RSR's List of Big Bang Predictions
This is the show from Monday November 24th, 2014
Summary:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v6/n1/exoplanets
* Alleged Confirmed Predictions of the Big Bang Contradicted by Physicists: The list below disproves the widely-repeated claim that the big bang has been validated by confirmed predictions. To repudiate that claim, we present direct testimony from:
- leading journals like Nature, Physics Letters Review, and The Astrophysical Journal
- a Nobel scientist who won the prize for the discovery of the CMB
- distinguished professors of physics from prestigious institutions like Princeton
- America's premier particle physics lab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
- Cambridge University's Modern Cosmology, Science News and New Scientist
- Alan Guth, the father of inflation theory himself, from creationist physicists, and from
- hundreds of relevantly degreed scientists, including many from leading institutions.
* The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict include: The repudiations of the predictive ability of the big bang documented in the list below are regarding:
- the failed prediction of an entire universe worth of antimatter
- the failure to predict an entire universe worth of dark matter
- the 2.7K CMB background radiation and the missing shadow of the CMB
- 2014's claimed discovery of gravity waves, i.e., inflation's smoking gun
- questioning even inflation's predictive value (and noting the BB's failure to predict inflation)
- the claimed initial abundances of the elements hydrogen, helium and lithium
- magnetic monopoles, and both lithium problems, and
- the transparency problem, and dozens of other major failed predictions of the big bang.
If the following contrary-to-interest expert testimony from leading big bang advocates is accurate, then Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing, p. 18, and on RSR, etc.) is wrong when he, along with ten thousand others, claims that confirmed predictions validate the big bang.
* Failed Antimatter Prediction and Failed Dark Matter Search: Scientists have identified two entire universes worth of failure in the predictions of big bang theory, regarding both its erroneous antimatter prediction and its failure to either predict, or detect, dark matter. If the big bang has actually occurred, transforming vast energy into all of the matter of the universe, then that would have created as much antimatter as matter. Extensive compelling scientific investigation including repeatable experiments suggests that there is an entire cosmos worth of antimatter that should have been created by the big bang within our universe that, thankfully, simply does not exist. When supercolliders form matter from energy, as expected from the laws of physics, equal parts of matter and antimatter form; and if they come into contact, they annihilate one another. Big Bang theorists have spent decades looking for antimatter regions of the universe with leading astronomers culminating a significant project by writing, "we conclude that a matter-antimatter symmetric universe is empirically excluded" with the journal Science reporting a physicist's assessment: "The work is extremely compelling and gives me fresh pessimism" that is, on the difficulty of explaining why the universe even exists. And if the big bang can't even explain why the universe exists, not surprisingly, neither can it explain how the universe works.
Further, regarding the hypothetical entities dark matter and dark energy, which are believed in to save the big bang theory from millions of actual astronomical observations which otherwise contradict it, although they are claimed to make up 95% of the entire universe, the big bang also failed to predict these. (That's like an economist in 2008 predicting the outcome of Barack Obama's economic policies and later being credited for accuracy even though he never foresaw any deficit spending. How accurate is a prognosticator who admits to missing 95% of the picture?) And intense searches for dark matter, like in the closest 13,000 light-year swath of the galaxy, turn up empty. Thus, in addition to its many other failed predictions (as we shall see), the big bang's failure to predict nearly 100% of the alleged matter of the universe is in addition to its failed prediction of 100% of the universe-worth of antimatter.
Now consider the standard model's track record regarding the CMB, with one of the very scientists who won the Nobel prize for its discovery being the first person to dial back the credit given to the big bang for that discovery.
* Alleged Confirmed Prediction of CMB: One of the actual discoverers of the Cosmic Microwave Background disagrees with big bang advocates like Lawrence Krauss who claim that the prediction of the temperature of the CMB, at 2.7K, would confirm the validity of that model. In his lecture given on the very occasion of sharing the Nobel Prize for discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, Robert W. Wilson, admitted:
The first confirmation of the microwave cosmic background that we knew of, however, came from a totally different, indirect measurement. This measurement had, in fact, been made thirty years earlier by [Mount Wilson Observatory's] Adams and Dunhan [see Wilson's references, dated 1937-1941]... from the first rotationally excited state. McKellar [reference] using Adams' data... calculated [via absorption lines from cyanide detected in outer space] that the excitation temperature of CN was 2.3 K. This rotational transition occurs at 2.64mm wavelength, near the peak of a 3 K black body spectrum. [Robert Wilson, Nobel Lecture, see more..., and see also Arno Penzia's lecture]
In the 1950s George Gamow and his students made predictions of the CMB temperature ranging from 3 to 50 degrees Kelvin. Thus even after hard data from the Mount Wilson observatory indicated what the correct temperature should be, from the Gamow camp some predictions [or postdictions as the case may be] were close to the actual temperature, and others were off by a factor of more than 10 universes. However two of Gamow's students, Alpher and Herman, earlier, in 1948, predicted the CMB was 5 degrees Kelvin (Nature, Evolution of the Universe). This was close enough to 2.73 for the other predictions to be ignored and for the big bang to be considered experimentally confirmed. Of course, such predictions were logically constrained by absolute zero and by the expected frigid temperature of outer space and by the work of Adams and McKellar. Yet with all that, the published 1948 prediction was still off by a full universe margin of error.
Regarding the CMB (aka MBR), big bang theorists did not predict the significant and generally aligned anisotropies found in the CMB from 2001 to 2013, which were so contrary to the expectations of the materialist origins crowd that it was referred to as the cosmic 'axis of evil'; and 'evil' because it seems to point to the Earth as a very special place indeed. Going back a bit further though with cosmology predictions, in that Physics Essays' Big Bang Theory Under Fire, regarding the 2.73K temperature of the CMB:
“History also shows that some Big Bang cosmologists’ ‘predictions’ of MBR [microwave background radiation] temperature have been ‘adjusted’ after-the-fact to agree with observed temperatures.” Mitchell, pp. 370-379
And generally, regarding chemical elements, CMB temperature, etc:
"What’s more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation." Eric Lerner et al., “Bucking the Big Bang,” New Scientist, Vol. 182, 22 May 2004, p. 20.
Therefore many relevantly degreed scientists working at prestigious institutions have signed CosmologyStatement.org stating that, "the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters..." RSR thanks these courageous scientists, but also, we thank the creation movement and especially Dr. Walt Brown for the determination to hold the secular cosmologist's feet to the fire by not allowing them to make unsubstantiated claims.
If you have additional information about the above "predictions", please feel free to pass your thoughts along to Bob@realscienceradio.com. Thanks!
