Stephen P. King (stephenk1@home.com)
Mon, 05 Apr 1999 12:27:10 -0400
Ben et al,
I do appreciate your thinking here. Cosmogony (the philosophy of
origins of the Universe e.g.
http://www.kheper.auz.com/topics/Meher_Baba/MeherBaba-cosmogony.htm) has
been a long time subject of study for me. The key assumption of the Big
Bang is the assumption of unique initiality; without this assumption, it
is just GR. Eventually we will bring Peter Wegner in on the discussion
and we will deal with initiality. I am scheduled to speak with him this
evening, barring Camile's birth... :)
Ben Goertzel wrote:
>
> > The problem is that the Big Bang introduces more problems than it
> >explains. It postulates a unique "beginning" and "end" to spacetime.
> >There are more facts to be accounted for that the Big Bang with its
> >"dark matter" and "cosmic strings" and inflatons can deal with. It
> >reminds one of the epicycle theory! ;) There is evidence from the plasma
> >physics community that galaxies, quasars and even gamma ray bursters can
> >be explained nicely using their formalisms without any unobservables at
> >all! "Ghost galaxies" indeed!
>
> Just to clarify
>
> -- dark matter is not a logically a consequence of the big bang, it's a
> consequence of some extra assumptions that people make
>
> -- cosmic strings are not needed for the big bang
Extra assumptions = epicycles on epicycles...
> I'm not wedded to the big bang theory. However, it was the discovery of
> the cosmic background radiation that caused most steady state theorists to give up
> (pretty much all but Hoyle and Narlikar, who developed the steady state theory initially ;)
Hoyle and Narlikar's Perfect Cosmological Principle: "The Universe
looks the same on average to any observer no matter *where* or *when*",
can be show to be derivable from LS theory!
http://www-astro.physics.uiowa.edu/~jsm/synop8.htm
http://www.bowdoin.edu/dept/physics/astro.1998/astro04/intro.html
In my paper Forbidden Symmetry, I explored the idea that The Big Bang's
radiation and Hubble expansion is an illusion due to the way that
individual observer's local frames of reference have a mutual entropy
(defined best with Kosko's subsethood theorem). Hitoshi posited the
illusion stemming from the combination of a fixed initial time
co-ordinate combined with a Robertson-Walker metric. I see these two
representations as complementary. More latter...
> This one particular empirical observation very strongly supports the big
> bang, and I know of no alternative explanation. If we can find one, that's great.
Yes, there is a need for an alternative. We are working on it!
> ben
Onward,
Stephen
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