Science Based Cosmology

Overview

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(c) Copyright 2008-2011 David Dilworth

Science Based Cosmology is limited to ideas which meet the minimum criteria for a scientific claim.

Cosmology is the study of the largest scale structures and dynamics of our universe.

Our universe's largest known structures are collections of galaxies called Filaments, Supercluster complexes, Lyman Alpha (gas) Blobs, Voids, Walls, and Bubbles. Some of them appear as large as 3.5 billion light years across. That's about a quarter of the distance to the farthest objects we can see and some 35,000 times larger than our Milky Way galaxy. How these structures move and change shape are some of the dynamics.

Cosmology involves the study of phenomena including redshifts, galaxy surface brightness to distance ratios, diffuse millimeter radiation, supernova rise and decay curves, gamma ray burst dilation, galaxy rotation curves, Olbers paradox, and light element abundances. As of today these are measured only by observing the wavelengths, brightness, location and polarization of their "light" and how these change over time.

Cosmology includes the study of ideas, models and theories which do not have a beginning as well as those that do.

"Science based Cosmology" is limited to ideas which meet the minimum criteria for a scientific claim -

While ordinary conversations can use the words "theory" and "hypothesis" nonchalantly, science, and especially physics, has strict limits on the use of those terms.

The Burden of Proof is on the proponent of a claim (such as the Big Bang model) - not on a skeptic.

While this is not strictly correct (all scientific claims require the same threshold amount and quality of repeatable evidence from testing), it nevertheless dramatizes that in science the proponent of an idea, not a skeptic, is responsible for providing clear, unambiguous claims for the idea, all necessary definitions, the evidence and rationale.

Definitions

Superclusters are a concentration of galaxies; large groups of smaller galaxy groups. The Shapley Supercluster is the largest one we recognize situated about 600-650 million light years from us.

Filaments are paths of galaxies forming the boundary between two voids. They are the largest known structures and contain almost all the galaxies.

Voids (and Supervoids) are large volumes of space with very few or no galaxies. The largest known void is about 3.5 billion light years across.

Lyman Alpha Blobs are huge volumes of gas as large as 400,000 light years across.

Walls are filaments which are significantly (that's ambiguous) larger along their largest axis than their second largest axis. The largest reported is the "Great Wall" at about 750 million light years long.

Cosmology fascinates me because of the many astounding, natural phenomena beyond our planet. When I heard about the first three-dimensional mapping of our universe by Geller and Huchra I was thrilled. For the first time in human history we could see the real three-dimensional structures of our Universe - not just make wild (I mean educated) guesses. Then they released a film of flying through galaxies to see the 3-Dimensional structure of a huge section of our Universe -- bubbles, and voids and filaments - oh my !

My curiosity was captivated and never let go. So when invited to take a 4000 level physics class in Cosmology at the Naval Postgraduate school by the esteemed Professor Emeritus of Physics Kai Wohler (a student of Heisenberg) - I jumped at the chance. Since then I've studied and analyzed many hundreds of (often gratuitously and hilariously opaque[2] ) astrophysics papers and more than a hundred Cosmology books.

While I can crawl through a fair bit of a dozen or so math fields, I'm not one of the handful of amazing people who can claim complete and breezy fluency with all the half-dozen higher level mathematics used by Cosmology Theorists (e.g. Lorenz Transforms, Riemannian Geometry, Tensor Calculus, Eigen values and vectors, Hamiltonian mechanics, Lagrangian Density, and General Relativity).

However, physical dynamics is better situation. Using my physics training, cosmology research, years of experience conducting thousands of physical experiments (and most useful- a decade reviewing hundreds of fundamental experiments while serving at local Science Fairs as Head Judge / Encourager), my grasp of most cosmology dynamics and principles is reasonably good. The important application of this is whether Cosmology concepts meet the minimum thresholds for a scientific claim. You will be the judge of whether I can clearly explain all this in plain English for the heart of this website -- the non-superficial (and almost math-free) science-based Cosmology Glossary.

* Fully appreciating how some friends and colleagues might consider this blasphemy ;-) it is this author's opinion -- that in the same way that you can successfully drive a car without needing to understand the math of vehicle dynamics, it is similarly not necessary to understand the many fields of higher mathematics to understand Cosmology's principles, dynamics, and physics. What little math is included - you can safely ignore, and even then I try to put it in terms and units familiar to ordinary science enthusiasts (like furlongs per fortnight ;-)

If you can spend a little time examining and thoughtfully considering the evidence and reasoning compiled and summarized here you should easily appreciate how some cosmology ideas are clearly outside boundaries of the scientific method; how more than a few cosmology claims contradict fundamental physics or prematurely reverse the Burden of Proof away from their own claims.

The biggest prestidigitation may be that so many of the pieces of the Big Bang models fail to meet the minimum threshold for a simple hypothesis, a complete (clear and unambiguous) hypothesis.

It still stuns and dismays me when cosmologists (on both sides of the Big Bang debate) argue that, instead of examining alternatives to their own ideas, the boundaries of science should be "loosened up" or that fundamental physics laws don't apply to their ideas.

I was chosen to give a talk on this website's subject at a 2008 conference and the associated paper was published in 2009. In part, this website is intended to give you a look at what parts of cosmology are reasonably categorized as science, and to unemotionally and objectively separate them from the claims which on closer inspection are science-fiction; lets call them incomplete hypotheses. The second list is uncomfortably long.

And I promised you a story: In spite of being widely disparaged, the US legal profession has a surprisingly good process to insure its students get critical-thinking training and testing - yet I am embarrassed to remind you that my chosen field of science does not. If you are familiar with the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) which really does require high-quality critical thinking, and then realize there is nothing remotely resembling this for science - did a light just go on?

Perhaps this is why so many Astrophysicists agree with the observation I call (with tongue firmly in cheek) the Hyper-Certainty Principle (the less data - the stronger the advocacy).

This is a gentle way of leading up to a big "opportunity." Nobel prize winning physicist Richard Feynman once went out on a limb to give a Brazilian University commencement talk with the bold theme "No science is being taught in Brazil."

Based on responses I've received from hundreds of scientists, young and old, I believe the problem is more widespread and far deeper than that - that here in the US we really don't teach the scientific method or the criteria for a hypothesis.

Yet this is easily fixed. Using the LSAT as a model for a standardized Science critical thinking test is a good start.

PS I welcome corrections and suggestions for improvements for this website, and of course - science humor.

1. The most cited author of Big Bang concepts, Princeton's P.J. Peebles does not refer to the "Big Bang" as a "theory," he correctly calls it a "model." Many popular authors ignore this important distinction.

2. There is a bit of tortured logic in cosmology, but you haven't fully enjoyed this idea until you read the explanation for "non-integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect." I hadn't laughed that well in a long time.

_________

David Dilworth is one of only a handful of lifetime members of the organization Committee for Scientific Inquiry (formerly known as CSICOP).

His 2009 paper "Ground Rules for Cosmological Physics" was published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in the 2008 Cosmology Conference "CCC2" Proceedings.

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