Every cosmology predicts a cosmic microwave background, CMB blackbody radiation: those of QSSC, Halton Arp, I. E. Segal, Plasma cosmology, Nernst, MacMillan, Millikin, and so on.

All of these theories predict a nonzero thermal spectrum (since a universe with a zero absolute temperature is impossible; even in an empty universe there still resides ZPE, ZPF, etc., thus kinetic heat).

The supposition that the CMB is a relic of a hot dense state has been problematic since the 1960's.

The CMB is neverthless one of the mighty pillars used to support the standard model, (along with redshift z due to a time-dependent scale factor to the metric, and primordial nucleosynthesis of the light elements).

My contention is that the case for this is not at all sound.

Fred Hoyle had this to say:

Claims that the CMB is proof of a hot event are inpired and cannot be disassociated from the staging__be it though creative resolve or wishful thinking__of the modern cosmology revolution. The official Nobel accreditations demonstrates the essential theatrical nature of the development.

The observed CMB, a perfect blackbody spectrum at a radiation temperature in intergalactic space of 2.726 K, is not a remnant of a hot creation event. The CMB was produced by stellar means (hydrogen burning stars, supernovae) over a time span of approximately 100 billion years, or more. (Burbidge, Hoyle, 1998, ApJ, 509 L1-L3)

Coldcreation

Fred Hoyle was cool.

CC

Here are a couple of sites I found. There are certainly many more. If anyone has a good link please post it here for a discussion of one of the major tenets, The Holly Grail of BB cosmology, the twilight's last gleaming, the dawn's early light, the bow wow of Fire-dog, the hiss of guano, an instant replay of the opening kickoff, and as S. Hawking wrote of the CMB; the handwriting of God...the greatest discovery of the century, if not of all time:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002astro.ph.11036N

http://www.cambridge.org/catalogue/c...1858984&ss=exc

Coldcreation

Hi, Coldcreation. I'm still waiting for the thread you promised a week ago, on December 26th. You know, the one where you said you will show how your preferred model quantitatively agrees with the data.

Do all of these "cosmologies" also explain all the evidence associated with the CMBR I listed in another thread? (SZ-effect, changing temperature, power spectrum etc. etc. etc. - you probably remember that)


I suppose that ZPE means zero-point energy, and ZPF zero-point force? Well, the second has nothing to do with "kinetic heat" (since a force is not an energy!), and the first occurs even at temperature zero, so it also has nothing to do with "kinetic heat" and "a nonzero thermal spectrum".


Why do most cosmologists think otherwise? Are they too dumb to see "the truth", are they caught in an "old paradigma", do they fear to lose their jobs if they speak out, or what?


Well, present a model which can explain all the available data (not just the few things you mention here), quantitatively. As long as you don't do that, your "contention" has little value.


Hoyle seems to say that because the BBT can not predict the temperature of the CMBR from first principles (i. e. without making some measurements of cosmological parameters first), it does not explain the CMBR. That argument is totally nonsensical.


Sorry, I do not have access to that journal. Do Hoyle et al. address in that article all the points of evidence I already mentioned?

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This is a big ATM issue. The hot Big Bang is still advocated by must blue shirts AFAIK. Me being a red shirt I have no trouble with a cold "big burst" .

But I was wondering why you use the time span of approximately 100 billion years, or more. It would appear that you are not only questioning the cause of the CMBR, but that you question the age of "our" expanding universe too.

Do you have any argument for why you say "our" universe is 100 billion years old instead of 13.7 billion?

No, it is critical. If first principles, if the time period and size of the universe that we observe were consistent with expansion using the mechanisms proposed in the 1960's, the background temperature would still be a keystone observation. But the universe is much too large and too old to fit a first principles argument. An ad hoc parametric - the inflationary event - had to be added to 'explain' the age, size, and structure; disassociating the theory from first principles.

