. Press on, young Sir.
Best regards, Dan

(My bold) Well, this does not make sense at all. All over the world people are working on plasma(astro)physics, which, if you look at it closely, is EU, because all the theories that the EU proponents say that are barred from investigation, are used in plasma(astro)physics, be it Birkeland currents, double layers etc.
The problem is that up until now no EU theory has been able to show any good results, starting with the "electric sun" to stay close at home, and moving outward to the BB.
Now please note, that plasma(astro)physics is an element that has to be taken along in cosmology (how else are you going to describe the early universe?). EU proponenst seem to think that plasma physics and electric fields are forbidden terrain for mainstream scientists.
If you can show that your EU idea has merit, which means put it to the scrutiny of your peers, and it is found to be valid then it will be accepted over a period of time (to go into details e.g. in space physics the discussion between the reconnection and the current disruption models, where the latter could be seen as the "EU" in this discussion, and I happen to think both processes take place). Nothing goes immediately, people (even scientists) need time to digest new ideas.

So, if you Extropia DaSilva have any ideas on EU, please share them with us, and we discuss them.

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Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
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Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Uhuh.

It must be possible to break out of this catch 22, because if it were not there would never have been any paradigm shifts in scientific thinking.

Do not hold your breath waiting for me to write an EU theory that has any merit. Sadly, we are no longer in the good old days when scientific debate was held in centres of great learning that shut their doors to all but the highly qualified. These days any old fool can put forward an opinion on forums. Luckily, there are probably REAL experts who can explain how, where and why the opinions of the less well-qualified are in error. Which means I get to learn far more quickly than I ever would have in an age without forums

Right now I am more interested to know why EU is not in any way accepted as a real alternative. The answer is becoming clear very quickly, I assure you.

'All over the world people are working on plasma(astro)physics, which, if you look at it closely, is EU, because all the theories that the EU proponents say that are barred from investigation, are used in plasma(astro)physics, be it Birkeland currents, double layers etc.'

Indeed. One of the unexplored features of the universe are the magnetic fields that stretch across clusters of galaxies. It is proposed that inflation could be responsible for this because, when electrons and protons 1st formed the 1st hydrogen atoms, photons would have scattered off electrons and protons. Being as they are a lot heavier than electrons, the photons would have scattered differently off them, generating small differences in the velocoties of protons and electrons and this would have created electric currents and, therefore, magnetic fields.

'EU proponenst seem to think that plasma physics and electric fields are forbidden terrain for mainstream scientists'.

The work I mentioned above is enough to show this is not the case. Electricity DOES feature in inflationary cosmology. But, as I understand it, the PC community's complaint is that electricity is invoked only at a particular stage in the universe's development and is afterwards ignored. Regardless of the fact that the PC community has not provided sufficient quantitive analysis, is it REALLY so wrong to be suspicious that general relativity might be a good description of a theoretical universe that is governed by gravity and not OUR universe that is mostly plasma and therefore electrically charged and therefore controlled mainly by electromagnetic effects?

Well, just give it a try, Extropia DaSilva, and see if magnetic fields are more important than gravity. The intergalactic magnetic field is approximately 0.1 nT (I think I have that correctly), and look at the effects that you think are important.

Now, the problem with electrical effects is ofcourse that plasmas are quasi-neutral and therefore electric fields only appear under special circumstances (like e.g. double layers) and for the rest are shielded in the deBye sphere. Therefore, a plasma blob can usually be taken as just a big blob under the influence of gravity.

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Optimism does not change the laws of physics. (T'Pol)
A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is. (Dao De Jing 27)
************************************************** *************************
Martin ( http://www.geocities.com/DrMartinV )

Well, I wouldn't look to "cosmologystatement.org" for an unbiased view of the situation.

I don't think the funding panels are nearly as closed-minded or dogmatic as you seem to imagine. And I think it's wrong to characterize participants in funding panels as "supporters of [the big bang]." They are supporters of science and of ideas that are supported by evidence.

Who are these funding panels? For the largest funding organization, the National Science Foundation, funding panel members are just researchers from around the country invited to review proposals. Yes, the proposals they choose to fund aren't going to be "insubstantial." They have to show promise. Proposals that are "against the mainstream" do not get tossed out thoughtlessly. They may be given more of a chance, because panelists are not particularly interested in verifying something we already know. Innovative is good. But a proposal must also show that there is a reasonable chance for success.

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

This is an excellent example of why there is no catch-22. The mainstream scientist at this point, points out that the inflationary period was 300,000 years before the universe cooled off enough for atoms to form.

The answer is quite clear and immediate: as it stands, there is no EU theory which agrees with the observable universe nor with the basic laws of physics.

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"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
"A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes."
Mark Twain

Avatar courtesy of Bunny.

Hi Kesh.

I got into this EU 'debate' on another forum and a couple of people assured me that if I were to argue its case amongst propper physicists I would find myself hopelessly out of my depth with EU in tatters.

They certainly seem to be in the right. I AM out of my depth on this forum and nothing I have collected on ES/EU stands as justification to call it a theory, let alone suggest it is superior to anything else.

I have not yet read all the threads on the EU debate so my refutation of it is somewhat cautious. But, certainly, what little I have read is showing it to be the worthless pseudoscience I was always warned it was. (PS, I do not think the ES HYPOTHESIS was psuedoscientific because it put forward a model that could be tested and falsified. Tim Thompson seems to have shown that what evidence exists in its favour is a distortion of the truth and I currently know of ZERO EU papers that put forward a propper scientific argument that quantitively defends the ideas. I therefore consider it BUNK and realise it was psuedoscientific to claim the 'evidence' I had in its favour was otherwise).

the thing is though Cosmic Plasmas(EU, as some refer to Cosmic Plasmas,I do not. by the way I don't like Cosmic Plasmas referred to as EU, it just somehow rubs me the wrong way). interestingly enough, is the starting point of the BB. theory.

