Daily Archives: May 7, 2013

View 773 Tuesday, May 07, 2013

I’m slowly recovering from whatever it was that bit me.

I am still reading The Static Universe. It states that there are QUASARS with measurable proper motion, but whose red shift distance places them so far away that the motion we see and measure has to be orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light. That seems inconsistent with the General Theory of Relativity on which the whole notion of red shift as the proper measure of distance to the objects is based. There are other observations totally at odds with the Standard Cosmology. I am not so familiar with the literature on Cosmology, but if this book is at all correct, the Standard Theory has been falsified. The Expanding Universe as we were taught it in high school is not correct, and we have not the foggiest notion of how far away a number of cosmological objects are; which means we do not have to accept the Standard Theory with its postulated (but not observed) Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and mega-massive Black Holes. Indeed, we really don’t know a lot about the universe beyond a few hundred lightyears. We have a scientific consensus and a peer review group that accepts the Standard Theory and discourages publications of observations that seem to contradict it, but in fact the consensus is not based on the preponderance of the observed data.

Which sounds a lot like the Consensus Theory of Climate Change.

‘Cosmologists’ are to astronomers as ‘educators’ are to teachers, one finds.

I’m deeply suspicious of anything beyond the most basic, coarse-grained principles of quantum mechanics which we’re fairly sure we sort of understand at a superficial level of detail. As far as I can tell, the rest is pretty much all supposition based on assumptions about an unscientifically-small number of actual data-points.

—-

Roland Dobbins

Richard Feynman insisted that no one, including him, understood Quantum ElectroDynamics. He could teach you how to do quantum calculations, and to make theories that could be verified by experiment, but he could not tell you how to understand it. What he could do was look carefully at observations. He was careful to point out that Newton never understood gravity, and neither do we, but Newton could generate hypotheses from observations. Now Feynman was addicted to data and observations, and to the best of my knowledge pretty thoroughly accepted the operational philosophy of science,

We have this from The Meaning of Everything:

It was thought in the Middle Ages that people simply make many observations, and the observations themselves suggest laws. But it does not work that way. It takes much more imagination than that. So the next thing we have to talk about is where the new ideas come from. Actually, it does not make any difference, as long as they come. We have a way of checking whether an idea is correct that has nothing to do with where it came from. We simply test it against observation. So in science we are not interested in where an idea comes from.

Richard Feynman

Feynman had little good to say about philosophy, but I find that paragraph more valuable than a semester I spent studying logical positivism under Gustav Bergmann. When I began as an undergraduate I thought I was a logical positivist, until I learned what that meant. Philosophy of Science under Bergmann was an important experience.  I suppose I came away as an adherent of Karl Popper, but that’s a different story.  I did find Bergmann a refreshing antidote to the unrelenting behaviorism of the University of Iowa Psychology Department.

Re: Static Universe

There are a few points to be made on this subject, in my opinion.

The first is that the anomaly in the local area around the Milky Way can be explained by the fact that the Local Group is gravitationally bound. Also, in any system such as this there are bound to be random motions that have nothing to do with the grand scheme; orbital velocities of stars in the Galactic disk are fairly uniform but there are random variations, for example.

The expansion hypothesis is supported at large distances by data from type Ia supernovae (I think that’s right) which are rather uniform standard candles for reasons connected with the basic physics of the supernovae themselves.

The equations of general relativity pretty well demand either a contracting or an expanding universe; the only way to get around this is to introduce a fudge factor (famously known as the cosmological constant) which has to be set to ridiculous precision (120+ significant figures) at an early period of the Universe in order to leave us with the universe we are actually in. Either that, or general relativity is wrong; but there is rather a lot of evidence for relativity and very little against.

Finally, the Hipparcos mission has the primary purpose of determining positions and parallaxes for millions of stars. The precision is high enough that parallax measurements as a yardstick can be pushed out a long way; IIRC the figure is about 500 light years. Useful, because Polaris is closer than that.

Regards,

Ian Campbell

Yes: the extension of parallax methods of determining distance to a Cepheid variable has made it possible to determine accuracies out to to other galaxies in the Local Group by giving a better measure of the distances to a given Cepheid well beyond the limits of parallax measurements. Unfortunately the red shift method of determining distances doesn’t work in that region, as I understand it.