* Missing Shadow of the Big Bang: As reported in Science Daily, University of Alabama at Huntsville scientist Dr. Richard Lieu concludes, "Either... the Big Bang is blown away or ... there is something else going on'." The Astrophysical Journal reported on a "vital test of the present cosmological paradigm" i.e., the big bang, that "taken at face value, one may even hold the opinion that there is in fact no strong evidence" for the long-predicted shadow of the CMB from behind 31 nearby galaxy clusters. As with dozens of some of the most careful and extensive observations ever made in the history of science, the missing shadow is yet another failure, not of an incidental off-the-cuff prediction but of a fundamental requirement of the big bang. As Dr. Lieu put it, "These shadows are a well-known thing that has been predicted for years. If you see a shadow… it means the radiation comes from behind the cluster. If you don’t see a shadow, then you have something of a problem." See also the Royal Astronomical Society's follow-up corroboration and hear RSR's 2014 discussion with one of the world's more successful physicists, at rsr.org/john-hartnett, that this hard data implies that the CMB may have a foreground source. Yet the BB remains a matter of deep faith among believers, as Dr. Lieu told space.com, "I myself am not at this point prepared to accept that the CMB is noncosmological and that there was no Big Bang. That would be doomsday."
* Inflation Theory's Alleged Predictive Value, Bicep2, and Gravity Waves[/b]: In March of 2014 the science world and the non-creationist media ecstatically celebrated the big bang's "smoking gun" with a premature announcement of evidence of the "inflation period", one of the most fantastic rescue devices any theory in the history of science has ever been granted. Bob Enyart and Fred Williams opened their March 2014 program on RSR's List of Evidence Against the Big Bang with a brief dismissive statement of what was then uncritical reporting of the alleged discovery. But within months, as Ron Cowan reported in the journal Nature:
"I had thought that the [BICEP2] result was very secure," said Alan Guth, the cosmologist who first proposed the inflation concept in 1980... “Now the situation has changed,” added Guth, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
While there was no big bang, nor any inflation period, gravity waves themselves if they existed would not inherently contradict creation. However, this episode illustrates the worldwide, knee-jerk tendency to claim success for big bang predictions. RSR is sad for Stanford physicist Andrei Linde, one of the authors of inflation, who was videotaped hearing the news of the Bicep2 "discovery", who said:
Let us hope that this is not a trick. I always live with this feeling, what if I am tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful [i.e., a just-so BB theory rescue device]. What if...
Yes, what if. Months later, after the September 2014 release of Planck satellite data on dust, the headlines stated:
- Physics World: BICEP2 gravitational wave result bites the dust thanks to new Planck data
- The Guardian: Scientists got it wrong on gravitational waves
- Time Magazine: Big Bang ‘Proof’ Might Just Be Space Dust, Study Finds
- MIT The Tech: Astronomers confirm contamination by stardust
- The Economist: Dust to Dust - A dramatic recent “discovery” in physics is looking rather dodgy
- NewScientist: Ripples from dawn of creation vanish in a puff of dust
- BBC: Cosmic inflation: BICEP 'underestimated' dust problem [RSR: Can the dust be from within the solar system?]
- Nat'l Geographic: Grand Cosmological Claim Crumbles? 25,000 times the readers of National Geographic clicked "Like" to promote the alleged confirmation of the big bang's inflation period. But even many months after they reported the correction, only 51 of their readers similarly promoted the correction.
More significantly, the gravity wave hysteria also illustrates the lack of predictive value of what is essentially a speculation on top of a speculation, that is, the inflation period of the big bang. Also exposed was the extreme viewpoint bias and gullibility of the scientific community, of the secular media, and of the old earth progressive creationists (like at Reasons to Believe, where they are yet to add a caution on what they claim is proof of the non-existent inflationary period). Worse though than all that gullibility, is the infinite pliability of amorphous theories like biological evolution and like inflation and cosmological evolution. "Premature hype over gravitational waves" ignored the "serious flaws in the analysis" with the "proof" transforming itself from "sure detection into no detection" as Dr. Paul Steinhard wrote in June 2014 in another scathing article in Nature. The professor of physics at Princeton concluded:
The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and detection of gravitational waves was the 'smoking gun' proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. ... Yet some proponents of inflation... insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible? ...inflation is [theoretically] driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. ... No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable. ...it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.
A cosmologist from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario has a similar view. Neil Turok, who once bet Stephen Hawking that gravitational waves would never be detected, also says: "One of its problems is it’s very adjustable. [Inflation theory] makes very few specific predictions that you could actually go out and check with a measurement."
* Inflation Theory Not a BB Prediction But an Ad Hoc Secondary Assumption: Inflation was assumed to address the BB's starlight travel time problem. Like the starlight and time challenge put to biblical creationists, the big bang has the same problem, known as its horizon problem. Even a 14-billion year old universe is nowhere near old enough to enable the temperature of the background radiation to even out so perfectly. So, just as dark matter was not a prediction of the BB, in 1981, not as a prediction of the big bang, but in an ad hoc, adjusting to the data, dramatic secondary assumption, Alan Guth imagined an inflation period in which space expanded at speeds far greater than the speed of light, to solve the problem of a big bang universe being far too homogenous (even temperature) to be explained by the most fundamental of the laws of thermodynamics. So, in addition to inflation 2014 gravity wave fiasco as explained just above, the proposed wildly rapid and astoundingly brief expansion of space has no known mechanism that would power and suddenly start the expansion. Also unsolved is the "graceful exit" problem of an equally sudden stop. Yet while this inflation was proposed to account for the smoothness of the universe, apparently, it resulted in a far too smooth universe to enable the formation of stars and galaxies! Thus, as a dramatic offsetting counter assumption, cosmologists have begun proposing dark matter bubbles to get densities of matter in the midst of all that inflated homogeneity. That is, while inflation was imagined to address the problem of the universe being too homogenous, to solve the exact opposite problem, dark matter bubbles have now been imagined because the extreme evenness of background radiation indicates that the universe was not lumpy enough to naturally form stars. An expanding universe exacerbates the problem that the laws of physics do not enable the natural formation of stars from gas clouds. So BB cosmologists call again upon the super malleable great-in-a-pinch dark matter to rescue their theory. It is now claimed that trillions upon trillions of dark matter bubbles (DMBs) allegedly formed in a just-so arrangement by way of the big bang so that each one would gravitationally attract gas to form the trillions of alleged Population III protostars. With all those DMBs formed, this tertiary assumption/rescue device also solves the problem of how galaxies formed, suggesting that DMBs were initially arranged into clusters which formed the galaxies. Imagined inflation and DMBs are such dramatic attempts to explain observations which otherwise bluntly falsify the standard model, that one can see that the big bang theory is as pliable as any science fiction holodeck could be.
* Alleged Confirmed Prediction of Abundances of Elements: While most cosmologists reject that God could have created the universe in six literal days, they themselves believe that within 20 minutes of the big bang, all of its matter had been created, via big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Before the era of "precision cosmology", long ago in history back to the year 1990, a handful of scientists were determined to state, for the record, that the big bang theory had not predicted the relative abundances of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Rather, they argued, big bang proponents were adjusting the theory's parameters to match already existing observations:
“It is commonly supposed that the so-called primordial abundances of D (Deuterium, i.e., heavy hydrogen, N+P), 3He (Helium N+2P), and 4He (2N+2P) and 7Li (Lithium 3P+4N) provide strong evidence for Big Bang cosmology. But a particular value for the baryon-to-photon ratio needs to be assumed ad hoc to obtain the required abundances.” -H. C. Arp et al., 1990 Nature 346, pp. 807-812
Today, in the modern age, there are at least hundreds of relevantly degreed scientists who agree and have gone on record stating that the big bang's predictions are instead post-dictions, made by adjusting the theory's parameters to make it agree with observations, regardless of how those observations may change. Researchers working at prestigious institutions including the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Sheffield University, George Mason University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, Cambridge University, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Penn State, Cal State Fullerton, University of Virginia, European Southern Observatory, and scores of other prestigious institutions, have signed CosmologyStatement.org:
...the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters... May 22, 2004, New Scientist
This observation applies to various predictions of the big bang (see above and below).
