(This web page is part of a seven page research paper.  It is recommended that the paper be read in the order it was written.
Please begin here or you can download the entire paper in Acrobat PDF format.)

Cosmology
 

“Cosmology used to be regarded as a pseudo science, an area where wild speculation, was unconstrained by any reliable observations. We now have lots and lots of observational data, and a generally agreed picture of how the universe is evolving. But cosmology is still not a proper science, in the sense that as usually practiced, it has no predictive power... To go further, and be a real science, cosmology would have to predict how the universe should be. We could then test its predictions against observation, like in any other science.”
- Stephen W. Hawking, January '99, Physics Colloquiums - Quantum Cosmology, M-theory and the Anthropic Principle, http://www.hawking.org.uk/text/physics/quantum.html

    Paradoxically, at this point in time the most important subject with the greatest baring on the collective lives of everyone on Earth is the question of the origin of the universe. The current popular scientific theory is referred to as the ‘Big Bang’ cosmology and asserts that the universe began approximately 10-15 billion years ago in a violent explosion from a singularity. This theory grew in popularity to become the dominant cosmological model based on an expanding universe theory that used Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and evidence discovered by Edwin Hubble that appeared to support it.

Ripples caused by Einstein's space theory
"In 1916, Albert Einstein announced his general theory of relativity and the following year produced his model of space based on that theory. Einstein argued that the universe was immobile, but Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter calculated Einstein's equation and proved that the universe was actually expanding. In 1922, Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann used Einstein's equations to prove that the universe could either shrink or expand.”

Hubble's rule of an expanding universe
"During the uncertainties of the era, Hubble was able to observe galaxies at distances up to 7 million light years away. By doing so he was able to come up with Hubble's Law, which said that the further galaxies were away from earth the faster they moved away from our planet. Hubble's rule proved the universe was expanding like a big balloon. In 1930, Einstein visited Wilson Observatory and viewed photos of galaxies taken by Hubble. After seeing the photographs, Einstein gave up his theory of an immobile universe for all time. The orbiting space telescope observing the universe is named after Hubble.”
- National Space Development Agency of Japan (NASDA), Edwin Hubble - Lawyer-turned-astronomer who photographed the galaxies, http://spaceboy.nasda.go.jp/note/kagaku/E/Kag13_e.html

    One of the major pieces of evidence for the Big Bang theory is that distant galaxies are "moving away" from us and newer evidence found in the past five years would indicate that these recessional velocities are actually ‘increasing’ as the Universe ‘expands’. Yet how many astronomers do you think consider and factor in the following subjective values when formulating the recessional velocity of other galaxies?

    If they are factoring all of these "subjective" values along with their "objective" observation of distant galaxies then they should also be asked how are they accounting for Einstein’s theories of General and Special Relativity in regards to our velocity and not just the velocity of other galaxies. How do they propose to obtain a secondary observer’s vantage point? What effect may the theoretical quantum plenum/vacuum energy that seems to permeate the space within a galaxy have on light that enters from outside the galaxy?

    According to Margaret Burbidge University Professor Emeritus of the Department of Physics and Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego in her lecture that I attended, “The Riddle of the Redshift: The Universe We Don't Understand”, ‘very’ few astronomers even bother to consider ‘our’ velocity in their research. As suggested in her lecture, I have found a pattern that supports her claim.

“Measurements of periodic red-shift bunching appeared in the literature at least as far back as 1977 in the work of W.G. Tifft. The implications of this phenomenon are apparently too terrible to contemplate, for astrophysicists have not taken up the challenge. They may be forced to take the phenomenon more seriously, because two new reports of redshift bunching have surfaced.”

“First, B. Guthrie and W, Napier, at Edinburgh's Royal Observatory, have checked Tifft's "bunching" claim using accurately known red shifts of some nearby galaxies. They found a periodicity of 37.5 kilometers/second -- no matter in which direction the galaxies lay.”
- William R. Corliss, From Science Frontiers #80, MAR-APR 1992, Science Frontiers ONLINE, No. 80: Mar-Apr 1992, MORE EVIDENCE FOR GALACTIC "SHELLS" OR "SOMETHING ELSE", http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf080/sf080a04.htm

    Dr. William J. Tifft’s work was originally attacked by colleagues by suggesting he had not considered another subjective velocity value I had not ‘specifically’ cited, that of the ‘variation’ in Earth’s orbital velocity. Note that Tifft was following through on the same kind of research that Hubble began.

    The image below is from another page as credited below. It is a map of galaxies similar to our own. A distinctly similar pattern of galaxies arranged in arches or walls is observed above and below our Galaxy. The comment on the page regarding these patterns is worth noting, “The patterns in the north and south are similar. These large patterns are a tough challenge for attempts to model the development of structure in the universe.”