As to the evidence for and against relativity theory, the major ‘against’ is its complexity. Beckmann asserted that his entailed aether could explain all the observations with far simpler math and fewer assumptions. Starting with observed data and generating a new set of theories is of course very difficult, and may never happen.

Expanding Universe

Jerry,

The reason the Hubble shift was assumed to be a Doppler shift is that nobody had a plausible alternative explanation. This assumption was based on the theory that space was a perfect vacuum. It isn’t. Quantum Mechanics predicts "virtual" particles appearing and being annihilated almost instantly. This is experimentally demonstrated by the Casimir effect. Light slows down in a dense (non-vacuum) medium. This implies an energy loss – the red shift. Note also that there is no known way to measure the velocity of light from a distant object.

Regards,

Roy

Roy Lofquist

Ratcliffe’s The Static Universe makes that point: there is no such thing as a vacuum. I don’t think he questions the absolute invariance of the speed of light in a vacuum, but since there is no vacuum… Some Quasars have enormous red shift yet they have detectable proper motion. If we have no real idea of the size of the visible universe… Well, it’s something to think about. But all observed red shifts cannot be a simple Doppler effect of expansion.

re: cosmology

Despite it’s name, astrophysics is barely a science, or more accurately, very little of it has the same reliability as physics.

The core problem is the dearth of direct observation and the small size of the observation database.

Therefore Astrophysicists have to:

1) rely on a lot of second-hand data

2) assume that conditions which apply in the Solar system also apply everywhere else.

2) is further compounded by the scarcity of direct observation even within the Solar system.

So most of what’s presented as knowledge about the universe is actually but speculation, not groundless speculation but speculation still.

Almost every time we send a probe to a new part of the Solar system, we discover that things there are different, sometimes dramatically, from what was until then the accepted truth.

If Earth-based observation gives such unreliable results for objects that are only a few AU’s away from us, how can we assume that our hypotheses about objects that are even a few parsecs away actually describe what’s there?

My favorite example is the Sun: it’s supposed to be fueled by H-H fusion, yet it doesn’t seem to be hot enough for it to happen. The cold, hard truth is that astrophysicists are telling us it works on handwavium. It’s just 1AU away but we have no idea of what really happens inside.

Similarly, if dark matter had been invented in an sf book, there’d be flame wars about whether it’s handwavium or unobtainium.

It’s not very important as actual discoveries are made, like extrasolar planets, and faulty theories about galaxies millions of light-years away won’t kill anybody – not before someone invents a really good warp drive anyway!

What really irks me is this acceptance of speculation as solid science blurs the general public’s understanding of what constitutes a proven scientific theory, something you can base important decisions on, and what is mere opinion – climate is what comes to mind here…

Best Regards,

Jean-Louis Beaufils,

Paris

Some random thoughts:

As I recollect, Fr. Lemaitre derived the expanding universe from the field equations for general relativity. DeSitter space was unstable, but Einstein cooked the books with the Cosmological Constant simply in order to maintain a steady state universe. Nevertheless, it still moved, and Einstein was eventually convinced. In any case, Lemaitre predicted the redshift and the cosmic background radiation. Hubble discovered the former before Lemaitre’s paper had been translated into English (and the English translation was edited to omit the prediction). News of the discovery of the latter was delivered to Lemaitre on his deathbed.

Somewhere along the line, at a conference in California – it may have been one of the Solvay conferences – Fred Hoyle noticed Fr. Lemaitre enter the auditorium, nudged the man next to him and said, "Here comes the big bang man." A legend was born. He meant the term as a put-down, because the idea of the universe having a beginning offended his beliefs; but he and Lemaitre became friends during a road trip to meet Hubble and other American astronomers.

There is a strange parallel between using apparent redshift to estimate galactic distances and the way the medievals used brightness to estimate stellar distances. The dimmer and smaller the star, they farther off they were. But it turned out that some stars were just dimmer than others, and the apparent diameters were artifacts of atmospheric aberration. It’s quite possible redshift is likewise due in part to expansion and in part to other factors.