Initial Lithium Abundances Still a Mess: In 2012, in A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss references big bang "calculations that so beautifully explain the observed abundance of the light elements (hydrogen, helium, and lithium)", yet in 2014 two papers, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and in Physics Letters Review, report two extreme problems with the lithium prediction, with the lithium-6 prediction off by a thousand fold (see below) and all lithium isotopes showing a "discrepancy" from "BBN calculations" indicating that "the Li problem seems to be an universal problem, regardless of the parent galaxy" (see below).
Missing 50% of Expected Hydrogen & Helium: Continuing in A Universe from Nothing, Krauss adds that, "The very same [big bang] calculations... also tell us more or less how many protons and neutrons, the stuff of normal matter, must exist in the universe.... Yet the initial density of protons and neutrons in the universe arising out of the Big Bang... accounts for about twice the amount of material we can see in stars and hot gas. Where are those particles?" With all that missing matter, it's interesting to hear the repeated claim that the big bang "beautifully" explains the initial abundances, except of course that half of everything that is predicted is missing. Considering the mass of the universe, that's a lot of missing matter. And forget about dark matter. This missing matter is the baryonic matter missing based on the big bang prediction. COMPARED TO ALL THE MASS OF ALL THE GAS AND STARS IN ALL THE GALAXIES, THERE IS THAT MUCH MASS, YET AGAIN, THAT IS MISSING. Big bang proponents believe that all that matter is lurking out there somewhere. "It is easy to imagine ways to hide protons and neutrons", Krauss writes, in dark objects that don't shine. Yet, as a search with a strong flashlight can make it unlikely that a car is hiding somewhere in a parking lot, the fact that the universe is far more transparent than BB cosmologists had predicted is now leaving even fewer places for all of this additional mass to be hiding.
Baryon-to-Photon Ratio: Even in the age of "precision cosmology", the baryon-to-photon ratio is still an estimate based upon cosmological assumptions. To take that Krauss quote above even further, he writes that, "the initial density of protons and neutrons in the universe arising out of the Big Bang [were] determined by fitting to the observed abundance of hydrogen, helium, and lithium" (A Universe from Nothing, p. 24). As explained by Dr. Jake Hebert (Ph.D. in physics from the University of Miami) in 2013:
Note that Krauss said the initial baryonic density of the universe has been determined by fitting to the observed abundances of the light elements. What does this mean? The theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis contains a “free” or “undetermined” number called the “baryon-to-photon ratio,” indicated by the symbol ?B. Photons are “particles” of electromagnetic radiation, and this ratio specifies the number of baryons compared to the number of photons in the Big Bang universe. Again, the theory itself does not actually specify [predict] the value of ?B. Instead, ?B may be chosen so that the abundances of hydrogen and helium that would have been produced in the Big Bang match those actually observed in nature—about 75 percent hydrogen and nearly 25 percent helium... These theoretical abundances match the observed abundances fairly well if one chooses ?B so that there are roughly two billion photons per baryon in the universe.
This assessment, written in 2013, describes the same circular confirmation as published in Nature in 1990 and in the Cosmology Statement in 2004. There are an estimated 413 photons per cubic centimeter in the universe. The baryon-to-photon ratio, previously thought to be about a billion to one, is now believed, in 2014 to be about 2 billion photons for each baryon, inferred from something called the angular power spectrum of the CMB. This is said to be in good agreement with the standard model. In an important paper in 2000, a baryon density was estimated that was some 50% higher than expected, yet that too was judged to be in "agreement with the basic inflation paradigm."
Hydrogen and Helium: As an additional historical example of the big bang theory's pliability, consider hydrogen and helium and notice how parameters have been adjusted historically to keep the theory matching the latest data. Physics Essays published the William Mitchell article, Big Bang Theory Under Fire (Vol. 10, No. 2, June 1997, pp. 370–379), on the allegedly confirmed prediction of the percentages of the initial abundances of these lightest elements that would have been created by the big bang:
The study of historical data shows that over the years predictions of the ratio of helium to hydrogen in a BB universe have been repeatedly adjusted to agree with the latest available estimates of that ratio as observed in the real universe. The estimated ratio is dependent on a ratio of baryons to photons (the baryon number) that has also been arbitrarily adjusted to agree with the currently established helium to hydrogen ratio. These appear to have not been predictions, but merely adjustments of theory (‘retrodictions’) to accommodate current data.
Helium Problem: Many of the papers in this RSR report on Big Bang Predictions were published in just the last few years. Let's get a few more historical examples though of how the process has worked, for the pattern continues to this day. Dennis Sciama in Modern Cosmology, published back in 1971 by Cambridge University Press, described the Big Bang's "Helium Problem". For helium:
...had a minimum abundance of about one helium atom to every eleven hydrogen atoms. Since, as we shall see, this is a very high helium abundance to have been produced by stars in the Galaxy, it is tempting to suggest that the minimum ratio of 1/11 represents the relative helium abundance when the Galaxy was formed, and that localised increases in the observed ratio have to do with the local production of helium after the Galaxy was formed. Unfortunately for this simple picture, from 1966 onwards several observers have reported the existence of stars in which helium is underabundant, in some cases by as much as a factor of a hundred, as compared with the 'minimum' ration of 1/11. (Sciama, p. 151)
* Problems with Abundances of the Next Two Light Elements: Regarding beryllium and boron, after those first 20 minutes of alleged BBN, then allegedly about 150 million years pass until the first stars begin to form. In the cores of the so-called Population III first generation of stars by way of stellar nucleosynthesis the other elements of the universe allegedly began to form, including beryllium and boron.
