Category Archives: Big Bang

Groupthink, Dogma & Inertia

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Re: this Ethan Siegel article.

“If we ever want to go beyond our current understanding, any alternative theory has to not only reproduce all of our present-day successes, but to succeed where our current theories cannot. That’s why scientists are often so resistant to new ideas: not because of groupthink, dogma, or inertia, but because most new ideas never clear even the first of those epic hurdles, and are inconsistent with the established data we already possess.“

Strangely enough that is a pretty good description of why modern theoretical physics appears to be in fact quite dogmatic and inert. If new ideas can be dismissed for not immediately clearing the “epic hurdles” that theorists prescribe, then they amount to nothing more than preemptive barriers to new ideas. This greatly favors the orthodoxy.

No research funding is available for new ideas that don’t hurdle the barriers. They function as a defensive bulwark protecting the standard model from unorthodox incursions.

The only new ideas that are quickly adopted are those that fit the old model to new data. The favored model can be continuously revised (new epicycles, dark matter, etc.) into agreement with unpredicted new data. The “epic hurdles” only apply to new ideas that challenge the orthodoxy. New ideas needed to salvage the old model are adopted without reservation.

And so here we are, stuck with a cosmological model that is in an exactly analogous situation to that which existed with respect to Ptolemaic Cosmology prior to Kepler. Ptolemy’s model could be massaged into agreement with most observations and repeatedly tinkered into agreement with new, more accurate data, but only to some degree. So it is with the Big Bang model. Math is like that, but math is not physics.

Like PC, the BB model has at its core two fundamental misperceptions about the nature of physical reality. PC assumed geocentrism and that bodies orbited the earth in perfect circles. Only once geocentrism and perfect circles were set aside could science advance.

The two misperceptions underlying the BB are first, that the Cosmos can be mathematically modeled as a simple, unitary, simultaneously-existing entity – a Universe. Secondly, the observed cosmological redshift can be attributed to some form of recessional velocity. The inevitable consequence of those assumptions is an Expanding Universe model – the BB.

The first assumption has been falsified by known physics. The speed of light has a finite maximum such that it requires light from the most distant objects we currently observe more than 10 billion years to reach us. It therefore follows that we have no knowledge of the simultaneous state of the Universe because it is physically impossible to have such knowledge. It is a metaphysical conceit, not a demonstrable scientific fact, that such a Universe even exists.

The second assumption is false because it depends on the first being true. It is meaningless to assume something that requires something that does not exist (the Universe) to have a property (expansion) that cannot possibly be observed.

As was the case in Kepler’s time, the only solution to the dogmatic inertia that cripples modern cosmology is to discard the foundational assumptions of the standard model and start over, by rigorously assessing the data on hand without the distorting blinders of the old model.

Over the last century there has been an enormous increase in our knowledge of the Cosmos but due to the dogmatic inertia of the scientific academy all of that new knowledge has not generated any new ideas because it has all been run through the meat-grinder of the standard model. The result has been a dogmatic and inert BB model that describes in excruciating detail a Universe that does not exist and bears no resemblance to the Cosmos we actually observe.

Kepler had an advantage that modern researchers do not – he was not dependent on the dogmatic and inert modern scientific academy for funding. Modern cosmology will remain an unscientific digression into prescientific orthodoxy until it’s research funding is driven by the physics researchers investigating, by observation and measurement, physical reality.

Theoretical modelers in such a system would be required to produce models that reflect the physical phenomenon uncovered by physics researchers. The math must follow the physics if cosmology is to be a science.

The failed Big Bang model needs to be consigned to the dust bin of history where it can serve as an object lesson in how not to do science.

Denial Of The Deluded

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The New York Times has a recent guest article entitled The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel. It is in some ways good to see doubts about the Standard Model of Cosmology surfacing in the mainstream press. What the authors, an astrophysicist and a theoretical physicist, have on offer though is some weak tea and a healthy dose of the usual exculpatory circular reasoning.

The authors do point out some of the gaping holes in the SMoC’s account of the Cosmos:

  • “normal” matter — the stuff that makes up people and planets and everything else we can see — constitutes only about 4 percent of the universe. The rest is invisible stuff called dark matter and dark energy (roughly 27 percent and 68 percent).
  • Cosmic inflation is an example of yet another exotic adjustment made to the standard model. Devised in 1981 to resolve paradoxes arising from an older version of the Big Bang, the theory holds that the early universe expanded exponentially fast for a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. 

That’s a start I guess but then we get this absurd rationalization for simply accepting the invisible and entirely ad hoc components of the SMoC:

There is nothing inherently fishy about these features of the standard model. Scientists often discover good indirect evidence for things that we cannot see, such as the hyperdense singularities inside a black hole.

Let’s be clear here about this so-called “indirect evidence“; all of it essentially boils down to model dependent inference. Which is to say, you cannot see any evidence for these invisible and/or impossible (singularities) things unless you peer through the distorting lenses of the simplistic mathematical models beloved of modern theoretical physicists. People who believe that mathematical models determine the nature of physical reality are not scientists, they are mathematicists and they are deluded – they believe in things that, all the evidence says, are not there.

Not only are mathematicists not scientists, they are not good mathematicians either. If they were good at math and found that one of their models was discordant with physical observations they would correct the math to reflect observations. What mathematicists do is correct reality to fit their math. That is where the dark sector (dark matter & dark energy) come from – they added invisible stuff to reality to make it fit their broken model.

A mathematician did come up with a correction to Newtonian dynamics that had been inaccurately predicting the rotation curves of disk galaxies. Mordehai Milgrom developed MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) in the 1980s and it was quite successful in predicting galactic disk dynamics.

Unfortunately the mathematicists had already off-loaded their problem onto reality by positing the existence of some unseen dark matter. All you have to know about the state of modern theoretical physics is that after 40 years of relentless searching and failure to discover any empirical evidence there remains a well-funded Dark Matter cottage industry, hard at work seeking evidence for the non-existent. This continuing search for that which is not there represents a betrayal of science.

It might appear that the authors here are not mathematicists given that they seem to be suggesting that the SMoC is not sacrosanct and needs to be reconsidered in its entirety:

We may be at a point where we need a radical departure from the standard model, one that may even require us to change how we think of the elemental components of the universe, possibly even the nature of space and time.

