Natural Science Forum / Physics / Relativity / November 2005

Non-expanding universe

Some arguments are given below.
Of course, the anti-Bigbangers are crackpots!  ;-)

Marcel Luttgens

----

The First "Crisis in Cosmology" Conference
held in Moncao, Portugal, 2005 June 23-25

(Source: MNASSA, vol 64, nos 9 & 10, p 144-151)

Hilton Ratcliffe
ratcliff@iafrica.com

The Editors have requested a mainstream
cosmologist to comment on this article,
bearing in mind its unorthodox viewpoint.
The rebuttal will appear in the November-
December issue of MNASSA.

In May 2004, a group of about 30 concerned scientists published an
open letter to the global scientific community in New Scientist in
which they protested the stranglehold of Big Bang theory on
cosmological research and funding. The letter was placed on the
Internet (http://www.cosmologystatement.org) and rapidly attracted
wide attention. It currently has about 300 signatories representing
scientists and researchers of disparate backgrounds, and has led
to a loose association now known as the Alternative Cosmology Group
(http://www.cosmology.info). The author was one of the early
signatories to the letter, and holding the view that the Big Bang
explanation of the Universe is scientifically untenable, patently
illogical, and without any solid observational support whatsoever,
became involved in the organisation of an international forum where
we could share ideas and plan our way forward. That idea became a
reality with the staging of the "First Crisis in Cosmology Conference"
(CCC-1) in the lovely, medieval walled village of Moncao, in far
northern Portugal, over three days in June of this year.

It was sponsored in part by the University of Minho in Braga (Portugal)

and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin (Texas, USA).
Professor Jose Almeida of the Department of Physics at the University
of Minho was instrumental in the organisation and ultimate success
of an event that is now to be held annually. The conference was
arranged in three sessions. On the first day, papers were presented
on observations that challenge the present model, the second day dealt
with conceptual difficulties in the standard model, and we concluded
with alternative cosmological world-views. Since it is not practicable
here to review all the papers presented (some 34 in total, plus six
posters), I'll selectively confine my comments to those that interested
me particularly. The American Institute of Physics will publish the
proceedings of the conference in their entirety in due course for
those interested in the details.

First up was professional astronomer Dr Riccardo Scarpa of the
European Southern Observatory (Santiago, Chile). His job involves
working with the magnificent Very Large Telescope array at Paranal,
and I guess that makes him the envy of just about every astronomer
with blood in his veins! His paper was on Modified Newtonian Dynamics
(MOND), which I had eagerly anticipated and thoroughly appreciated.
MOND is a very exciting development in observational astronomy used
to make dark matter redundant in the explanation of cosmic
gravitational effects like the anomalous rotational speeds of galaxies.
Mordehai Milgrom of the Weizmann Institute (Israel) first noticed
that mass discrepancies in stellar systems are detected only when
the internal acceleration of gravity falls below the well-established
value a0 = 1.2 x 10^-8 cm?s^-2. The standard Newtonian
gravitational values fit perfectly above this threshold, and below a0
MOND posits a breakdown of Newton's law. The dependence then becomes
linear with an asymptotic value of acceleration a = sqrt((a0 g)), where
g is the Newtonian value. Scarpa has called this the weak gravitational
regime, and he and colleagues Marconi and Gilmozzi have applied it
extensively to globular clusters with 100% success. What impressed me
most was that the clear empirical basis of MOND has been thoroughly
tested, and is now in daily use by professional astronomers at what is
arguably the most sophisticated and advanced optical-infrared
observatory in the world. In practice, there is no need to invoke dark
matter. Quote from Riccardo: "Dark matter is the craziest idea we've
ever had in astronomy. It can appear when you need it, it can do what
you like, be distributed in any way you like. It is the fairy tale of
astronomy".