Beryllium Problem: Twenty years later, reports were still coming in of abundances far out of the predicted ranges. The Astrophysical Journal, in 1991, published a paper titled, First detection of beryllium in a very metal poor star - A test of the standard big bang model, which stated:
The star HD 140283, which has [Fe/H]=-2.6, has a beryllium abundance of log (9Be/H) - -12.8 +/- 0.3, a factor of ~~ 1000 greater than the primordial value predicted in the standard model of light element nucleosynthesis. (p. 17)
Translating that into English, Ron Cowen, in Science News' Starlight Casts Doubt on Big Bang Details, reported that:
Examining the faint light from an elderly Milky Way star, astronomers have detected a far greater abundance [by three orders of magnitude] of beryllium atoms than the standard Big Bang model predicts. (p. 151)
Boron Problem: Five years later another Science News report illustrated the way that the big bang's chemical evolution story is not so much predictive as it is malleable and adjusts to the current data (as Walter ReMine said of neo-Darwinism, "Evolutionary theory adapts to data like fog adapts to landscape"). This excerpt, from 1996, is again from Cowen, but the square brackets provide our RSR observations. For decades, big bang theory offered:
"...no explanation for two light-weight elements—beryllium and boron—and the bulk of the lithium. “...it hasn’t been entirely clear where they came from,” notes Douglas K. Duncan, an astronomer at the University of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum in Chicago... [Regardless though, cosmologists told a creation story for Be, B, and Li. However,] “what I was taught in graduate school..." can’t generate the three elements in the abundances observed today... [So as different quantities of these elements are observed, we'll just have to continue to change the theory.] Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have only made matters worse. ...astronomers have for the first time measured the abundance of boron in eight stars [which allegedly] date from the formation of the Milky Way, some 10 billion years ago, and provide a record of boron abundance from that long-ago era. To the surprise of many astronomers, the Hubble studies show that the abundance of boron way back when wasn’t much lower than it is in the interstellar medium today. That finding is at odds with the notion that boron arose from the collision of high-speed protons with heavier elements. Ten billion years ago, “there wasn’t very much carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in the galaxy, so there weren’t very many targets for the cosmic-ray protons to hit,” notes Duncan. ...but the new model accounts more fully for the elemental abundances... (Science News, Cowen).
Yes, of course it does.
* Failed Big Bang Prediction of Monopoles: Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles that would have only a "north" but not a "south" pole. With knowledge of the above colossal predictive failures of the big bang and especially its inflationary theory, the following Wikipedia quote on monopoles approaches the event horizon... of humor:
Cosmological models of the events following the big bang make predictions about what the horizon volume was, which lead to predictions about present-day monopole density. Early models predicted an enormous density of monopoles, in clear contradiction to the experimental evidence. This was called the "monopole problem". Its widely accepted resolution was not a change in the particle-physics prediction of monopoles, but rather in the cosmological models used to infer their present-day density. Specifically, more recent theories of cosmic inflation drastically reduce the predicted number of magnetic monopoles, to a density small enough to make it unsurprising that humans have never seen one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#cite_note-36This resolution of the "monopole problem" was regarded as a success of cosmic inflation theory. (last accessed Oct. 8, 2014)
Of course there is an intense atheistic and specifically anti-Christian bias generally on Wikipedia and an extreme gullibility regarding alleged evidence for the materialist origins claims of evolution and the big bang. The introduction to WP's Physical cosmology article states regarding the "standard model of cosmology" that "This model requires the universe to contain large amounts of dark matter and dark energy whose nature is currently not well understood, but the model gives detailed predictions which are in excellent agreement with many diverse observations." Objecting to this, Bob Enyart edited the article's "Talk page" to ask:
Should this phrase be removed: "which are in excellent agreement with many diverse observations." First, it lacks attribution. Secondly, because dark matter and dark entities are hypothetical entities introduced specifically to explain such observations, of course they will agree with those observations. Thus, just as WP is designed to prevent circularity in its own editing (i.e., WP articles may not reference each other for attribution), so too, if there is any circularity here, it will undermine the value of this article. Bob Enyart, Denver KGOV radio host
* Failed Big Bang Lithium-6 Prediction Off a Thousand-Fold: Physics Worlds reports on a 2014 paper in Physics Letters Review that, "Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) theory... fails miserably when it comes to the two stable lithium isotopes: lithium-6 and lithium-7." This long-feared conclusion, based on the laws of physics, is now also experimentally confirmed using an underground accelerator. To quote ICR's Brian Thomas, "Unfortunately for Big Bang theorists, their experiment succeeded... if lithium actually formed by some primordial [BB] nucleosynthesis, it should indeed have formed in the predicted ratio." So how far off is the big bang theory's prediction from actual, empirical observation? Physics World editor, Hamish Johnston answers:
The BBN model predicts that lithium-6 should account for about two out of every 100,000 lithium nuclei in "metal-poor" stars, which are believed to be among the first stars to have formed and so should reflect the composition of the early universe. However, observations... suggest that the abundance of lithium-6 is more than a thousand times greater in such stars, accounting for about 5% of all the lithium present.
This isotope ratio lithium problem adds yet another piece of evidence against the big bang and also, for the umpteenth time, falsifies Lawrence Krauss' claim to RSR that, "all evidence overwhelmingly supports the big bang", which is disproved, at least regarding lithium-7 as per the 2013 paper, Standard Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis After Planck, and by the admission of Physics World editor, Hamish Johnston that, "the amount of lithium-6 observed in today's universe is so different from the amount that theory predicts..."
* The Traditional Cosmological Lithium Problem: The lithium isotope ratio problem described just above is in addition to the traditional cosmological "lithium problem" which has been updated in a 2014 paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The traditional cosmological lithium problem is that, regardless of isotopes, the amount of observed lithium where theory attributes it to the big bang itself is inconsistent with big bang nucelosynthesis (BBN). Earlier, a secondary assumption was that the inconsistency was possibly a "local problem", perhaps only manifesting itself in our own or similar galaxies. So the authors asked:
...is the Li problem a local problem, limited to our Galaxy, or is it independent of the environment? The analysis of the RGB stars in M54 confirms the findings in ? Centauri (Monaco et al. 2010), considered as the remnant of an accreted dwarf galaxy: the Li problem seems to be an universal problem, regardless of the parent galaxy.
Thus Mucciarelli, et al., conclude:
Our result shows that this discrepancy is a universal problem concerning both the Milky Way and extra-galactic systems. Either modifications of BBN calculations, or a combination of atomic diffusion plus a suitably tuned additional mixing during the main sequence, need to be invoked to solve the discrepancy. MNRAS, 2014
* The Transparency Problem: Surprised astronomers are seeing objects that are apparently far more distant than any that they expected to be able to see. Scientists using NASA's FERMI telescope have recently exacerbated the "transparency problem" because, comparing observation to big bang predictions, there is a tremendous amount of missing "infrared light between galaxies", apparently, billions of years worth. According to New Scientist, this "may call into question our understanding of how galaxies are born", which of course was rather questionable already. As noted above, this transparency problem may exacerbate the problem of where to hide all the additional regular matter allegedly created in the big bang, the equivalent of "twice the amount of material we can see in stars and hot gas. Where are those particles?" Yes. Where?
* Shock and Awe: The above list contains just a few of all the failed predictions of big bang theory. Our popular List of Evidence Against the Big Bang documents the big bang's falsified predictions regarding:
- where mature galaxies could not exist
- nine billion years worth of missing metals in a trillion stars
- that distant galaxies must have less surface brightness
- spiral galaxies missing millions of years of collisions
- arms of spiral galaxies rotating far more rapidly than expected
- distant galaxy clusters existing where they should not
- superclusters of galaxies existing where they should not
- missing Population III stars,
- and dozens more.
