The CMB is not indicative of the Big Bang Theory as opposed to other theories. Back when a background radiation temperature was being contemplated, there were conjectures based on expanding and non-expanding theories. The non-expanding ones were closer, but that's by no means a slam dunk, of course.
It's still pretty suspicious that it's that good of a blackbody curve, and isotropic enough to cause calculation issues. Parsimony would indicate that as being of more local origin.
The point being, CMB does not prove the Big Bang, but if the Big Bang were true, then the CMB should provide information about it.
Sumna biach, I'm uninstalling Autoform as soon as I get the chance:)
I remember a story called "Angel Station" where they had "vat meat". I was pretty enamoured of the concept at the time, really. Hell, I eat and enjoy hot dogs - by-products and all.
Seriously, though, the search to clone organs has been on for quite some time, and 'vat-grown meat' is very likely to happen at some point in time in the future. It won't happen on its own; some strange enlightened vegan or ex-Microsoft philanthropist will have to get the idea in their heads. There's a need for cloned organs regardless, though, so the longer it takes for someone to do vat meat, the cheaper it will be at the outset.
The fates of the farm animals of the future might be more up in the air, but it could be for the better. An economy of scale may no longer be required for some of the meat animals - this may push the balance back to smaller farms. It may depend on lobbying and advertising, though - you better believe that big operations, especially for chicken and pork, are going to take every opportunity to denigrate vat meat.
What would they call vat meat, though? "Vat meat" doesn't sound appealing as a name at all:)
Another kink in the road is Thermal Depolymerization. One argument against using real animals would be the waste products, but Thermal Depolymerization is proving its worth in trials in turkey processing plants, turning the waste into something useful.
I leave the actual prognosticating to others:)
-- Ritchie
P.S. Sorry for the other post - Autoform pulled that up after I did my preview. Grrr. Fool me twice.
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already:)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
I'm a gardening geek myself, and I think I'd be doing that if there were no computers around. There are a lot of geekly things you can do with gardening, and I don't think there are many gardeners who are masters of all of them.
There's plant identification (so controversial at the time - identifying by plant's private parts!), propagation, grafting (had an uncle who was big on this, and it can help you grow plants in different climates than they were bred for), growing edible plants, growing specialty plants (orchids, carnivorous plants, cacti), breeding plants, making the perfect lawn, landscaping, watering schemes, collecting odd plants, pruning, composting.
You can totally geek out with any one or two of these specialties.
I like collecting odd plants, growing fruit and growing fragrant plants. We just got some cherry-plum crosses and honeyberries this year (zone 3!), and there are mimosas (touch-sensitive) , papayas and teddy-bear vines indoors. Zone 3's pretty challenging, but I'm impressed at what grows and overwinters here. (e.g. Yucca, of all things!)
Now if I could only figure out how to keep seedlings alive and fungus-gnat-free:)
Much more valuable than the sound bite at the end of the day is the data just underneath the tawdry summary. "Typing with cold fingers makes you less productive," isn't something you'd scream "Eureka!" about, but finding out that saving $40,000 on your heating bill is causing approximately $740,000 in lost productivity is.
The papers themselves contain a lot more of the assumptions and statistics - and those maintain their validity over time. Trace "sodium is bad for you" back to the studies, and you may realize that the sample set is of people who are prone to hypertension. That's often why the pronouncements, which journalists promulgate (but make no mistake about it, scientists are also eager to summarize their work into a rule-of-thumb-for-everyone) can end up reversing or partly-reversing themselves every 5-25 years (fat is bad, fat is good, this kind of fat is good and this is not, the good kind of fat is only good if it's not trans...), but the research itself is not invalidated.
Another thing to look out for in the announcements are things like "students at Cornell University have found...". How many graduate students actually get to do groundbreaking research? Especially pre-PhD level? Student work has got to be pardoned from the 'obvious question' process.
To complain about science because the summary is obvious is cheap and tawdry.
The thing I like about the FreePascal crowd is that they don't go overboard adding shortcuts and special rules. I remember trying out GPC, and wondering if there was any hope of porting one of my frameworks to it, but it's practically Alice-in-Wonderland-esque in there. At least, my impression was that the ground was constantly shifting. Heck, you can use & and | instead of and and or.
I'm pleased also to hear that FreePascal is moving to Subversion - we've been using Subversion as a version control system for a while, and it's a very, very nice alternative to CVS.
I'm also glad that FreePascal has introduced interfaces. We've been forging a very nice foundational class library from interfaces. I have a few presentations put together for CDUG here in town, specifically for Delphi, but now relevant to FreePascal. (I wonder if the Generics trick will work in FP or not:)
Lazarus was still very, very rough around the edges last I checked. Perhaps after my wedding, I'll have time to poke my nose in there and at least help clean things up:)
Evolutionary theory is cumulative change over time. That scenario would damage evolutionary theory, because evolution works with what's given to it. There were no primates, and only loose ancestors of mammals at the time. Anything that looked even remotely human wouldn't have been anything like us.
Despite how creationists pooh-pooh 'macroevolution', their vision of it, especially the young-earthers, is that you must have had some day when a lizard hatched two or more birds. This is nothing like what evolutionary theory predicts. It takes time to produce later generations that look different (dogs have been with us for 100,000 years; most breeds have been developed over the past few hundred, using much more draconian selection than nature ever does), no longer interbreed, then drift apart in characteristics.
Evolutionary theory also does not set 'goals'. There's pressure on creatures to survive, not to become medium-sized, social tool users. There are many, many different compromises that are made in social interaction, development age, musculature and digestion that give certain advantages. We have extremely vulnerable babies, have to give up individual advantages for social ones, live in constant contact which can spread diseases through the population, and have specialized to the point where many of us cannot survive outside society, but we do well where the resources and/or our capacity to change local environments will support us and even, for the more adventurous of us, to take on living in more extreme conditions.
