Young Cosmos

[Advanced Creation Science]
Here is a rare dissenting voice regarding the Big Bang from the Discovery Institute:

Was there a Big Bang? by David Berlinski.

NOTWITHSTANDING THE investment made by the scientific community and the general
public in contemporary cosmology, a suspicion lingers that matters do not sum up as they should. Cosmologists write as if they are quite certain of the Big Bang, yet, within the last decade, they have found it necessary to augment the standard view by
means of various new theories. These schemes are meant to solve problems that cosmologists were never at pains to acknowledge, so that today they are somewhat in the position of a physician reporting both that his patient has not been ill and that
he has been successfully revived.
….

THE BIG BANG rests on the hypothesis that the universe is expanding, and in the end the
plausibility of its claims will depend on whether the universe is expanding. Astronomers can indeed point to places in the sky where the redshift of the galaxies appears to be a linear function of their distance. But in astrophysics, as in evolutionary biology,
it is failure rather than success that is of significance. The astrophysical literature contains interesting and disturbing evidence that the linear relationship at the heart of Hubble’s law by no means describes the facts fully.

At the end of World War II, astronomers discovered places in the sky where charged particles moving in a magnetic field sent out strong signals in the radio portion of the spectrum. Twenty years later, Alan Sandage and Thomas Mathews identified the source of such signals with optically discernible points in space. These are the quasarsquasi stellar radio sources. Quasars have played a singular role in astrophysics. In the mid-1960’s, Maarten Schmidt discovered that their spectral lines were shifted massively to the red. If Hubble’s law were correct, quasars should be impossibly far away, hurtling themselves into oblivion at the far edge of space and time. But for more than a decade, the American astronomer Halton Arp has drawn the attention of the astronomical community to places in the sky where the expected relationship between redshift and distance simply fails. Embarrassingly enough, many quasars seem bound to nearby galaxies. The results are in plain sight: there on the photographic plate is the smudged record of a galaxy, and there next to it is a quasar, the points of light lined up and looking for all the world as if they were equally luminous. These observations do not comport with standard Big Bang cosmology. If quasars have very large redshifts, they must (according to Hubble’s law) be very far away; if they seem nearby, then either they must be fantastically luminous or their redshift has not been derived from their velocity. The tight tidy series of inferences that has gone into Big Bang cosmology, like leverage in commodity trading, works beautifully in reverse, physicists like speculators finding their expectations canceled by the very processes they had hoped to exploit.
….
WITHIN ANY scientific discipline, bad news must come in battalions before it is taken seriously. Cosmologists can point to any number of cases in which disconcerting evidence has resolved itself in their favor; a decision to regard the quasars with a watchful indifference is not necessarily irrational. The galaxies are another matter. They are central to Hubble’s law; it is within the context of galactic observation that the crucial observational evidence for the Big Bang must be found or forged. The battalions now begin to fill. The American mathematician I.E. Segal and his associates have studied the evidence for galactic recessional velocity over the course of twenty years, with results that are sharply at odds with predictions of Big Bang cosmology. Segal is a distinguished, indeed a great mathematician, one of the creators of modern function theory and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He has incurred the indignation of the astrophysical community by suggesting broadly that their standards of statistical rigor would shame a sociologist. Big Bang cosmology, he writes,

“owes its acceptance as a physical principle primarily to the uncritical and premature representation of [the redshift-distance relationship] as an empirical fact…. Observed discrepancies … have been resolved by a pyramid of exculpatory assumptions, which are inherently incapable of noncircular substantiation.”

The serious student of creation science is invited to enjoy the rest of the article!

This entry was posted on Friday, June 22nd, 2007 at 9:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized, Big Bang, Advanced Creation Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.