it is unfortunate that good papers are rejected for silly reasons. But I guess in your case it will not stop it from appearing in print some way.

Are you willing to write a guest post on the prediction you made in 1996 ?

let me know.
Cheers,
T.

Notice also that Alpher and Gamow predicted the cosmic background radiation in 1948 and it was discovered in 1965.

Actually, the big bang theory is incomplete, because when you take the derivative of the Hubble expansion law v = HR, you get acceleration a=dv/dt = d(H*R)/dt = (H*dR/dt) + (R*dH/dt) = H*v = R*H^2. This tells you that receding masses around us have a small outward acceleration, only on the order of 10^{-10} ms^{-2} for the most distant objects. This is a tremendous prediction. I published it via Electronics World back in Oct 96, well before Perlmutter confirmed it observationally.

This is just about the observed acceleration of the universe! Smolin points this amount of acceleration and the “numerical coincidence” that it is on the order of a = Hc = R*H^2 out in his book “The Trouble with Physics” (2006) but neglects to state that you get this result by differentiating the Hubble recession law! Note that arXiv.org allowed my paper upload from university in 2002, but then deleted in within seconds, unread!

Dr Bob Lambourne of the Open University years ago suggested submitting my paper to the Institute of Physics’ Classical and Quantum Gravity, the editor of which sent it for “peer-review” to a string theorist who rejected it because it added nothing to string theory!

So some additional evidence and confirmed predictions of the big bang do definitely exist (the outward acceleration of matter leads to radially outward force, which by newton’s 3rd law gives a predictable inward reaction force, which allows quantitative predictions of gravity that again are confirmed by empirical facts). Don’t just believe that only stuff that survives censorship by string theorists is factual. Classical and Quantum Gravity was publishing the Bogdanov’s string theory speculations (which the journal later had to retract) at the time it was rejecting my fact-based paper!

So I’ll just nit-pick.

#6 EST: the current top mass is 172.6+-1.4, not 170.9. I admit it makes very little difference, but it does bring the allowed higgs mass range up a bit. About opposing SUSY: for me it is not just so much the fact it has what, 110 free parameters, 43 CP phases, etc…: it is just the fact that it appears to be constructed so that it is hiding where we havent found it yet. Big revolutions in physics happened by recognizing existing phenomena in a different context, rather than having to dig much deeper…
Island, Forrest, the current status of cosmology is not above well-motivated criticism: inflation and dark energy require faith to digest. However, I am with EST on this one: let’s see what Planck brings. In the meantime, dealing with dark matter appears a more intelligent option, since there we have lots of data to account for.

Thomas, I’m off to see your theorem (needed to finish this comment before leaving the page

Thank you all for this interesting discussion, guys.
Cheers,
T.

SUSY will of course not be discovered at the LHC. This is an immediate consequence of Larsson’s theorem.

“e non è colpa mia {…] se esiste l’imbecillità”

The source for Veltman’s comment was the 2001 lecture to which you linked.

Perhaps we should update his comment to take into account the time elapsed:)

It’s true he is a sceptic about a range of physical theories, but he is usually careful to differentiate between levels of scepticism. For example, he is extremely sceptical of string theory, pretty sceptical about SUSY, and mildly sceptical about the Higgs.

Physics appears to be losing its tolerance for scepticism, but the twentieth century – the second golden age of physics – was characterised by the most intense scepticism: within the mainstream Pauli, Feynman and Coleman make Veltman look like a pussycat, and outside the mainstream Einstein himself was no slouch when it came to criticising quantum theory.

So even when Veltman raises doubts about General Relativity, as he does, he is simply acting within a magnificent tradition.

“this is probably only true because fundamental physics research is discouraged in order to concentrate on the ever increasing complexity that’s required to account for the previously mentioned assumptions.”

Yeah, too bad. Sounds right to me, not that I can follow all those complexities anyway.

Evil,

The “continuous creation of matter (as) required in the steady state idea violates energy conservation, and from what basis do you explain how and why matter would be continuously created?

Certainly a good question since it was a question that also bothered me in the late 50’s when I first learned about it !! (I’m quite old) };-> .

Their answer was that matter was being created from the ZPF. That sounded like BS at the time to me, and it still does. Later, about 1960 Hoyle proposed an alternative: that the energy lost from fermion spin was recovered in the ZPF and reformulated into matter surrounding galactic size Black Holes. OK, that was a cool idea as far as I was concerned at the time, maybe not completely BS I thought.

My own theories now propose something similar to Hoyle/ Narlikar in 63. Both are diminution of matter theories. In my theory, about every half million years matter decreases about 10% in proportion to what it was before. Everything appears to be exactly the same except space would accordingly appear to be expanding at an accelerated rate, fancy that!!, even though there would be no real expansion at all, just an optical illusion of diminusion –

instead the lost material would be in the form of dark matter that reformulates around galactic Black Holes where forces create fermions from dark matter. If matter is being created from dark matter, there would be a time when there was just one beginning dark matter particle – at least that is the theory.