Sounds promising but alas, the reconsideration is not to be of the foundational assumptions of the model itself but only certain peripheral aspects that rest on those assumptions such as “…the assumption that scientific laws don’t change over time.” Or they suggest giving consideration to to this loopy conjecture: “…every act of observation influences the future and even the past history of the universe.“

What the authors clearly do not wish to reconsider is the model’s underlying concept of an Expanding Universe. That assumption – and it is only an assumption of the model – was adopted 100 years ago at a time when it was still being debated whether the galaxies we observed were a part of, or separate from, the Milky Way. It was, in other words, an assumption made in ignorance of the nature and extent of the Cosmos as we now observe it. The authors treat the Expanding Universe concept as though it had been handed down on stone tablets by some God of Mathematicism:

A potent mix of hard-won data and rarefied abstract mathematical physics, the standard model of cosmology is rightfully understood as a triumph of human ingenuity. It has its origins in Edwin Hubble’s discovery in the 1920s that the universe was expanding — the first piece of evidence for the Big Bang. Then, in 1964, radio astronomers discovered the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background, the “fossil” radiation reaching us from shortly after the universe began expanding.

For the record, Edwin Hubble discovered a correlation between the redshift of light from a galaxy and its distance. That is all he discovered. It is an assumption of the model that the redshift is caused by some form of recessional velocity. It is also an assumption of the abstract mathematical physics known as the FLRW equations that the Cosmos is a unified, coherent, and simultaneously existing entity that has a homogenous and isotropic matter-energy distribution. Both of those assumptions have been falsified by observations and by known physics.

Also for the record it should be noted that prior to the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation predictions by Big Bang cosmologists ranged over an order of magnitude that did not encompass the observed 2.7K value. At the same time scientists using thermodynamic considerations made more accurate predictions.

The belief in an Expanding Universe has no scientific basis. It is a mathematicist fantasy, and until that belief is set aside, the Standard Model of Cosmology will remain a crappy, deluded fairy tale that does not in any objective way resemble the magnificent Cosmos we observe.

The Self-Deluded Nature of Modern Cosmology

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In a discussion over at ACG, Louis Marmet recently posted this 2022 paper by the cosmologist James Peebles. It is, in essence, another apologia for the current mess in theoretical cosmology offered by one of the prominent purveyors of that mess. The paper is a hot cauldron of disingenuous argumentation based on the usual mathematicist predilection for circular logic that always begins with the premise that the standard model is correct only to arrive at the same conclusion.

Rather than sort through all of the disingenuous arguments presented, I want to focus on a peculiarly blatant factual misrepresentation repeated numerous times throughout the paper. It is this falsehood that the paper’s strained defense of ΛCDM (against the barrage of anomalies besetting the model) relies on:

To reduce the chance of misunderstanding I emphasize that the empirical case that the ΛCDM theory is a good approximation to reality remains compelling. (…)

… the tests have persuasively established that the ΛCDM theory is a good approximation to reality that likely requires refinement. (…)

… the ΛCDM universe has been shown to look a lot like what is observed. (…)

,,, we have a compelling case that the ΛCDM theory is a useful approximation to reality… (…)

… many well-checked tests show that the ΛCDM universe looks much (like) our universe.

Apparently the strategy is the old, repeat the lie often enough and somebody might believe it. The facts of the matter are incontrovertible though. There is no empirical evidence supporting the existence of any of the ΛCDM model’s defining features. The Cosmos we directly observe does not contain any of the following elements:

  • A singularity
  • A Big Bang event
  • An Inflation event
  • Expanding spacetime
  • Dark Matter
  • Dark Energy

Taken together, those are the defining elements of the ΛCDM model. None of them appear in the Cosmos we observe. There is not even a faint family resemblance between the ΛCDM model and the Cosmos we observe. Any claim to the contrary is simply a falsehood.

So how do cosmologists like Peebles wind up convincing themselves that their model universe looks like reality? Obviously empiricism has nothing to do with the matter. It is solely a matter of belief. Modern cosmology is simply a cult of belief. The belief system can be reduced to the following propositions:

  • Mathematics underlies and determines the nature of physical reality. (Mathematicism)
  • The assumptions of the FLRW model that underlies ΛCDM are axiomatically true and therefore the expanding universe of ΛCDM is axiomatically true.
  • Any physical elements that ΛCDM requires physical reality to possess in order to reconcile the model with observations must exist because the model is correct.

To be fair to Peebles here, he does admit that “... the extreme simplicity of the dark sector of the standard ΛCDM cosmology seems unlikely to be better than a crude approximation to reality…“, but that’s a pretty tepid comment considering the “dark sector” (dark matter & dark energy) of the model constitutes 95% of the model’s matter-energy content, while comprising 0% of empirical reality’s matter-energy content. It’s like saying Ptolemy’s epicycles are a crude approximation of physical reality. They are, but that is beside the point.

Both crude approximations are necessary because the underlying models (geocentrism, the expanding universe) are inaccurate representations of physical reality. The crude approximations are necessary because the foundational assumptions of both models are fundamentally wrong.

The standard model of cosmology is a crude approximation of the Cosmos in the same way that Ptolemy’s geocentric cosmology was. The Cosmos is not an “expanding universe” and the Earth is not at its center. It does not matter that cosmologists choose to believe the former but reject the latter. There is no direct empirical evidence to support their belief and the model based on it is palpably nonsensical, being entirely composed of elements (both entities and events) that do not exist in physical reality.

Science is not supposed to be the study of belief systems, it is by definition restricted to the study of physical reality. Modern cosmology as currently practiced is a belief system, not a science. Physical reality bears no resemblance to the standard model of cosmology and vice versa. ΛCDM is an abject scientific failure and it desperately needs to be relegated to the dust bin of history if cosmology is to ever become a real science rather than a playground for self-deluded mathematicists.

The Mathematicist’s Tale

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19Jun22 The following was posted as a comment to this Medium post by Eric Siegel. It has been slightly edited.

This is a good overview of the illogical mathematicism at the root of the inane Big Bang model. The Friedmann equation is indeed the headwaters of all the nonsense that currently engulfs and overwhelms any possibility of a meaningful scientific account of the Cosmos.

The Friedmann equation rests not only on the two simplifying assumptions of mathematical convenience, isotropy and homogeneity, the author cites. There was also an unstated but implicit assumption that the Cosmos could be treated as a unified, coherent, simultaneous entity, a Universe.

Further it was assumed that the field equations of General Relativity, derived in the context of the solar system, could be stretched to encompass this imaginary Universe. The results speak for themselves.

The standard model of cosmology is an incoherent, unscientific mess. It claims that once upon a time 13.8 billion years ago the entirety of the Cosmos was compressed into a volume smaller than a gnat’s ass that began expanding for an inexplicable reason, then accelerated greatly due to the fortuitous intervention of an invisible inflaton field, which set invisible spacetime expanding at just the right rate to arrive at the current state of the Universe, which we are told is 95% composed of some invisible matter and energy that has no other purpose than to make the model agree with observations; the remaining 5% of this Universe is the stuff we actually observe.

