Quote:
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Originally Posted by C1ay
Or, such organized structures really do take eons to develop as previously thought and there wasn't a Big Bang after all.
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"Yeah, that was my thought too. Strange that they did not comment on that at all."
And my thought too.
Some stuff from my
Cosmology page;
One thing that is very interesting (and disturbing) is how knowledge gets corrupted over time. This particularly applies to the idea that 'Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding'. He did no such thing, Hubble discovered a relationship between redshift and distance - one possible cause of this is the Doppler shift due to matter moving away from other matter (an expanding universe). Now this is a profoundly different thing to say, and yet it is simply amazing as to the number of respected scientists who say that Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding (which is not science!) As Eric Lerner correctly notices;
In one of its several variations the big bang cosmological theory is almost universally accepted as the most reasonable theory for the origin and evolution of the universe. In fact, it is so well accepted that virtually every media article, story or program that touches on the subjects of astronomy or cosmology presents the big bang (BB) as a virtual proven fact. As a result, the great majority of the literate populace of the world, including most of the scientists of the world, accepts big bang theory (BBT) as scientific fact. (Lerner, 1991)
It should be pointed out that Hubble himself was not convinced that red shift was exclusively due to Doppler effect. Up to the time of his death he maintained that velocities inferred from red shift measurements should be referred to as apparent velocities.' (Mitchell, 1997)
Below we quote a few scientists who have made this error, simply because we wish to strongly make the point about how we begin to assume things to be true, above and beyond what the observation tells us;
About 1929 the American astronomer Hubble demonstrated the existence of a strange correlation between distance and speed of the nebulae: they all move outwards, away from us, and with a velocity which increases proportional to the distance; or, in other words, the system of the spiral nebulae is expanding - just as the primitive comparison of this system with a gas had suggested to earlier thinkers. Now if one regards the expansion to have been the same in the past as it is today, one is led to the idea that the whole system must have had a beginning when all matter was condensed in a small 'supernucleus,' and one can calculate the time interval since this 'beginning of the world' and the present instant. The result obtained from Hubble's data was 2000 to 3000 millions of years.
Meanwhile the relativistic cosmology initiated by Einstein and De Sitter began to ripen in the hands of Friedmann, Lemaitre, Tolman, Robertson and others. A series of new possible models of the world were discovered between the extreme cases found by Einstein and De Sitter, and the question arose which of them fitted the empirical facts best, in particular those facts established by Hubble. Today there are many ramifications and refinements of the theory and there has been so enormous an increase of observational material that it is difficult to judge the actual situation. Earlier ideas which seemed to be most fertile have turned out to be too narrow or even wrong. (Born, 1964)
In the years following his proof of the existence of other galaxies, Hubble spent his time cataloguing their distances and observing their spectra. At that time most people expected the galaxies to be moving around quite randomly, and so expected to find as many blue-shifted spectra as red-shifted ones. It was quite a surprise, therefore, to find that most galaxies appeared red-shifted: nearly all were moving away from us! More surprisingly still was the finding that Hubble published in 1929: even the size of a galaxy's red shift is not random, but is directly proportional to the galaxy's distance from us. Or, in other words, the farther a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away! And that meant that the universe could not be static, as everyone previously thought, but is in fact expanding; the distance between the different galaxies is growing all the time.
In 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding. This means at earlier times objects would have been closer together. .. Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. (Hawking, 1988)
Only after the astronomer Edwin Hubble had studied the motions of galaxies and independently discovered that the universe was expanding. (Wertheim, 1997)
I am quite simply amazed that these good scientists can write such loose 'science'. Hopefully this will be an important lesson to Humanity – that we must always distinguish between empirical observations - and theories / interpretations founded on those observations!
Geoff Haselhurst
http://www.spaceandmotion.com
