Post by Cine_Man on Dec 2, 2002 15:29:02 GMT -5
There are several mechanisms for "red shift"... I'm not contesting the observed effect...
Expansion hangs on virtually the sole observation of the "standard candles" -- the Cepheid Variables. The assumption is that the Cepheids are totally uniform.
If you've seen one.... you have seen 'em all. It is how distance is measured in astronomy... because there are no other markers. It seems like a circular argument to me, if you are cancelling out possibilities because of an axiomatic approach. So the supposition as I see it, is that (assuming the Cepheids are precisely uniform) and the conduction medium of interstellar space is ideal, the only explanation for red shift is that the universe is expanding. I'm a bit uncomfortable with this... added to the current observation that the expansion is non-uniform in time -- speeding up and slowing down for unknown reasons. At the moment, it would appear that the expansion is in another period of acceleration. No one knows why, or how. It would also appear that our region of the universe is moving in a particular "direction", toward a mythologically mysterious "Great Attractor".
I hope you understand that what I am looking for is something that I could actually present to a bank that they would accept as collateral, in terms of a firm foundation for what is, unfortunately, necessarily an extremely remote and baffling phenomenon -- maybe its what most of us take for granted as "reality".
But for the most part, I get the sneaking suspicion that things are the way they are because Dr. August So-and-So, the high priest of Whatever, sez "Its this way"... and then sets out to preserve that view through whatever means necessary, including suppression of the truth.
This goes on ALL THE TIME and is not limited to academia. If a thesis supervisor feels threatened by new thinking then the candidate will be harassed and hounded out of the program... its completely feudalistic, and not surprisingly so, since the prime science of Astronomy used to be the province of the high-shamans and advisors to royalty. Present-day astronomers don't really share the mantle of responsibility (or privilege) that the old-time astrologers had -- but that ancestral lineage still lingers... Space Science is expensive -- and you need access to power to get funding, and in the present ruling system the reasons to spend money have to satisfy political/defense agendas.
Sorry for the rant, in the final analysis, the debate over the origins of the Universe may seem to be a hopelessly arcane and obscure debate similar to the "angels on the head of a pin" exercises. However, billions of taxpayer dollars are being expended on experiments that may have no real value... say, looking for "heavy neutrinos".
The only real progress sometimes comes when the basic tenets of a theory are challenged and explored. Middle Ages scholars were so distracted in working out the increasingly complex "epicycles" that explained the motions of the planets that they failed utterly and completely to realize that the sun and the rest of the solar system didn't orbit the earth, (as the geo-centric, and maybe ego-centric view held), and all that went away when Copernicus risked his reputation (but not his life -- because he himself suppressed the idea until he was dying) and suggested otherwise.
You know, I'd be the happiest guy around if all this stuff actually turned out to be true... That massless energy has mass... that energy does come out of a vacuum... that 90% of the known univese is an exotic and undetectable "dark matter", and that the Cosmological Constant isn't just a bugger factor that Einstein threw in (then retracted), but has been re-instated because its needed to explain why the Universe is running away again. But it baffles the s**t out of me why everybody is running around trying to make things more complicated when that usually means that the fundamental principles are flawed.
Cine_...
Expansion hangs on virtually the sole observation of the "standard candles" -- the Cepheid Variables. The assumption is that the Cepheids are totally uniform.
If you've seen one.... you have seen 'em all. It is how distance is measured in astronomy... because there are no other markers. It seems like a circular argument to me, if you are cancelling out possibilities because of an axiomatic approach. So the supposition as I see it, is that (assuming the Cepheids are precisely uniform) and the conduction medium of interstellar space is ideal, the only explanation for red shift is that the universe is expanding. I'm a bit uncomfortable with this... added to the current observation that the expansion is non-uniform in time -- speeding up and slowing down for unknown reasons. At the moment, it would appear that the expansion is in another period of acceleration. No one knows why, or how. It would also appear that our region of the universe is moving in a particular "direction", toward a mythologically mysterious "Great Attractor".
I hope you understand that what I am looking for is something that I could actually present to a bank that they would accept as collateral, in terms of a firm foundation for what is, unfortunately, necessarily an extremely remote and baffling phenomenon -- maybe its what most of us take for granted as "reality".
But for the most part, I get the sneaking suspicion that things are the way they are because Dr. August So-and-So, the high priest of Whatever, sez "Its this way"... and then sets out to preserve that view through whatever means necessary, including suppression of the truth.
This goes on ALL THE TIME and is not limited to academia. If a thesis supervisor feels threatened by new thinking then the candidate will be harassed and hounded out of the program... its completely feudalistic, and not surprisingly so, since the prime science of Astronomy used to be the province of the high-shamans and advisors to royalty. Present-day astronomers don't really share the mantle of responsibility (or privilege) that the old-time astrologers had -- but that ancestral lineage still lingers... Space Science is expensive -- and you need access to power to get funding, and in the present ruling system the reasons to spend money have to satisfy political/defense agendas.
Sorry for the rant, in the final analysis, the debate over the origins of the Universe may seem to be a hopelessly arcane and obscure debate similar to the "angels on the head of a pin" exercises. However, billions of taxpayer dollars are being expended on experiments that may have no real value... say, looking for "heavy neutrinos".
The only real progress sometimes comes when the basic tenets of a theory are challenged and explored. Middle Ages scholars were so distracted in working out the increasingly complex "epicycles" that explained the motions of the planets that they failed utterly and completely to realize that the sun and the rest of the solar system didn't orbit the earth, (as the geo-centric, and maybe ego-centric view held), and all that went away when Copernicus risked his reputation (but not his life -- because he himself suppressed the idea until he was dying) and suggested otherwise.
You know, I'd be the happiest guy around if all this stuff actually turned out to be true... That massless energy has mass... that energy does come out of a vacuum... that 90% of the known univese is an exotic and undetectable "dark matter", and that the Cosmological Constant isn't just a bugger factor that Einstein threw in (then retracted), but has been re-instated because its needed to explain why the Universe is running away again. But it baffles the s**t out of me why everybody is running around trying to make things more complicated when that usually means that the fundamental principles are flawed.
Cine_...