One reason why any "Catch 22" case would be particularly hard to make (pace the signatories to the petition Extropia DaSilva cites) is surveys.

Whether it's 2dF, SDSS, 2MASS, IRAS, DENIS, WMAP, .... these huge surveys are fully public - even the raw data is available (in many cases).

Anyone - when developing an alternative cosmological theory or not - can get these survey data, for free! (you will need a broadband internet connection, and you may need to live in North America, the EU, Australia, Japan, ....)

This data is very much richer and better than anything available only a few decades ago - deeper, more consistent, more wavebands, errors much better characterised, ....

Further, ALL HST data - including the raw data - becomes available after a proprietary period (6 months, a year), and for much of it (HDF, UDF, ...) the proprietary period is 0 days.

With such a huge wealth of high quality data available, for free, what more could anyone developing an alternative want?

Maybe they want computing power? A top-of-the-line, out-of-the-box PC today has computing power that astronomers only 25 years ago couldn't have even dreamed of, much less bought. And with science grids like BOINC, and the widespread, free, availability of the underlying grid protocols, anyone developing an alternative, with a need for really heavy-duty computing, could have it - I'm sure the PCs of the signatories to the petition, plus those of their friends and relatives would make a big dent into any computing project.

So what, in fact, is the Catch 22? A paying job at a university?

'The answer is quite clear and immediate: as it stands, there is no EU theory which agrees with the observable universe nor with the basic laws of physics.'

It is curious, then, that such a clear and immediate falsification of the EU hypothesis should have generated a thread that runs to more than 70 pages.

Either one side is stubborn to the point of lunacy when it comes to avoiding admitting defeat or it is not as clear and immediate as you say.

Should I really declare everything about EU to be bunk? Could that possibly be as premature as Einsteins famous retraction of the cosmological constant?

Once you've finished reading the the EU thread, I for one would be very interested to know what you conclude.

One thing that you may conclude is that there is not a binary choice to be made (or, perhaps, not the binary choice you state).

For example, "the EU hypothesis"; AFAIK (as far as I know) no EU proponent, in that thread, characterised it as a (mere) hypothesis, so a 'clear and immediate falsification' was not (and is not) possible.

It's the former. The EU gang refuse to let anything like a lack of experimental evidence for their concept stand in their way of declaring everything about physics to be wrong.

Yep. The situation with the cosmological constant was ambiguous, so it's no surprise the Einstein turned out to be wrong in declaring it a mistake. The EU situation is different. They want to replace general relativity with their concept (it's not even a hypothesis) while ignoring the amazing accuracy with which GR matches many observations. My standard challange to EU types is to provide a description of the behavior of binary pulsars. The agreement between GR and the observation is astounding. Any alternative, such as the EU concept, must do at least as well before it can even be considered as viable. So far no one has done so.

Many take Pauli's comment as in my sig to indicate his opinion of ideas that cannot be tested. They are "not even wrong" because they make no predictions that can be used to prove them wrong. The EU concept certainly falls into this category. Of course, it also fulfills the more obvious interpretation. It's an idea that's so far out there that it bypassed wrong and went straight to ridiculous.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

'It's an idea that's so far out there that it bypassed wrong and went straight to ridiculous.'

Given that its rival has generated speculation in extra dimensions curled up in the fabric of the cosmos and time travel and gateways to parallel universes and creating new universes by heating up a region of space to 10^29 degrees K and letting it rapidly cool and 70% of the universe made up of something very dark and mysterious...

I would say that EU would have to come up with some wayyyyyy crazy ideas to top that list!

As you say, those are speculations (except for that last point), and I'm not so sure they are necessarily "generated" by the reigning paradigm. It sounds like you're just reading the wrong authors. You should be reading Murray Gell-Mann, not Michio Kaku.

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

String theory is cutting edge physics (or highly speculative depending on your point of view.) There are many in the scientific community who view it with suspicion because it has yet to make new testable predictions. That being said, string theorists realize that their theories have to be compatible with current theories and many string theories do make predictions that match those of QED, QCD, etc. This puts them way ahead of anything the the EU proponents have done have done with their "model". Most EU types seem to scorn the idea that their idea has to do anything like this, hence the scorn with which I, and other physicists view that idea.

For the purposes of the present discussion, however, string theories are a red herring. EU ideas (or at least the ones I've encountered here) seek to displace general relativity as a theory of gravity and view gravity as a manifestation of the EM force. Thus my challenge still remains. GR is the current, mainstream, theory of gravity. Any theory that seeks to replace it must do at least as well at matching observations. Binary pulsars are a classic example. When an EU model can match the data as well as GR does (as you can find in the link to the Nobel prize site I provided above) then maybe we can talk. Until then, the EU has no legs to stand on.

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"I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." - William Thompson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin

"If it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be, but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic!" - Tweedledee

This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. - Wolfgang Pauli

The real Catch 22, is that the current standard model lacks the kind of definition Neried insists on seeing in any plausible alternative. No one has a good model for Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Inflation or galactic evolution that is consistent with observational evidence. Peebles & company openly concede this, but in a recent UT article, they were blaming this on the lack of computing power...and these guys have access to every mip we can give them. Whatever I come up with on whatever system, it will be a less rigorous model than what is 'out there' under the guise of the BB. These non-working but highly complex models have taking a centuries of manhours to develop. Neried will have to wait a long time for anyone to half-cover that many bases...

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

I count myself as one of the "EU gang" and I never claimed "everything about physics to be wrong". I don't mind it when you want to state that EU is not a theory (yet, imo), or lacking experimental evidence (and there are areas where this isn't true), but don't characterise t