Then, more broadly speaking, 10,000 discoveries have falsified evolutionist predictions. Yet with the relentless barrage of evolutionists quoted as ”shocked" by wildly unexpected discoveries that contradict their most fundamental suppositions, evolutionists, like Lawrence Krauss, typically pretend that no such pattern of falsified predictions exists. As with the discovery of hot Jupiters and the sequencing of the chimp's Y chromosome, a thousand times over, naturalistic scientists are baffled by what they find, which repeating pattern, of discovery and shock, discovery and shock, discovery and shock, is actually an ongoing experiment of prediction and falsification, of their claim of naturalistic origins. An open-minded evolutionist should be willing to re-evaluate his materialistic assumptions. "Rejection of a Creator is not a conclusion from science, but a bias forced onto science," said Bob Enyart.
* Hundreds of Scientists Reject Claims of Confirmed Big Bang Predictions: Hundreds of scientists, including many at world-class institutions, have publicly signed the Cosmology Statement as published in New Scientist to show the growing dissent in scientific circles regarding the increasingly awkward and superficially propped-up theory of the big bang. For RSR's full list of the thousands of scientists who doubt the big bang, see rsr.org/scientists-doubting-darwin#and-the-big-bang. Specifically though, many of the signers of the Cosmology Statement work at leading institutions including the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Sheffield University, George Mason University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, Cambridge University, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Penn State, Cal State Fullerton, University of Virginia, European Southern Observatory, and scores of other prestigious institutions, and as recorded at CosmologyStatement.org they have stated:
...the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.
Today's Resource: You'll just love the science DVDs, books, and written, audio or video debates we offer through our Real Science Radio broadcasts! So have you browsed through our Science Department in the KGOV Store? Check out Bob most highly-recommended astronomy DVD, What You Aren't Being Told About Astronomyhttp://www.kgovstore.com/servlet/Detail?no=257!
This is the show from Monday November 24th, 2014
Summary:
http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/am/v6/n1/exoplanets
* Alleged Confirmed Predictions of the Big Bang Contradicted by Physicists: The list below disproves the widely-repeated claim that the big bang has been validated by confirmed predictions. To repudiate that claim, we present direct testimony from:
- leading journals like Nature, Physics Letters Review, and The Astrophysical Journal
- a Nobel scientist who won the prize for the discovery of the CMB
- distinguished professors of physics from prestigious institutions like Princeton
- America's premier particle physics lab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
- Cambridge University's Modern Cosmology, Science News and New Scientist
- Alan Guth, the father of inflation theory himself, from creationist physicists, and from
- hundreds of relevantly degreed scientists, including many from leading institutions.
* The Big Bang's Failed Predictions and Failures to Predict include: The repudiations of the predictive ability of the big bang documented in the list below are regarding:
- the failed prediction of an entire universe worth of antimatter
- the failure to predict an entire universe worth of dark matter
- the 2.7K CMB background radiation and the missing shadow of the CMB
- 2014's claimed discovery of gravity waves, i.e., inflation's smoking gun
- questioning even inflation's predictive value (and noting the BB's failure to predict inflation)
- the claimed initial abundances of the elements hydrogen, helium and lithium
- magnetic monopoles, and both lithium problems, and
- the transparency problem, and dozens of other major failed predictions of the big bang.
If the following contrary-to-interest expert testimony from leading big bang advocates is accurate, then Lawrence Krauss (A Universe from Nothing, p. 18, and on RSR, etc.) is wrong when he, along with ten thousand others, claims that confirmed predictions validate the big bang.
* Failed Antimatter Prediction and Failed Dark Matter Search: Scientists have identified two entire universes worth of failure in the predictions of big bang theory, regarding both its erroneous antimatter prediction and its failure to either predict, or detect, dark matter. If the big bang has actually occurred, transforming vast energy into all of the matter of the universe, then that would have created as much antimatter as matter. Extensive compelling scientific investigation including repeatable experiments suggests that there is an entire cosmos worth of antimatter that should have been created by the big bang within our universe that, thankfully, simply does not exist. When supercolliders form matter from energy, as expected from the laws of physics, equal parts of matter and antimatter form; and if they come into contact, they annihilate one another. Big Bang theorists have spent decades looking for antimatter regions of the universe with leading astronomers culminating a significant project by writing, "we conclude that a matter-antimatter symmetric universe is empirically excluded" with the journal Science reporting a physicist's assessment: "The work is extremely compelling and gives me fresh pessimism" that is, on the difficulty of explaining why the universe even exists. And if the big bang can't even explain why the universe exists, not surprisingly, neither can it explain how the universe works.
Further, regarding the hypothetical entities dark matter and dark energy, which are believed in to save the big bang theory from millions of actual astronomical observations which otherwise contradict it, although they are claimed to make up 95% of the entire universe, the big bang also failed to predict these. (That's like an economist in 2008 predicting the outcome of Barack Obama's economic policies and later being credited for accuracy even though he never foresaw any deficit spending. How accurate is a prognosticator who admits to missing 95% of the picture?) And intense searches for dark matter, like in the closest 13,000 light-year swath of the galaxy, turn up empty. Thus, in addition to its many other failed predictions (as we shall see), the big bang's failure to predict nearly 100% of the alleged matter of the universe is in addition to its failed prediction of 100% of the universe-worth of antimatter.
Now consider the standard model's track record regarding the CMB, with one of the very scientists who won the Nobel prize for its discovery being the first person to dial back the credit given to the big bang for that discovery.
* Alleged Confirmed Prediction of CMB: One of the actual discoverers of the Cosmic Microwave Background disagrees with big bang advocates like Lawrence Krauss who claim that the prediction of the temperature of the CMB, at 2.7K, would confirm the validity of that model. In his lecture given on the very occasion of sharing the Nobel Prize for discovering the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, Robert W. Wilson, admitted:
The first confirmation of the microwave cosmic background that we knew of, however, came from a totally different, indirect measurement. This measurement had, in fact, been made thirty years earlier by [Mount Wilson Observatory's] Adams and Dunhan [see Wilson's references, dated 1937-1941]... from the first rotationally excited state. McKellar [reference] using Adams' data... calculated [via absorption lines from cyanide detected in outer space] that the excitation temperature of CN was 2.3 K. This rotational transition occurs at 2.64mm wavelength, near the peak of a 3 K black body spectrum. [Robert Wilson, Nobel Lecture, see more..., and see also Arno Penzia's lecture]
In the 1950s George Gamow and his students made predictions of the CMB temperature ranging from 3 to 50 degrees Kelvin. Thus even after hard data from the Mount Wilson observatory indicated what the correct temperature should be, from the Gamow camp some predictions [or postdictions as the case may be] were close to the actual temperature, and others were off by a factor of more than 10 universes. However two of Gamow's students, Alpher and Herman, earlier, in 1948, predicted the CMB was 5 degrees Kelvin (Nature, Evolution of the Universe). This was close enough to 2.73 for the other predictions to be ignored and for the big bang to be considered experimentally confirmed. Of course, such predictions were logically constrained by absolute zero and by the expected frigid temperature of outer space and by the work of Adams and McKellar. Yet with all that, the published 1948 prediction was still off by a full universe margin of error.
