The press release from BICEP making claims regarding detection of gravitational waves which inform us about the origin of the cosmos has been doing the rounds of the world’s media organisations. Hans Jelbring comments:
Big Bang – The greatest fairy tale ever told
Hans Jelbring – 18-3-2014
There is freedom of choosing religion in our country so there is no problem what you or I believe. On the other hand there is a problem when scientists mix facts supported by evidence and laws of nature with fantasy, unfounded hypotheses and faith.
There is no qualitative difference being a creationist believing that earth and our galaxy was created 6000 years ago or believing that the universe was created from a small cosmic egg 14 billion years ago. From where did this egg originate and what existed before that? There must have been something more (or rather, less) than a nuclear bomb within it since at that point not even matter are believed to has existed. None of these beliefs are or can be supported by scientific methods or verified experience. Hence, it cannot be classified as science.
Many years ago a saw a “scientific” 600 page book in a book store. It claimed to tell what happened in the first MINUTE after Big Bang. It was loaded with formulae and unverified hypotheses. To me this book represented a peak of human hubris, a pretention that logic and mathematical models without any verified anchoring in reality could give the answer to the eternal mystery of our existence. Evidently the author was religious or crazy.
This is still my opinion. Science can hardly explain every problem that nature presents using scientific methods. Some parts of physical reality are just too complex to untangle, at least at our contemporary level of scientific understanding and knowledge. And so, any such statement is by definition unscientific. The concept of Big Bang and the following process would be called a fairy tale or superstition during the old days.
Today measurements of micro wave radiation from space are stated to tell what happened during the first SECOND after Big Bang. What a joke! What about measurements of other types of electromagnetic radiation that come from space such as, radio waves, visible light, X-rays and gamma rays which often present great problems to interpret?
You could as well state that the universe was created by Mickey Mouse and suggest he should get a Noble prize for his great feat.
Hans Jelbring
________________________________
A partial extract f the Arstechnica article:
When the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced a press conference for a “Major Discovery” (capital letters in the original e-mail) involving an unspecified experiment, rumors began to fly immediately. By Friday afternoon, the rumors had coalesced around one particular observatory: the BICEP microwave telescope located at the South Pole. Over the weekend, the chatter focused on a specific issue: polarization in the Cosmic Microwave Background left over from the Big Bang. With the start of the press conference, it’s now clear that we’ve detected the first direct evidence of the inflationary phase of the Big Bang, in which the Universe expanded rapidly in size.
BICEP, the Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization experiment, was built specifically to measure the polarization of light left over from the early Universe. This light, known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), encodes a lot of information about the physical state of the cosmos from its earliest moments. Most observatories (such as Planck and WMAP) have mapped temperature fluctuations in the CMB, which are essential for determining the contents of the Universe.
Polarization is the orientation of the electric field of light, which conveys additional information not available from the temperature fluctuations. While much of CMB polarization is due to later density fluctuations that gave rise to galaxies, theory predicts that some of it came from primordial gravitational waves. Those waves are ripples in space-time left over from quantum fluctuations in the Universe’s earliest moments.
Primordial gravitational waves remain one of the outstanding untested hypotheses of inflation, the most popular model that explains the incredible uniformity of the CMB. According to inflationary theory, the Universe expanded very rapidly in the first fraction of a second, filling the cosmos with gravitational ripples. While inflation so far seems to explain a lot about the Universe, we have no direct evidence for it. BICEP, as a dedicated CMB polarization observatory, could provide some hints about primordial gravitational waves—and by extension, inflation.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
I agree
Creationist fantasies and apocalyptic climate angst are all part of our modern misuse of science.
Seems to me one can prove anything one wants with the cosmic background radiation ..soon I expect to see the face of Elvis there too. (Sarc)
I like Omar Khyam’s take:
Ah, love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits – and then
Remold it nearer to Heart’s Desire!