There are ecological niches in general for ground-diggers, herbivores, etc. and you'll find that creatures in isolated areas (islands are a great place to study them) will slide into roles where there's less competition. In Australia, there were major marsupials in roles for practically every major mammal in Europe or the Americas.
If they found that komodo dragon, that would set the scientific world completely on its side.
Mind you, evolution is about nature's economics. Genetically engineering a komodo dragon to produce chickens is something else entirely:)
To calculate the magnetic moment of a planet at creation, we must know the original material. In the previous article I presented Scriptural evidence that God originally created the Earth as a sphere of pure water.
The paper then proceeds from this assumption, calculating the magnetic moment of water, and so on.
You could proceed logically from such a questionable assumption, and come out with an equally questionable result. At least that would give you "if you accept premise A, I can show you that B is correct". However, there is more heavenly interference going on (I'll be adding my own italics - they're not in the original, of course):
All the magnetic moments cancel out, so that water normally has no net magnetic moment of its own. However, God was under no requirement to create the water molecules in their normal order. For example, He could have created all the molecules with their proton magnetic moments lined up in a given direction, producing the maximum magnetic moment possible from the protons. Or, He could have lined up the protons of the third ortho group (Figure 4(D)) along the field axis. Figure 5 shows this order. This would produce a field having one-fourth of the maximum strength with a minimum of deviation from the normal order. I do not know from Scripture what proportion of the protons God aligned in each case. In the previous article I put an arbitrary factor, k, into the equations. This alignment factor represents what fraction' of the maximum field God chose.
So, not only do we have to take on assumption that the earth started out as a sphere of water, but that, contrary to the current laws of physics, God is artificially aligning the water molecules to create a magnetic field.
The earth starting out as a sphere of water would presuppose as well that either the water can turn into rock (if you can find it, you can follow into his similarly-styled paper on "Is The Earth's Core Water?" - looks like it may only be in paper form or for subscribers only), or attract rock from nearby space (which would throw off the initial masses considerably - and which it doesn't look like he's promoting).
I would reiterate: the creationists are not being scientifically discriminated against, they're invoking supernatural powers to create just the right starting conditions and occasionally interfering with their development in order to arrive at the right already-measured values. That is not scientific, because it can never be proved wrong; the conditions and interference can be changed to suit.
I will actually levy the same charge against the current crop of cosmologists as well. They have made their theories so flexible that they can tweak knobs on equations at will, which means that it has lost nearly all predictive power.
The exchanges between Humphreys and Ross are pretty interesting:) Ross' side of the storm can be found at Reasons to Believe. Humphreys' side is peppered into numerous headlines at the ICR.
I'm inclined to believe Ross' reasons for reticence; ICR-sponsored debaters are known for being charismatic, picking the venue for maximum layman and supporter audience attendance, and coming with a well-prepared slick presentation and pitch, which their opponents, expecting an actual debate, come off as being boring, pedantic, and constantly on the defence. Ross has the right to be scared of that. Moderated debates, such as those on radio and television, do much better, and that goes as much for political debates.
Personally, I would call it 'crap'. They've done a mighty job of playing with mathematics, but the only real-world prediction they've made of note, the expectation of supersymmetric partners or boson-fermion interconversions, has not come to pass. They've consumed a disproportionate number of mathematical bright sparks doing heavy 10 or 11-dimensional mathwankery for decades, with not much to show for it...
...and hardly any criteria by which we may judge it to be true or false.
It's not science at this point, it's art. The beauty of the equations, twisting elegantly as they grace the page, has become all-consuming.
Finding a human inside a tyrannosaurus would certainly change our current understanding of evolution, but it would _not_ prove it false.
Certainly, the burden of proof would be on the community to make sure it wasn't a hoax, but a verified Tyrannosaurus with a verified Homo sapiens sapiens in its belly embedded in a Late Cretaceous stratum would threaten the theory.
It would be like standing somewhere on the Earth, holding out an apple, and having it go up. Sure, gravity may hold on the rest of the planet, but if you're going to have a global theory, then you're going to have to explain it, too.
We can't have our cake and eat it, too. We are willing to put our nads on the line here and say, "according to evolutionary theory, this can't happen".
Now if the fossil is lying instead in soft sandstone at the bottom of a lake, then the explanation is much, much more likely to be (A) pranksters or (B) living (or recently living) dinosaurs!
Or, if indeed the T. rex was real, and the human was real, and it was buried in a Late Cretaceous layer, but there was also something resembling an old British police box, then it wouldn't disprove evolutionary theory... it would prove time travel:)
Genes are recipes, not blueprints; most changes are in amount or timing of expression. Witness the fact that dwarf humans look mostly like regular humans - there's no need to make every gene 'shrink'
Sperm production weeds out a lot of the bad mutations. They need to be working cells before they meiose, so if something breaks in the fundamental machinery (and it can!), the particular sperm will be weak or dead.
The same goes for eggs, though not to the same degree - they don't divide as much, so they're less likely to have bad mutations.
Zygotes with bad mutations will often fail to implant in the womb, or develop improperly. If the bad mutations make the embryo fail to talk to the mother's immune system properly, it will be attacked and flushed.
If the baby has a terrible disease from the mutation, it may not live to childhood, never mind reproductive age. Most babies, though, have been through the aforementioned gauntlet, and will typically come out fine.
If the child is particularly susceptible to measles, or depression, or anxiety, or overeating when there's an abundance of food, or can't sweat in a hot climate, their chances of having children of their own are reduced.
So in a way, you're almost right... at least about mutations that code for important things.
This is the key point: out of the millions of sperm and dozens of eggs and needing to survive in the womb, it truly is 'survival of the fittest', and every generation 'bakes' its next generation in the womb, every child different from its parents.