Regarding the CMB (aka MBR), big bang theorists did not predict the significant and generally aligned anisotropies found in the CMB from 2001 to 2013, which were so contrary to the expectations of the materialist origins crowd that it was referred to as the cosmic 'axis of evil'; and 'evil' because it seems to point to the Earth as a very special place indeed. Going back a bit further though with cosmology predictions, in that Physics Essays' Big Bang Theory Under Fire, regarding the 2.73K temperature of the CMB:
“History also shows that some Big Bang cosmologists’ ‘predictions’ of MBR [microwave background radiation] temperature have been ‘adjusted’ after-the-fact to agree with observed temperatures.” Mitchell, pp. 370-379
And generally, regarding chemical elements, CMB temperature, etc:
"What’s more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation." Eric Lerner et al., “Bucking the Big Bang,” New Scientist, Vol. 182, 22 May 2004, p. 20.
Therefore many relevantly degreed scientists working at prestigious institutions have signed CosmologyStatement.org stating that, "the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters..." RSR thanks these courageous scientists, but also, we thank the creation movement and especially Dr. Walt Brown for the determination to hold the secular cosmologist's feet to the fire by not allowing them to make unsubstantiated claims.
If you have additional information about the above "predictions", please feel free to pass your thoughts along to Bob@realscienceradio.com. Thanks!
* Missing Shadow of the Big Bang: As reported in Science Daily, University of Alabama at Huntsville scientist Dr. Richard Lieu concludes, "Either... the Big Bang is blown away or ... there is something else going on'." The Astrophysical Journal reported on a "vital test of the present cosmological paradigm" i.e., the big bang, that "taken at face value, one may even hold the opinion that there is in fact no strong evidence" for the long-predicted shadow of the CMB from behind 31 nearby galaxy clusters. As with dozens of some of the most careful and extensive observations ever made in the history of science, the missing shadow is yet another failure, not of an incidental off-the-cuff prediction but of a fundamental requirement of the big bang. As Dr. Lieu put it, "These shadows are a well-known thing that has been predicted for years. If you see a shadow… it means the radiation comes from behind the cluster. If you don’t see a shadow, then you have something of a problem." See also the Royal Astronomical Society's follow-up corroboration and hear RSR's 2014 discussion with one of the world's more successful physicists, at rsr.org/john-hartnett, that this hard data implies that the CMB may have a foreground source. Yet the BB remains a matter of deep faith among believers, as Dr. Lieu told space.com, "I myself am not at this point prepared to accept that the CMB is noncosmological and that there was no Big Bang. That would be doomsday."
* Inflation Theory's Alleged Predictive Value, Bicep2, and Gravity Waves[/b]: In March of 2014 the science world and the non-creationist media ecstatically celebrated the big bang's "smoking gun" with a premature announcement of evidence of the "inflation period", one of the most fantastic rescue devices any theory in the history of science has ever been granted. Bob Enyart and Fred Williams opened their March 2014 program on RSR's List of Evidence Against the Big Bang with a brief dismissive statement of what was then uncritical reporting of the alleged discovery. But within months, as Ron Cowan reported in the journal Nature:
"I had thought that the [BICEP2] result was very secure," said Alan Guth, the cosmologist who first proposed the inflation concept in 1980... “Now the situation has changed,” added Guth, who works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
While there was no big bang, nor any inflation period, gravity waves themselves if they existed would not inherently contradict creation. However, this episode illustrates the worldwide, knee-jerk tendency to claim success for big bang predictions. RSR is sad for Stanford physicist Andrei Linde, one of the authors of inflation, who was videotaped hearing the news of the Bicep2 "discovery", who said:
Let us hope that this is not a trick. I always live with this feeling, what if I am tricked? What if I believe in this just because it is beautiful [i.e., a just-so BB theory rescue device]. What if...
Yes, what if. Months later, after the September 2014 release of Planck satellite data on dust, the headlines stated:
- Physics World: BICEP2 gravitational wave result bites the dust thanks to new Planck data
- The Guardian: Scientists got it wrong on gravitational waves
- Time Magazine: Big Bang ‘Proof’ Might Just Be Space Dust, Study Finds
- MIT The Tech: Astronomers confirm contamination by stardust
- The Economist: Dust to Dust - A dramatic recent “discovery” in physics is looking rather dodgy
- NewScientist: Ripples from dawn of creation vanish in a puff of dust
- BBC: Cosmic inflation: BICEP 'underestimated' dust problem [RSR: Can the dust be from within the solar system?]
- Nat'l Geographic: Grand Cosmological Claim Crumbles? 25,000 times the readers of National Geographic clicked "Like" to promote the alleged confirmation of the big bang's inflation period. But even many months after they reported the correction, only 51 of their readers similarly promoted the correction.
More significantly, the gravity wave hysteria also illustrates the lack of predictive value of what is essentially a speculation on top of a speculation, that is, the inflation period of the big bang. Also exposed was the extreme viewpoint bias and gullibility of the scientific community, of the secular media, and of the old earth progressive creationists (like at Reasons to Believe, where they are yet to add a caution on what they claim is proof of the non-existent inflationary period). Worse though than all that gullibility, is the infinite pliability of amorphous theories like biological evolution and like inflation and cosmological evolution. "Premature hype over gravitational waves" ignored the "serious flaws in the analysis" with the "proof" transforming itself from "sure detection into no detection" as Dr. Paul Steinhard wrote in June 2014 in another scathing article in Nature. The professor of physics at Princeton concluded:
The BICEP2 incident has also revealed a truth about inflationary theory. The common view is that it is a highly predictive theory. If that was the case and detection of gravitational waves was the 'smoking gun' proof of inflation, one would think that non-detection means that the theory fails. ... Yet some proponents of inflation... insist that the theory is equally valid whether or not gravitational waves are detected. How is this possible? ...inflation is [theoretically] driven by a hypothetical scalar field, the inflaton, which has properties that can be adjusted to produce effectively any outcome. ... No experiment can rule out a theory that allows for all possible outcomes. Hence, the paradigm of inflation is unfalsifiable. ...it is clear that the inflationary paradigm is fundamentally untestable, and hence scientifically meaningless.
A cosmologist from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario has a similar view. Neil Turok, who once bet Stephen Hawking that gravitational waves would never be detected, also says: "One of its problems is it’s very adjustable. [Inflation theory] makes very few specific predictions that you could actually go out and check with a measurement."