To be clear, all of the entities and events the standard model describes are not part of the Cosmos we actually observe except for that rather trivial 5% of the BB Universe. That 5% of the model is the Cosmos we observe.

Science is the study of those things that can be observed and measured. At some point in the mid 20th century theoretical physicists adopted the conceit that science was the study of mathematical models. This categorical error was compounded by treating scientific hypotheses such as “universal expansion” as axioms (true by definition). In science, all truths are provisional; nothing can be held true by definition.

Axioms belong to the mathematical domain. Math is not science and the mathematicist belief that math underlies and determines the nature of physical reality has no scientific basis. That the Cosmos is a unified, coherent and simultaneously existing entity can only be true if the Cosmos had a miraculous simultaneous origin – the Big Bang,

The problem with miracles is that they are not scientific in nature; they cannot be studied only believed in. Believing in the Big Bang and weaving a fantastical account of an imaginary Universe is a mathematical/metaphysical endeavor that has nothing to do with science or physical reality.

Imaginary Universe? That’s right, the Universe of the Big Bang has no basis in any known physics. In the physics we know, there is a finite, maximum limit to the speed of electromagnetic radiation – 3×10^8 meters per second (186,000 miles per hour). It is via electromagnetic radiation that we observe the Cosmos.

The galaxy nearest to our own is Andromeda; it is detectable by the unaided eye as a fuzzy patch in the night sky. Andromeda is @ 2.5 million light years from Earth. Everything we know about Andromeda is 2.5 million years out of date, of its current state we do not have and cannot have any direct knowledge.

At the far extent of our observational range we observe galaxies that are @10 billion light years away. We do not have and cannot have any knowledge of the current state of any of those galaxies. The same argument holds for all the other galaxies we observe.

Galaxies are the primary constituents of the Cosmos we observe. It follows, therefore, that we do not and cannot have knowledge of the Cosmos’ current state. The very idea of the Cosmos having a current state is scientifically meaningless. Mathematicists believe otherwise:

“If you want to understand the Universe, cosmologically, you just can’t do it without the Friedmann equation. With it, the cosmos is yours.“


See that’s all you need, a simple mathematical model derived 100 years ago by “solving” the field equations of General Relativity (which does not have a universal frame) for a simplistic toy model of the Cosmos (that does have a universal frame). Suddenly you can know everything about everything, even things you can’t possibly observe or measure. That’s mathematicism hard at work creating an imaginary Universe for mathematicists to believe in. The standard model of cosmology has no scientific basis; it is a nerd fantasy and it is scientifically useless.

Another Day, Another Anti-Universe Rant

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I may or may not have posted this as a comment to a Quanta article. It has been modified. 25Feb2022

The belief in a wholly imaginary “universe” lies at heart of modern cosmology’s ludicrous, absurd and irrational standard model. The assumption of a universal metric with homogenous and isotropic contents underlies the FLRW equations that form the basis of all modern cosmological models.

Applying the imaginary universal metric to the field equations of General Relativity was an oxymoronic exercise that produced a ridiculous cosmological model, the Big Bang, that looks nothing like the Cosmos we actually observe. The observed Cosmos does not contain a Big Bang event, inflation, expanding spacetime, dark matter, or dark energy.

Those entities and events are part of the BB model but they are not part of empirical reality, which is to say they are not part of scientific reality. The entirety of the BB model is theoretical nonsense unhinged from the physical reality that is the only proper realm of scientific study.

Alexander Friedmann’s simplistic “homogenous and isotropic universe” assumption, made at a time when the known Cosmos consisted of our galaxy, was simply wrong. The vast Cosmos that falls within our observational range is neither homogenous nor isotropic and it makes no sense, no physical sense, to imagine that vast Cosmos constitutes a unified, coherent, and simultaneous entity.

The vast Cosmos, of which we will always have only a partial view constrained by the finite limit of light speed and the cosmological redshift, cannot be treated as a simplistic unitary entity capable of being modeled by our limited mathematical scribblings. In a very real physically meaningful way, the “Universe” of the Big Bang model doesn’t exist. It is a wholly imaginary entity.

To sustain a belief in their model of the “expanding Universe” modern cosmologists have to ignore the things that are there while believing in model-dependent imaginary things that aren’t there. Cosmology has devolved into a cult devoted to the care, maintenance, and defense of the ridiculously unscientific Big Bang model.

Modern cosmology is a mess and will remain so until the “expanding Universe” paradigm is consigned to the dustbin of history alongside Ptolemy’s geocentric model. It is time in other words to drag cosmology away from its cult-like fixation on the Big Bang and open the field to the study of cosmological models that are not dependent on the failed “expanding Universe” assumption, but are mathematically constructed to reflect the Cosmos we actually observe and measure. Humankind deserves a realistic cosmology; the dim, misbegotten fantasy we are currently saddled with doesn’t cut it.

Why The Cosmos Is Not A Universe

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One of the fundamental assumptions underlying the standard model of cosmology, commonly known as the Big Bang, is that the Cosmos comprises a unified, coherent and simultaneous entity – a Universe. It is further assumed that this “Universe” can be mathematically approximated under that unitary assumption using a gravitational model, General Relativity, that was devised in the context of our solar system. At the time that assumption was first adopted the known scale of the Cosmos was that of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, which is orders of magnitude larger and more complex than the solar system.

Subsequently as the observed Cosmos extended out to the current 13 billion light year range, it has become clear that the Cosmos is orders of magnitude larger and more complex than our galaxy. The resulting Big Bang model has become, as a consequence, absurd in its depiction of a cosmogenesis and ludicrous in its depiction of the “current state of the “Universe“, as the model attempts to reconcile itself with the observed facts of existence.

It will be argued here that the unitary conception of the Cosmos was at its inception and is now, as illogical as it is incorrect.

I Relativity Theory

The unitary assumption was first adopted by the mathematician Alexander Friedmann a century ago as a simplification employed to solve the field equations of General Relativity. It imposed a “universal” metric or frame on the Cosmos. This was an illogical or oxymoronic exercise because a universal frame does not exist in the context of Relativity Theory. GR is a relativistic theory because it does not have a universal frame.

There is, of course, an official justification for invoking a universal frame in a relativistic context. Here it is from a recent Sabine Hossenfelder video:

In general relativity, matter, or all kinds of energy really, affect the geometry of space and time. And so, in the presence of matter the universe indeed gets a preferred direction of expansion. And you can be in rest with the universe. This state of rest is usually called the “co-moving frame”, so that’s the reference frame that moves with the universe. This doesn’t disagree with Einstein at all.

The logic here is strained to the point of meaninglessness; it is another example of the tendency of mathematicists to engage in circular reasoning. First we assume a Universe then we assert that the universal frame which follows of necessity must exist and therefore the unitary assumption is correct!