Lest you think me impersonal and dour, I should point out that this is provably the way it is, though not necessarily the way it should be. We develop medicine, clean water, buildings, food supplies and relief efforts - these are all good things we've built with our own hands. We've taken some of nature's sieve out of the equation. It used to be a survival trait to have the right skin colour for the amount of sun where you live. Now, that's no longer the case (but take your Vitamin D or folic acid accordingly), and we can now have all colours of people living together.
Just because 'evolution happens' doesn't mean we can't have a hand in it now:)
Oh my god; scientific my great hairy behind. If there was ever a case for setting up theories that "evolutionists" don't actually believe in, and have nothing to do with, it would be this.
It cherry-picks pieces from a handful of scientific articles, and footnotes other CR papers for the majority of the rest.
From what I can gather, he asserts that magnetic fields must wind down over time (referring to Barnes' creationist paper)...
Not all creationists agree with my hypothesis that the original material was water, but all agree that once a magnetic field existed, it would decay over time.
...then he takes guesses and estimates, with no method for estimation given, that a creation 6,000 years old (according to an exact chronology given in Genesis) with winding down magnetic fields agrees with his mysterious estimates.
Using accepted models (which are really only guesses) of the cores' and an age of 6,000 years,6 I estimated the present magnetic moments for the Sun, Moon, and all the planets for which we had magnetic data in 1984.2 The values I got agreed well with the measured values shown by the solid dots in Figure 1.
On top of lumping everyone who believes in a universe, never mind an Earth, older than 6,000 years an "evolutionist", which is a mischaracterization itself (paint all old-earth geologists with that brush, why don't they?), the paper positively drips with False Dilemma, the belief that since a feature was not predicted, that their own personal after-the-observation-was-made guess validates the philosophy their brown thumb estimates came from, and that their view versus picked, made-up, or long-abandoned scientific hypothesis are the only two choices to be made.
These folks are not being turned away at the gates of scientific journals due to persecution or blindness. They have fundamental difficulties at the "show your work" stage.
Since most of us take care online, but we may want, for example, to log into banks and the like (I don't know - we forgot to pay the gas bill and we're on holiday in Spain at the time) on a public terminal.
Why not take a page from the likes of POPjisyo - it processes web pages to provide pop-up hints; why not put something together that will substitute your own password scheme whenever it encounters an <input type="password"> or the like? Put in your own never-repeating challenges so that your proxy program will submit the proper password on your behalf.
Aspects 'inject' behaviour into your classes. This is fine if the behaviour is completely orthogonal to the workings of your class, e.g. you're injecting enter/exit logging. If you start to inject functionality, however, the workings of the class can be substantially obscured. A number of the examples I've seen can be as properly done with more broken-down normal methods and a naming convention (e.g. before_x, after_x).
That said, chances are that the true benefits of aspect-oriented programming are not going to come from it being a mere curiosity to add to object-oriented programming. Someone is going to have to discover how to program in AOP where the focus is on AOP.
Possibly, it will have a journey like object-oriented programming. Started out with being used as object-based programming (just a more convenient way to associate data with functions), grew to some standard uses, then exploded into class libraries and eventually patterns.
Even 'interface-oriented programming' requires a slightly different tack than plain object-oriented programming does.
That's not to say that AOP will be the next actual big thing, or even really find its niche. There are plenty of good ideas that never really 'made it'. Time, and a whole passel of people with a lot of on their hands, will tell:)
My apologies to all - and remember, kids, don't install Autoform on your Firefox without being aware of the consequences (like having it re-load your last posted comment:)
Now, to try and re-create what I actually wrote...
Nothing is more fundamental than simple awareness, from which all matter originates.
IMO, nothing is more complicated than simple awareness, and especially consciousness. It takes a lot of extra machinery to do the 'introspection' part - the part we would call consciousness. We have an astounding amount of working memory and attention systems to support it. Books like Joseph LeDoux's Synaptic Self and even the more impenetrable Walter Freeman's How Brains Make Up Their Minds are fascinating tomes on what goes on in that wonderful grey pudding in our noggins.
I also take issue with the astounding human-centric idea that it takes "consciousness" to collapse quantum probabilities. Stretching that idea out to the idea that the equipment was in several superpositions of state until a human came along quickly enters the realm of pulp fiction. It's our modern-day "if a tree falls in the forest..." question, and I'll put my hat in the ring on the "yes" side.
Our current-day quantum experiments behave effectively like closed systems; they are not actually closed systems, and when it comes time to measure things, the measurement instruments come to participate in the quantum system. They're expressed mathematically as 'measurement operators' when they get turned into classical information. The entanglement or other quantum states may very well be transferred to and lost in the measurement device - probably any measured quantum state that the No-Cloning Theorem applies to.
*grin* You, of course, are more than welcome to speculate on whether neutrons are composed of 3 units of peace, 4 units of contemplation inside a 4*pi radius of transcendentalism:)
I'm sorry, that was a bit cheeky. You're more than welcome to your Eastern Mysticism - and that I will respect. I would, however, challenge you to come up with any way a scientist could ever usefully include 'consciousness' or 'awareness' in their research:)
No, worse than that - I made the mistake of not only installing Autoform, but not adding Slashdot to the Autoload URLs ignore list.
Now my comment, which expressed annoyance with the concept of 'consciousness' as a fundamental unit of anything as well as bashing the idea that a conscious observer has to be present to 'collapse the wave function' (measurement operators don't require a human brain behind them), is lost to the four winds, overwritten by the last dang thing I wrote.
At least I have a chance to go back and redo it and apologize for the mess.
Thanks for pointing it out *shakes head**sigh*.
It wouldn't be for karma - my karma's already excellent:)
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already:)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
My eMachines laptop got blown out of the water with an Windows XP Home SP2 install. (Windows XP Pro, apparently, didn't have the trouble in question).