“Dr. William J. Tifft of the University of Arizona is one of many astronomers who have continued Hubble's work by performing increasingly precise red-shift measurements. Tifft's technique has been to focus attention on stars in the arms of many spiral galaxies and to measure the observed red shift of each. Since such galaxies should be randomly distributed in the universe, one would expect the red shifts to also be random and to form a smooth distribution. Instead, in 1978 Tifft found that the red-shifts were grouped into clusters of similar values, and that the clusters were regularly spaced with a separation equivalent to velocity shifts of 72 kilometers per second. Such a "quantized" red-shift is completely unexpected and cannot be readily explained. Therefore, it is not surprising that Tifft's first reports of this phenomenon were met with great skepticism on the astrophysics community. Some skeptics noted that Tifft's quantization velocity is not much different from 60 kilometers per second, the semi-annual variation in the Earth's orbital velocity vector in its orbit around the Sun, and suggested that this velocity variation had produced the effect.”

“Tifft's results were so controversial that several groups of astronomers set out to prove that they were wrong by gathering data on red shifts more broadly and from a wider variety of galaxy types. To the surprise of the would-be disprovers, they found evidence for the same red-shift quantization that Tifft had reported. For example, a group of astronomers associated with the Royal Observatory at Edinburgh, Scotland, examined 89 spiral galaxies picked at random and found a periodic bunching of red shifts in their data that was similar to the 72 km/s intervals found by Tifft. The data they used came from many different observatories and many different telescopes, and it is therefore unlikely that some instrumental effects or systematic errors produce the observed red-shift quantization. The quantized red-shift phenomenon is not exclusively a property of the visible light spectrum of stars. Recent results from precision radio-telescope observations of spiral galaxies also appear to support Tifft's results. The quantized red-shift phenomenon won't go away. Astronomers are coming to accept it as a real phenomenon.”

“Are there theories that can explain the effect? Not really. Gravitational attraction is known to bunch galaxies into clusters of galaxies with similar red-shifts, but such bunches should be randomly distributed, not regularly spaced. Tifft's Arizona colleague W. John Cocke attempted to place the quantized red-shift effect in a theoretical ad hoc "quantum" framework by hypothesizing a "red shift" operator constructed to produce discrete recession velocities as eigenvalues of a wave equation.”
- John G. Cramer, Alternate View Column AV-68, Published in the November-1994 issue of Analog Science Fiction & Fact Magazine, Stretch Marks of the Universe, http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw68.html

- Image from Hans Haubold, A. M. Mathai, 1998, Figure 10, GRAVITATIONAL INTERACTION: STRUCTURE OF THE MACROCOSMOS, http://www.seas.columbia.edu/~ah297/un-esa/universe/universe-chapter5.html

    Here is another more mathematically detailed paper that is forced to conclude by applying available red-shift data to a flawed cosmological model, that Earth is the center of the universe.

“From this discussion it is obvious that if two or more quasars have the same value of z, they are at the same distance (though in different directions) from the Earth. In other words, assuming the cosmological red-shift hypothesis, the quasars in the 57 groups in Table I are arranged on 57 spherical shells with Earth as the center. This is certainly an extraordinary result. Some of the possibilities that we shall consider to accommodate this result may be disturbing, but we must consider these possibilities dispassionately.”

1. “Coincidence in distances could be possible if there were clustering. However, an examination of the coordinates of the various members of individual groups shows that in most cases there is no such correlation. Hence, this explanation has to be ruled out.”
2. “Quasars may be arranged like atoms in a crystal lattice, with the Earth being either at an empty lattice site or at a suitable interstitial site. Should that be the case, one would expect some pattern or regularity in the directions of quasars belonging to a certain group. No such evidence is found and this possibility must also be abandoned.”
3. “The Earth is indeed the center of the Universe. The arrangement of quasars on certain spherical shells is only with respect to the Earth. These shells would disappear if viewed from another galaxy or a quasar. This means that the cosmological principle will have to go. Also, it implies that a coordinate system fixed to the Earth will be a preferred frame of reference in the Universe. Consequently, both the Special and the General Theory of Relativity must be abandoned for cosmological purposes.”