Big Bang theory depends critically on three first principles: that the
Universe is holistically and systematically expanding as per the
Friedmann model; that General Relativity correctly describes
gravitation; and that Milne's Cosmological Principle, which declares
that the Universe at some arbitrary "large scale" is isotropic and
homogeneous, is true. The falsification of any one of these principles
would lead to the catastrophic failure of the theory. We saw at the
conference that all three can be successfully challenged on the basis
of empirical science. Retired electrical engineer Tom Andrews presented
a novel approach to the validation (or rather, invalidation) of the
expanding Universe model. It is well known that type Ia supernovae
(SNe) show measurable anomalous dimming (with distance or remoteness
in time) in a flat expanding Universe model. Andrews used observational
data from two independent sets of measurements of brightest cluster
galaxies (defined as the brightest galaxy in a cluster). It was
expected, since the light from the SNe and the bright galaxies
traverses the same space to get to us, that the latter should also
be anomalously dimmed. They clearly are not. The orthodox explanation
for SNe dimming - that it is the result of the progressive expansion
of space - is thereby refuted. He puts a further nail in the coffin
by citing Goldhaber's study of SNe light curves, which did not reveal
the second predicted light-broadening effect due to time dilation.
Says Andrews: "The Hubble redshift of Fourier harmonic frequencies
[for SNe] is shown to broaden the light curve at the observer by
(1 + z). Since this broadening spreads the total luminosity over
a longer time period, the apparent luminosity at the observer is
decreased by the same factor. This accounts quantitatively for the
dimming of SNe. On the other hand, no anomalous dimming occurs for
galaxies since the luminosity remains constant over time periods much
longer than the light travel time to the observer. This effect is
consistent with the non-expanding Universe model. The expanding model
is logically falsified."

Professor Mike Disney of the School of Physics and Astronomy at
Cardiff University calls a spade a spade. He has created an interesting
benchmark for the evaluation of scientific models - he compares the
number of free parameters in a theory with the number of independent
measurements, and sets an arbitrary minimum of +3 for the excess of
measurements over free parameters to indicate that the theory is
empirically viable. He ran through the exercise for the Big Bang
model, and arrived at a figure of -3 (17 free parameters against
14 measured). He therefore argued that the there is little statistical
significance in the good fits claimed by Big Bang cosmologists since
the surfeit of free parameters can easily mould new data to fit
a desired conclusion. Quote: "The study of some 60 cultures, going
back 12,000 years, shows that, like it or not, we will always have
a cosmology, and there have always been more free parameters than
independent measurements. The best model is a compromise between
parsimony (Occam's razor) and goodness-of-fit."

Disney has a case there, and it is amply illustrated when it comes
to Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) - which depends initially on an
arbitrarily set baryon/photon ratio - and the abundances of chemical
elements. Dr Tom van Flandern is another straight talking, no frills
man of science. He opened his abstract with the words "The Big Bang
has never achieved a true prediction success where the theory was
placed at risk of falsification before the results were known."
Ten years ago, Tom's web site listed the "Top Ten Problems with the
Big Bang", and today he has limited it to the Top Fifty. He pointed
out the following contradictions in predicted light element abundances:
observed deuterium abundances don't tie up with observed abundances
of 4He and 7Li, and attempts to explain this inconsistency have failed.
The ratio of deuterium to hydrogen near the centre of the Milky Way
is five orders of magnitude higher than the Standard Model predicts,
and measuring either for quasars produces deviation from predictions.
Also problematic for BBN are barium and beryllium, produced assumedly
as secondary products of supernovae by the process of spallation.
However, observations of metal-poor stars show greater abundance of
Be than possible by spallation. Van Flandern: "It should be evident
to objective minds that nothing about the Universe interpreted with
the Big Bang theory is necessarily right, not even the most basic
idea in it that the Universe is expanding."