* Inflation Theory Not a BB Prediction But an Ad Hoc Secondary Assumption: Inflation was assumed to address the BB's starlight travel time problem. Like the starlight and time challenge put to biblical creationists, the big bang has the same problem, known as its horizon problem. Even a 14-billion year old universe is nowhere near old enough to enable the temperature of the background radiation to even out so perfectly. So, just as dark matter was not a prediction of the BB, in 1981, not as a prediction of the big bang, but in an ad hoc, adjusting to the data, dramatic secondary assumption, Alan Guth imagined an inflation period in which space expanded at speeds far greater than the speed of light, to solve the problem of a big bang universe being far too homogenous (even temperature) to be explained by the most fundamental of the laws of thermodynamics. So, in addition to inflation 2014 gravity wave fiasco as explained just above, the proposed wildly rapid and astoundingly brief expansion of space has no known mechanism that would power and suddenly start the expansion. Also unsolved is the "graceful exit" problem of an equally sudden stop. Yet while this inflation was proposed to account for the smoothness of the universe, apparently, it resulted in a far too smooth universe to enable the formation of stars and galaxies! Thus, as a dramatic offsetting counter assumption, cosmologists have begun proposing dark matter bubbles to get densities of matter in the midst of all that inflated homogeneity. That is, while inflation was imagined to address the problem of the universe being too homogenous, to solve the exact opposite problem, dark matter bubbles have now been imagined because the extreme evenness of background radiation indicates that the universe was not lumpy enough to naturally form stars. An expanding universe exacerbates the problem that the laws of physics do not enable the natural formation of stars from gas clouds. So BB cosmologists call again upon the super malleable great-in-a-pinch dark matter to rescue their theory. It is now claimed that trillions upon trillions of dark matter bubbles (DMBs) allegedly formed in a just-so arrangement by way of the big bang so that each one would gravitationally attract gas to form the trillions of alleged Population III protostars. With all those DMBs formed, this tertiary assumption/rescue device also solves the problem of how galaxies formed, suggesting that DMBs were initially arranged into clusters which formed the galaxies. Imagined inflation and DMBs are such dramatic attempts to explain observations which otherwise bluntly falsify the standard model, that one can see that the big bang theory is as pliable as any science fiction holodeck could be.
* Alleged Confirmed Prediction of Abundances of Elements: While most cosmologists reject that God could have created the universe in six literal days, they themselves believe that within 20 minutes of the big bang, all of its matter had been created, via big bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). Before the era of "precision cosmology", long ago in history back to the year 1990, a handful of scientists were determined to state, for the record, that the big bang theory had not predicted the relative abundances of hydrogen, helium, and lithium. Rather, they argued, big bang proponents were adjusting the theory's parameters to match already existing observations:
“It is commonly supposed that the so-called primordial abundances of D (Deuterium, i.e., heavy hydrogen, N+P), 3He (Helium N+2P), and 4He (2N+2P) and 7Li (Lithium 3P+4N) provide strong evidence for Big Bang cosmology. But a particular value for the baryon-to-photon ratio needs to be assumed ad hoc to obtain the required abundances.” -H. C. Arp et al., 1990 Nature 346, pp. 807-812
Today, in the modern age, there are at least hundreds of relevantly degreed scientists who agree and have gone on record stating that the big bang's predictions are instead post-dictions, made by adjusting the theory's parameters to make it agree with observations, regardless of how those observations may change. Researchers working at prestigious institutions including the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Sheffield University, George Mason University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, Cambridge University, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Penn State, Cal State Fullerton, University of Virginia, European Southern Observatory, and scores of other prestigious institutions, have signed CosmologyStatement.org:
...the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters... May 22, 2004, New Scientist
This observation applies to various predictions of the big bang (see above and below).
Initial Lithium Abundances Still a Mess: In 2012, in A Universe from Nothing, Lawrence Krauss references big bang "calculations that so beautifully explain the observed abundance of the light elements (hydrogen, helium, and lithium)", yet in 2014 two papers, in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and in Physics Letters Review, report two extreme problems with the lithium prediction, with the lithium-6 prediction off by a thousand fold (see below) and all lithium isotopes showing a "discrepancy" from "BBN calculations" indicating that "the Li problem seems to be an universal problem, regardless of the parent galaxy" (see below).
Missing 50% of Expected Hydrogen & Helium: Continuing in A Universe from Nothing, Krauss adds that, "The very same [big bang] calculations... also tell us more or less how many protons and neutrons, the stuff of normal matter, must exist in the universe.... Yet the initial density of protons and neutrons in the universe arising out of the Big Bang... accounts for about twice the amount of material we can see in stars and hot gas. Where are those particles?" With all that missing matter, it's interesting to hear the repeated claim that the big bang "beautifully" explains the initial abundances, except of course that half of everything that is predicted is missing. Considering the mass of the universe, that's a lot of missing matter. And forget about dark matter. This missing matter is the baryonic matter missing based on the big bang prediction. COMPARED TO ALL THE MASS OF ALL THE GAS AND STARS IN ALL THE GALAXIES, THERE IS THAT MUCH MASS, YET AGAIN, THAT IS MISSING. Big bang proponents believe that all that matter is lurking out there somewhere. "It is easy to imagine ways to hide protons and neutrons", Krauss writes, in dark objects that don't shine. Yet, as a search with a strong flashlight can make it unlikely that a car is hiding somewhere in a parking lot, the fact that the universe is far more transparent than BB cosmologists had predicted is now leaving even fewer places for all of this additional mass to be hiding.
Baryon-to-Photon Ratio: Even in the age of "precision cosmology", the baryon-to-photon ratio is still an estimate based upon cosmological assumptions. To take that Krauss quote above even further, he writes that, "the initial density of protons and neutrons in the universe arising out of the Big Bang [were] determined by fitting to the observed abundance of hydrogen, helium, and lithium" (A Universe from Nothing, p. 24). As explained by Dr. Jake Hebert (Ph.D. in physics from the University of Miami) in 2013:
Note that Krauss said the initial baryonic density of the universe has been determined by fitting to the observed abundances of the light elements. What does this mean? The theory of Big Bang nucleosynthesis contains a “free” or “undetermined” number called the “baryon-to-photon ratio,” indicated by the symbol ?B. Photons are “particles” of electromagnetic radiation, and this ratio specifies the number of baryons compared to the number of photons in the Big Bang universe. Again, the theory itself does not actually specify [predict] the value of ?B. Instead, ?B may be chosen so that the abundances of hydrogen and helium that would have been produced in the Big Bang match those actually observed in nature—about 75 percent hydrogen and nearly 25 percent helium... These theoretical abundances match the observed abundances fairly well if one chooses ?B so that there are roughly two billion photons per baryon in the universe.
This assessment, written in 2013, describes the same circular confirmation as published in Nature in 1990 and in the Cosmology Statement in 2004. There are an estimated 413 photons per cubic centimeter in the universe. The baryon-to-photon ratio, previously thought to be about a billion to one, is now believed, in 2014 to be about 2 billion photons for each baryon, inferred from something called the angular power spectrum of the CMB. This is said to be in good agreement with the standard model. In an important paper in 2000, a baryon density was estimated that was some 50% higher than expected, yet that too was judged to be in "agreement with the basic inflation paradigm."
