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The Big Bang Vs. the Big Rumble
WBUR radio in Boston hosts a talk with two physicists, Alan Guth and Neil Turok, who represent, respectively, the consensus theory of the inflationary Big Bang and an upstart theory of the initiation of the universe in the collision of two three-dimensional "branes." Turok and Paul Steinhardt developed their "Ekpyrotic proposal" out of the mathematics behind string theory. In the audio the two physicists are perhaps more respectful of one another's views than the host wishes them to be. If you ignore the "let's you and him fight" framing of the debate, you will hear some interesting physics elucidated.
You see theoretical scientists (you know the ones that have been working on stuff for decades and still don't have a single experimental piece of evidence) like to make up terminology and throw around big scary formulas to justify wasting time and money working on stuff that cannot even be proven experimentally. Sorry for the bitterness, but I wouldn't even call these people scientists. They might as well say that a giant spaghetti monster flies around and his noodly appendages form tiny knots and those knots are the elementary particles....BUT...OMG! the appendages are so thin that we cannot experimentally detect their presence...but they are there, trust us, here is a big hairy formula (don't worry about the solutions for know) it proves everything -- Give us another PhD!
The cosmologies described here are based on the inference that the universe is expanding in a manner proportional to the observed roughly constant redshift-to-distance ratio (Hubble constant). The idea is that as space is stretched, the wavelength of light is stretched along with it, as it transverses that space.
The problem with all these mainstream cosmologies is that observations have been made that require rather different (non-cosmological) mechanisms for redshift to exist. Halton Arp has made and detailed these observations, and the surrounding controversy http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Red-Redshifts-Cosmolo gy-Academic/dp/0968368905. Paul Mermet is another astrophysicist that has studied the matter http://www.newtonphysics.on.ca/HUBBLE/Hubble.html.
Essentially, current mainstream cosmology is likely to be complete bunk, because it is predicated on one particular ill-founded interpretation of redshift.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
If you want to get away from blackboard theory and consider what people actually see through telescopes, there is a strong case to be made, with many photographs of the objects in question, that many high-energy, high-redshift quasars appear to be located in close proximity to, and interacting with, low-redshift, low-energy galaxies. If indeed these observations are accurate (statistically they have a very low probability of being errors) then it's impossible to use red-shift as a metric for the "age" of the universe. And the rest of conventional cosmology also falls away. What do you get? No Big Bang, faster than light travel for rocket-ship sized objects, and other neat results.
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Dr. Halton C. Arp used to be one of the premiere U.S. astrophysicists (assistant to Hubble, winner of many awards in his own right, including "best young American astronomer", plenty of publications, etc.), but after 28 years as a staff astronomer at Mount Palomar was kicked off the telescope for his heretical views about red-shift. Now he's in a self-imposed sort of exile at the Max Planck Institut fur Astrophysik in Germany, but continues to believe that his many observations are valid.
For a recent podcast interview (posted June 1) with Dr. Arp at Electric Politics, see here:
http://www.electricpolitics.com/podcast/2007/06/a
And for Dr. Arp's personal website which has quite a bit of his research online, see here:
http://www.haltonarp.com/
Sorry, English is my third language. How many languages do you speak?
So now I'm supposed to conclude that not only is the mainstream interpretation wrong, but that its supporters are conspiring to keep its problems out of the literature.
Anything else I should know?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
A few more things, by the sound of it. The first thing you should note is that the peer review system is very effective at filtering information. This makes it suited to both its official intent, which is to improve the quality of discourse, as well as to censorship. You seem to assume it is the former, but that is just an assumption about the intent and integrity of those holding editorial positions and key chairs.
Secondly, editorial systems have been thoroughly corrupted before. For an example, read this book http://www.amazon.com/Into-Buzzsaw-Leading-Journal ists-Expose/dp/1591022304.
Actually nothing has been 'proven' with regards to the beginning of the Universe. Everything is still theory, and while significant holes have been blown in the ekpyrotic model, I've no doubt that the 'real truth' if ever found will probably look significantly different from either the Big Bang or the Ekpyrotic model.