People grapple with the unknown in various ways. Here’s someone trying it from a phenomenological perspective:
http://www.robertlanzabiocentrism.com/biocentrism-the-new-face-of-the-cosmos/
… if the Big Bang was just one part in a million more powerful, the cosmos would have blown outward too fast to allow stars and worlds to form. Result: No us. There are over 200 parameters so exact that it strains credulity to propose that they are random. Tweak any of them and you never existed. None of them are predicted by any theory — they all seem carefully chosen, often with great precision, to allow for existence of life. The only scientific explanation (the so-called ‘Anthropic Principle’) says that we must find these conditions, because if we’re alive, what else could we find? Of course, this isn’t really an explanation unless you claim that there are an infinite number of universes and we just happen to be in the lucky-one. But there is no evidence whatsoever for these other universes anymore than there is for the existence of the Easter Bunny. The only real explanation is biocentrism, which explains how the universe is created by life, not the other way around.
According to biocentrism, space and time are not hard, cold physical objects, but rather forms of animal sense perception. When we speak of time, we inevitably describe it in terms of change. But change is not the same thing as time. Consider Heisenberg’s famous ‘uncertainty principle.’ If there was really a world out there with particles just bouncing around, then you should be able to measure all their properties. But it turns out you can’t – for instance, a particle’s exact location and momentum cannot be known at the same time. They’re like the man and the women in the cuckoo-clock – when one goes in the other comes out. This uncertainty is built in the fabric of the universe, but no one has a clue why. It only makes sense if we accept the fact that the universe is biocentric.
Consider a film of an archery tournament. An archer shoots an arrow and the camera follows its trajectory. Suddenly the projector stops on a single frame — you stare at the image of an arrow in mid-flight. The pause enables you to know the position of the arrow with great accuracy, but it’s going nowhere; its velocity is no longer known. This is the fuzziness described by in the uncertainty principle: sharpness in one parameter induces blurriness in the other. All of this makes perfect sense from a biocentric perspective. Everything we perceive is actively being reconstructed inside our heads. Time is simply the summation of the ‘frames’ occurring inside the mind. But change doesn’t mean there is an actual invisible matrix called “time” in which changes occur. That is just our own way of making sense of things.
There is a peculiar intangibility to space, as well. We can’t pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space is not a thing or object. It is part of our mental software that molds sensations into multidimensional objects. We think of space as a vast container that has no walls. But this is false. Distances between objects change depending on conditions like gravity and velocity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.
By treating space and time as fundamental and independent things, we pick a completely wrong starting point for understanding the world. In fact, new experiments are starting to confirm that quantum effects apply to the everyday world of human-scale objects.
Biocentrism unlocks the cage we have unwittingly confined ourselves. A new paradigm is usually considered nonsense from within the existing paradigm. But allowing the observer into the equation opens new approaches to understanding everything from the tiny world of the atom to our views of life and death. Above all, biocentrism offers a more promising way to bring together all of science as scientists have been attempting to do ever since Einstein. Until we recognize the universe in our heads, attempts to truly understand the world will remain a road to nowhere.
‘While inflation so far seems to explain a lot about the Universe, we have no direct evidence for it.’
You might guess Miles Mathis would have a view on this, and he does.
‘WHY EXPONENTIAL INFLATION IS IMPOSSIBLE’
http://milesmathis.com/inflat.html
Quite so.
Do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill ?
With computology anything goes and astrophysical religion is a sure thing — until you get caught:
http://www.rationalphysics.org/default.asp?dir=Home/Abstracts/Stephen+J%2E+Crothers
http://vixra.org/abs/1207.0018
I am inclined to agree with Miles Mathis and glad that I read his long article to the end ( see end of) http://milesmathis.com/inflat.html
“The Latin under my title above means “the unknown always seems more grand.” In the same way, those who speak of the unknown also seem more grand. Those currently at the top of physics are not true scientists, they are rhetoricians, sophists skilled at impressing the less clever with big words and sexy topics. But it is always easier to airily expound on the unknown and unknowable than to solve real problems. It is easier by far to make up big empty words and string together groundless theories and hide behind endless equations than it is to answer present questions. The scientific community at all levels must become scientific again: it must lose its gullibility and learn to see through empty speech and empty equations. Just as the modern person must learn to stop being fooled by politicians and salesmen, he must learn to stop being fooled by grandstanding fake scientists, intent only upon their own greater glory. The modern physicists at the top of the field have become nearly indistinguishable from politicians and salesmen, because, like them, they have lost all reverence for the truth, and all ability to speak it. The modern physicists in the middle of the field have become like party hacks, because they have lost all ability to recognize the truth, or tell it from a lie.