Upon reboot, I got an blue screen complaining about the safety of one of the drivers. "Fine, fine, I don't think my driver manufacturer is trying to kill my machine. I'll reboot to safe mode.
No dice. It stayed as steadfastly blue as it had last time. The recovery CD didn't copy enough config over to prevent it bluescreening. It was a good thing the machine was relatively new and I could do things from scratch, or I'd be a few days out, frantically downloading Knoppix on any disks I could find.
So I held off on SP2 for a while. When the manufacturer's fix came in, it ended up being an adjustment to the registry.
Now if that had happened on a larger scale? That could take out a business, especially with the monoculture of machines a lot of businesses seem to have.
We've run into troubles ourselves where we configure two usually-separate programs onto the same machine and configure it to use localhost. The firewall-turns-on setting busted a few of our deployments before we figured out what was going on.
...but there are some kinds of meetups of people for which it ended up being... inappropriate.
We used Meetup to get folks together and reunite local Delphi developers. The first couple of meet-and-greets at a coffee shop were pretty good.
That said, at least at the time, the venues listed for meeting at were sponsored by local businesses, and precious few of them were even passable for a meeting of geeks, especially when it became clear that folks wanted to come out and learn stuff.
The semi-biker-and-pool-hall that, through lack of folks knowing what it was, got voted in due to its convenient location. A quick survey of the hazy interior, and we realized the oops that we made.
There was, of course, no provision for getting the word out on a secondary venue this late in the game, so a quick trip to the convenience store for stationery (I always wondered who bought tape and pens at a store next to a bar:) and some rescue signage was put up for the stragglers.
Oh, wouldn't you know it - our second choice was closed.
My sympathies to the souls who got lost that day:)
So thanks, Meetup, for getting us together in the first place... I'm sorry we couldn't stay:)
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already:)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
Intrinsic is just another way of saying unexplainable: saying the redshift is "intrinsic" means that it is not due to anything. In other words, it has no explanation. That doesn't exactly seem scientific.
On the contrary. You do not have to have an explanation in hand. Dark energy, for example, has a name, but not an explanation (calling it Einstein's cosmological constant doesn't help much either:) Yet it can be used to generate hypotheses and tested, given certain assumptions.
In this case, we have an existing theory, and some disparate observations (e.g. at their measured redshift distances, older galaxies in any cluster seem to group on the near side, which is anti-Copernican) that have raised suspicions.
Having a hypothesis that expansion of space cannot statistically account for the observed redshift is a perfectly valid, and scientific, premise for experimentation.
That said, there are some theorists working on the problem.
That's the summary of the story that's been put together so far:)
The redshift they describe is 'cosmological redshift'. It is true that it would be technically incorrect to call it a Doppler redshift if the currently-held accelerating universe view is actually true.
There are Doppler redshifts on top of this as well - rotations and movement add to or subtract from the cosmological redshift.
What the papers I quote have been finding is that cosmological redshift (whether Doppler or not) isn't enough.
Intrinsic redshifts are statistically important. They do not, however, get rid of the cosmological component.
The current 'accepted' value of the Hubble Constant, which reflects the age of the universe, is 72 km/s/Mpc, giving us an age of about 13 billion years.
Taking the instrinic redshift from that gives us a Hubble Constant of 50-60 km/s/Mpc, which gives us an age of about 18 billion years, so that theorists might have time to deal with the 'vegetable soup' phenomenon, to quote a sound bite.
(Looking back to 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe still doesn't look very young. Of course, the revised age will also alter back the ages of some of the objects.)
There's some reason to believe that even the remaining cosmological component may not actually represent expansion, and it was presented in one of Edwin Hubble's later lectures, "The Observational Approach to Cosmology".
The premise, basically, is that a redshift would give a corresponding decrease in photon density, if due to expansion, but it doesn't.
We'll see what happens over the next few years, though:)
There's a decent amount of evidence that has been mounting over the past few years that a large component of redshift is in fact intrinsic, i.e. not attributed to the Doppler effect.
In some ways, it seems related to the much-glossed-over "K Effect" of a few decades ago, where it was found that bright, bright blue stars seemed to be systematically redshifted.
Researchers like M. B. Bell are of the opinion that the intrinsic redshifts are superimposed on a Big Bang flow (reducing the actual velocity we should be measuring). Others, like Arp, believe that the Hubble Flow is an illusion, and that the universe is actually relatively static once you take away the intrinsic redshifts.
David Russell's paper that just came out supports either view, and shows that other explanations (like Tully-Fisher Relationship errors or rotational velocities) are far too small to account for the large discrepancies.
In either case, intrinsic redshifts will take a lot of pressure off researchers to find 'dark energy', because the discrepancies of speed/distance are much reduced.
Then, perhaps, we can stop looking for something that isn't there?:)
The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.
Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.
Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them:)
Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but...
The CMB is not indicative of the Big Bang Theory as opposed to other theories. Back when a background radiation temperature was being contemplated, there were conjectures based on expanding and non-expanding theories. The non-expanding ones were closer, but that's by no means a slam dunk, of course.
It's still pretty suspicious that it's that good of a blackbody curve, and isotropic enough to cause calculation issues. Parsimony would indicate that as being of more local origin.
The point being, CMB does not prove the Big Bang, but if the Big Bang were true, then the CMB should provide information about it.
Sumna biach, I'm uninstalling Autoform as soon as I get the chance :)
I remember a story called "Angel Station" where they had "vat meat". I was pretty enamoured of the concept at the time, really. Hell, I eat and enjoy hot dogs - by-products and all.
Seriously, though, the search to clone organs has been on for quite some time, and 'vat-grown meat' is very likely to happen at some point in time in the future. It won't happen on its own; some strange enlightened vegan or ex-Microsoft philanthropist will have to get the idea in their heads. There's a need for cloned organs regardless, though, so the longer it takes for someone to do vat meat, the cheaper it will be at the outset.