This universal frame of the BB is said to be co-moving and therefore everything is supposedly OK with Einstein (meaning General Relativity, I guess) too, despite the fact that Einstein would not have agreed with Hossenfelder’s first sentence; he did not believe that General Relativity geometrized gravity, nor did he believe in a causally interacting spacetime. The universal frame of the BB model is indeed co-moving in the sense that it is expanding universally (in the model). That doesn’t make it a non-universal frame, just an expanding one. GR does not have a universal frame, co-moving or not.

Slapping a non-relativistic frame on GR was fundamentally illogical, akin to shoving a square peg into a round hole and insisting the fit is perfect. The result though speaks for itself. The Big Bang model is ludicrous and absurd because the unitary assumption is wrong.

II The Speed of Light

The speed of light in the Cosmos has a theoretical maximum limit of approximately 3×108 meters per second in inertial and near-initial conditions. The nearest star to our own is approximately 4 light years away, the nearest galaxy is 2.5 million LY away. The furthest observed galaxy is 13.4 billion LY.* This means that our current information about Proxima Centauri is 4 years out of date, for Andromeda it is 2.5 million years out of date, and for the most distant galaxy 13.4 billion years out of date.

Despite this hard limit to our information about the Cosmos, the BB model leads cosmologists to perceive themselves capable of making grandiose claims, unverifiable of course, about the current state of the Cosmos they like to call a Universe. In the BB model’s Universe it is easy to speak of the model Universe’s current state but this is just another example of the way the BB model does not accurately depict the Cosmos we observe.

In reality we cannot have and therefore, do not have, information about a wholly imaginary global condition of the Cosmos. Indeed, the Cosmos cannot contain such knowledge.

Modern cosmologists are given to believing they can have knowledge of things that have no physical meaning because they believe their mathematical model is capable of knowing unknowable things. That belief is characteristic of the deluded pseudo-philosophy known as mathematicism; it is a fundamentally unscientific conceit.

III The Cosmological Redshift

The second foundational assumption of the BB model, is that the observed redshift-distance relationship found (or at least confirmed) by the astronomer Edwin Hubble in the late 1920s was caused by some form of recessional velocity. Indeed, it is commonly stated that Hubble discovered that the Universe is expanding. It is a matter of historical record, however, that Hubble himself did not ever completely agree with that view:

To the very end of his writings he maintained this position, favouring (or at the very least keeping open) the model where no true expansion exists, and therefore that the redshift “represents a hitherto unrecognized principle of nature”.

Allan Sandage

However, for the purposes of this discussion, the specific cause of the cosmological redshift does not matter. The redshift-distance relation implies that if the Cosmos is of sufficient size there will always be galaxies sufficiently distant that they will lie beyond the observational range of any local observer. Light from those most distant sources will be extinguished by the redshift before reaching any observer beyond the redshift limited range of the source. Even in the context of the BB, it is generally acknowledged that the field of galaxies extends beyond the potentially observable range.

The extent of the Cosmos, therefore, is currently unknown and, to three dimensionally localized observers such as ourselves, inherently unknowable. A model, such as the BB, that purports to encompass the unknowable is fundamentally unscientific; it is, by its very nature, only a metaphysical construct unrelated to empirical reality.

IV The Cosmos – A Relativistic POV

Given the foregoing considerations it would seem reasonable to dismiss the unitary conception of the Cosmos underlying the Big Bang model. The question then arises, how should we think of the Cosmos?

Unlike scientists of 100 years ago when it was an open debate whether or not the nearby galaxies were a part of our galaxy, modern cosmologists have a wealth of data stretching out now to 13 billion light years. The quality and depth of that data falls off the farther out we observe however.

The Cosmos looks more or less the same in all directions, but it appears to be neither homogenous nor isotropic nor of a determinable, finite size. That is our view of the Cosmos from here on Earth; it is our point of view.

This geocentric POV is uniquely our own and determines our unique view of the Cosmos; it is a view that belongs solely to us. Observers similarly located in a galaxy 5 billion light years distant from us would see a similar but different Cosmos. Assuming similar technology, looking in a direction opposite the Milky Way the distant observers would find in their cosmological POV a vast number of galaxies that lie outside our own POV. In looking back in our direction, the distant observer would not see many of the galaxies that lie within our cosmological POV.

It is only in this sense of our geocentric POV that we can speak of our universe. The contents of our universe do not comprise a physically unified, coherent and simultaneously existing physical entity. The contents of our universe in their entirety are unified only by our locally-based observations of those contents.

The individual galactic components of our universe each lie at the center of their own local POV universe. Nearby galaxies would have POV universes that have a large overlap with our own. The universes of the most distant observable galaxies would overlap less than half of our universe. Those observers most distant and in opposite directions in our universe would not exist in each others POV.

So what then can we say of the Cosmos? Essentially it is a human conceptual aggregation of all the non-simultaneously reviewable matter-energy systems we call galaxies. The field of galaxies extends omni-directionally beyond the range of observation for any given three dimensionally localized observer and the Cosmos is therefore neither simultaneously accessible nor knowable. The Cosmos does not have a universal frame or a universal clock ticking. As for all 3D observers, the Cosmos tails away from us into a fog of mystery, uncontained by space, time, or the human imagination. We are of the Cosmos but can not know it in totality because it does not exist on those terms.

To those who might find this cosmological POV existentially unsettling it can only be said that human philosophical musings are irrelevant to physical reality; the Cosmos contains us, we do not contain the Cosmos. This is what the Cosmos looks like when the theoretical blinders of the Big Bang model are removed and we adopt the scientific method of studying the things observed in the context of the knowledge of empirical reality that has already been painstakingly bootstrapped over the centuries by following just that method.

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* In the funhouse mirror of the Big Bang belief system, this 13.4 GLY distance isn’t really a distance, it’s the time/distance the light traveled to reach us. At the time it was emitted according to the BB model the galaxy was only 2.6 GLY distant but is “now” 32 GLY away. This “now“, of course, implies a “universal simultaneity” which Relativity Theory prohibits. In the non-expanding Cosmos we actually inhabit, the 13.4 GLY is where GN-z11 was when the light was emitted (if our understanding of the redshift-distance relation holds at that scale.) Where it is “now” is not a scientifically meaningful question because it is not an observable and there is. in the context of GR, no scientific meaning to the concept of a “now” that encompasses ourselves and such a widely separated object.

Two Big Lies

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This fundamental idea — that matter and energy tells spacetime how to curve, and that curved spacetime, in turn, tells matter and energy how to move — represented a revolutionary new view of the universe. Put forth in 1915 by Einstein and validated four years later during a total solar eclipse — when the bending of starlight coming from light sources behind the sun agreed with Einstein’s predictions and not Newton’s — general relativity has passed every observational and experimental test we have ever concocted.

