Pat Fallon wrote:
> The assumption that the Big Bang theory is correct, and therefore imposes a time
> limit, looms large in these discussions. IMHO there are many problems with the
> BB [I've started a page with links to them at
> http://www.mmsweb.com/eykiw/bb/bb.htm].
>
> As John Kierein summarizes:
> "Stars in our galaxy and globular clusters are thought to be older than 14
> billion years and there seem to be similar stars that are seen in galaxies that
> are many billions of light years away from us and thus apparently formed closer
> to the time of the big bang.
This is old science. The conflict of the cosmological constants has been tenatively reconciled with the help of Hubble Space Telescope measurements.
Moreover, as Anders and others have pointed out here, the anti-BBers always tend to conveniently ignore the problem of the infinite light levels in their arguments....
> Even our earth is thought to be 5 billion years old, and is expected to exist
> for another 5 billion years before the sun expands and swallows it up. The
> atoms and molecules of the earth are thought to have been generated in previous
> stars that went through several cycles of supernovae. Even though
> supernovae are thought to last only fraction of our sun's lifetime, it is highly
> improbable that there is sufficient time for these cycles to have occurred since
> a big bang.
Depends on the size of the stars. Yellow dwarf stars are extremely long lived as stars go. The giant type stars are short lived, as evidenced by the extremely old nebulae, and the proven existence of galactic core black holes. Raise the ambient radiation levels around a star enough (thus creating the stellar equivalent of a greenhouse effect) or raise its mass, and you will age it faster. This is why stars near the galactic core are 'older', even stars that are near the mass of our own. As stars move from the arms to the intersticine spaces, their rates of aging also change.
> Similarly, our galaxy is rotating at a speed that only permits from 45 to 60
> rotations since the big bang, which (according to Mitchell) is not a long enough
> time for it to achieve its spiral shape. Many spiral galaxies are seen at a
> large distance and therefore from a time closer to the big bang which would
> indicate they would have had time for even fewer rotations. Recent Hubble Photo
> shows spiral galaxies within 5% of big bang time leaving time for only 2 or 3
> rotations at our galaxy's rotation rate. The galaxies in this photo don't seem
> to be crowded closer together as one would expect if they were really so close
> to the big bang.
Galactic rotation was faster then, as such rotation is based on the radius of the core black hole. As the core black hole expands, its rate of rotation slows due to relativistic drag effects. Thus, the number of rotations should not be based on the current rotation rate of our own galaxy. Because gravity is light speed limited, you can calculate the rotation speed near the core 50,000 years ago by the current rotation speed of the outer edge. Extrapolate this back in 50,000 ly steps to the time of the big bang, and I think you'll find that the number of rotations goes up by quite a bit.
>
>
> There are some very large chains of galaxies spread throughout the universe. It
> is believed these large structures, like the "great wall", would require many
> hundreds of billions of years to form.
Beleived by who? Current inflationary models show that the 'bubble' and 'wall' accretion structures we see are a natural product of the big bang.
> The temperature of intergalactic space was predicted by Guillaume, Eddington,
> Regener, Nernst, Herzberg, Finlay-Freundlich and Max Born based on a universe in
> dynamical equilibrium without expansion. They predicted the 2.7 degree K
> background temperature prior to and better than
> models based on the Big Bang. See "History of the 2.7 K Temperature Prior to
> Penzias and Wilson" by A. K. T. Assis and M. C. D. Neves in Aperion Vol.2, Nr.
> 3, page 79f, July 1995.
As I recently discussed with another person, any theory that maintains a steady state universe must reconcile without flim flam the fact that such a universe would have infinitely high levels of background radiation. Even if you postulate that light as it travels great distances will be degraded over time down the spectrum to redder and redder frequencies, it still creates a hugh cosmic greenhouse effect.
>
> There are many other discrepancies in redshift observations that are much better
> explained by non-doppler shifts. Hubble, of course, didn't agree that the
> redshift was doppler (see his book
> "The Observational Approach to Cosmology" or Alan Sandage's discussion of
> Hubble's beliefs). There were several difficulties with this interpretation
> that he pointed out. Not the least of which is that if it were doppler, then
> not only should each photon be stretched out by the doppler effect, but also the
> distance between each photon. Because the photon flux is reduced, this causes
> the object undergoing a doppler redshift to appear less bright than a
> corresponding object undergoing a
> non-doppler redshift. Hubble knew his observations were not in agreement with
> this brightness correction. He also knew that a simpler, non-curved-space
> cosmology resulted from a non-doppler interpretation, and he felt that simpler
> was better. He didn't know what causes the photons to lose energy as they
> travel through space, but he felt that it is some "new principle of nature" that
> I think is the Compton effect.
Even if the photons lose energy themselves, the energy does not just dissapear. For example, a hydrogen atom gets hit by a photon with enough energy to make its electron jump to the third shell. Since the electron wants to go back to the first shell, it can either dump all the energy into one photon of equal energy to the one that hit it, or two photons, one having the 3rd shell to 2nd shell energy, and the other having the 2nd shell to 1st shell energy. Unless there are other types of decay which can dissipate energy into other forms of matter (in which case they can be experimentally verified in any laboratory), then there is no net energy loss. In which case a steady state universe will pile up infinite energy levels, leading to background energy levels so high that the vacuum should collapse upon itself from the energy density (i.e. infinite energy levels means the whole universe is a black hole). This is an obvious contradiction to the whole idea of the 'steady state', thus negating itself as a viable theory.
> As big bang theorists attempt to solve the age problem by making the time to the
> big bang longer, they exacerbate the quasar problem. Quasars become even farther
> away and intrinsically brighter. Yet their temperature remains that of ordinary
> stars as exhibited by emission spectra of metallic ions
> that can only exist at a limited range of temperature. They are known to be
> about stellar size since they vary in brightness on a scale of a few minutes to
> seconds. How do they stay so bright at
> such a low temperature in such a small volume? They can't. They must have an
> intrinsic non-doppler redshift and be nearby to be explained.
unless the quasars are in fact, as has been theorized, merely the polar emission jets of glactic black holes which are pointed our way.
Mike