As far as the fine structure argument goes, the most obvious fine structure is the galactic contamination, followed by directional flow and axial orientation along the zodiac. None of these features are likely cosmic. Inferences that lesser anisotrophys - polarization, ect., are consistent with models require a lot of faith in a lot of parametric juggling.

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jwj

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

You might be taken more seriously if you avoid such blanket statements, particularly your use of the word "every", which makes this statement patently false. You could just as easily and more accurately say, "All of the following cosmologies predict a CMB...."

False.

Please explain in detail how the combined radiation of billions of individual, separate "hydrogen burning stars, supernovae" can produce a perfect blackbody spectrum like the one that is observed. If you cannot, then your above statement is completely baseless.

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

Cool?
Hoyle made some significant contributions to the field, but I think if you were counting, you would find that he was more often just flat out wrong than correct in his views.

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

This is silly. If redshifted quasars are physically related to non-redshifted galaxies as Hoyle and Burbidge proposed, the quasars MUST be intrinsically redshifted and none of them blueshifted and that is what we observe...although if H&B's theory is correct, the LOWEST redshifts observed in quasers should be found in association with blueshifted galaxies, and this could be tested.

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jwj

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

Well, except that the apparent magnitude of the quasars they claim to be associated with the nearby galaxies is pretty dim, and the redshift of the 'associated' quasars is a fairly diverse set of redshifts out to z>4. By the time we start looking at galaxies with z>2 (where you *might* get a statistically significant difference in surrounding redshifts) the galaxy apparent magnitude is already dim, and the quasars would be invisible to our current equipment (if the H&B model is correct).

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Forming opinions as we speak

My question about the age of the universe mentioned in the OP went unanswered and so I guess Coldcreation might have gotten cold feet, lol. Just kidding Cold, I know you will respond when you get time.

Coldcreation brought it up, so let's discuss it here instead of starting a new thread.

This is a subject that I predict will start to get more interest here at BAUT ATM.

I say that for two reasons. 1) Because the CMBR has traditionally been considered the result of cooling from a 50 billion degree plus "implied" Big Bang event. The cooling was greatly assisted by exponential expansion at superluminal speeds in the first 10^-23 seconds, give or take a nanosecond . Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Except:
Where did the 50 billion degrees heat come from?
How much matter would be required to cause that heat under pressure?
Would the amount of matter required to produce that heat be equivalent to all the matter in our expanding universe; compressed to a tiny point of near infinite density? Maybe so.
Under what circumstances could such pressure compress that much matter?
How could all of that spring forth from nothing, nowhere, and when time didn't even exist? It couldn't.

2) This idea came up in my slow and cumbersome bottom up approach to cosmology. I am glad to see that a cold environment instead of a hot bang has gotten some interest outside of my musty basement.

And there are a great many other tests, (one of which antoniseb outlined), and most (all?) of which the H&B idea failed ... unless, of course, you wish to show, in quantitative detail, that the great deal of high-quality observational data is, in fact, consistent?

If you do, my nomination for a place to start is lensed quasars (and remember, this challenge, to the ATM idea on the table, is quantitative).

So unless there is someone willing to step forward and defend the H&B cosmology - quantitatively - let's have Cold Creation continue to present his ATM cosmology ideas, preferrably quantitatively, so other BAUT members can challenge them ...

Apropos of which, how does your ATM idea differ from those of Hoyle and Burbidge, Cold Creation?

Pretty cool indeed, I mean the CMB. At only 2.7 K, that energy permeating the universe may be no more than the answer to Olber's Paradox. This is what shines down to us in Kelvin from all directions and from zillions of light years away, way below the visible or infrared, energies spewed out by zillions of stars and galaxies in all directions. CMB does not of necessity have to be a left over energy from a Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago; it could be left over energy from all star generated energy everywhere, regardless of whether or not the universe was born out of nothing 13.7 billions years ago, or ever. What's left over today is 2.7 Kelvin, in all directions of space. Why make a big deal out of it? Olber, and Hoyle, would have been proud, if so.