The fates of the farm animals of the future might be more up in the air, but it could be for the better. An economy of scale may no longer be required for some of the meat animals - this may push the balance back to smaller farms. It may depend on lobbying and advertising, though - you better believe that big operations, especially for chicken and pork, are going to take every opportunity to denigrate vat meat.
What would they call vat meat, though? "Vat meat" doesn't sound appealing as a name at all :)
Another kink in the road is Thermal Depolymerization. One argument against using real animals would be the waste products, but Thermal Depolymerization is proving its worth in trials in turkey processing plants, turning the waste into something useful.
I leave the actual prognosticating to others :)
-- Ritchie
P.S. Sorry for the other post - Autoform pulled that up after I did my preview. Grrr. Fool me twice.
Hear, hear.
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings ;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already :)
By the way, speaking of aether... ;)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
Everybody's MMV :)
-- Ritchie
Seconded!
I'm a gardening geek myself, and I think I'd be doing that if there were no computers around. There are a lot of geekly things you can do with gardening, and I don't think there are many gardeners who are masters of all of them.
There's plant identification (so controversial at the time - identifying by plant's private parts!), propagation, grafting (had an uncle who was big on this, and it can help you grow plants in different climates than they were bred for), growing edible plants, growing specialty plants (orchids, carnivorous plants, cacti), breeding plants, making the perfect lawn, landscaping, watering schemes, collecting odd plants, pruning, composting.
You can totally geek out with any one or two of these specialties.
I like collecting odd plants, growing fruit and growing fragrant plants. We just got some cherry-plum crosses and honeyberries this year (zone 3!), and there are mimosas (touch-sensitive) , papayas and teddy-bear vines indoors. Zone 3's pretty challenging, but I'm impressed at what grows and overwinters here. (e.g. Yucca, of all things!)
Now if I could only figure out how to keep seedlings alive and fungus-gnat-free :)
-- Ritchie
Much more valuable than the sound bite at the end of the day is the data just underneath the tawdry summary. "Typing with cold fingers makes you less productive," isn't something you'd scream "Eureka!" about, but finding out that saving $40,000 on your heating bill is causing approximately $740,000 in lost productivity is.
The papers themselves contain a lot more of the assumptions and statistics - and those maintain their validity over time. Trace "sodium is bad for you" back to the studies, and you may realize that the sample set is of people who are prone to hypertension. That's often why the pronouncements, which journalists promulgate (but make no mistake about it, scientists are also eager to summarize their work into a rule-of-thumb-for-everyone) can end up reversing or partly-reversing themselves every 5-25 years (fat is bad, fat is good, this kind of fat is good and this is not, the good kind of fat is only good if it's not trans...), but the research itself is not invalidated.
Another thing to look out for in the announcements are things like "students at Cornell University have found...". How many graduate students actually get to do groundbreaking research? Especially pre-PhD level? Student work has got to be pardoned from the 'obvious question' process.
To complain about science because the summary is obvious is cheap and tawdry.
-- Ritchie
The thing I like about the FreePascal crowd is that they don't go overboard adding shortcuts and special rules. I remember trying out GPC, and wondering if there was any hope of porting one of my frameworks to it, but it's practically Alice-in-Wonderland-esque in there. At least, my impression was that the ground was constantly shifting. Heck, you can use & and | instead of and and or.
I'm pleased also to hear that FreePascal is moving to Subversion - we've been using Subversion as a version control system for a while, and it's a very, very nice alternative to CVS.
I'm also glad that FreePascal has introduced interfaces. We've been forging a very nice foundational class library from interfaces. I have a few presentations put together for CDUG here in town, specifically for Delphi, but now relevant to FreePascal. (I wonder if the Generics trick will work in FP or not :)
Lazarus was still very, very rough around the edges last I checked. Perhaps after my wedding, I'll have time to poke my nose in there and at least help clean things up :)
-- Ritchie
Evolutionary theory is cumulative change over time. That scenario would damage evolutionary theory, because evolution works with what's given to it. There were no primates, and only loose ancestors of mammals at the time. Anything that looked even remotely human wouldn't have been anything like us.
Despite how creationists pooh-pooh 'macroevolution', their vision of it, especially the young-earthers, is that you must have had some day when a lizard hatched two or more birds. This is nothing like what evolutionary theory predicts. It takes time to produce later generations that look different (dogs have been with us for 100,000 years; most breeds have been developed over the past few hundred, using much more draconian selection than nature ever does), no longer interbreed, then drift apart in characteristics.
Evolutionary theory also does not set 'goals'. There's pressure on creatures to survive, not to become medium-sized, social tool users. There are many, many different compromises that are made in social interaction, development age, musculature and digestion that give certain advantages. We have extremely vulnerable babies, have to give up individual advantages for social ones, live in constant contact which can spread diseases through the population, and have specialized to the point where many of us cannot survive outside society, but we do well where the resources and/or our capacity to change local environments will support us and even, for the more adventurous of us, to take on living in more extreme conditions.
There are ecological niches in general for ground-diggers, herbivores, etc. and you'll find that creatures in isolated areas (islands are a great place to study them) will slide into roles where there's less competition. In Australia, there were major marsupials in roles for practically every major mammal in Europe or the Americas.
If they found that komodo dragon, that would set the scientific world completely on its side.
Mind you, evolution is about nature's economics. Genetically engineering a komodo dragon to produce chickens is something else entirely :)
-- Ritchie
He does go into more detail in some of the papers he references, but they're on similarly shaky ground.
The paper The Creation of Planetary Magnetic Fields contains a number of faith-based a priori assumptions. To wit:
The paper then proceeds from this assumption, calculating the magnetic moment of water, and so on.