Problems in describing the geometry of the Universe were dealt with
by several speakers, and we must here of course drill down a bit to
where the notion came from (in the context of Big Bang theory). The
theory originated in Father Georges Lemâitre's extensions to
Friedmann's solution of the Einstein General Relativity (GR) field
equations, which showed that the Universe described in GR could not
be static as Einstein believed. From this starting point emerged some
irksome dilemmas regarding the fundamental nature of space and the
distribution of matter within it. It was here more than anywhere that
the rich diversity of opinion and approach within the Alternative
Cosmology Group was demonstrated. Professor Yurij Baryshev of the
Institute of Astronomy at St Petersburg State University quietly
presented his argument against the Cosmological Principle: large-scale
structure is not possible in the Friedmann model, yet observation
shows it for as far as we can see. I had recently read Yurij's book
The Discovery of Cosmic Fractals, and knew that he had studied the
geometric fractals of Yale's famous professor Benoit Mandelbrot,
which in turn led to his extrapolation of a fractal (inhomogeneous,
anisotropic) non-expanding large-scale universe. Conference
co-ordinator professor Jose Almeida presented a well-argued case
for an interesting and unusual worldview: a hyperspherical Universe
of 4-D Euclidean space (called 4-Dimensional Optics or 4DO) rather
than the standard non-Euclidean Minkowski space. Dr Franco Selleri
of the Università di Bari (Italy) provided an equally interesting
alternative - the certainty that the Universe in which we live and
breathe is a construction in simple 3-D Euclidean space precludes
the possibility of the Big Bang model. He says: "No structure in
three dimensional space, born from an explosion that occurred
10 to 20 billion years ago, could resemble the Universe we observe."
The key to Selleri's theory is absolute simultaneity, obtained by
using a term e1 (the coefficient of x in the transformation of time)
in the Lorentz transformations, so that e1 = 0. Setting e1 = 0
separates time and space, and a conception of reality is introduced
in which no room is left for a fourth dimension. Both Big Bang and
its progenitor General Relativity depend critically on 4-D Minkowski
space, so the argument regressed even further to the viability of
Relativity itself. And here is where the big guns come in!

World-renowned mathematical physicist professor Huseyin Yilmaz,
formerly of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University,
and his hands-on experimentalist colleague professor Carrol Alley of
the University of Maryland, introduced us to the Yilmaz cosmology.
Altogether four papers were presented at CCC-1 on various aspects
of Yilmaz theory, and a fifth, by Dr Hal Puthoff of the Institute
for Advanced Studies, was brought to the conference but not presented.
It is no longer controversial to suggest that GR has flaws, although
I still feel awkward saying it out loud! Professor Yilmaz focussed
on the fact that GR excludes gravitational stress-energy as a source
of curvature. Consequently, stress-energy is merely a coordinate
artefact in GR, whereas in the Yilmaz modification it is a true
tensor. Hal Puthoff described the GR term to me as a "pseudo-tensor,
which can appear or disappear depending on how you treat mass."
The crucial implication of this, in the words of professor Alley,
is that since "interactions are carried by the field stress energy,
there are no interactive n-body solutions to the field equations of
General Relativity." In plain language, GR is a single-body description
of gravity! The Yilmaz equations contain the correct terms, and they
have been applied with success to various vexing problems, for example
the precession of Mercury's perihelion, lunar laser ranging
measurements, the flying of atomic clocks in aircraft, the relativistic
behaviour of clocks in the GPS, and the predicted Sagnac effect in
the one-way speed of light on a rotating table. Anecdote from professor
Alley: at a lecture by Einstein in the 1920's, professor Sagnac was
in the audience. He questioned Einstein on the gedanken experiment
regarding contra-radiating light on a rotating plate. Einstein thought
for a while and said, "That has got nothing to do with relativity".
Sagnac loudly replied, "In that case, Dr Einstein, relativity has got
nothing to do with reality!"