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Credibility is simply incredible... sometimes even to me.
disclaimer

The OP seems to be proposing that the CMBR was caused by the first round of hydrogen stars. Now though I questioned the 100 billion time frame for that, I still think the tread is a CMBR thread.



Nereid, you seem to be pointing this thread toward the red shift issue. Who can refute the red shift? Let's just go home.

Now if this isn’t a CMBR thread or if it is necessary out of protocol that Coldcreation stand up and take all questions I’ll just leave it at that.
Otherwise my question stands:

I am going to disagree here. To begin with, none of the alternative cosmologies literally "predicted" a thermal background. Only big bang cosmology did that. A cosmic thermal background is a necessary consequence of all big bang models. On the other hand, most (maybe even all) of the alternative cosmologies can be made to produce thermal backgrounds, some more easily than others. But in all of those cases the thermal background is an exceptional acident, with "thermal" being a special case of "background", which has to be contrived. So a thermal background favors big bang cosmology because "thermal" is the rule, rather then the exception, only in big bang cosmology.

I don't know what that reference is, but I don't think that claim can be supported. Arthur Eddington addressed this issue back in 1926: The Internal Constitution of the Stars, chapter 13, Diffuse Matter in Space, where the first section title is The Temperature of Space. Eddington properly points out that the energy density of the stars would have an effective temperature of about 3.18 Kelvins, from the Stefan-Boltzmann Law, but would not have a Planck Law spectrum, as required for any true "thermal" source.

In current mainstream (big bang) cosmology, it is the cosmic infrared background which represents the light from the first generation of stars.

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The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

What exactly do you mean with the "size" of the universe? AFAIK, measurements seem to suggest that it is infinitely large.

Please explain what inflation has to do with these properties.

Please elaborate. What parameters do you talk about, and in what way are they "juggled"?

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Here is a simple way to view the CMBR in a static model. Think of the universe as a giant oven, with the stars being the heating elements. The stars keep burning and burning, but the universe doesn't heat up. Why? Because there are openings in the 'walls' of the oven allowing heat to escape. What are these openings? They are collectively just the cosmological redshift (to be understood as a non-expansion effect), which reduces the energy of each photon. The starlight interacts with all the matter in the oven, including the dust and gas of interstellar space. Given an infinite amount of time (only available in a static model), the oven will reach an equilibrium state characterized by a uniform blackbody temperature. Note that the CMBR photons are not just the redshifted photons themselves; that idea was shown to be wrong. It is just the normal background of a big old oven.

You appear to have taken a shot at the question I asked of Coldcreation:
Your attempt is certainly not very rigorous, but at least you've given it the old college try.

It seems to me that you have reached a state of thermal equilibrium for the background photons via the mechanism of handwaving. There are (at least) two reasons I think your explanation fails:

1. The dust and gas and other matter in the universe are not uniformly distributed, so how can you achieve thermal equilibrium from interactions with unevenly distributed matter even if you have an infinite amount of time?

2. Stars, galaxies, and active galactic nuclei continue to exist, pumping out photos, and these objects are separated by vast stretches of near-empty space. If you or Coldcreation are claiming that the measured background radiation is a result of "background starlight", well, clearly the existing stars and other bright objects are not ALL in thermal equilibrium with each other. They are in obvious thermal isolation. Their contribution to your so-called background starlight is not going to produce a blackbody spectrum.

But we do observe a near-perfect blackbody spectrum in the CMB. It's not coming from your (overly contrived) oven analogy. It's coming from the (much better analogy ) COSMIC SOUP that existed after the early hot universe cooled enough to allow nuclei to capture and retain electrons, allowing all the photon radiation to stream more freely without colliding with another particle. The soup was in near-perfect thermal equilibrium because just seconds before, each particle of soup was in direct and repeated contact with the surrounding particles of soup.

How can one star be in thermal equilibrium with another star when they're not even close to being in contact with each other?

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

It matters not that the matter is unevenly distributed. A hydrogen atom out in deep space will be hit by radiation from all sides and reemit radiation. It does not matter where the radiation originated or how far the radiation travelled before hitting the atom. The elements in your oven are also not evenly distributed throughout the oven. Yet it can still reach an equilibrium temperature.