For my own part, I don’t want to hear any more about the edges of the universe or wormholes or first seconds or backward causality or vacuum energy or any of the rest. When a physicist starts talking about those things, I know he or she is trying to sell me a car or win a prize or publish a bestseller or make the cover of TIME magazine. Those people should go to Hollywood and get an honest job.”
Where in the universe has it been proved that the passage of time is a constant?
Is yesterday’s hour the same length as todays? Or 6000 years ago or 14 billion years …we have no method of ensuring it is so. We are stuck in our ‘now time’ frame of reference.
We are, as it were, stuck in the ‘glass universe’ were we can not prove that the refractive index (of time) away from ourselves is the same or different.
As long as all time dependant constants track with the variation of time we can’t see it’s effects,
e.g the speed of light = 299 792 458 m / s and always is.
Time may have been progressing at a faster rate earlier in the universe’s history, currently it is as we know it, and in the future it may pass slower. Maybe time started rapidly and has slowed giving the appearence of an inflating universe.
Imagine viewing the universe from a frame of reference outside of the universe may reveal that it is as small as a grain of sand, or many times the vasteness we assume it to be. Distances between objects change depending on conditions like passage of time, and gravity, so that there is no absolute distance between anything and anything else.
Lazy thinkers Wish to build their argument on the back of previous work without examining the base that the earlier was created on. The Big Bang theory was created on a weak foundation that has since been shored up with more sloppy work. Lots of gilding and paint over cracked plaster and weak foundations. An outsider looks and sees walls a bit out of alignment and spires tilting. 25 years ago I tore the whole thing down and rebuilt to suit my understanding of the facts without their theories. My theories are as useful to me as theirs are to them.
I can not imagine the universe beginning in a point singularity. Like many other things in theoretical science if you extend the argument far enough you reach a point that is physically impossible. Wrong answer! Start over! If facts don’t fit, Start over! Slapping more theory and math on it is not the solution. GOD is not a mathematician. GOD is not a theorist. This is applied science that works because it HAS TO WORK! The engineer in not a magician. A Wizard maybe. 😎 pg
Hans, great comments. (I also see you wrote this next month–time travel is fabulous.)
The problem, of course, for the microwave being somehow proof of the BB is microwaves do not have a label identifying where they were first emitted. 87 different assumptions, theories, and meaningless measurements tell you nothing except what the belief of the researcher is.
Personally, I think the microwaves come from reruns of old TV shows. Prove me wrong!
For Mickey, that would be Ignoble prize; for Hawking, the Nobel.
Geran: well spotted. I’ve brought Dr Jelbring home from the future. 🙂
Reblogged this on JMG's Blog.
“BICEP, as a dedicated CMB polarization observatory, could provide some hints about primordial gravitational waves—and by extension, inflation.”
Well stated. The polarization patterns in the cosmic microwave background were expected to exist as remnants of primordial gravity waves, and a long systematic search for them finally seems to have succeeded. Now the findings need to be verified independently and if/when they are, many new questions will surely arise. Such is the nature of science. A huge jigsaw puzzle is assembled painstakingly, one little piece at a time. Will this one ever be completed? No way! But the fascination is with trying to understand whatever scrap seems to be revealed by the process, and we can be confident that both increasing puzzlement and greater understanding will continue to emerge long after this generation of scientists has passed away.
Tallbloke,
It is wonderful to discover that you are a fan of the tent maker who loved a glass of wine. Makes me wonder why the Moslem world went dry like us Welsh Wesleyans.
