Astronomy has little to celebrate in 2009!
Posted by seumasach on January 17, 2009
15th January, 2009
| For those who haven’t noticed, this year is “The International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009).” The International Year of Astronomy will involve 135 nations and thousands of events around the world. It marks the celebration of the 400th anniversary of the first use of an astronomical telescope by Galileo Galilei. |
 >> Galileo and the four large moons of Jupiter, which he discovered with his telescope. Portrait: by Justus Sustermans, painted in 1636. Jupiter and Galilean satellites: NASA/JPL. [Click to enlarge] |
| However, astronomers have little to celebrate in 2009. They have usurped the role of the church and cast out a modern-day Galileo!
Astronomers are repeating the mistakes of the Roman Catholic Church in Galileo’s day by refusing to accept what telescopes are showing them. The fear is the same – of having cherished dogma swept away, and with it their authority. It seems to be the nature of authorities to nurture and perpetuate self-servingmyths. |
 >> Halton “Chip” Arp addressing an interdisciplinary meeting in 2000. He is an American astronomer known for his 1966 Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. He is also known as a critic of Big Bang mythology and for advocating a non-standard cosmology incorporating intrinsic redshift of quasars. Photo: W. Thornhill. [Click to enlarge] |
Dr. Halton Arp is a modern ‘Galileo,’ in our midst. He was regarded in his early career as a leading young astronomer, but he made the poor career move of proving the Big Bang never happened. Like Galileo, he did this by diligent observation. He showed that Edwin Hubble’s intuition about the nature of the universe was simple and correct:
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 >> Edwin Powell Hubble 1889 – 1953. In 1923-25 he identified Cepheid variables in “nebulae” and proved conclusively that they are outside the Galaxy, thus demonstrating that our galaxy is not the universe. Hubble measured distances to galaxies and in 1929 published the velocity-distance relation which, taken as evidence of an expanding Universe, is the basis of Big Bang cosmology. [Click to enlarge] |
However, theoretical physics, since the time of Einstein, seems to have developed a penchant for religiosity (seeing “the face of God” in an equation or in the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation). We are expected to believe that which can’t be detected. Meaningless terms and phrases (the fabric of space time, the Big Bang) punctuate a new secular catechism. And at the heart of modern cosmology is a miraculous creation story. The “theory” of the Big Bang is not science.
Astrophysicist Michael Disney writes in The Case Against Cosmology, “…the word ‘cosmologist’ should be expunged from the scientific dictionary and returned to the priesthood where it properly belongs.” But reassigning cosmology from the astronomical priesthood to the religious priesthood would solve nothing. They were never really separate. For example, physicists like Paul Davies, author of God and the New Physics and The Mind of God, receive the £1,000,000 Templeton Prize. Until 2001 the name of the prize was Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion! The miraculous creation story of the Big Bang originated from the Belgian Roman Catholic priest and scientist Monsignor Georges LeMaître. The Electric Universe argues that if we want real answers, cosmology should follow in the distinguished steps of the Scandinavians Kristian Birkeland and Hannes Alfvén and be in the practical hands of electrical engineers and plasma experimentalists – not mathematical theorists. And since the Electric Universe is an interdisciplinary synthesis including human observations of the sky stretching back into prehistory, it uncovers the origin of astronomical priesthoods. Once that is assimilated into our collective consciousness we will have a basis for rational cosmology and spirituality. Cosmology today, like that in Galileo’s day, is a state-run enterprise. The outcome is the same – dominance of science, its politics and education, by a few dogmatic “cardinals” of science. So, despite technological marvels, astronomy in 2009 is in the grip of a modern “dark age,” ironically reflected in physically meaningless terms like “dark matter,” “dark energy,” and “black holes.” It is long overdue to turn on the electric light! |
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History Repeats Itself |
 >> Arp’s paper “Companion Galaxies on the Ends of Spiral Arms” was submitted to the prestigious Astrophysical Journal. The editor at the time, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, scribbled his comment across the corner of Arp’s paper. In the background is Arp’s image of the large, active spiral galaxy NGC 7603 with its companion attached by a bridge of matter to a spiral arm. The redshift of the larger galaxy is 8,700 km/sec and the smaller, 17,000 km/sec. According to the redshift-distance equation, the companion galaxy should be a far-distant background object with no possible connection to NGC 7603. Since then, two small quasars with far more discordant redshifts have been found in the bridge. And in another celebrated instance, a supposedly distant quasar has been found in front of an opaque, much nearer galaxy. Credits: document image – Universe: The Cosmology Quest DVD, 2003; NGC7603 image – M. Lopez-Corredoira and C. M. Gutierrez,Two emission line objects with z > 0.2 in the optical filament apparently connecting the Seyfert galaxy NGC 7603 to its companion. [Click to enlarge] |
Chandrasekhar did not have the courtesy to send Arp’s paper to independent referees. Clearly, “imagination” is Chandrasekhar’s codeword for “belief” because Arp’s observation of discordant redshifts of connected objects in deep space strikes at the belief in the redshift-distance assumption. Arp’s observations show that the universe is, as Hubble thought, essentially static, ageless and infinite. The miraculous big bang never occurred. Despite all the hubris and ballyhoo, we are ignorant of how the universe came into being. Chandrasekhar, described by Arp as “an incomprehensible theoretician,” was awarded the Physics Nobel prize in 1983 for his whimsy on the gravitational collapse of stars. From this flight of mathematical fancy, based on a simplistic self-gravitating gas model of stars, has come a science fiction menagerie of neutron stars, quark stars, strange matter stars and black holes. Invalid, unintelligible theory is the foundation of modern gravitational cosmology, but it wins Nobel Prizes.