How about “the relative abundances of hydrogen, helium, and lithium in your model”, a question that must be addressed. …… I think BB theorists already knew the observed ratios before they started “calculating”. Maybe I’m wrong about this.

In my own theory (last copyright 1997, but published over and over again in my own mind) hydrogen and helium nuclei are created and fused from dark matter respectively, surrouding galactic Black Holes and jettisoned via their jets to form a surrounding galaxy. Additionally light elements are created by presently uncalculated (by me) fission processes within stars, do you think? =:-)X

Your friend forrest

http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/

Sorry, T.

Sorry, I probably shouldn’t have been openly disrespectful but my point is that there is a “singular” pre-assumption that inflationary theory is required to justify, which isn’t most naturally indicated by the reversal of expansion.

To say that it’s more plausible that we had some kind of extraordinarily rapid expansion event, rather than what it looks like, which is that we had a big bang at the point where the problems appear if you don’t preassum a singularity is laughable to me as long as I feel that there is a more clean solution, (that I illustrated and linked-to, for Forest, above).

The horizon problem and the background are accounted for when a causally connected universe of finite volume “rethermalizes”, so a viable mechanism for it that doesn’t even produce these “problems” is…. “cleaner”.

LOL!

Best,
EST

Uh… apparently you missed where I clearly pointed out why your statement is only true if we preassume a singularity under different conditions than we arrive at simply by projecting expansion backwards to the point where the horizon problem, DOES otherwise falsify ***conventional*** big bang theory.

And I say… bring on the experimients.

Island,
All of the issues explained by inflation were not things which falsified the Big Bang theory. The BB simply gave no answer for these questions by itself. On the other hand, inflation makes several testable predictions, some of which have been verified in recent years by WMAP and which will be further tested by Planck.

I think that this is probably only true because fundamental physics research is discouraged in order to concentrate on the ever increasing complexity that’s required to account for the previously mentioned assumptions.

But maybe you can appreciate something else that I feel complelled to say, from something that you said to Evil String Theorist.

forrest noble said:
The first concerning expansion was also predicted concurrently by the steady state theory via the continuous creation of matter explaining the apparent expansion.

But somewhere along the line somebody missed something relevant that nobody cares about now, because there is a whole bunch of support from the community for previously mention unproven assumptions, as well as their now-compounded extensions.

Depending upon the cosmological model that this takes place in, this continuing natural process necessarily increases tension between ordinary matter and the vacuum, which will inevitably compromise the forces that bind the structure, and we’ll have *another* big bang in a universe that has pre-existing finite volume, as described in my previous post.

What a coincidence:

http://www.lns.cornell.edu/spr/2006-02/msg0073320.html

Your right Evil, it made two predictions. The first concerning expansion was also predicted concurrently by the steady state theory via the continuous creation of matter explaining the apparent expansion. Many other theories have, I believe, equally explained the red-shift of galaxies and none of the more well know of these have ever been disproved.

My own finite-beginning diminution-of-matter theory (250 page long manuscript), and the related theory of matter relativity to time also readily explains the red-shift without resorting to either expansion or accelerated expansion. Simple math compared to Guth’s expansion theory. The second, the background radiation was long ago predicted by Eddington and scores of others up to the present time, as the radiation of matter heated by distant star light. No interaction between matter is required. Only absorption and re-radiation.

Since hydrogen in general occupies about one atom or proton per cubic meter of space it is the primary source of this evenly dispersed minuscule heat. About six months ago a radio astronomer in the U.S.claimed that intergalactic hydrogen radiates at the same background temperature as the observed MBR, and that our satellites could not distinguish the difference if there truly was CMBR. His finding were published in the prestigious Dec. 07, 07 Astrophysical Jounal. Some of the negative comments were: Was there a Big Bang, or simply a Big Bust of ill conceived Cosmology?

http://www.dsri.dk/~mykal/tmp/tycho/Verschuur.doc

I was an adult during the so-called background radiation prediction. I think you will find that it was just another case of hundreds of unknown predictions. It was, at the time, an obscure prediction of the countless hundreds or maybe thousands of alternative BB predictions. As you know a few researchers predicted 30 degrees Kelvin for a CMB.

I believe not only there prediction was not very close compared to Eddington’s, who was within less than one degree accuracy.

As I mentioned above, find a single current prediction of the BB. None are accepted by most BB theorists because their publication could undermine the theory. At least that’s my take on it. Also I suggest that only the understanding that there is no overall expansion, will the BB theory eventually fall. Granted if the CMB premise falls, the BB theory will be in more precarious waters.

Island, I also believe that true thinking is a premium in todays science theory.

your friend forrest

Put it this way… if we don’t pre-assume a singularity, then when we project expansion backwards to the point where these issues arise, we don’t come to this conclusion.

Instead, we would most naturally conclude that the big bang occurred at the point where “re-thermalization” is understood to have taken place… in a universe with pre-existing finite volume.

There are no horizon, flatness, nor monopoles problems when there is pre-existing information projected into the initial conditions and the matter field… but “god” forbid that we question the unproven assumptions that include “adjusted physics” that make predictions after the observational fact.