Hans Jelbring,
Thanks for a trip down memory lane. Fred Hoyle wrote the book on “Continuous Creation” and to the day he died he fought valiantly against those folks with their “Big Bang”.
I was an undergraduate at Pembroke College, Cambridge at the time, so I supported Fred Hoyle even though I had no idea about the relative merits of the conflicting theories. Hoyle was “one of us” so he had to be right.
Then I got a job that involved microwaves. A couple of years later (1964) Penzias & Wilson noticed the cosmic backgound radiation that peaked at ~160 GHz, corresponding to what Stefan-Boltzmann say an object at 2.725 Kelvin would radiate.
Strangely enough, people on sites like this tie themselves in knots because everything in the universe is receiving this background energy. Given that the source is at less than 3 Kelvin, energy is being transferred from “Cold to Hot”. Folks like the “Sky Dragons” claim this is not possible owing to the second law of thermodynamics. It is beyond obvious that they are wrong given the abundant experimental evidence that led to a Nobel prize for P&W.
In spite of my affection for the admirable Fred Hoyle the cosmic background radiation did it for me. The Big Bang explained what was being observed better than Fred’s theory. While every “Law” revealed by physicists is eventually superceded by a better “Law”, I must respectfully disagree with your excellent rant!
Many thanks for sharing your experience and opinions gallopingcamel. I am getting curious of what facts made you declare that “the cosmic radiation did it for me”. For sure the level of knowledge has rissen since Fred Hoyle was active.
At what year did you get your revelation?.
Are you aware that there are about 60 unproven hypotheses that claim to explain the reason why there is a red-shift? If anyone else than an expanding universe is the correct one Big Bang is dead.
Do you know about the extensiv radiowave emission which is found around quasars? From where is it coming and why?
Where is the energy coming from, required to drive the expansion of a universe where all other (measurable) systems except quasars are contracting rather than expanding?
The interstellar space is loaded with electromagnetic radiation and also by dust particles. Since any dust particle has to have a temperture the measurements simply shows the result. There is no reason that the source is further away than the dust particle emitting the radiation. That distance might be 1 or millions of light years away. Any way it has to exist and where is it if it not the 2.7 K.
There are at least 3 confirmed physical processes producing a red-shift besides the hypothetical expanding universe.
I respectfully await an answer since a discussion might be rewarding. .
I concentrate on understanding the solar system, where we can measure stuff in a variety of ways. I’m pretty much agnostic on creation theories. Some people don’t seem to be able to get along without having an ultimate ‘explanation’ which excludes others. It doesn’t bother me much, though I tend to prefer a plurality of ideas which can feed off each others development, even if they are ultimately incompatible.
There’s a brief but wide ranging list of summaries of alternative cosmological models here: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alternative_cosmology
As instrumentation improves, the anisotropies in the CMB are seen to contain coherence. The mainstream theorists seem to think that lends support to their theory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background
“The glow is very nearly uniform in all directions, but the tiny residual variations show a very specific pattern, the same as that expected of a fairly uniformly distributed hot gas that has expanded to the current size of the universe. In particular, the spectral radiance at different angles of observation in the sky contains small anisotropies, or irregularities, which vary with the size of the region examined. They have been measured in detail, and match what would be expected if small thermal variations, generated by quantum fluctuations of matter in a very tiny space, had expanded to the size of the observable universe we see today. This is a very active field of study, with scientists seeking both better data (for example, the Planck spacecraft) and better interpretations of the initial conditions of expansion. Although many different processes might produce the general form of a black body spectrum, no model other than the Big Bang has yet explained the fluctuations. As a result, most cosmologists consider the Big Bang model of the universe to be the best explanation for the CMB.
The high degree of uniformity throughout the observable universe and its faint but measured anisotropy lend strong support for the Big Bang model in general and the ΛCDM model in particular. Moreover, the WMAP[8] and BICEP[9] experiments have observed coherence of these fluctuations on angular scales that are larger than the apparent cosmological horizon at recombination. Either such coherence is acausally fine-tuned, or cosmic inflation occurred.[10][11]
On 17 March 2014, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced their detection of signature patterns of polarized light in the CMB, attributed to gravitational waves in the early universe, which if confirmed would provide strong evidence of inflation and the Big Bang.[5][6][7]”
Can anyone in the house explain the section I bolded?