How to understand Einstein’s equation for General Relativity

Sooner or later it seems Ethan Siegel will trot out every disingenuous argument employed by the Big Bang cult in support of its peculiarly unscientific belief system. Two big lies about General Relativity popular among the faithful are succinctly presented in the above quote. The first is that Einstein “put forth” the idea of that GR reduced gravity to the geometrization of a substantival spacetime.

Einstein opposed that view throughout the years subsequent to GR’s introduction, whenever it was proposed. That is a matter of historical record. The formulation that Siegel presents here is a paraphrasing of John A. Wheeler’s well known assertion. That assertion directly contradicts Einstein’s clearly and repeatedly stated position on the matter.

The second big lie is that GR “has passed every observational and experimental test…“. That is true only of tests performed on the scale of the solar system. GR does not pass tests on galactic and cosmological scales without the ad hoc addition of dark matter and dark energy. The existence of neither of those hypothetical entities is supported by direct empirical evidence; the only support they can realistically be said to have is that they reconcile GR with observations. Siegel knows this, he just chooses not to mention it. That is what is known as a lie of omission:

Lying by omission, also known as a continuing misrepresentation or quote mining, occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception… An omission is when a person tells most of the truth, but leaves out a few key facts that therefore, completely obscures the truth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Types_and_associated_terms

Adventures in Theoretical Physics II – Fun with General Relativity

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Well here’s a cute little video that manages to do a good job of conveying just how daft and detached from reality theoretical physics has gotten over the last century:

The first 11 minutes or so are effectively a sales pitch for one of the structural elements of the Big Bang Model – Spacetime. The deal is, you’re supposed to believe that the force of gravity is not really there – nothing is holding you to the surface of the earth, rather the earth is accelerating upward and pushing against you.

And the reason this is happening is that you are not following a curved path in –Spacetime, because according to the video you are being knocked off of that curved path by the earth that is accelerating upwards and you are in the way and that’s gravity, tada! How do we know this? Well that’s obvious, it’s in the math and the math tells reality what’s going on and if reality doesn’t like it, that’s too bad. So don’t go trusting your lying eyes, alright.

In addition to Spacetime, this fairy tale is predicated on a ridiculous over-extension of the Principle of Equivalence that Einstein used in developing Special Relativity. Einstein was very clear that the POE applied only under the severely constrained circumstances of a thought experiment. His main purpose seems to have been to provide a physical interpretation for the observed equivalency between gravitational and inertial masses. Einstein presented the POE as informing his ideas about gravity.

The video ignores Einstein’s constraints and pretends the POE is fundamental to General Relativity, so it winds up insisting that things that are obviously not true in physical reality, are, nonetheless, true simply because the math can be framed that way – your lying eyes be damned.

We are told that a man falling off a roof is in the exact same situation as an observer in a non-accelerating rocket ship far from any gravitating body. This claim is made even though it is obviously not true; the falling man will be injured, if not killed, when he hits the ground, whereas no such fate will befall the observer in the rocket ship.

So the idea is, until the falling man meets his unfortunate fate, the situation is the same and therefore both situations are the same, the different outcomes not withstanding – because the math is the same. Observers free falling in orbit won’t be able to tell they’re not in an inertial frame – unless they look out the window, so that’s just like being in an inertial frame too. Right, of course.

In a similar vein, the video insists that an observer in a rocket accelerating at 9.8 m/s^2 will not be able to tell the difference between that situation and standing on the surface of the earth. The presenter fails to mention however, that only holds true as long as the observer doesn’t observe out the window, which will alert the observer that the rocket and therefore the observer are not at rest on the surface of a large gravitating body and therefore the situation is not comparable to standing at rest on the surface of the earth. Also, if any observer steps off the rocket, they will be left behind as the rocket accelerates away. But nevertheless, it’s all the same – as long as no one looks out the window, and maybe you remember that the earth is actually accelerating upwards under your feet, like the floor of the rocket. Sure, of course.

For the sake of introducing some sanity in this matter, here is Einstein on the POE. Note that the second paragraph completely contradicts the claims made in the video implying the equivalence of all inertial and non-inertial frames.

We must note carefully that the possibility of this mode of interpretation rests on the
fundamental property of the gravitational field of giving all bodies the same acceleration, or, what comes to the same thing, on the law of the equality of inertial and gravitational mass…

Now we might easily suppose that the existence of a gravitational field is always only an apparent one. We might also think that, regardless of the kind of gravitational field which may be present, we could always choose another reference-body such that no gravitational field exists with reference to it. This is by no means true for all gravitational fields, but only for those of quite special form. It is, for instance, impossible to choose a body of reference such that, as judged from it, the gravitational field of the earth (in its entirety) vanishes.

RELATIVITY THE SPECIAL AND GENERAL THEORIES, ALBERT EINSTEIN, authorized translation by Robert W. Lawson, original version 1916, translated 1920, appendices 3 and 4 added 1920, appendix 5 added to English translation 1954

It is clear from this statement that the POE of Einstein’s thought experiment is the Galilean version, commonly referred to nowadays as the “Weak” POE. The so-called “Einsteinian” and “Strong” POEs of modern cosmology are post-Einstein formulations attributed initially to Robert Dicke, though there were doubtless others who perpetrated and embellished this nonsense. Neither extension of the POE has anything to do with the foundations of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. It is those mid-20th century extensions that are misleadingly presented in the video as fundamental features of General Relativity.

The POE, in its current, extended usage, is mostly just a conjecture of mathematical convenience, allowing theorists to use Special Relativity math instead of the more difficult General Relativity formulations. It also results in a theoretical claim that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant. That claim contradicts both GR which predicts that the speed of light varies with position in a gravitational field and observations which confirm that prediction.

This unwarranted belief that the speed of light is a universal constant has also produced a cottage industry of theorists expounding a theory of undetected structures called Black Holes with the physically absurd properties of an event horizon and a singularity. No such structures exist. The relativistic slowing of light in a gravitational field precludes their existence. It does not preclude the existence of massive high-density objects.

Ok, let’s grant that this video presentation is of dubious scientific quality and does not, perhaps, represent the consensus view of the scientific community, particularly with regard to the so-called Principle of Equivalence, although if not the consensus, the Strong POE certainly commands significant support by a majority of theoretical cosmologists . The usual suspects will whine, of course, that pop-science presentations like this video cannot be trusted.

That complaint is also lodged against anything written for a general audience, even when the author is a fully accredited scientist with a relevant FAS (full alphabet soup) after their name. If it’s written so non-experts can understand it, then it is, on some level, wrong.