It’s not too strange that locally we find both red and blue shifts. Locally, stars are whirling around the galactic center, and it seems likely that the Local Group is likewise moving locally due to gravitational attraction among galaxies. So the general motion will be more evident farther away, much as the flow of a river will be more evident looking at the river as a whole rather than the whorls and eddies in the immediate vicinity.

I also wonder because the more distant objects are as they were millions of years ago, not as they are now. So might they be moving faster simply because the universe was expanding faster in the distant past? But surely this is known and corrected for.

Of course, I’m no big fat expert.

Mike Flynn

All of which gives us quite enough to think about. I suppose I need to come out of the Cosmic realm and back to the society we live in.

I would be astonished if there were one single explanation for redshift. But if redshift is our best way to determine distance to an observed very distant object, we need to know when and how to rely on it.

Light from a million lighyears distance travels through a lot of space. How much of that is empty? Sir Fred Hoyle had his ideas on that. And he certainly didn’t believe in the Big Bang. From what I recall of Feynman he would have been delighted to find that everything we knew about Cosmology was wrong…

If you’re looking for a good book to recommend to a young reader, try Starswarm. Adults like it too…

View 773 Monday, May 06, 2013

I woke up, had breakfast, and essentially spent the day in bed accomplishing nothing today. I am not sure what has got me, but I think the day’s rest has got me past it. More tomorrow. Apologies for the weekend funk.

The world continues, with strange stories.

‘The head of a rival kindergarten is reported to have confessed to lacing the yogurt with rat poison because the two schools were both trying to attract children.’

<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-22378488>

—

Roland Dobbins

Kerbal Space Program (Space Program Simulation Game)

Dr. Pournelle,

After reading the review on Kerbal Space Program that you linked to, I decided to download the demo to try over the weekend. I was quickly hooked and bought the full version the following Monday.

I was expecting a fairly basic "build a rocket and launch it" game. I was wrong. If you design your rocket poorly, expect it to fall over and explode on the launch pad…or lift off and then explode, or lift off and then crash. Through some trial and error, you can make it out of the atmosphere, but then you need to establish a stable orbit.

If you get really ambitious, you can start heading for the moon and further destinations…but you will end up learning a little about orbital mechanics and weight to thrust ratios. Fortunately, even if you are a little dense (like me) there are a lot of tutorials available on Youtube. So far, I’ve managed to reach orbit and even land on the moon and return. I definitely have a new respect for what the folks at NASA were able to do during the 60s.

I am rambling a bit, but I do think that many of your readers would find the game interesting and entertaining.

E. Ashley Howell

The new system I use for this journal, unlike the old Front Page system, makes it much harder to insert bookmarks and links into the text but the link is in https://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor/?p=13411 about halfway through the mail items. I gather there is considerable material on line about the game and how to play it, with different strategies, and some have used it to design space programs along the lines of those in Niven/Pournelle’s Footfall.

I expect to give it a try myself one of these days.

Last Thursday night at LASFS my friend and colleague John DeChancie brought me a copy of The Static Universe by Hilton Ratcliffe. Ratcliffe is a South African Astronomer who rejects the entire notion of the Expanding Universe on the grounds that there is no real evidence for it, and quite a lot of evidence against it. That seems a very bold statement, since the Standard Cosmological Theory asserts that the universe is expanding according to Hubble’s Law, and while there is considerable controversy over the exact size of Hubble’s Constant, there is no real question about its existence. I have been through the book once, and this is the sort of book that an amateur like me must read at least twice, since understanding some of the material in the first part assumes you things that are discussed later in the book. My understanding is not helped by Ratcliffe’s aggressive and sometime mocking style; and he often assumes that his readers are familiar with arguments that most of us have not been taught.

For all of that, it’s an intriguing book. I can recall in high school being taught the Hubble Expanding Universe as the truth established by science. It hadn’t yet been complicated by the insertion of dark matter and dark energy so that most of the universe turns out to be invisible and unobservable by any direct means (or if those concepts were around they hadn’t reached down to Brother Henry at Christian Brothers College High School in Memphis). We were taught that there was plenty of observational evidence for Hubble’s expanding universe, and indeed we read about Hubble’s observations.