You could proceed logically from such a questionable assumption, and come out with an equally questionable result. At least that would give you "if you accept premise A, I can show you that B is correct". However, there is more heavenly interference going on (I'll be adding my own italics - they're not in the original, of course):
So, not only do we have to take on assumption that the earth started out as a sphere of water, but that, contrary to the current laws of physics, God is artificially aligning the water molecules to create a magnetic field.
The earth starting out as a sphere of water would presuppose as well that either the water can turn into rock (if you can find it, you can follow into his similarly-styled paper on "Is The Earth's Core Water?" - looks like it may only be in paper form or for subscribers only), or attract rock from nearby space (which would throw off the initial masses considerably - and which it doesn't look like he's promoting).
I would reiterate: the creationists are not being scientifically discriminated against, they're invoking supernatural powers to create just the right starting conditions and occasionally interfering with their development in order to arrive at the right already-measured values. That is not scientific, because it can never be proved wrong; the conditions and interference can be changed to suit.
I will actually levy the same charge against the current crop of cosmologists as well. They have made their theories so flexible that they can tweak knobs on equations at will, which means that it has lost nearly all predictive power.
The exchanges between Humphreys and Ross are pretty interesting :) Ross' side of the storm can be found at Reasons to Believe. Humphreys' side is peppered into numerous headlines at the ICR.
I'm inclined to believe Ross' reasons for reticence; ICR-sponsored debaters are known for being charismatic, picking the venue for maximum layman and supporter audience attendance, and coming with a well-prepared slick presentation and pitch, which their opponents, expecting an actual debate, come off as being boring, pedantic, and constantly on the defence. Ross has the right to be scared of that. Moderated debates, such as those on radio and television, do much better, and that goes as much for political debates.
Cheers, Eric
-- Ritchie
Personally, I would call it 'crap'. They've done a mighty job of playing with mathematics, but the only real-world prediction they've made of note, the expectation of supersymmetric partners or boson-fermion interconversions, has not come to pass. They've consumed a disproportionate number of mathematical bright sparks doing heavy 10 or 11-dimensional mathwankery for decades, with not much to show for it...
...and hardly any criteria by which we may judge it to be true or false.
It's not science at this point, it's art. The beauty of the equations, twisting elegantly as they grace the page, has become all-consuming.
So yeah, it counts.
:)
Finding a human inside a tyrannosaurus would certainly change our current understanding of evolution, but it would _not_ prove it false.
Certainly, the burden of proof would be on the community to make sure it wasn't a hoax, but a verified Tyrannosaurus with a verified Homo sapiens sapiens in its belly embedded in a Late Cretaceous stratum would threaten the theory.
It would be like standing somewhere on the Earth, holding out an apple, and having it go up. Sure, gravity may hold on the rest of the planet, but if you're going to have a global theory, then you're going to have to explain it, too.
We can't have our cake and eat it, too. We are willing to put our nads on the line here and say, "according to evolutionary theory, this can't happen".
Now if the fossil is lying instead in soft sandstone at the bottom of a lake, then the explanation is much, much more likely to be (A) pranksters or (B) living (or recently living) dinosaurs!
Or, if indeed the T. rex was real, and the human was real, and it was buried in a Late Cretaceous layer, but there was also something resembling an old British police box, then it wouldn't disprove evolutionary theory... it would prove time travel :)
You're missing a few key points:
So in a way, you're almost right... at least about mutations that code for important things.
This is the key point: out of the millions of sperm and dozens of eggs and needing to survive in the womb, it truly is 'survival of the fittest', and every generation 'bakes' its next generation in the womb, every child different from its parents.
Lest you think me impersonal and dour, I should point out that this is provably the way it is, though not necessarily the way it should be. We develop medicine, clean water, buildings, food supplies and relief efforts - these are all good things we've built with our own hands. We've taken some of nature's sieve out of the equation. It used to be a survival trait to have the right skin colour for the amount of sun where you live. Now, that's no longer the case (but take your Vitamin D or folic acid accordingly), and we can now have all colours of people living together.
Just because 'evolution happens' doesn't mean we can't have a hand in it now :)
Oh my god; scientific my great hairy behind. If there was ever a case for setting up theories that "evolutionists" don't actually believe in, and have nothing to do with, it would be this.
Here is one of Humphrey's publications.
It cherry-picks pieces from a handful of scientific articles, and footnotes other CR papers for the majority of the rest.
From what I can gather, he asserts that magnetic fields must wind down over time (referring to Barnes' creationist paper)...
...then he takes guesses and estimates, with no method for estimation given, that a creation 6,000 years old (according to an exact chronology given in Genesis) with winding down magnetic fields agrees with his mysterious estimates.
On top of lumping everyone who believes in a universe, never mind an Earth, older than 6,000 years an "evolutionist", which is a mischaracterization itself (paint all old-earth geologists with that brush, why don't they?), the paper positively drips with False Dilemma, the belief that since a feature was not predicted, that their own personal after-the-observation-was-made guess validates the philosophy their brown thumb estimates came from, and that their view versus picked, made-up, or long-abandoned scientific hypothesis are the only two choices to be made.
These folks are not being turned away at the gates of scientific journals due to persecution or blindness. They have fundamental difficulties at the "show your work" stage.
I call shenanigans.
Since most of us take care online, but we may want, for example, to log into banks and the like (I don't know - we forgot to pay the gas bill and we're on holiday in Spain at the time) on a public terminal.
Why not take a page from the likes of POPjisyo - it processes web pages to provide pop-up hints; why not put something together that will substitute your own password scheme whenever it encounters an <input type="password"> or the like? Put in your own never-repeating challenges so that your proxy program will submit the proper password on your behalf.
It's a thought, anyways :)
-- Ritchie
That is even easier - on Windows, you can use the SetClipboardViewer to get notifications of clipboard changes.
