Kim, For some reason you didn't get my reply. Here it is again: 1 and 2. I don't believe that an object moving through space is comparable to the expansion of space itself; hence the limitation of the speed of light wouldn't apply. What other laws of physics would have to have been different or not exist? A. They postulate that none of the laws of physics originally existed except possibly gravity. Taking the same position I could say that before the laws of physics existed any number of things existed including your fairy godmother. What is space? Some physicists believe even empty space has energy states. If empty space has energy the idea that is somehow exempt from the laws of physics is called into question. In the past, when a theory did not follow existing physical laws it was abandoned - the assumption that Einstein used was that we are not in a special situation and that the same laws apply everywhere and at every time. 3. Does it matter whether or not the theory is predictive (unless they really do succeed in creating a singularity at CERN)? Discoveries of things such as dark matter, dark energy, etc. haven't invalidated the theory, but yes, these nasty surprises have certainly given the theorists more to ponder. Perhaps they will eventually have to discard the big bang, but from everything with which I'm familiar I don't see that happening. A. I think is does. Otherwise you have just-so-stories - how the tiger got its stripes etc. A theory that makes no predictions cannot be falsified and hence cannot be verified either. 4. I know that Wikipedia isn't 100 percent reliable, but under the article "Cosmic microwave background radiation" I read that a 1948 estimate by Gamow and others of the CMBR was 5K, later re-estimated at 28K. The higher estimate was based on someone's mis-estimate of the Hubble constant and was soon abandoned in favor of the original, lower estimate. I also understand that the suggestion that the CMBR is background stellar radiation cannot account for the black body nature of the CMBR. From what I read in Wikipedia, numerous lines of observations and experiment all support the hypothesis that the CMBR is a remnant of the big bang. A. Hoyle actually derives the background radiation of 2.73 deg K. and the amplitude of its fluctuations from the thermalization of starlight. See pages 201-207 of "A Different Approach to Cosmology", by Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar. The 50 deg value was from George Gamow in 1948, granted it was based on some flawed assumptions (see Wikipedia article and search for 50). 5. I wish I could remember where I read about it, but I think this "problem" was put to bed some time ago. Does anyone else have information about this, one way or the other? A. There have been some strained explanations as I mentioned such as, "Quasar Apparent Proper Motion Observed by Geodetic VLBI Networks", D. S. MacMillian. I don't think the case is closed and more work needs to be done with space telescopes. The proper motion observed for even the Helix is very small. The problem is we need to encourage theories and ideas that question the current paradigm instead of sweeping them under the rug. Anyone who questions the Big Bang such as Halton Arp is in danger of losing his job. 6. Again, I'm probably not as knowledgeable, but I've never read anything about observations of red dwarfs, globular clusters, or other objects that indicate greater age than the accepted age of the universe, 13.75+/- billion years, or that galaxy clusters would take 100 billion years to form. What have I missed? Let me address the problem of galaxy clusters. See below quote for circular reasoning from http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/10/galaxy-cluster-at- the-edge-of-the-universe/ "And that's the key issue. Clusters are so big that they take quite a bit of time to form. But how long? We're not sure. We're not sure exactly how long galaxies take to be born either. So every time we see one farther away we push back the time it takes to form them. Think of it this way: if it takes, say, 5 billion years to form a cluster, then we wouldn't see any more than 13.7 - 5 = 8.7 billion light years away. This one is 9.6 billion, so we know that clusters cannot take more than 13.7 - 9.6 = 4.1 billion years to form. In reality they probably take quite a bit less time. Observations like this one will help us understand just how much less. The reason this is important is because we don't know the exact timeline of the Universe after the Big Bang. We know when it happened, and we know when the first stars formed, but it's hard to say when the first galaxies and clusters of galaxies started to come together. Most likely that wasn't a firm time, but it was spread out over hundreds of millions or billions of years. But the more we see, the better we can figure that out. As it happens, the colors of the galaxies in this image give a clue as to how old they are: young stars are blue, and old stars are red, so by looking carefully at the mix the age of the galaxies can be estimated. The galaxies in this cluster look like they formed around 11.5 billion years ago, making them already a couple of billion years old when they emitted the light we see in the picture." What they have done is assume the age of the universe has to be 13.7 billion years and so they have backed out how long it took the clusters to form. The point I made is how long would it take the large clusters to form from normal gravitation interaction. G. de Vaucoleurs estimates it would take 100 billion years for a large super cluster to form from normal gravitational interaction. Think about it, the Milky Way is on a collision course with Andromeda in 4.5 billion years. How long do you think it took for galaxies in the Virgo Cluster to merge to form M87 and for the cluster to form under normal gravitational conditions. As Hilton Radcliffe points out on page 160 of the "The Static Universe", stars in elliptical galaxies are generally considered to be about 10 billion years old - yet we have seen elliptical galaxies more than 12 billion light year away. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HE_1523-0901 In 2007, a star in the Galactic halo, HE 1523-0901, was estimated to be about 13.2 billion years old, nearly as old as the Universe. As the oldest known object in the Milky Way at that time, it placed a lower limit on the age of the Milky Way.