The great observational "proof" of Big Bang theory is undoubtedly
the grandly titled Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, stumbled
upon by radio engineers Penzias and Wilson in 1965, hijacked by
Princeton cosmologist Jim Peebles, and demurely described by UC's
COBE data analyser Dr George Smoot as "like looking at the fingerprint
of God." Well, it's come back to haunt them! I was delighted that
despite some difficulties Glenn Starkman of Case Western Reserve
University was able to get his paper presented at the conference
as I had been keenly following his work on the Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) data. Dr Starkman has discovered some
unexpected (for Big Bangers) characteristics (he describes them
as "bizarre") in the data that have serious consequences for the
Standard Model. Far from having the smooth, Gaussian distribution
predicted by Big Bang, the microwave picture has distinct anisotropies,
and what's more says Starkman, they are clearly aligned with local
astrophysical structures, particularly the ecliptic of the solar
system. Once the dipole harmonic is stripped to remove the effect
of the motion of the solar system, the other harmonics, quadrupole,
octopole, and so on reveal a distinct alignment with local objects,
and show also a preferred direction towards the Virgo supercluster.
Conference chair, plasma physicist Eric Lerner concurred in his paper.
He suggested that the microwave background is nothing more than
a radio fog produced by plasma filaments, which has reached a natural
isotropic thermal equilibrium of just under 3K. The radiation is
simply starlight that has been absorbed and re-radiated, and echoes
the anisotropies of the world around us. These findings correlate
with the results of a number of other independent studies, including
that of Larson and Wandelt at the University of Illinois, and also
of former Cambridge enfant terrible and current Imperial College
theoretical physics prodigy, professor Joao Magueijo. Quote from
Starkman: "This suggests that the reported microwave background
fluctuations on large angular scales are not in fact cosmic, with
important consequences." Phew!

The final day saw us discussing viable alternative cosmologies,
and here one inevitably leans towards personal preferences. My own
bias is unashamedly towards scientists who adopt the classical
empirical method, and there is no better example of this than Swedish
plasma physics pioneer and Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven. Consequently,
I favoured the paper on plasma cosmology presented by Eric Lerner,
and as a direct result of that inclination find it very difficult
here to be brief! Lerner summarised the basic premises: most of the
Universe is plasma, so the effect of electromagnetic force on a
cosmic scale is at least comparable to gravitation. Plasma cosmology
assumes no origin in time for the Universe, and can therefore
accommodate the conservation of energy/matter. Since we see evidence
of evolution all around us, we can assume evolution in the Universe,
though not at the pace or on the scale of the Big Bang. Lastly, plasma
cosmology tries to explain as much of the Universe as possible using
known physics, and does not invoke assistance from supernatural
elements. Plasmas are scale invariant, so we can safely infer
large-scale plasma activity from what we see terrestrially. Gravity
acts on filaments, which condense into "blobs" and disks form.
As the body contracts, it gets rid of angular momentum which is
conducted away by plasma. Lerner's colleague Anthony Peratt of
Los Alamos Laboratory modelled plasma interaction and has arrived
at a compelling simulation of the morphogenesis of galaxies.
Since plasma cosmology has no time constraints, the development
of large-scale structures - so problematic for Big Bang - is
accommodated.
Lerner admits that there's still a lot of work to be done, but with
the prospect of more research funding coming our way, he foresees
the tidying up of the theory into a workable cosmological model.

No account of CCC-1 would be near complete without a summary of
a paper that caught all of us by complete surprise. Professor Oliver
Manuel is not an astronomer. Nor indeed is he a physicist. He is a
nuclear chemist, chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the
University of Missouri, and held in high enough esteem to be one
of a handful of scientists entrusted with the job of analysing
Moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions. His "telescope"
is a mass spectrometer, and he uses it to identify and track isotopes
in the terrestrial neighbourhood. His conclusions are astonishing,
yet I can find no fault with his arguments. The hard facts that
emerge from professor Manuel's study indicate that the chemical
composition of the Sun beneath the photosphere is predominantly
iron! Manuel's thesis has passed peer review in several mainstream
journals, including Nature, Science, and the Journal of Nuclear Fusion.
He derives a completely revolutionary Solar Model, one which spells
big trouble for BBN. The latest published data from the SOHO and
TRACE satellites unambiguously support Manuel's hypothesis, and
that's about as much as I can say here. Watch this space!

