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The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

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Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#71

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

medo-bear wrote: post #58
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the point was that "the unpopular, unconvincing hypothesis is right" need be treated as a possibility only if the probability is high enough, and knowing that the vast majority are wrong is an important bayesian input in properly estimating that probability

help me out. historically, at what point in bayesian probability estimation did "there is no such thing as ether" theorists go from crank to lets pay attention to these guys

I literally composed my post excluding the word "crank", because I felt "unpopular, unconvincing hypothesis" was a less judgemental way of phrasing it, and one that focused on the idea, not the ideator, but you went ahead and used crank anyways

anyways, the threshold is likely when the hypothesis becomes convincing enough to a sufficient proportion or number of experts in the field

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#72

Post by chiefalchemist »

polemic wrote: post #29
chiefalchemist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the problem with groupthink, isn't it? That is, wrong until it's not and then suddenly everyone pretends like they knew it was true all along. Science has ego-issues the same way sports and entertainment do. Scientists aren't any less human than the rest of us (tho' they often seem to pretend otherwise).

On the other hand, scientific consensus isn't "groupthink", and being a contrarian doesn't automatically entitle you to other people's attention and time.

Or does it?

There are plenty of examples where science got it wrong. Were it took years, even decades to get enough people to listen.*

That's not the way science is supposed to work. Politics? Yes. But not science.

I trust you can do the math from here.

* And when the tides turn, these not even an acknowledgement, let alone an apology. Scientists shouldn't not be turning in their graves for lacking an apology. That level of arrogance is also not healthy and proper Science.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#73

Post by colechristensen »

cwp wrote: post #38
colechristensen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people do this. Come up with a theory with testable set of predictions that isn’t just a patchwork of models glued together to explain data and then you’ll convince people.

Agreed, this his how things work in practice, but man, I wish we could do better. The question of whether new observations falsify the current theory is completely separate from the creation of a better theory. If the Big Bang theory is wrong, then it's wrong, and we just don't know how the universe began.

The posted article does neither though. Nowhere is any observation that actually contradicts existing theory. The author is taking advantage of the fact that new measurements are allowing for refined models and pretending that this surprise is the same as contradiction for an already existing bias against mainstream theories.

Nothing I saw demonstrated in any way that the Big Bang didn’t happen.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#75

Post by pdonis »

Sanzig wrote: post #10

Author's Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner I get the impression he's regarded as something of a crank in astrophysics communities.

Not so much a crank as a person pushing an agenda and being willing to bypass the normal scientific process to do it.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#76

Post by pdonis »

polemic wrote: post #29
chiefalchemist wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's the problem with groupthink, isn't it? That is, wrong until it's not and then suddenly everyone pretends like they knew it was true all along. Science has ego-issues the same way sports and entertainment do. Scientists aren't any less human than the rest of us (tho' they often seem to pretend otherwise).

On the other hand, scientific consensus isn't "groupthink", and being a contrarian doesn't automatically entitle you to other people's attention and time.

> scientific consensus

Science doesn't advance by consensus. It advances by constructing models and comparing their predictions with observations. As Einstein famously remarked when someone mentioned to him that a hundred scientists had signed a letter saying they were doubtful of his theory of relativity: "If the theory were wrong, one would have been enough." We don't believe our best current theories because there is a consensus. We believe them because they have made accurate predictions that have been confirmed by experimental data to many decimal places.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#77

Post by pdonis »

cwp wrote: post #38
colechristensen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people do this. Come up with a theory with testable set of predictions that isn’t just a patchwork of models glued together to explain data and then you’ll convince people.

Agreed, this his how things work in practice, but man, I wish we could do better. The question of whether new observations falsify the current theory is completely separate from the creation of a better theory. If the Big Bang theory is wrong, then it's wrong, and we just don't know how the universe began.

> The question of whether new observations falsify the current theory is completely separate from the creation of a better theory.

No, it isn't. Theories don't get "falsified" except in rare cases and in the idealized fanciful histories of some philosophers of science. The idea that you can run one critical experiment that, if the results come out a certain way, will falsify a theory, is a myth.

Scientific models like our current hot Big Bang model make thousands of predictions about observed data. No model ever matches all the data with 100% accuracy. But if there is no other competing model that matches the data better, we do the best with what we have. Saying the Big Bang model is "falsified" if the error in some prediction vs. data is over some threshold is useless if we don't have a better model to replace it with.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#78

Post by pdonis »

StanislavPetrov wrote: post #20
colechristensen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people do this. Come up with a theory with testable set of predictions that isn’t just a patchwork of models glued together to explain data and then you’ll convince people.

>Come up with a theory with testable set of predictions that isn’t just a patchwork of models glued together to explain data and then you’ll convince people. The dark matter crowd was able to convince quite a few people without hurdling such a high bar, not to mention stuff like string-theory..

> The dark matter crowd was able to convince quite a few people without hurdling such a high bar

I don't know where you're getting this from. Dark matter models make lots of testable predictions, and they currently match the overall data set (which includes many different observations, not just the galaxy rotation curves that are most often mentioned) better than any other models.

> not to mention stuff like string-theory

Here I agree: string theory has not made a single testable prediction.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#79

Post by pdonis »

behnamoh wrote: post #2

Summary by a commenter in the link: Radio astronomy observations of Pulsars indicate that the Hubble Red Shift is caused by “Tired Light” rather than the expansion of the universe. When Hubble published his observations of red shifted light from distant objects there were two possible explanations that came to the fore. One, originated by Georges Lemaitre, was that the Universe was expanding. The other, from Fritz Zw…

> Tired Light

Is a hypothesis that, as a sole or primary explanation of observed redshifts of galaxies, has been thoroughly debunked in the scientific literature.

> the intergalactic media is not an electromagnetic vacuum

This is true, but it cannot explain the observed data by itself, because the observed data is not "redshifts" by themselves. The observed data is a combination of redshifts, apparent luminosity, and angular size for thousands of observed galaxies. These data have observable relationships that can only be explained by cosmological expansion. If the redshifts were caused solely by dispersion in the intergalactic medium, their relationships with apparent luminosity and angular size would be very, very different. That is a quick summary of the thorough debunking of "tired light" that can be found in the scientific literature over a period of some decades.

Re: The Big Bang didn't happen: What do the James Webb images show?

#80

Post by RachelF »

while_true_ wrote: post #74

So the linked article is the work of a crank, but it does raise a fair question: is the density of small distant galaxy smudges on the Webb image consistent with Big Bang theory?

Yes, this is the crux of the matter.

Forget the ad-hominem "he's a known crank" arguments.

He raises valid questions in his article, if he's a crank, then refute his facts or conclusions.

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