Hallo Tallbloke,
The reason why I am not able to understand the bold section above might be that it is impossible to grasp what it means if a logical approach is attempted. Too many definitions of concepts are missing strict definitions and suddenly the conclusion is by default “or cosmic inflation occurred”. To me it seems that “knowing” five potential outcomes A, B, C, D and E and the four first are proven wrong then E has to be correct. The result is based on an unscientific reduktionistic hypothesis excluding alternativ F, G etc. The latter are alternatives which are not known to exist (undiscovered) yet. My reasoning is supported by the fact that human knowledge in this area is still limited and more options are likely to show up us time goes by. Acceptance of the bold sentences as truth requires faith in what the author states.
However, read the whole extensive detailed explanation why it is not understandable at http://milesmathis.com/inflat.html. That will work out fine for anybody who understands Miles.
Hope this will help you.
GC: It is wonderful to discover that you are a fan of the tent maker who loved a glass of wine. Makes me wonder why the Moslem world went dry like us Welsh Wesleyans.
He was a pretty good mathematician and astronomer too…
For “Is” and “Is-not” though with Rule and Line
And “Up” and “Down” by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom,
Was never deep in anything but — Wine.
Hans,
The Scientific Method has slowly [and insidiously] been derailed by the Mathematical Alchemists.
The rot set in when Newton shoehorned mass into Kepler’s Third Law of Planetary Motion and then [somehow] shoehorned himself in as president of the Royal Society.
Sadly, dedicated believers in Mathematical Alchemists are unwilling to accept that the falsification of Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation has been well documented.
This is hardly surprising because science went full retard early in the 20th century when the mainstream swallowed Einstein’s mathematical alchemy that conjured up spactime which magically combines space and time into a single continuum.
Sadly this slow motion scientific train wreck has spawned an ever increasing list of embedded fairy tales because the Mathematical Alchemy of Newton and Einstein [and many more] is now sacrosanct in the state funded halls of academia.
Keep up the good work.
Best Regards
Tim Cullen
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Hans Jelbring,
Many thanks for your thought provoking comments. As you point out there are plenty of unexplained phenomena out there with more being discovered every day owing to ever more sensitive instruments for detecting electro-magnetic radiation and particles.
My field is quantum electro-optics so don’t expect profundity on the “Weighty” issues (pun intended) you pose. I accept Hubble’s contention that the universe is expanding as evidenced by the relationship between distance and red shift. No doubt ther are plenty of alternative explanations but I will stick with the simple one.
But is the expansion of the universe accelerating or decelerating? Will the end of the universe be hot (Big Crunch) or cold (0 Kelvin). The vast majority of humanity could not care less because they won’t be around an Exa-year from now. We are oddities given our curiousity about things like the fate of the universe.
The answer may depend on weird concepts that are well above my pay grade such as string theory (a universe with 11 or 13 dimensions!), dark matter or dark energy.
@tallbloke, the section you bolded talks about acausality and that seems a weasel word for inflation with speed greater than that of light (in order to match “better” WMAP interpretation, YMMV).
@malagabay 😎 spacetime springs into mathematical, fictitious existence whenever you want that c = 1 is length (say, unit m) and whenever you want that c = 1 is time (say, unit s).
[…] Hans Jelbring: Big Bang – BICEP flexes it’s muscle […]
Miles Mathis debunks the whole thing.
‘You have to be kidding me! … They now admit that they don’t know what 95% of the Universe is composed of (see recent dark matter announcements, or my papers), but they know that only gravity waves could cause these twists?’
Click to access guth.pdf
‘The promotion and self-promotion couldn’t be any less subtle. Well, no, I guess it could be a little less subtle. Guth could be outside the Royal Academy in Stockholm, wearing a sandwich board and ringing a bell.’
There’s also some science discussion 😉
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