Just about everyone in the civilized world understands now that the Milky Way is a galaxy of millions of stars and that we are in it; and that off at great distances there are other “island universes” – galaxies – as large as or larger than our galaxy. At the time of this discovery astronomers were only just discovering how large the universe really was, because there were no reliable means of measuring the distances to stars and other objects outside our solar system. The best method was to measure the angle to the object at different points in the Earth’s orbit. Even before the actual distance of the Earth to the Sun was known with any precision, the angles could be determined to an accuracy of about one second (60 minutes to a degree, sixty seconds to the minute), so that the parsec – the distance to an object with one second of parallax – could be determined in “astronomical units” of the distance of Earth to Sun. When the Au was determined with some accuracy the parsec could be translated into kilometers. Given the accuracy of ground based observations, distances to objects of about 100 parsecs could be determined with reasonable accuracies.

This allowed calculation of distances to stars and objects up to about 300 lightyears. Beyond that no direct measurement was possible. Unfortunately the objects observed as nebulae – island universes – are considerably farther than that. The Magellanic Clouds lie at 160,000 and 200,000 lightyears distance. Measuring distances to the Clouds and other galaxies relies on observation of certain kinds of variable stars whose blink rate correlates exactly with their absolute brightness. Unfortunately the closest of those stars, Polaris, is 433 lightyears, just a bit farther than the limit of accuracy of determination by parallax; a condition that may not last much longer.

Stars that seemed to be Cepheid Variables – ones that blink with a rate proportional to their brightness – were found in the Andromeda Nebula, at 2.5 million lightyears the nearest “island universe” to ours and by the 1920’s it became established that ours is not the only galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy has trillions of stars in it – and it is one of billions of galaxies. Distances to those galaxies can be determined using the Cepheid Variables – but only to a certain distance.

Hubble determined those distance so far as he could. Meanwhile others had observed “red shifts” in the light coming from those galaxies. Hubble thought those red shifts correlated linearly with distance. The Standard Cosmological Theory was born. The red shifts were explained as Doppler effects – those galaxies were moving away from us – and the farther away from us they were the faster they were moving away from us. The Universe Is Expanding. This expanding universe was predicted by General Relativity. All was well.

It then became standard to determine the distance to a very far away object by measuring the red shift of the light from it – there being no other way of determining that. At millions of light years we are far beyond the limits of angular measurement and geometry. But all was well because it all fit.

Then, quietly, the observational component of this theory collapsed: it turns out that the universe is not expanding in our general region, and our local galaxies are not all receding from us at rates proportional to their distance, and the primary data on which the Hubbard theory, and thus the Expanding Universe, and thus the Big Bang theory, were based was an artifact. The Standard Theory was modified to say that the universe is expanding, but we don’t observe it at distances of a few million lightyears.

This is the thesis of the first part of Ratcliffe’s book: that there is no actually observational evidence for the correlation of red shift with distance, and within the sphere in which we can estimate distances by observations – using parallax and Cepheid Variable blink rates – the expanding universe does not hold. Indeed within the sphere where we have some means of determining distances we find not only red shift but blue shift objects. When we get to the regions where we believe the universe is in fact expanding, the only evidences we have for that is the red shifts themselves.

Radcliffe then brings up evidence against the expanding universe and points out that Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies contains several examples that simply cannot be explained by the Standard Expanding Universe. And then there is the phenomenon of Quasars.

At this point I need to read the book again before I will attempt to review his arguments; but it appears that the evidence for the Expanding Universe is based largely on extrapolations from the original Hubble Slipher observations, and stayed in place after those observations were shown not to be complete or accurate, and indeed applied to a region in which Expansion is not taking place; and the evidence for expansion is based on a circular method of estimating distances.

I wish I had Sir Fred around to discuss this with. He never did believe in the Big Bang, and when he was in the proper mood he could explain many of these complexities to people like me who are very much amateurs. I find it astonishing that an entire theory of the cosmos is based on observations now known to be faulty, and I find it hard to believe. I also find it hard to believe that a great part of the universe is made up of matter we can’t see and energy we can’t detect, and more over we can’t find that stuff around here in our neighborhood. All our fundamental theories seem increasingly complex and held up by more and more complex assumptions; are we due for something new?

But it’s late, I am beyond my understanding of this book, and it’s time for bed. With luck I will feel better in the morning.