“We are essentially left with only one possibility - No.3 in the cosmological red-shift interpretation. However, before we accept such an unaesthetic possibility, we must raise the question: Are the `red shifts' real? We wish to point out that we have proposed an alternative explanation of the spectra of quasars (Varshni, 1973, 1974, 1975; Menzel, 1970; Varshni and Lam, 1974) which is based on sound physical principles, does not require any red shifts, and has no basic difficulty.”
- Varshni,Y.P.: 1976, Astrophys.Space Sci., 43, 3, THE RED SHIFT HYPOTHESIS FOR QUASARS : IS THE EARTH THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE?, http://home.achilles.net/~jtalbot/V1976b/index.html

    I want to be completely clear about this, I in no way support the view that the Earth is the center of the universe. That conclusion, based on valid red shift values is a consequence of a flawed cosmological model. I contend the evidence would seem to support such an absurd notion because several factors related to the ‘observers’ place in the universe was not understood. One should note that these findings parallel the ancient and common sense geocentric (Earth-centered) view of the universe. This view was based on direct observational evidence but a flawed model. Even today in English we say the sun ‘rises’ and the sun ‘sets’. I contend there is no reason to reject red-shift observational data or discard the theories of special and general relativity but instead the data must be reevaluated and utilized in formulating values and theories that incorporate the ‘observers’ velocity and not just the perceived velocity of extra-galactic bodies.

    I argue we are in a galactic sized gravitational distortion of space-time. While I believe the funnel design (below right) often used to visually represent the warping of space-time is useful, I propose it be considered along with a celestial spherical model, as proposed in Vashni’s article, analogous to diagrams used to show the angular distances of latitude and longitude for a planet (below left and center) be used to help explain the differences and arrangement of red-shift values. While I don’t propose space within our Galaxy is curved in a perfect sphere, I do think a similar model should be used because it’s easy to understand that the gravitational effects of an object warps space-time in ‘all’ directions.
 

    To visually demonstrate this effect and its shape, the picture below shows that stars, while concentrated along the ecliptic plane of the Galaxy, actually exist in all directions around the center.

- Image from Schombert, University of Oregon lecture, http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast222/lectures/lec19.html

    I also contend our solar systems orbital velocity around the Galaxy varies continually. For perhaps the last 110 million years we have been ‘falling’ from our furthest position (apogee) towards our closest position (perigee) to the center of the Galaxy in an elliptical orbit. Within the past five years our velocity has accelerated sufficiently to allow astronomers measuring red-shift values to see significant changes in Doppler effect measurements. When these astronomers attempted to incorporate these values into a Big Bang cosmological theory they attempted to explain the values by suggesting that the universe has begun ‘accelerating’ in its theoretical expansion.

“The universe is not only expanding, but that expansion appears to be speeding up. And as if that discovery alone weren’t strange enough, it implies that most of the energy in the cosmos is contained in empty space — a concept that Albert Einstein considered but discarded as his “biggest blunder.” The new findings have been recognized as 1998’s top scientific breakthrough by Science magazine.”
- Alan Boyle, MSNBC, Dec. 17, 1998, Science lists 1998’s biggest breakthroughs - Weird discovery about our accelerating universe ranks No. 1 in annual review, http://msnbc.com/news/224520.asp

    Here is a portion of a transcript from the PBS Nova series, “Runaway Universe”. I think it’s wonderfully illuminating to have the opportunity to read the subjective reasoning conveyed by scientists as they discover something that completely surprises them and directly challenges their expectations. The following comments are from two astronomers recollecting their thoughts upon finding that, “The data showed that the distant supernovae were dimmer and therefore much farther away than the team expected.” as the narrator stated.

“ADAM RIESS: I was actually scared that I had made an error. One by one, we started checking off sort of a long list of possible errors and none of them seemed to be the case. Finally, we had to come to grips with this unusual result. I no longer looked at it as a likely mistake, but rather as something very bizarre that nature was trying to tell us. “

“BRIAN SCHMIDT: It was not something that I particularly wanted to be in my data. And so I was horrified because I knew that it was going to be very difficult to sell this to my colleagues, because my colleagues are the ones who have educated me, and they…”

“NARRATOR: Brian's colleagues, along with the entire scientific community, might have discounted his results, except that Saul Perlmutter's group--working separately--announced the exact same conclusion.”

“The discovery seemed to contradict everything we thought we knew about gravity and its impact on galaxies and stars.”
- A NOVA Production by Thomas Lucas Productions, Inc. for WGBH/Boston, © 2000 WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS air date: November 21, 2000, NOVA #2713: Runaway Universe, http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2713universe.html

    As noted, such findings were completely unexpected by the proponents of Big Bang cosmology and were even going to be ‘discounted’ except that others simultaneously reached the same conclusion. As a consequence, obscure theoretical physics were and are being considered to try and explain this ‘acceleration’ of an expanding universe. Note the inherent flaw in the application of the scientific method, that is, a Big bang origin is not questioned even though the evidence directly contradicts what was expected and predicted. Instead attempts are made to ‘fix’ the theory instead of reconsidering the initial premise.