Aspects 'inject' behaviour into your classes. This is fine if the behaviour is completely orthogonal to the workings of your class, e.g. you're injecting enter/exit logging. If you start to inject functionality, however, the workings of the class can be substantially obscured. A number of the examples I've seen can be as properly done with more broken-down normal methods and a naming convention (e.g. before_x, after_x).
That said, chances are that the true benefits of aspect-oriented programming are not going to come from it being a mere curiosity to add to object-oriented programming. Someone is going to have to discover how to program in AOP where the focus is on AOP.
Possibly, it will have a journey like object-oriented programming. Started out with being used as object-based programming (just a more convenient way to associate data with functions), grew to some standard uses, then exploded into class libraries and eventually patterns.
Even 'interface-oriented programming' requires a slightly different tack than plain object-oriented programming does.
That's not to say that AOP will be the next actual big thing, or even really find its niche. There are plenty of good ideas that never really 'made it'. Time, and a whole passel of people with a lot of on their hands, will tell :)
My apologies to all - and remember, kids, don't install Autoform on your Firefox without being aware of the consequences (like having it re-load your last posted comment :)
Now, to try and re-create what I actually wrote...
IMO, nothing is more complicated than simple awareness, and especially consciousness. It takes a lot of extra machinery to do the 'introspection' part - the part we would call consciousness. We have an astounding amount of working memory and attention systems to support it. Books like Joseph LeDoux's Synaptic Self and even the more impenetrable Walter Freeman's How Brains Make Up Their Minds are fascinating tomes on what goes on in that wonderful grey pudding in our noggins.
I also take issue with the astounding human-centric idea that it takes "consciousness" to collapse quantum probabilities. Stretching that idea out to the idea that the equipment was in several superpositions of state until a human came along quickly enters the realm of pulp fiction. It's our modern-day "if a tree falls in the forest..." question, and I'll put my hat in the ring on the "yes" side.
Our current-day quantum experiments behave effectively like closed systems; they are not actually closed systems, and when it comes time to measure things, the measurement instruments come to participate in the quantum system. They're expressed mathematically as 'measurement operators' when they get turned into classical information. The entanglement or other quantum states may very well be transferred to and lost in the measurement device - probably any measured quantum state that the No-Cloning Theorem applies to.
*grin* You, of course, are more than welcome to speculate on whether neutrons are composed of 3 units of peace, 4 units of contemplation inside a 4*pi radius of transcendentalism :)
I'm sorry, that was a bit cheeky. You're more than welcome to your Eastern Mysticism - and that I will respect. I would, however, challenge you to come up with any way a scientist could ever usefully include 'consciousness' or 'awareness' in their research :)
-- Ritchie
Spit, spit, spit.
No, worse than that - I made the mistake of not only installing Autoform, but not adding Slashdot to the Autoload URLs ignore list.
Now my comment, which expressed annoyance with the concept of 'consciousness' as a fundamental unit of anything as well as bashing the idea that a conscious observer has to be present to 'collapse the wave function' (measurement operators don't require a human brain behind them), is lost to the four winds, overwritten by the last dang thing I wrote.
At least I have a chance to go back and redo it and apologize for the mess.
Thanks for pointing it out *shakes head* *sigh*.
It wouldn't be for karma - my karma's already excellent :)
Hear, hear.
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings ;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already :)
By the way, speaking of aether... ;)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
Everybody's MMV :)
-- Ritchie
My eMachines laptop got blown out of the water with an Windows XP Home SP2 install. (Windows XP Pro, apparently, didn't have the trouble in question).
Upon reboot, I got an blue screen complaining about the safety of one of the drivers. "Fine, fine, I don't think my driver manufacturer is trying to kill my machine. I'll reboot to safe mode.
No dice. It stayed as steadfastly blue as it had last time. The recovery CD didn't copy enough config over to prevent it bluescreening. It was a good thing the machine was relatively new and I could do things from scratch, or I'd be a few days out, frantically downloading Knoppix on any disks I could find.
So I held off on SP2 for a while. When the manufacturer's fix came in, it ended up being an adjustment to the registry.
Now if that had happened on a larger scale? That could take out a business, especially with the monoculture of machines a lot of businesses seem to have.
We've run into troubles ourselves where we configure two usually-separate programs onto the same machine and configure it to use localhost. The firewall-turns-on setting busted a few of our deployments before we figured out what was going on.
I can see why IT would stay away.
Ouch.
-- Ritchie
...but there are some kinds of meetups of people for which it ended up being... inappropriate.
We used Meetup to get folks together and reunite local Delphi developers. The first couple of meet-and-greets at a coffee shop were pretty good.
That said, at least at the time, the venues listed for meeting at were sponsored by local businesses, and precious few of them were even passable for a meeting of geeks, especially when it became clear that folks wanted to come out and learn stuff.
The semi-biker-and-pool-hall that, through lack of folks knowing what it was, got voted in due to its convenient location. A quick survey of the hazy interior, and we realized the oops that we made.
There was, of course, no provision for getting the word out on a secondary venue this late in the game, so a quick trip to the convenience store for stationery (I always wondered who bought tape and pens at a store next to a bar :) and some rescue signage was put up for the stragglers.
Oh, wouldn't you know it - our second choice was closed.
My sympathies to the souls who got lost that day :)
So thanks, Meetup, for getting us together in the first place... I'm sorry we couldn't stay :)
-- Ritchie
Hear, hear.
I've been quite surprised at the influx of "odd" observations over the past few years; I certainly wasn't expecting local pancake structures.
You raise a pretty good point, though, on the structure of disks, large and small, in the first place.
Plasma physicists jump up and down that the in-vogue theories treat large-scale magnetic fields and currents as non-existent, as though charge must cancel out on the large scale, therefore it has no effect. Sometimes, they make a good point - some of the disk systems do resemble dynamos.