I don't think anyone was saying stars are in thermal equilibrium with each other. I'm not understanding your point here.

I never promised anything. But I will attempt to get a pdf. file online first. In the mean time, I did not need a pdf online to begin a discussion on CMBR. This topic cannot wait.


Could you make a list here for other users who may not be familliar with the other thread?


Zero-point fluctuations, ZPF, are an irreducible property of ZPE.

My point is simple: All comologies predict a CMB. There can be no cosmology with an absolute zero value thermal spectrum, even in principle. As a zero value would result in the break-down of the third law of thermodynamics, GR and QM.


I would agree with you on 2 and 3.

What Hoyle does say is clear and it makes sense. What he 'seems' to say is your interpretation. I would help of you could get hold of the papers in question.

It is a pitty the abuse of parameters (DM, DE, etc.) has had such importance in the outcome of maintream ideas on the CMB.


I will have to go to my office and find a copy of the paper.
Good question!!!

CC

I repeat and I add, all cosmologies either implicitely or explicitely predict a thermal radiation (a nonzero CMBR temperature). A zero value (i.e., absolute zero temperature for a blackbody thermal spectrum, even in principle, is not an option). See explanation above.


Sorry to disagree with you.


I beleive the answer to this question is of key importance. But you may not appreciate the tenets: infinite universe in both space and time, nonexpanding, etc.
I will come back with a complete answer shortly.

"There was a great debate going on at that time between the theory that the universe began with a big bang and the theory... that the universe had existed forever... Martin [Rees] and I were impressed by the observational evidence that was beginning to come in for the big bang from counts of radio sources and quasars. The controversy was finally settled by the discovery of a faint background of radiation that could only have been left over from the big bang." -- Stephen Hawking, 1997

Do you really think that Stephen Hawking was unaware of your argument, which was first put forward and published in 1896?

Do you really think that Stephen Hawking had no basis or reason to state that the background of radiation could only have been left over from the big bang?

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

Well, replace "promised" with "said".


What I wrote there was:
Apparently you either missed that post, or chose to ignore most of these pieces of evidence.


What exactly do you mean with "irreducible property"?

BTW, you ignored my argument that ZPE (or ZPF) don't imply a non-zero temperature.



Do you mean a temperature of zero when you say "zero value"? Well, obviously there can be no thermal spectrum with a temperature of zero. But I don't see why a cosmology with no thermal background spectrum at all should be possible (obviously, there is always radiation from stars, but it has already been pointed out that that radiation does not have a thermal spectrum).


Interesting. And on what do you base that assessment?

Sorry, for me it is not clear what his argument exactly is. Could you try to rephrase it for me, please? Unfortunately, I do not have access to any university physics library in the moment, so it is hard to get hold of the papers. Are they available online somewhere?

(1) I don't see what DM and DE have to do with an "abuse of parameters".

(2) IIRC (several years have passed since I read a paper by Hoyle et al.), they (also) use quite a lot of (partly) ad hoc parameters.


IIRC, they addressed the isotropy and the near-perfect black body spectrum (although their arguments didn't look very convincing to me), and they also attempted to address the power spectrum, but had to use several free parameters in order to do that (again, I read the relevant paper several years ago, and my memory is quite vague on that). And I don't remember them at all addressing the other points I mentioned.

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The universe is big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the universe, that's peanuts. (Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

Do Hoyle et al. address the facts that
(1) there are no stars older than about 13 billion years in our galaxy, and

(2) if one looks at very distant galaxies (several billion light years away), the stars there are even younger? (e.g., with made-up numbers in order to illustrate the point: in a galaxy whose light was emitted 6 billion years ago, we see only stars up to an age of about 7 billion years)

(3) most very distant galaxies (see the Hubble (Ultra) Deep Fields) look very different from galaxies today ("immature"), quite irregular, with almost no structure

(4) there is evidence that at earlier times, there was a radiation with a temperature consistent with the temperature of the CMBR predicted by the BBT for these earlier times?