The reason for this situation is straightforward: much of what theoretical physicists believe cannot be translated into clear, logical, statements of scientific fact. What you get instead is confident handwaving consisting of metaphysical assertions that have no factual basis in empirical reality and a lot of math. According to theorists this is because theoretical physics can only be properly understood by those steeped in years of study of the underlying mathematical esoterica that informs only the truly knowledgeable. To which the only proper retort is: math is not physics and if your math cannot be translated into empirically verifiable physical terms – then your math is inadequate to the task of being a proper scientific model of physical reality.

The modern POE is just a conjecture of mathematical convenience, nothing more. Nonetheless, this modern POE permeates and perverts the scientific literature. Here is an Encyclopedia of Britannica entry for the POE:

In the Newtonian form it asserts, in effect, that, within a windowless laboratory freely falling in a uniform gravitational field, experimenters would be unaware that the laboratory is in a state of nonuniform motion. All dynamical experiments yield the same results as obtained in an inertial state of uniform motion unaffected by gravity. This was confirmed to a high degree of precision by an experiment conducted by the Hungarian physicist Roland Eötvös. In Einstein’s version, the principle asserts that in free-fall the effect of gravity is totally abolished in all possible experiments and general relativity reduces to special relativity, as in the inertial state.

Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Equivalence principle”. Encyclopedia Britannica, 31 Mar. 2019, https://www.britannica.com/science/equivalence-principle. Accessed 6 June 2021.

It should be noted that, according to the encyclopedia’s referenced article on Roland Eötvös, his experiment “… resulted in proof that inertial mass and gravitational mass are equivalent…“, which is to say, that it demonstrated the Weak POE only. It is also clear, that the authors of this entry are confused about the distinctions between the three POEs. But what of that; it’s only an encyclopedia trying to make sense of the nonsensical world of the modern theoretical physicist and modern theoretical physics is an unscientific mess.

Adventures in Theoretical Physics I – Entropy

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Updated 3Jun21

Entropy is one of those slippery concepts floating around in theoretical physics that defies easy explication. The following quote is from a small subsection of an extensive Wikipedia entry on entropy:

The following is a list of additional definitions of entropy from a collection of textbooks:

-a measure of energy dispersal at a specific temperature.

-a measure of disorder in the universe or of the availability of the energy in a system to do work.

-a measure of a system’s thermal energy per unit temperature that is unavailable for doing useful work.

In Boltzmann’s definition, entropy is a measure of the number of possible microscopic states (or microstates) of a system in thermodynamic equilibrium. Consistent with the Boltzmann definition, the second law of thermodynamics needs to be re-worded as such that entropy increases over time, though the underlying principle remains the same.

Note that this is a “list of additional definitions”, there are seemingly innumerable others peppered throughout the article. It would be a hard to caricature the overall impression of incoherence, oozing like quicksand and sucking under any rational attempt to say concisely what, exactly, entropy is, beyond the usual handwaving about a vaguely specified measure of disorder.

The first sentence of the Wiki article states unequivocally that “Entropy is… a measurable physical property…”. That statement is false. In section 7.8 it is made clear that entropy cannot be measured directly as a property. Rather, discrete energy transfers are dropped into an equation that ostensibly “describes how entropy changes dS when a small amount of energy dQ is introduced into the system at a certain temperature T.” The only measurements made are of energy and temperature. Entropy is a made-up mathematical concoction; It is not a real property of physical reality.

The reader will also be pleased to note that the same article informs us that “In 1865, Clausius named the concept of “the differential of a quantity which depends on the configuration of the system,” entropy… “.

The real problem with the concept of entropy is not that it may be useful in doing some thermodynamic calculations. Clearly, it is of some mathematical value? What it does not have is any clear explanatory power or physical meaning, and well, math just isn’t physics. Nonetheless, entropy has been elevated to a universal, physical law – the Second Law of Thermodynamics, where the situation doesn’t get any less opaque. In fact the opacity doesn’t get any more opaque than this gem:

Nevertheless, this principle of Planck is not actually Planck’s preferred statement of the second law, which is quoted above, in a previous sub-section of the present section of this present article, and relies on the concept of entropy.

Section 2.9 of the 2nd Law wiki entry above

Here is Planck’s quote from “…a previous sub-section of the present section of this present article…”:

Every process occurring in nature proceeds in the sense in which the sum of the entropies of all bodies taking part in the process is increased. In the limit, i.e. for reversible processes, the sum of the entropies remains unchanged.

Of course, the only question that remains then is, what exactly is entropy?

The final word on the nature of entropy should be this comment by John von Neumann which appears in a sidebar of this section, wherein he advises Claude Shannon to call his information uncertainty concept entropy because “… In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.” Can’t argue with that logic. It appears that the definition of entropy is entropic. It is getting ever more disordered with the passage of time.

So what’s the problem? This is after all, a relatively trivial matter compared to the Grand Delusions of Theoretical Physics, like Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Quarks & etc. Or is it? Well, actually the Entropy Paradigm represents a major blind spot in fundamental physics. Theoretical physics has this misbegotten, laboratory based idea that all ordered systems are in some sense, “running down” or losing the ability to do work, or becoming more disordered or, or… something, called Entropy.

Entropy is all downhill, all the time. In the context of a designed laboratory experiment, the original, closed-system condition is some prearranged, ordered-state, that is allowed to “run down” or “become disordered” or whatever, over time and that, more or less is Entropy! Fine so far, but when you make Entropy a universal law – The Second Law of Thermodynamics, all is lost, or more exactly half of reality is lost.

Why? Because there are no closed systems outside the laboratory. What you get when you ignore that fact is this kind of bloated nonsense:

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. 

Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1927)

Entropy is correct, if all it boils down to is, ordered, closed, systems will become disordered. But entropy doesn’t tell you how the systems came to be ordered in the first place. If you extrapolate from a closed-system experiment, a Universal Law that says, or implies, that all systems rundown, but you have no theory of how those systems came to be ordered in the first place, you have exactly half a picture of reality – because over here in the real world, ordered systems do arise from disorder.

It’s hard to do good physics if you have this half-blind view of reality. You start babbling about the Arrow of Time, the heat death of the Universe, not to mention whatever this is. You may have to invoke an unobservable Creation Miracle like the Big Bang to get the ball rolling.

Babble Update (3Jun21)

“If you want your clock to be more accurate, you’ve got to pay for it,” study co-author Natalia Ares, a physicist at the University of Oxford, told Live Science. “Every time we measure time, we are increasing the universe’s entropy.”

Livescience.com

Meanwhile, physical reality doesn’t work like that. Physical reality is locally cyclic – like life itself. There is, for instance, a considerable body of observational evidence suggesting that galaxies reproduce themselves. That body of evidence has been dismissed with spurious statistical arguments, and the well-established astronomer who made them, Halton Arp, was denied telescope time to continue making those observations. No one has since been permitted to pursue that line of observational research.

