Did the Big Bang actually not happen? New Webb telescope images.

As I mentioned in #4, I think the most the new data actually shows is that the date of the Big Bang needs to be shoved back in time somewhat. There are too many reasons why the overall data base confirms that it did in fact happen and explains a lot of things including the CMBR.

Whatever it was that did happen, I doubt it was the beginning of everything.  If it was, then nothing existed previously.  How can nothing, for no reason, suddenly explode into something?  I wonder if a re-evaluation of the evidence could show alternative possibilities?

Whatever it was that did happen, I doubt it was the beginning of everything.  If it was, then nothing existed previously.  How can nothing, for no reason, suddenly explode into something?  I wonder if a re-evaluation of the evidence could show alternative possibilities?

The same problem applies to the notion that "something", some sort of physical reality, has always eternally existed. An intricately and elegantly and apparently purposely organized system that ultimately resulted in our present physical existence. This in my opinion is unmistakable evidence for a creative Intelligence having intervened in this beginning, from outside the system. If that was not the case and there never was any form of creative beginning event, then it still is proposing "something from nothing", where the "something" contains a huge amount of complex functional specified information (in many forms including the underlying physical laws finely tuned for the existence of life), that in our experience can only come from conscious intelligence.

Can anybody explain to me why, Eric J. Lerner having apparently misrepresented the "panic" in an article title, and having apparently quote mined Allison Kirkpatrick, I or anybody else should take this manipulator seriously?

To be fair to Lerner, I do think it was a bit odd to have a scientific paper referencing Panic at the Disco. This might just be an unawareness of the artist(s?) and thus the joke was seen as a sense of unease.

While I admittedly don't take Lerner seriously at first glance, my understanding is one of the major physicists behind the Big Bang Theory - Paul Steinhardt - has rescinded his support for a few reasons.

The same problem applies to the notion that "something", some sort of physical reality, has always eternally existed. An intricately and elegantly and apparently purposely organized system that ultimately resulted in our present physical existence. This in my opinion is unmistakable evidence for a creative Intelligence having intervened in this beginning, from outside the system. If that was not the case and there never was any form of creative beginning event, then it still is proposing "something from nothing", where the "something" contains a huge amount of complex functional specified information (in many forms including the underlying physical laws finely tuned for the existence of life), that in our experience can only come from conscious intelligence.

To extend my argument:

This would be equivalent to pointing at that Rembrandt portrait hanging on the wall of the museum over there and claiming that it is not a masterpiece example of a creative human artists's work, that it has always existed and had no creative event. A claim that is, most importantly, illogical in the extreme, in addition to being counter-intuitive, since the canvas and paint are obviously manufactured, and there are obvious brushstrokes on the surface indicating a steady and skilled hand. And perhaps most important of all, there is a strong emotional and meaningful communication from the picture, an uncanny impression of the essence of a live human presence. None of this meaningful information inherent to and carried by the painting can possibly exist without it having had a creator.

Has anyone estimated just how far back in time the new date for the big bang might be?

I'm obviously not an astronomer, but I have come to think that the Big Bang is a good example of scientific extrapolation gone waay too far - something that I think corrupts a lot of science.

Basing the theory on the CMWB seems fairly shakey. I mean first of all it is necessary to computer-correct the data to remove the distortion introduced by the rest of our galaxy! Isn't it a bit extreme to even assume that we know enough about our galaxy to attempt that task? Also, wouldn't it seem reasonable that the universe has a black body thermal radiation arising from all the dust and other stuff?

Every bit of computer adjustment like that lowers the quality of the data.

That gets you to the conclusion that the CMWB is uniform, but that isn't enough, because physicists wanted to deduce things about its minute non-uniformities. Eventually, they concluded that yes, it is non-uniform - something that was necessary for galaxies to form at all! However on the way someone pointed out that the data has a slight alignment with the plane of the ecliptic - something that makes no sense unless you assume that this is an after-effect of the aforementioned removal of the effect of the rest of the galaxy!