These are only a few pieces of evidence I can think of in the moment...

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The universe is big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the universe, that's peanuts. (Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

A priori, there is no reason why there should be a background thermal spectrum in the universe at all. Non-thermal spectra have to exist, for sure - but why a thermal background spectrum?

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The universe is big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the universe, that's peanuts. (Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

I don't know what Hoyle said about that, but it is not a surprising fact since most main sequence stars have lifespans less than that. In addition, in static models it can be envisaged either that galaxies are semi-permanent objects or that galaxies have lifetimes of about that same age.

Don't you mean that this is the way it has to be for the Big Bang model and so observations tend to creep toward this desired result? There are no such restrictions in the static model.

This has been discussed here before. The evidence seems to fit the eye of the beholder. Every year, however, we here more and more results about remarkably mature galaxies being found sooner and sooner after the BB.

That is one reading of the CMBR. I gave another one above. The Big Bang doesn't actually predict a specific temperature. It cannot, since it cannot possibly tell us what the initial volume of the universe was. It can only say, if if was so much, then T would have been so much.

Regarding the perfect thermal blackbody spectrum of the microwave background, from what I have read there were two blackbodies used in the instrument on COBE that measured this spectrum: an external blackbody "calibrator" and an internal blackbody "calibrator". The internal calibrator never removed but was an integral part of the interferometer system that showed a blackbody spectrum, in that half the photons entering the cone passed through this internal blackbody and its resulting signal was incorporated into the final "diagram". It seems to me this guarantees a blackbody spectrum. Can anyone explain why that would not be so?

Hawking has been wrong before. He's been the first to admit it on most occasions. Everyone is wrong once is a while. Hoyle or Einstein were not exempt from error, and neither is Hawking (viz, his recent words about how reasonable is the existence of lambda, after decades of trashing Einstein for having introduced it into his equations). Hawking has every reason to defend the CMB. Without "the handwriting of God..." as a relic of a hot early time, an entire life (particularly his) dedicated to the BB goes up in smoke.

Thanks for the link. It's a good one. I had not seen that paper before. I noticed they mention Millikan, Nernst (as in my op) and your old pal Eddington.

I just skimmed it but will read it through in depth later.

CC

Actually this particular thread was not so much meant as a showcase of my personal ideas, but more as a spotlight to bring to the attention to those unfamilliar, and to those who forgot, alternative views of the origin and evolution of the CMB. And especially, I hope will emerge, the CMB in generic to all cosmologies, and that to use the existence of the CMB as proof, or evidence, solely of a hot creation event in the past is entirely unfounded. And finally, I would like to emphasize that to assume the CMB is a redshifted remnant, or fossil soup, of an early hot dense state, is a massive unsubstatiated extrapolation.

But since you ask, I will mention that the QSSC universe has stars and galaxies spread out indefinitely and at a constant density (compatible with what is observed now) in accord with the perfect cosmological principle. And so it was possible within a timeframe of 100 Gyrs to attain the 2.7 K spectrum in perfect blackbody form.

My back-of-the-envelope calculations show that in order to reach the 2.7 K 600-250 billion years is required (that incidentally is about the time hydrogen began to form and condense, leading quickly to protostars). Those numbers may strike the reader as enormous compared with the age of stars, say, located in globular clusters here in the Milky Way (15-18 Gyrs), or compared to the supposed age of the universe (13.7 Gyrs).

Keep in mind, though, that an infinite spatiotemporal universe has all the time it needs. Put differently, it took an infinite amount of time for the temperature of the universe to reach 2.7 K. It goes without saying that the universe was colder in the past (the CMB tends to absolute zero temperature as time t tends to minus infinity).

CC

What you write is very interesting. Olbers, though, was more preoccupied with visible light. You may be right nonetheless because of the same type of reasoning could explain the relative isotropy of the CMB blackbody.