Some of the papers I've read in passing on "push" gravity theories estimate that the force of gravity is proportional to 1/d**2 locally, but trends to 1/d on the outsides of the galaxy. Otherwise, there's a lot of unseen matter there (and we haven't seen anything resembling the high-velocity clouds gathering on the edges of the galaxy)... or, alternately, we're ignoring a dynamo effect.
Or... etc. (Assuming we stop before postulating that angels sit on the edge fanning galaxies with their wings ;)
It's the bank of poorly-explained pieces that will lead us to our next big theoretical breakthrough (or revolution) - but it takes some special vigilance to keep track of what hasn't actually been explained properly, and what's been merely papered over.
Too many tweaks. They should have realized something was wrong sometime between inflation theory, and dark-energy-requiring ever-increasing-acceleration theory. Plenty of duct tape on things already :)
By the way, speaking of aether... ;)
I can understand the establishment position somewhat... it's either duct tape or anarchy. There's got to be a standard to measure against, but if the explanations start stretching thin, they need an exit strategy.
If that day comes, they will need to exit to something, though. What's out there that can explain the pancakes at multiple scales of the universe and other phenomena as well?
Perhaps they need to take a page out of other research and development, and apportion some funds to "blue sky" research.
The biggest dividends will come from research that's reviewed for logic, self-consistency and explanation of phenomena without regard to how well it fits into prior patterns. Pro-Ams and people in fields with more easily measureable results (applied sciences, for one) realize these benefits, but being in a field where so many assumptions have to be made to interpret the results in the first place make this next to impossible for the theoreticians to condone dissent.
Everybody's MMV :)
-- Ritchie
On the contrary. You do not have to have an explanation in hand. Dark energy, for example, has a name, but not an explanation (calling it Einstein's cosmological constant doesn't help much either :) Yet it can be used to generate hypotheses and tested, given certain assumptions.
In this case, we have an existing theory, and some disparate observations (e.g. at their measured redshift distances, older galaxies in any cluster seem to group on the near side, which is anti-Copernican) that have raised suspicions.
Having a hypothesis that expansion of space cannot statistically account for the observed redshift is a perfectly valid, and scientific, premise for experimentation.
That said, there are some theorists working on the problem.
Contenders for a mechanism:
Some of these have got to be wrong, of course, (and this doesn't rule out other mechanisms) but those will show up on further experiments.
Cheers :)
That's the summary of the story that's been put together so far :)
The redshift they describe is 'cosmological redshift'. It is true that it would be technically incorrect to call it a Doppler redshift if the currently-held accelerating universe view is actually true.
There are Doppler redshifts on top of this as well - rotations and movement add to or subtract from the cosmological redshift.
What the papers I quote have been finding is that cosmological redshift (whether Doppler or not) isn't enough.
Intrinsic redshifts are statistically important. They do not, however, get rid of the cosmological component.
The current 'accepted' value of the Hubble Constant, which reflects the age of the universe, is 72 km/s/Mpc, giving us an age of about 13 billion years.
Taking the instrinic redshift from that gives us a Hubble Constant of 50-60 km/s/Mpc, which gives us an age of about 18 billion years, so that theorists might have time to deal with the 'vegetable soup' phenomenon, to quote a sound bite.
(Looking back to 1-2 billion years after the Big Bang, the universe still doesn't look very young. Of course, the revised age will also alter back the ages of some of the objects.)
There's some reason to believe that even the remaining cosmological component may not actually represent expansion, and it was presented in one of Edwin Hubble's later lectures, "The Observational Approach to Cosmology".
The premise, basically, is that a redshift would give a corresponding decrease in photon density, if due to expansion, but it doesn't.
We'll see what happens over the next few years, though :)
Thanks for the link!
There's a decent amount of evidence that has been mounting over the past few years that a large component of redshift is in fact intrinsic, i.e. not attributed to the Doppler effect.
In some ways, it seems related to the much-glossed-over "K Effect" of a few decades ago, where it was found that bright, bright blue stars seemed to be systematically redshifted.
Researchers like M. B. Bell are of the opinion that the intrinsic redshifts are superimposed on a Big Bang flow (reducing the actual velocity we should be measuring). Others, like Arp, believe that the Hubble Flow is an illusion, and that the universe is actually relatively static once you take away the intrinsic redshifts.
David Russell's paper that just came out supports either view, and shows that other explanations (like Tully-Fisher Relationship errors or rotational velocities) are far too small to account for the large discrepancies.
(Some more hubbub on the topic.)
In either case, intrinsic redshifts will take a lot of pressure off researchers to find 'dark energy', because the discrepancies of speed/distance are much reduced.
Then, perhaps, we can stop looking for something that isn't there? :)
I'm sure they're subject-shopping, but it's interesting that there are so many weird things going on out there.
It does feel like there are a few things about to tease themselves apart in cosmology...
Gravity seems to be behaving oddly, with things like the Pioneer acceleration and the anomalous in-track acceleration of the LAGEOS satellites.
The limited age of the universe is being stretched to strange proportions of late with observations of the early universe looking more developed than expected. Observations by the Spitzer may throw even more confusion on the fire.
Add to the pile interesting oddities like Quantized Redshift, originally proposed by Tifft and still observed, that would see to put us at the center of the universe (we shouldn't see the equivalent of even "shells" from our point of view). The Fingers of God is an interesting graphic interpretation.
Association of high-redshift quasars with low-redshift galaxies rounds off the plate.
Actually, a number of these controversies have been around since the mid-80's, but the power and spectrum spread of our telescopes has been getting better. It's been hard to get time to observe the controversial objects - the allocation committees tend to turn such proposals down - but there are plenty of controversies left in the skies, even when we don't go looking for them :)
Personally, I'm excited by the possibilities. It feels like there's something just around the corner, if only we can get some research time in on it.