On top of that, for the Big Bang to work at all, it was necessary to add a total kludge - the period of exponential expansion, which as far as I know doesn't correspond to any conventional physics.

Sorry I can't pepper that with references, but hopefully I'm not saying anything too off the mark.

The Big Bang... hypothesis, I'll call it, has too many holes, sadly. It's not even a theory, in my eyes. I mean... you need to be able to test and replicate for that to be the case, and the Big Bang has not a single trait that allows it to be tested scientifically, nevermind repeatedly tested.

The biggest problem is that is far too conveniently like the Christian creation myth. The creator was a devout Catholic priest at that. He wanted a "scientific" theory that was based on his unscientific religious faith. That alone makes it highly unsatisfying as any kind of explanation for a beginning of the physical universe. It's not based on following a trail of data to some center of a maze. It's based on a religious creation, retold to sound "scientific". Imagine if any other religion's creation myth got such treatment...

On top of that... the logical weirdness of it is something I can't think past... a bang, a something, that came from essentially an empty nothingness... that is somehow expanding, faster than the speed of light... into nothing...? How does an "explosion" that is infinite energy compressed into a single point explode and expand into a void....? That takes one hell of a miracle...

All of this is based on massive extrapolations of manipulated data models, in the end. Completely unreliable. Every bit as believable as the Neo-Darwinist and Darwinist just-so stories. No meaningful data, just a bunch of convenient interpretations.

As for the protests that Big Bang proponents would have... no, one does not need to have an alternative theory or hypothesis, nevermind a better one. Sometimes, we just never have explanations for anything, and have to accept it for what it is. Consciousness is one such mystery that has no scientific explanation. We don't have any theory or hypothesis for it, and yet, it must be the base of any scientific axiom, else there can be no science.

The Big Bang... hypothesis, I'll call it, has too many holes, sadly. It's not even a theory, in my eyes. I mean... you need to be able to test and replicate for that to be the case, and the Big Bang has not a single trait that allows it to be tested scientifically, nevermind repeatedly tested.

The biggest problem is that is far too conveniently like the Christian creation myth. The creator was a devout Catholic priest at that. He wanted a "scientific" theory that was based on his unscientific religious faith. That alone makes it highly unsatisfying as any kind of explanation for a beginning of the physical universe. It's not based on following a trail of data to some center of a maze. It's based on a religious creation, retold to sound "scientific". Imagine if any other religion's creation myth got such treatment...

On top of that... the logical weirdness of it is something I can't think past... a bang, a something, that came from essentially an empty nothingness... that is somehow expanding, faster than the speed of light... into nothing...? How does an "explosion" that is infinite energy compressed into a single point explode and expand into a void....? That takes one hell of a miracle...

All of this is based on massive extrapolations of manipulated data models, in the end. Completely unreliable. Every bit as believable as the Neo-Darwinist and Darwinist just-so stories. No meaningful data, just a bunch of convenient interpretations.

As for the protests that Big Bang proponents would have... no, one does not need to have an alternative theory or hypothesis, nevermind a better one. Sometimes, we just never have explanations for anything, and have to accept it for what it is. Consciousness is one such mystery that has no scientific explanation. We don't have any theory or hypothesis for it, and yet, it must be the base of any scientific axiom, else there can be no science.

The Big Bang as presently formulated has a lot of defects that do make it questionable. However, I think there still must have been some sort of creative origination event at some point in the remote past.

The fact is, as I mentioned in #4, the sky is not infrared-bright with a solid expanse of ancient galaxies with red shifts more than 10, along any line-of-sight. That would theoretically be the case if there literally were no Big Bang and the galaxy-populated Universe extended indefinitely in distance and into the past. It would seem that, because of this evidence of absence, the galaxy population density must still drop off precipitously at some high red-shift number, at some number of billions of years before the present, at some number of billions of light-years distance, at which time the real Big Bang (or some sort of creative origination event) did occur. 