“Is the universe coming apart at the seams or precisely in balance? There’s astronomical evidence to back up either side of that argument, based on observations of exploding stars and distant gas clouds. But scientists say both claims could be correct. What is incorrect — or at least incomplete — is our understanding of how the universe works.”

“COSMOLOGY’S BIGGEST BOMBSHELL came from researchers who studied the characteristics and brightness of a particular kind of exploding star. As detailed last week, their findings indicated that the universe was expanding at an ever-increasing rate, due to a strange characteristic of empty space variously known as vacuum energy, dark energy, the effect of the cosmological constant, lambda, propulsive gravity or even “antigravity.””

“Clear all the matter and radiation that you can out of a piece of space, and there’s still energy there,” said University of Washington researcher Craig Hogan, a member of the international High-Z Supernova Search Team. “That is a property that is not predictable one way or another by the current theories.”
- Alan Boyle, Dec. 24, 1998, Scientists are seeing the big picture- Supernovae and gas clouds become yardsticks for universe, http://msnbc.com/news/226086.asp

    Well the Big Bang theory must entail something more than just red-shift observations for it to have so many advocates right? I present here for your consideration a sweeping and reasoned criticism of numerous aspects of BB theory. Here is only the abstract and the philosophical introduction to the material. The paper is composed largely of content from the author, William C. Mitchell’s book, “The Cult of the Big Bang: Was There a Bang?”

Abstract
“The very old big bang problems (of the singularity, smoothness, horizon, and flatness) and the failed solutions of inflation theory; newer BB problems relating to missing mass (as required for a flat inflationary universe), the age of the universe, radiation from the "decoupling" ("smearing" of black body spectrum), a contrived BB chronology, the abundances of light elements, and red shift anomalies; and problems, newer yet, regarding inconsistencies of red shift interpretation, curved space, inflation theory, the decelerating expansion of a BB universe, and some additional logical inconsistencies of BB theory are presented.”

“In one of its several variations the big bang cosmological theory is almost universally accepted as the most reasonable theory for the origin and evolution of the universe. In fact, it is so well accepted that virtually every media article, story or program that touches on the subjects of astronomy or cosmology presents the big bang (BB) as a virtual proven fact. As a result, the great majority of the literate populace of the world, including most of the scientists of the world, accepts big bang theory (BBT) as scientific fact.”

“Education establishments involved in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, theoretical physics and cosmology are dominated by those who have accepted BB as the theory to be pursued. Scientists who seriously question the BB are generally considered disruptive, ridiculed and derogatorily referred to as big bang bashers.”

“As a result of that attitude alternate cosmological possibilities are left uninvestigated. Untold man-hours and vast sums of money are spent in pursuit of data in support of the prevailing theory. Such endeavors are not in keeping with the ideals of impartial scientific investigation. It is all but forgotten that the BB is not fact, but an unproven theory.”

“Fortunately there long has been an unindoctrinated minority of scientists, both amateur and professional, who continue to discover and present observational evidence and logic that provides reason to doubt the accepted paradigm. Some of better known and most effective of the scientists in this struggle are Halton Arp of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, Anthony Peratt of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, and Jayant Narlikar of the Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics in India. Other well known astronomers/cosmologists who have long fought for the proper consideration of alternate cosmologies include Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, Fred Hoyle, Herman Bondi, Thomas Gold and Eric Lerner.”

“Due to the efforts of those and other fighters for evenhanded cosmological investigation and, despite the powerful influence of mainstream BB cosmologists, evidence against the BB has been building to the point where the world may soon start to doubt it. Some of that evidence is briefly reviewed in this paper.”
- William C. Mitchel, As Published in Physics Essays Volume 10, Number 2, June 1997, BIG BANG THEORY UNDER FIRE, http://nowscape.com/big-ban2.htm

    In a search for a credible alternative to Big Bang Cosmology I contend the Quasi Steady State Cosmology is far more theoretically and evidentially valid. It should be noted that Fred Hoyle its chief proponent was no latecomer to the cosmological debate. He is in fact the individual who derisively coined the term, "Big Bang". However, because the theory’s proponents were not clever enough to think up a better name, the moniker stuck.