Meanwhile, there is also no comparable body of observational evidence for the Big Bang supported model of galaxy formation, via accretion, from a primordial, post-BB cloud. Like the rest of the Big Bang’s defining features, galaxy formation by accretion is not an observed phenomenon in the Cosmos.

So, an over-generalization (to the point of incoherence), of some simplistic closed-system laboratory experiments done in the 18th and 19th centuries, has come to aid and abet, the absurd Big Bang model of the Cosmos. Modern theoretical physics is an incoherent, unscientific mess.

Starts With a Bang, Ends With Nonsense

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Ethan Siegel’s columns for Forbes magazine are tour de forces of the illogical circular reasoning that passes for scientific discourse in the modern theoretical physics community. They are best avoided out of respect for the good name of science. It is, however, sometimes instructive, not to mention eye-opening, to slog through one, in order to appreciate just how self-deluded the pseudo-science known as modern cosmology has become.

Case in point: this article from Dec 22, 2020. Therein, Siegel is at great pains to demonstrate that dark matter and dark energy are the only scientific way of accounting for observed cosmological phenomena in the context of the Standard Model of Cosmology, commonly known as the Big Bang model. This is true of course, the BB model can only account for cosmological observations if it is allowed to invoke the existence dark matter and dark energy – so therefore dark matter and dark energy must exist despite the absence of any empirical evidence for their existence. Reasoning can’t get any more circular than that.

In some of Siegel’s arguments there is almost no logical argument at all, just a recitation of certain facts followed by an assertion unsupported by the facts presented, that those factual observations were predictions rather than post-dictions of the model (emphasis added):

What’s remarkable is that, because the laws of physics that govern particles (and nuclear fusion) are so well-understood, we can compute exactly — assuming the Universe was once hotter, denser, and expanded and cooled from that state — what the different ratios of these different light elements ought to be. We’ve even studied the reactions in the lab directly, and things behave precisely as our theory predicts. The only factor we vary is the photon-to-baryon ratio, which tells us how many cosmic photons (particles of light) there are for every proton or neutron (the baryons) in our Universe.

We’ve now measured it all. Satellites like COBE, WMAP, and Planck have measured how many photons there are in the Universe: 411 per cubic centimeter of space. Intervening clouds of gas that appear between us and a distant light source, like a luminous galaxy or quasar, will absorb a fraction of the light as it travels through the Universe, teaching us the abundances of these elements and isotopes directly. When we add it all up, only ~5% of the total energy in the Universe can be normal matter: no more and no less.

What a mess! The central assumption (emphasized above) is simply the BB model, which is itself based on two foundational assumptions:

  1. The cosmos is a unitary, coherent, simultaneous entity – a “Universe”.
  2. The cosmological redshift is caused by some form of recessional velocity.

Neither of those assumptions has any empirical basis and both date to the early 20th century when the scale of the cosmos was barely grasped. They are however, sacrosanct among cosmologists. Those foundational assumptions are, by some common but unstated agreement, true by definition in the cosmological community. They are more than just assumptions, they are beliefs, and they are almost certainly wrong. But, what of that… Assuming our assumptions are correct we can use math to massage our model into agreement with observations – just like good old Ptolemy did way back around the dawn of the previous Dark Ages.

More recently Siegel has posted a similarly obtuse argument concerning the supposed successes of the Big Bang model and its unchallengeable status. It features the same kind of circular reasoning as above: Our model is correct as long as our assumptions and postulates are correct, therefore the things we assume and postulate are correct, because the model is correct. The result of this transparently illogical syllogism, which underlies all of the author’s triumphalist claims for the Big Bang model, is the nonsensical narrative that winds from inexplicable Big Bang to the now 95% invisible “Universe”.

The reason there are no significant challenges to the Big Bang orthodoxy from within the scientific community is that the community members have been trained to accept the 100 year old premises of the model. So, again, the author is correct to this extent: if you accept the model’s premises you are going to wind up with some ludicrous depiction of the Cosmos like LCDM. However, the simplistic assumptions of 100 years ago have proven a disastrous foundation for modern cosmology. The model depicts an inane, unscientific, “Universe” that does not at all resemble, in its defining features, the Cosmos we actually observe.

In the Cosmos we observe there is no Big Bang event, no inflation, no expanding spacetime, no dark matter, no dark energy. All of those things are essential elements of LCDM . None of those things are present in the Cosmos we observe. Physical reality does not look like the LCDM “Universe”. People like the author, who, nonetheless, believe the absurd LCDM story, do so because they are functionally, mathematicists.

Mathematicism is an ancient, half-baked philosophy whose proponents believe that mathematics underlies and determines the nature of physical reality. So, dark matter (& etc.) cannot be empirically demonstrated to exist? That is of no concern to a mathematicist; it all has to be there because a peculiar model (LCDM) requires it in order to reconcile itself with observations, and therefore dark matter (& etc.) have to exist. Pay no attention to the testimony of your lyin’ eyes (and telescopes)!

Mathematicism is junk philosophy. It is not science. How we got to this state of affairs is going to provide plenty of work for future historians of science. For now though, there is much to do just to pry the cold, dead hands of mathematicism from the throat of theoretical physics (which is now barely alive in any scientific sense).

Science rests on observation (detection) and measurement, not the febrile imaginings of reality-challenged, nerd-mathematicists with a cult-model to defend. What passes for science among the theoretical physics community of the academy these days is not science in any meaningful sense. The Big Bang model is Exhibit A for that proposition.

(Parts of this post were taken from a comment I made on Siegel’s Medium article.)

Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to 3 Scientists for Work on Fairy Tale

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It’s sadly, depressingly true. Some mathematicist nonsense that attends modern cosmological theory has been awarded science’s grandest prize:


This award has been given to mathematical work on a mathematical theory that has nothing to do with actual physics. Black holes, the ostensible subject matter of the work are fictitious entities that only arise in a mathematical models (such as Schwarzschild solution to the field equations of General Relativity) that ignore one of the fundamental consequences of General Relativity – the speed of light varies with position in a gravitational well.

Specifically, the steeper the gravitational well, the slower the speed of light. It follows directly from this, an observed fact, that gravitational collapse is a self-limiting event. In the Schwarzschild and similar solutions, the speed of light is held constant and results in a theoretical collapsed state (a black hole) that is physically nonsensical, containing as it does a singularity (a mass of zero-volume and therefore infinite density).

Modern theoretical cosmology is a mess, in which Einstein’s General Relativity has been dumbed-down in service of mathematical convenience. The result has been dumb-downed, mathematical models (the Big Bang, black holes), that present physically nonsensical accounts of observed reality. These models do not remotely resemble the physical reality we can actually observe and measure. They are mathematical fairy tales.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was just awarded for work on a dumbed-down mathematical model that has nothing to do with real physics.