The conference concluded with a stirring concert by a three-piece
baroque chamber music ensemble, and it gave me cause to reflect
that it appeared that only in our appreciation of music did we find
undiluted harmony. That the Big Bang theory will pass into history
as an artefact of man's obsession with dogma is a certainty; it will
do so on its own merits, however, because it stands on feet of clay.
For a viable replacement theory to emerge solely from the efforts of
the Alternative Cosmology Group is unlikely unless the group can soon
find cohesive direction, and put into practice the undertaking
that we become completely interdisciplinary in our approach.
Nonetheless, that there is a crisis in the world of science is
now confirmed. Papers presented at the conference by some of the
world's leading scientists showed beyond doubt that the weight
of scientific evidence clearly indicates that the dominant theory
on the origin and destiny of the Universe is deeply flawed. The
implications of this damning consensus are serious indeed, and
will in time fundamentally affect not only the direction of many
scientific disciplines, but also threaten to change the very way
that we do science.
--
About the author: Kwa Zulu Natal-born Hilton Ratcliffe is an
astrophysics graduate currently researching transient galaxy dynamics.
He is a member of ASSA, the Durban Centre of ASSA, and the Astronomical
Society of the Pacific, and is an Associate of the (British) Institute
of Physics. He describes his recreational interests as astronomy
(naturally!), wildlife, linear algebra, and entertaining charges of
heresy and sedition.

Cf. October, 2005 PROGRESS IN PHYSICS Volume 3

The First Crisis in Cosmology Conference
Monçao,Portugal,June 23-25 2005

Hilton Ratcliffe
Astronomical Society of Southern Africa
E-mail:ratcliff@iafrica.com
The author attended the first Crisis in Cosmology Conference
of the recently associated Alternative Cosmology Group,and makes
an informal report on the proceedings with some detail on selected
presentations.

***

http://www.cosmology.info/

About the Alternative Cosmology Group

The Alternative Cosmology Group (ACG) was initiated with the Open
Letter on Cosmology written to the scientific community and published
in New Scientist, May 22, 2004. The letter points to the fundamental
problems of the Big Bang theory, and to the unjustified limiting of
cosmological funding to work within the Big Bang framework. The
epicyclic character of the theory, piling ad-hoc hypothesis upon
hypothesis, its incompleteness and the appearance of a singularity
in the big bang universe beginning require consideration of
alternatives. This has become particularly necessary with the
increasing number of observations that contradict the theory's
predictions. Big Bang cosmology has been in a crisis since the
early 90's when the Cold Dark Matter model began to fail. Fifteen
years later, this crisis has worsened, despite the addition of dark
energy. Observations fail to show the dramatic differences between
the high-redshift and local universe required by the Big Bang theory.
We still find normal galaxies, heavy elements, strings and clusters
of galaxies at the further and further shifting outskirts of the
observable universe. The anisotropy of the cosmic background radiation,
the existence of very large-scale structures, the cosmic anisotropy
to electromagnetic wave propagation are among many observations
that contradict Big Bang expectations. At the same time, non-Big Bang
alternatives have increasingly shown promise to coherently explain
the observations and to predict new phenomena. We believe, therefore,
that a shift in effort in cosmology to these alternatives is essential
if the field is to advance.

****

See also:

Evidence for a Non-Expanding Universe:
Surface Brightness Data From HUDF
Eric J. Lerner
Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Inc. Email: elerner@igc.org

Abstract.

Surface brightness data can distinguish between a
Friedman-Robertson-Walker
expanding universe and a non-expanding universe. For surface brightness

measured in AB magnitudes per angular area, all FRW models, regardless
of cosmological parameters, predict that surface brightness declines
with redshift as (z+1)^-3, while any non-expanding model predicts
that surface brightness is constant with distance and thus with z.
High-z UV surface brightness data for galaxies from the Hubble Ultra
Deep Field and low-z data from GALEX are used to test the predictions
of these two models up to z=6. A preliminary analysis presented here
of samples observed at the same at-galaxy wavelengths in the UV shows
that surface brightness is constant, mu =kz^0.026+-0.15 , consistent
with the non-expanding model. This relationship holds if distance is
linearly proportional to z at all redshifts, but seems insensitive
to the particular choice of d-z relationship.
Attempts to reconcile the data with FRW predictions by assuming that
high-z galaxies have intrinsically higher surface brightness than
low-z galaxies appear to face insurmountable problems. The intrinsic
FUV surface brightness required by the FRW models for high-z galaxies
exceeds the maximum FUV surface brightness of any low-z galaxy by
as much as a factor of 40. Dust absorption appears to make such
extremely high intrinsic FUV surface brightness physically
impossible. If confirmed by further analysis, the impossibility of
such high-m galaxies would rule out all FRW expanding universe
(big bang) models.