“In the April 1999 issue of Physics Today -- certainly a mainstream publication, but occasionally daring -- we find a long, technically deep article outlining a new cosmology that jettisons the Big Bang and even redshifts as infallible measures of cosmological distances. It should come as no surprise that the authors are G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, and J.V. Narlikar. They propose a quasi-steady-state universe to replace the hot Big Bang. “

“It is easy to itemize narrow, specific problems bedeviling the Big Bang, but the three "boat-rockers" listed above also have an important philosophical bone to pick with modern astronomers and cosmologists.”

"The theory departs increasingly from known physics, until ultimately the energy source of the universe is put in as an initial condition, the energy supposedly coming from somewhere else. Because that "somewhere else" can have any properties that suit the theoretician, supporters of Big Bang cosmology gain for themselves a large bag of free parameters that can subsequently be tuned as the occasion may require.

"We do not think that science should be done in that way. In science as we understand it, one works from an initial situation, known from observation or experiment, to a later situation that is also known. That is the way physical laws are tested. In the currently popular form of cosmology, by contrast, the physical laws are regarded as already known and an explanation of the later situation is sought by guessing at parameters appropriate to the initial state. We think this approach does not merit the high esteem that cosmologists commonly accord it."
- William R. Corliss, Jul-Aug 1999, Science Frontiers ONLINE, A NEW COSMOLOGY, from Science Frontiers #124, JUL-AUG 1999, http://www.science-frontiers.com/sf124/sf124p05.htm

    Not long after that article was published their book, “A Different Approach to Cosmology : From a Static Universe Through the Big Bang Towards Reality” was published.

“This is a highly-controversial book in which three distinguished cosmologists argue with persuasion and conviction that the astronomical community is wrongly interpreting cosmological data by using the standard Big Bang model. They conduct a deep and wide review of the history of cosmology, explaining what they regard as its defects and inconsistencies. This is followed by the most extensive presentation they have ever published of their alternative view of how to interpret the data. The work touches the most fundamental questions: the origin, age, structure and properties of the universe.”
- Review for Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge, Jayant Vishnu Narlikar, April 2000, A Different Approach to Cosmology : From a Static Universe Through the Big Bang Towards Reality, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521662230/qid=976549249/sr=1-1/104-7342963-9687926

 

    Sir Fred Hoyle’s most widely accepted scientific work concerned Nucleosynthesis, the physics that explained how the chemical elements are synthesized by stars. Because of his work there is no reason to believe that the chemical elements, including the material that Earth and ‘we’ are made of, are a ‘by-product’ of a theoretical Big Bang process. Hoyle was denied the Nobel Prize for this work apparently because of some of his more controversial ideas. Instead a collaborator, astrophysicist WA Fowler of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena received the prize for this work. (see, http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,3604,540961,00.html )

“The temperature generated at the centre of a collapsing star is considered and it is shown that values sufficiently high for statistical equilibrium to exist between the elements must occur. The relative abundances of the elements can then be worked out from the equations of statistical mechanics. These equations are considered in detail and it is shown that a roughly uniform abundance of the elements over the whole of the periodic table can be obtained. The process of rotational instability enables the heavy elements built up in collapsing stars to be distributed in interstellar space.”
- Fred Hoyle, April 6, 1946, The Synthesis of the elements from hydrogen, http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1946MNRAS.106..343H

    Perhaps you may have actually heard of the QSSC before and are aware it has critics. I’m not going to discuss those critiques here, instead I will continue arguing my thesis. For those familiar with the QSSC I think it likely they will find that the evidence I present in this paper could be utilized to augment the research for those unanswered questions that the theory has not yet answered.

    And here we have the Royal Astronomical Society acknowledging that ‘many’ cosmologists have chosen to reject the red supernova shift evidence discovered by Reiss, Schmidt and Perlmutter’s group, “But to most theoretical physicists the cosmological constant has seemed utterly mysterious and unnecessary, and many have been reluctant to accept the results of the supernovae teams.” This reminds me of that quote by Carl Sagan, "The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and it has no place in the endeavor of science.”

    Regardless, the important information in the article is not their attempt to proclaim that the Universe expansion is accelerating but that have devised a methodology that supports the existence of dark energy which if you ignore Hoyle’s work brings you right back to Einstein’s theory of a cosmological constant that logically negates the Big Bang theory.

“Their results show that the universe is full of dark energy, completely consistent with the earlier supernovae results. "It seems that Einstein did not make a blunder after all -- dark energy appears to exist and to dominate over more conventional types of matter," Efstathiou said. "An explanation of the dark energy may involve String Theory, extra dimensions or even what happened before the Big Bang. At present nobody knows. The ball is now firmly in the theorists court."
- Royal Astronomical Society, 20 March 2002, Universe Expansion is Accelerating, UK and Australian Researchers Say, http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/universe_expansion_020320.html