And there are other strong evidence-based arguments against there never having been a creative beginning of some sort, that I briefly described in #22 and #24.

The Big Bang as presently formulated has a lot of defects that do make it questionable. However, I think there still must have been some sort of creative origination event at some point in the remote past.
The fact is, as I mentioned in #4, the sky is not infrared-bright with a solid expanse of ancient galaxies with red shifts more than 10, along any line-of-sight. That would theoretically be the case if there literally were no Big Bang and the galaxy-populated Universe extended indefinitely in distance and into the past.

Was Olber'sparadox a problem in Fred Hoyle's universe? If expansion was occurring, surely there would still be a horizon beyond which light would never reach us?

It would seem that, because of this evidence of absence, the galaxy population density must still drop off precipitously at some high red-shift number, at some number of billions of years before the present, at some number of billions of light-years distance, at which time the real Big Bang (or some sort of creative origination event) did occur. 

And there are other strong evidence-based arguments against there never having been a creative beginning of some sort, that I briefly described in #22 and #24.

Well it may be a mistake to choose the BB on purely metaphysical grounds, and the size of the universe could be totally indeterminate. Another idea might be that the plan of the universe (thinking Idealistically) might be infinite and it would only get filled in as needed!

Was Olber'sparadox a problem in Fred Hoyle's universe? If expansion was occurring, surely there would still be a horizon beyond which light would never reach us?

Well it may be a mistake to choose the BB on purely metaphysical grounds, and the size of the universe could be totally indeterminate. Another idea might be that the plan of the universe (thinking Idealistically) might be infinite and it would only get filled in as needed!

I don't know how Fred Hoyle dealt with Olber's Paradox. Good question. 

I just found the apparent textbook answer, which depends on assuming the reality of the Big Bang and the red shift causing recession velocity (and the corresponding distance relation), where for very great red shifts the massed light from the extremely distant Big Bang universe expansion is radically shifted down to extremely long wavelength and low energy to the microwave radio region to become the CMBR.

It seems to me that there still needs to be a good argument against the design argument I outlined in #22 and #24.

It seems to me that there still needs to be a good argument against the design argument I outlined in #22 and #24.

Ultimately there does need to be some sort of design, but my main quibble is that I think science has bumbled along creating towers of theories that get cemented in place far too early.

The foundations of modern cosmology (and other areas of modern science) are getting very creaky. Just as an example of what else might be shakey, there is a vigorous discussion over at Skeptiko about whether viruses exist or not! I started out thinking this was an absurdly wild theory, but it turns out there is a lot of evidence suggesting it really might be true.

Getting back to astronomy, there is Hubble's Law, which isn't really a law, more like a correlation that seems to work in the vicinity of our galaxy. It is extrapolated back to about 13 billion lightyears, but the radius of our galaxy is about 50,000 lightyears (I think). That is quite some extrapolation, but that is how astronomical distances are measured these days - the red shift of an object tells you how fast it is moving radially away from earth, and Hubble's Law translates that into a distance.

Light can also get red shifted  in other ways, for example if light travels through clouds of molecular hydrogen it undergoes Raman scattering that causes the photons to lose energy. I think I have read that it is thought that molecular hydrogen (H2) is rare in space so this type of red shift would not be important, well maybe but think what is standing on that assumption!

This was the whole area that Halton Arp was poking into - it is absolutely foundational to astronomy, and yet the astronomical community were not interested, and since he died in 2012, I expect that problem will be brushed under the carpet for a few more years yet. Halton Arp found quasars with huge red shifts that seemed to be associated with foreground galaxies, and to have been ejected from their centres. Quasars are normally supposed to lie very far away and back in time (to correspond with their huge red shift).

My feeling is that science needs to slow down, and accept that it is hopelessly dangerous to lay down theories that are only really relevant in far distant places where measurements are going to be very indirect.