[5] This estimate was determined using the UV-Visual Echelle Spectrograph of the Very Large Telescope to measure the relative strengths of spectral lines caused by the presence of Thorium and other elements created by the R-process. The line strengths yield abundances of different elemental isotopes, from which an estimate of the age of the star can be derived using nucleocosmochronology.[5] See: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html Radioactive Dating of an Old Star (15.2 Billion years old) A very interesting paper by Cowan et al. (1997, ApJ, 480, 246) discusses the thorium abundance in an old halo star. Normally it is not possible to measure the abundance of radioactive isotopes in other stars because the lines are too weak. But in CS 22892-052 the thorium lines can be seen because the iron lines are very weak. The Th/Eu (Europium) ratio in this star is 0.219 compared to 0.369 in the Solar System now. Thorium decays with a half-life of 14.05 Gyr, so the Solar System formed with Th/Eu = 24.6/14.05*0.369 = 0.463. If CS 22892-052 formed with the same Th/Eu ratio it is then 15.2 +/- 3.5 Gyr old. It is actually probably slightly older because some of the thorium that would have gone into the Solar System decayed before the Sun formed, and this correction depends on the nucleosynthesis history of the Milky Way. Nonetheless, this is still an interesting measure of the age of the oldest stars that is independent of the main-sequence lifetime method. A later paper by Cowan et al. (1999, ApJ, 521, 194) gives 15.6 +/- 4.6 Gyr for the age based on two stars: CS 22892-052 and HD 115444. A another star, CS 31082-001, shows an age of 12.5 +/- 3 Gyr based on the decay of U-238 [Cayrel, et al. 2001, Nature, 409, 691-692]. Wanajo et al. refine the predicted U/Th production ratio and get 14.1 +/- 2.5 Gyr for the age of this star. The Age of the Oldest Star Clusters When stars are burning hydrogen to helium in their cores, they fall on a single curve in the luminosity-temperature plot known as the H-R diagram after its inventors, Hertzsprung and Russell. This track is known as the main sequence, since most stars are found there. Since the luminosity of a star varies like M3 or M4, the lifetime of a star on the main sequence varies like t=const*M/L=k/L0.7. Thus if you measure the luminosity of the most luminous star on the main sequence, you get an upper limit for the age of the cluster: Age < k/L(MS_max)0.7 This is an upper limit because the absence of stars brighter than the observed L(MS_max) could be due to no stars being formed in the appropriate mass range. But for clusters with thousands of members, such a gap in the mass function is very unlikely, the age is equal to k/L(MS_max)0.7. Chaboyer, Demarque, Kernan and Krauss (1996, Science, 271, 957) apply this technique to globular clusters and find that the age of the Universe is greater than 12.07 Gyr with 95% confidence. They say the age is proportional to one over the luminosity of the RR Lyra stars which are used to determine the distances to globular clusters. Chaboyer (1997) gives a best estimate of 14.6 +/- 1.7 Gyr for the age of the globular clusters. But recent Hipparcos results show that the globular clusters are further away than previously thought, so their stars are more luminous. Gratton et al. give ages between 8.5 and 13.3 Gyr with 12.1 being most likely, while Reid gives ages between 11 and 13 Gyr, and Chaboyer et al. give 11.5 +/- 1.3 Gyr for the mean age of the oldest globular clusters. Summary Method Value [Gyr] +Errorbar -Errorbar Elements 14.5 +2.8 -2.5 Old Stars 14.4 +2.2 -2.2 GC MSTO 12.2 +1.3 -1.3 Disk WDs 11.5 +infinity -1 GC WDs 12.8 +1.1 -1.1 Weighted Mean 12.94 +0.75 -0.75 7. Is the Texas A&M paper online, and if so can you share the link? I'm really interested in reading this. See http://www.science.tamu.edu/articles/708/ 8. I'm not sure what you're saying here relative to Michelson, Morley and Einstein. I admit to not being able to wrap my mind around a lot of scientific thought, especially in relation to cosmology. Can anyone truly imagine what a singularity looks like (or tastes, smells, feels, sounds like) or how the universe as we see it came from such a thing? I have a difficult time imagining a neutron star, or why my son just left for school with a light jacket when the temperature outside is only about 15 degrees. Still, I've not read any credible science that supports a steady state universe or any other alternative to the big bang. A steady state universe, for example, is just as hard for me to fathom as a universe that began as an infinitesimally small point. A. The Michelson, Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was a constant regardless of the velocity of the source. If an object is approaching us at 50 percent the speed of light and emits light, the light will still only come to us at the speed of light (instead of one and a half times the speed of light) although it will be blue shifted. This physical result changed the whole field of physics. The problem with the Big Bang is in order to get it to work you have to invoke inflation and say all the current laws of physics didn't apply. Thanks, Don for your willingness to share your opinion, even when you know many of us believe something different. A general question for everyone: Besides steady state, what alternate theories exist? A. The old steady state is dead. Current models include Eric J. Lerner's Plasma Universe, the recycling boom and bust theories, Hoyle's ever expanding eternal universe ("A Different Approach to Cosmology"), Radcliffe's "Static Universe" (not really static but not significant expansion). I tried to answer most of the questions but you should read Hoyle's, Arp's, Lerner's and Radcliffe's books. I am not sure what the correct theory is but the Big Bang violates so many physical laws including the law of entropy and the main premise of information theory. You can't get something from nothing. -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Kim Sent: Monday, December 20, 2010 1:10 PM To: 'Utah Astronomy' Subject: [Utah-astronomy] big bang for Don Don, did you have a chance to read my post in response to your list of problems with the big bang, made on Friday the 17th? I really wasn't trying to attack your or anyone's position - I truly just want information since I'm obviously not as well-read on the subject. I would like to know what you think about my comments and questions if you feel like responding. And of course I welcome anyone else's thoughts. Kim _______________________________________________ Utah-Astronomy mailing list Utah-Astronomy@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/utah-astronomy Visit the Photo Gallery: http://www.slas.us/gallery2/main.php Visit the Wiki: http://www.utahastronomy.com