A Brief History Of The Universe According To ΛCDM

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Once upon a time, 13.8 billion years ago, the entirety of the ΛCDM model Universe was compressed into a volume smaller than a gnat’s ass (a statement of universal simultaneity forbidden by Relativity Theory).

The original condition of this model Universe is inexplicable in terms of known physics. Regardless, the model Universe erupted from its inexplicable condition, for an unknown reason, in a somewhat explicable cosmic flatulence event.

With the aid of an inflaton field the model Universe then expanded into today’s model Universe, which is 95% composed of things that are not observed in the Cosmos (Dark Matter and Dark Energy). The remaining 5% of the model Universe consists of the things that are observed in the Cosmos. 

This model should not be classified as science. It constitutes nothing more than the feverish imaginings of the mathematicist mindset that has utterly debased the field of cosmological studies.

A General Critique of The Standard Model of Cosmology (ΛCDM)

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Foundational Assumptions

  1. The Cosmos is a singular, unified, simultaneous entity (a Universe) that can be modeled as such using the field equations of General Relativity. This assumption invokes the existence of a universal frame – the FLRW metric, which is antithetical to the foundational premise of Relativity Theory, that a universal frame does not exist. Solving the equations of GR for a universal frame is an oxymoronic exercise. The existence of a universal frame is impossible to empirically verify.
  2. The cause of the observed cosmological redshift is some form of recessional velocity. A recessional velocity produces a redshift, but not all redshifts are caused by recessional velocities. There is no empirical evidence supporting this assumption.

Consequent Supporting Hypotheses

  1. The model Universe had a singular origin – the Big Bang event. The Big Bang is not an observed component of the Cosmos. It is only a model dependent inference.
  2. Subsequent to the Big Bang event, the model Universe underwent an Inflation event driven by an inflaton field. Neither the Inflation event nor the inflaton field are observed components of the Cosmos. They constitute a model dependent hypothesis necessary to reconcile the model with observations.
  3. The Universe is expanding because spacetime is expanding and driving the galaxies apart. There is no evidence for the existence of a substantival spacetime, that is, for the existence of a spacetime that can interact causally with matter and energy. A substantival spacetime, one that can drive the galaxies apart, is not an observed component of the Cosmos.
  4. Dark Matter comprises @ 85% of the total matter content of the model Universe. The only salient characteristic of Dark Matter is that it reconciles the standard model with observations. Dark Matter is not an observed component of the Cosmos.
  5. Dark Energy comprises @ 69% of the matter-energy content of the model Universe. The only salient characteristic of Dark Energy is that it reconciles the standard model with observations. Dark Energy is not an observed component of the Cosmos

The Big Bang Hustle

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(Correction appended 2020-06-21)

Comes before us then, the cosmologist duo of Luke A. Barnes and Geraint F. Lewis, a couple of Aussies, with a Universe they want to sell you. The pitch, as presented in this promo for their new book, is that the Big Bang explains certain observations that cannot be explained by any competing model and any competing model must explain them. The argument rests on three points that aren’t so much about observations, but in two cases are merely superficial claims to explaining things that are essentially self-explanatory in terms of known physics, without invoking the big bang. The third point rests on the unjustified contention that the big bang interpretation is the only acceptable, existing explanation for the cosmological redshift.

The three points discussed in the video and their fundamental weaknesses are:

Olber’s Paradox – Olber’s paradox is inherently resolved by the cosmological redshift and this resolution does not depend on the Big Bang assumption that the redshift is a consequence of some form of recessional velocity. The cosmological redshift exists and if the cosmos is of sufficient size there will be a distance beyond which light from a galaxy is redshifted to a null energy state or, more likely, will be reduced to a minimum state where it will pool with all other such distant sources to form a microwave “background” from the point of view of a local observer.

The Cosmological Redshift – That the redshift is caused by some form of recessional velocity, from which cosmologists reason backwards to the Big Bang event, is simply an assumption of the standard model. If the assumption is rather that what expands are the spherical wavefronts of light being emitted by galaxies, you get a picture that is consistent with observations and which can be treated with a standard General Relativity formalism to yield a cosmological redshift-distance relationship – no big bang, with its ludicrously inexplicable original condition, required.

Nucleosynthesis – The cosmic abundances of the elements are what they are. BB theorists have simply imported nuclear theory and fit it to their model. Model fitting is a technique as old as Ptolemy. As the linked article makes clear there are many possible pathways to nucleosynthesis. The BB version also doesn’t even work that well.

Don’t know much about dark matter and dark energy… Barnes and Lewis kind of joke about this, which is appropriate I guess, since according to the standard model, 95% of the model’s Universe is composed of this unobserved and, by their account, poorly understood stuff. Which brings us to one of the central conceits of the video and, presumably, the book it is promoting, which is that the standard model “explains” satisfactorily, all of our cosmological observations.

The problem with the standard model’s “explanations” for observed phenomena is precisely that they are not scientifically satisfactory. They are not satisfactory because “explanations” such as dark matter, and dark energy are not empirically resolvable. Dark matter and dark energy are necessary to the standard model, in order to fit the model to observations. Physical reality, however, has no use for either, in as much as, no evidence for their physical existence can be found beyond this urgent need to somehow fit the standard model to observations.

By invoking, as necessary components of physical reality, entities for which there is no observational evidence, modern cosmology has descended into a pre-Enlightenment medieval mind-set. Dark matter and dark energy are just the modern, secular version of angels and devils dancing on the head of a pin. Their scientific, “explanatory” power in nil.

The video also features such an egregious scientific error as to be almost breathtaking. At the 5:50 minute mark, in an attempt to justify their claim that only the expanding universe interpretation of redshift accounts for Olber’s Paradox, Barnes makes the completely fallacious argument that the more distant a luminous object is, its apparent size diminishes, but not its apparent brightness. That is simply wrong.

Even the most perfunctory treatment of light theory would include a discussion of the luminosity-distance relationship. That someone with a Phd (I presume in science), would choose to ignore basic scientific knowledge in order to advance a spurious claim about the explanatory power of the standard model, says all you need to know about the state of modern cosmology. It’s a mess.

Correction (2020-06-21): In a conversation with Louis Marmet over at A Cosmology Group, he pointed out that technically Barnes was correct; he was speaking of surface brightness, which does not change with distance for an extended object. Stars, however, are not resolvable as extended objects by the human eye, only by the largest telescopes. The apparent magnitude of point-like sources, such as stars varies according to the luminosity-distance relationship. Barnes’ argument remains false – on its own terms.