From: metzler@pablo.physics.lsa.umich.edu (Chris Metzler)
Newsgroups: sci.physics
Subject: Re: The Big Bang Never Happened
Date: 6 Jan 1993 23:37:31 GMT
Organization: University of Michigan Department of Physics
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: pablo.physics.lsa.umich.edu

In article <wwadge.726349985@csr>, wwadge@csr.UVic.CA (Bill  Wadge) writes:
|> That's the title of a book I just read by Eric J. Lerner.
|> 
|> He sets out to refute the Big Bang theory and what he sees as the
|> ideological basis for it.
|> 
|> He favours the cosmological theories of H. Alfven (based on plasma
|> physics).
|> 
|> The book is very persuasive, but I'm not a physicist - any opinions?
|> 
|> If the book has already been discussed in the group, sorry, I'm
|> relatively new - is there an archive?
|> 
|> Bill Wadge       wwadge@csr.uvic.ca
|> University of Victoria


The book, to put it bluntly, is a crock.  Having failed to convince the
scientific establishment of the validity of his version of Alfven's
model, Lerner has gone to the public to plead his case -- as if
scientific fact was something that you vote on, rather than, well, fact.
Lerner seems to feel that the failure of the "plasma universe" to be
adopted has more to do with the sociology of science than the comparison
of theory with observation or experiment.  This is a convenient tack for
him to take, because it is, IMHO, easier to construct a seemingly valid
argument in sociology than it is in physics.  However, in doing so, he
neglects to tell the public these simple facts:

1.)  Whether or not the hot Big Bang model is right or wrong, it has
successfully explained a very wide variety of observations and experiments;
no other competing cosmological model has been able to do this.

2.)  Whether or not the hot Big Bang model is right or wrong, it has
successfully PREDICTED (God, I'm capitalizing!  Help me!) a wide variety
of observations and experiments (yes, even experiments); no other competing
cosmological model has been able to do this.

3.)  There is not one single observation -- not one -- that falsifies the
hot Big Bang model.  People often get inflation, or cold dark matter,
or the Einstein-deSitter (\Omega = 1) universe, or cosmic strings, or
what have you, confused with the hot Big Bang model; various results that
have cast doubt on scenarios such as above say NOTHING about
the validity of the hot Big Bang model.  They merely cast doubts on, or
even falsify, specific versions of the hot Big Bang model.  They would
falsify the hot Big Bang model only if those were the only options available.

4.)  The Plasma Universe is in great disagreement with observation.  In some
cases, it makes greater ad hoc assumptions than any which are made in any
version of the hot Big Bang model (even inflation).  For example, it is
very difficult to explain the thermal spectrum of the cosmic microwave
background outside of the Big Bang.  Lerner postulates invisible filaments
which scatter radiation from non-thermal sources in just exactly the right
way to make the microwave background look like a blackbody spectrum to
better than one part in 10^5.  What is the physical basis for believing in
such filaments?  Who knows?

In regard to #3 above, it is certainly possible to falsify the Big Bang
model.  For example, if someone detected a set of distant galaxies (with
distances determined independantly of the Hubble law) with strong BLUEshifts,
or if light element abundance observations strongly break ranks with Big
Bang nucleosynthesis theory, then it's safe to say that the hot Big Bang
model would be in trouble.  But no such observations have ever occurred.
And in his desire to discredit most of modern physics -- including,
unbelievably enough, the Standard Model of Particle Physics -- Lerner
really starts to scream that he doesn't know what he's talking about.
There, he demonstrates that compatibility/incompatibility with the data
really isn't what he's interested in.

If you are seriously interested in studying this in more depth, I would
suggest reading P.J.E. Peebles, D.N. Schramm, E.L. Turner, and R.G. Kron,
"The case for the relativistic hot Big Bang cosmology," Nature v352,
pp 769-776.


-- 
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Chris Metzler                                    313-764-4607 (office)
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