It is nonsense to believe that a star can collapse, given the ignorance of what an electric star is, and what gravity really is and how it relates to the electrical structure of matter. For reasons unknown, Nature has contrived to have the units of charge, positive and negative, carried by particles (the proton and electron respectively) whose gravitational mass differs by a factor of nearly 2,000 times. Out of this simple difference grows the wonderful complexity of plasma behavior and the Electric Universe. Amongst other things, it means that neutral matter in a gravitational field will exhibit electric dipole behavior that assists charge separation and resists gravitational collapse. |
 >> The enormous difference in strength of the electric force compared to gravity is shown in this example. Unfortunately, graduate students in astrophysics are taught that the attractive electric force betweenunlike charges is so huge that plasma in space must be charge neutral. Observation shows that this is only approximately so. The example above shows that even the smallest departure from charge neutrality can have significant effect! Diagram: Department of Physics & Astronomy, Georgia State University. [Click to enlarge] |
There is no choice! The evidence that the universe is not expanding has been available for decades. Hubble’s “new principle of nature” is not new. But it requires “letting go” of some things we “know” that simply aren’t so. Quasars are not faint, their light redshifted and star-like, because they are very distant and moving rapidly away from us. Arp has shown that quasars are nascent galaxies, born from the central nucleus or ‘womb’ of nearby active galaxies. They are born at high velocity with faint and highly redshifted light. As they age, their brightness and mass increases, their intrinsic redshift decreases in quantum steps, and their velocity decreases until they become a companion galaxy of their parent. Intrinsic redshift is quite distinct from “tired light” or interaction with intervening particles. The decreasing quantized redshift of the light from a quasar shows that the quasar’s increase in mass occurs resonantly at the subatomic particle level. (Einstein intuited correctly, I believe, that quantum behavior requires a resonant structure within subatomic particles). It throws into sharp relief how a belief that the masses of the proton and the electron are universally fixed can shackle progress. Yet such a belief has been allowed to flourish when there is no knowledge of the relationship of matter to mass. Homo sapiens sapiens proves to be homo sapiens ignoramus! Luckily for progress there are always individual exceptions to this general observation about humanity. I consider that Arp’s following remark will prove to be prescient:
In an Electric Universe we are not isolated, disconnected and alone. |
 >> Excerpt from the letter from the telescope allocation committee barring Arp from access to telescopes. Credit: Universe: The Cosmology Quest DVD, 2003 [Click to enlarge] |
Arp documents in his book Seeing Red that Sir Martin Rees upheld the sorry record of Astronomers Royal in actively denying and frustrating innovation.
A final word on this subject from Arp:
Astronomy looks set to encounter more surprises and to publish more science fiction this year. Meanwhile, the Electric Universe has plenty to celebrate in 2009. Wal Thornhill |
In These New Times 
forrest noble said
Although I believe that much of what has been said above is true, still observation is observation and interpretation is a perspective twist that only sometimes will ultimately obfuscate the underlying information provided.
With many new telescopes of all types going online in the near future, I believe that new revealing observations will be made that will be difficult to deny. Despite the amazement and quandaries most likely produced because of present-day misunderstandings of cosmic mechanics, new understandings in cosmology starting in 2009 and the following 20 years will be greatly realized replacing much of today’s related theories and beliefs, lines from an optimists journal.
David Hardy said
One dose not have to be a scientist to see the flaws in Big Bang structure.
The suggestion that a singularity smaller than an atom, existed and for some unaccountable reason blew apart goes beyond reason.
That it contained all the contents of the universe goes beyond reason.
That space did not exist prior to the Big Bang but came into existence with it suggesting that beyond the visible universe there is ‘no space’, ie nothing.
That no center point is locatable goes beyond reason when we are told that the containment boundary between the visible universe and us is 13.7 billion light years away, presumably in every direction. Strange, but that puts us in the middle.
To back up the claim that those most distant galaxies at the outer most visible distance are at the edge, they claim that they are the youngest in the universe. but what is worse they claim that they are expanding away from us. However, if this is so and their light has taken 13 billion years to reach us, one would have to conclude that they have been expanding away into the distance for the last 13 billion years. Now that puts the boundary out of visible range to maybe 26 billion light years away.
However, after all that we have to add another 13 billion light years beyond those galaxies as we know that all stars shine globally.
Is 39 billion light years enough then?
I think not. Besides the above problems there are so many others, that added together, must create the most unworkable collection of theories on any subject ever. Big Bang is an outlandish myth just like so many other religious creations that just cling. Creation exists and everything created had a beginning, and that’s OK, but everything is made out of something else, and that recycling mechanism looks like eternity to me. QED
David Hardy said
I feel it’s high time that so called experts, ie, university graduates who have become teachers of their chosen subject, should truly examine what they have learned and question all of it. A guru should be sure about everything or at least admit that what he says is still theoretical.
Cosmology has, as I have infered above, virtually become a religion where theory has been established as fact, and not permitted to be questioned. – -This is not how it might be – this is how it is’, is the message. And what we, the experts don’t know, no body else does either. And if you can’t express your ideas in a mathematical equation, go away. But,
Do stars shine globally? If the answer is not yes, then prove it.
If we can see stars at the edge of the universe containment 13 billion light years away, where is their light going to in every direction it is shining? If the answer is that it does not escape through the boundary between space and no space, a practical answer is required.
Is Singularity Big Bang just a test of loyalty? Will a ‘Yes” student bow to it’s foundational structure regardless of having to accept continuous expansion and at the same time agree with Professor Andrei Linde that the observable galaxies 13 billion lightyears away are ‘still there’?
If they are 13 billion years old that means that not only have they travelled goodness knows how far into the distance beyond where they were, but the light is shining away beyond where they are now another 13 billion light years.
It seems so strange that Science had to complicate the Big Bang scenario. Was there any need to include the bladder boundary that adds to its absurdity?
Of course there’s only one way that such a containment could work and that is to have it as a mirror that reflects all energy back into the universe. – But that’s even just as absurd, because we here on earth could be right at the focal point of all that reflected lght energy and be burnt up. So –
How easy is it to accept that we are right in the middle of the universe? Is it really 13.7 billion light years to the bladder in every direction from this point in the universe? It would appear so, and if it isn’t then where are we in relation to the centre of the bubble?
I am not a well educated person and left school at 15 years of age to work on the dairy farm. Formal education is all very fine but it seems to leave no ecnouragement to think beyond the square that offers the highest passes in exams. And exams and those passes are what it’s all about. The better the memory of all that historic stuff you’ve learned the better. However, being faced with the practical, the best way of measuring the length of a fence line is to step it out, which keeps you on your toes. From that you can work out how many strainer posts and fence posts and battens you will need, how many meters of wire, and how many stays, gates, etc.And knowing the speed of light, the distance to the sun, and the length of the day, you know that the sun is not where you see it is but 8 minutes west of where it appears. [You can work out a lot from that example about where things are or might be in the cosmos]. Yeah, it’s time for a cuppu, and almost time to get the cows in for milking. Funny that, they know the time and none of them has a watch.
David
David Hardy said
Challenge – If Established Cosmology can prove beyond reasonable doubt to me and everyone else that stars do not shine globally, and therefore it is impossible for light to escape from the claimed boundary of the universe, then I will rest my case.
Also, on the claim that galaxies observed as being thirteen billion light-years away, ‘are still there’, requires a rational confirmation, since over the last thirteen billion years they have been racing away into the distance. Or is the image we observe not already 13 billion years old perhaps?
Now for the main question – If perchance these stars are shining away into the far beyond, as one would rationally expect, and that their light has taken all those billions of years to reach us, how far have they travelled over that period of time, and how far ahead of them is their light shining?
If Big Bang or any other beginning theory, [with conservation of matter/energy fully observed], of the universe is to be accepted, what time span do we add onto the claimed thirteen point seven billion year age of the universe to cope with the above observations?
If a bladder containment still exists, in my reckoning that’s twenty-seven billion years, or possibly thirty-nine or forty billion years since the Big Bang.
[I think that politicians and people in authority who lead, teach and influence us, should consider that Truth may well be worth it’s weight in gold.]
David.
cayo coco said
Thanks so much for this very informative blog.