Hydrogen and Helium: As an additional historical example of the big bang theory's pliability, consider hydrogen and helium and notice how parameters have been adjusted historically to keep the theory matching the latest data. Physics Essays published the William Mitchell article, Big Bang Theory Under Fire (Vol. 10, No. 2, June 1997, pp. 370–379), on the allegedly confirmed prediction of the percentages of the initial abundances of these lightest elements that would have been created by the big bang:
The study of historical data shows that over the years predictions of the ratio of helium to hydrogen in a BB universe have been repeatedly adjusted to agree with the latest available estimates of that ratio as observed in the real universe. The estimated ratio is dependent on a ratio of baryons to photons (the baryon number) that has also been arbitrarily adjusted to agree with the currently established helium to hydrogen ratio. These appear to have not been predictions, but merely adjustments of theory (‘retrodictions’) to accommodate current data.
Helium Problem: Many of the papers in this RSR report on Big Bang Predictions were published in just the last few years. Let's get a few more historical examples though of how the process has worked, for the pattern continues to this day. Dennis Sciama in Modern Cosmology, published back in 1971 by Cambridge University Press, described the Big Bang's "Helium Problem". For helium:
...had a minimum abundance of about one helium atom to every eleven hydrogen atoms. Since, as we shall see, this is a very high helium abundance to have been produced by stars in the Galaxy, it is tempting to suggest that the minimum ratio of 1/11 represents the relative helium abundance when the Galaxy was formed, and that localised increases in the observed ratio have to do with the local production of helium after the Galaxy was formed. Unfortunately for this simple picture, from 1966 onwards several observers have reported the existence of stars in which helium is underabundant, in some cases by as much as a factor of a hundred, as compared with the 'minimum' ration of 1/11. (Sciama, p. 151)
* Problems with Abundances of the Next Two Light Elements: Regarding beryllium and boron, after those first 20 minutes of alleged BBN, then allegedly about 150 million years pass until the first stars begin to form. In the cores of the so-called Population III first generation of stars by way of stellar nucleosynthesis the other elements of the universe allegedly began to form, including beryllium and boron.
Beryllium Problem: Twenty years later, reports were still coming in of abundances far out of the predicted ranges. The Astrophysical Journal, in 1991, published a paper titled, First detection of beryllium in a very metal poor star - A test of the standard big bang model, which stated:
The star HD 140283, which has [Fe/H]=-2.6, has a beryllium abundance of log (9Be/H) - -12.8 +/- 0.3, a factor of ~~ 1000 greater than the primordial value predicted in the standard model of light element nucleosynthesis. (p. 17)
Translating that into English, Ron Cowen, in Science News' Starlight Casts Doubt on Big Bang Details, reported that:
Examining the faint light from an elderly Milky Way star, astronomers have detected a far greater abundance [by three orders of magnitude] of beryllium atoms than the standard Big Bang model predicts. (p. 151)
Boron Problem: Five years later another Science News report illustrated the way that the big bang's chemical evolution story is not so much predictive as it is malleable and adjusts to the current data (as Walter ReMine said of neo-Darwinism, "Evolutionary theory adapts to data like fog adapts to landscape"). This excerpt, from 1996, is again from Cowen, but the square brackets provide our RSR observations. For decades, big bang theory offered:
"...no explanation for two light-weight elements—beryllium and boron—and the bulk of the lithium. “...it hasn’t been entirely clear where they came from,” notes Douglas K. Duncan, an astronomer at the University of Chicago and the Adler Planetarium & Astronomy Museum in Chicago... [Regardless though, cosmologists told a creation story for Be, B, and Li. However,] “what I was taught in graduate school..." can’t generate the three elements in the abundances observed today... [So as different quantities of these elements are observed, we'll just have to continue to change the theory.] Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope have only made matters worse. ...astronomers have for the first time measured the abundance of boron in eight stars [which allegedly] date from the formation of the Milky Way, some 10 billion years ago, and provide a record of boron abundance from that long-ago era. To the surprise of many astronomers, the Hubble studies show that the abundance of boron way back when wasn’t much lower than it is in the interstellar medium today. That finding is at odds with the notion that boron arose from the collision of high-speed protons with heavier elements. Ten billion years ago, “there wasn’t very much carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen in the galaxy, so there weren’t very many targets for the cosmic-ray protons to hit,” notes Duncan. ...but the new model accounts more fully for the elemental abundances... (Science News, Cowen).
Yes, of course it does.
* Failed Big Bang Prediction of Monopoles: Magnetic monopoles are hypothetical particles that would have only a "north" but not a "south" pole. With knowledge of the above colossal predictive failures of the big bang and especially its inflationary theory, the following Wikipedia quote on monopoles approaches the event horizon... of humor:
Cosmological models of the events following the big bang make predictions about what the horizon volume was, which lead to predictions about present-day monopole density. Early models predicted an enormous density of monopoles, in clear contradiction to the experimental evidence. This was called the "monopole problem". Its widely accepted resolution was not a change in the particle-physics prediction of monopoles, but rather in the cosmological models used to infer their present-day density. Specifically, more recent theories of cosmic inflation drastically reduce the predicted number of magnetic monopoles, to a density small enough to make it unsurprising that humans have never seen one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_monopole#cite_note-36This resolution of the "monopole problem" was regarded as a success of cosmic inflation theory. (last accessed Oct. 8, 2014)
Of course there is an intense atheistic and specifically anti-Christian bias generally on Wikipedia and an extreme gullibility regarding alleged evidence for the materialist origins claims of evolution and the big bang. The introduction to WP's Physical cosmology article states regarding the "standard model of cosmology" that "This model requires the universe to contain large amounts of dark matter and dark energy whose nature is currently not well understood, but the model gives detailed predictions which are in excellent agreement with many diverse observations." Objecting to this, Bob Enyart edited the article's "Talk page" to ask:
Should this phrase be removed: "which are in excellent agreement with many diverse observations." First, it lacks attribution. Secondly, because dark matter and dark entities are hypothetical entities introduced specifically to explain such observations, of course they will agree with those observations. Thus, just as WP is designed to prevent circularity in its own editing (i.e., WP articles may not reference each other for attribution), so too, if there is any circularity here, it will undermine the value of this article. Bob Enyart, Denver KGOV radio host
* Failed Big Bang Lithium-6 Prediction Off a Thousand-Fold: Physics Worlds reports on a 2014 paper in Physics Letters Review that, "Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN) theory... fails miserably when it comes to the two stable lithium isotopes: lithium-6 and lithium-7." This long-feared conclusion, based on the laws of physics, is now also experimentally confirmed using an underground accelerator. To quote ICR's Brian Thomas, "Unfortunately for Big Bang theorists, their experiment succeeded... if lithium actually formed by some primordial [BB] nucleosynthesis, it should indeed have formed in the predicted ratio." So how far off is the big bang theory's prediction from actual, empirical observation? Physics World editor, Hamish Johnston answers:
The BBN model predicts that lithium-6 should account for about two out of every 100,000 lithium nuclei in "metal-poor" stars, which are believed to be among the first stars to have formed and so should reflect the composition of the early universe. However, observations... suggest that the abundance of lithium-6 is more than a thousand times greater in such stars, accounting for about 5% of all the lithium present.
This isotope ratio lithium problem adds yet another piece of evidence against the big bang and also, for the umpteenth time, falsifies Lawrence Krauss' claim to RSR that, "all evidence overwhelmingly supports the big bang", which is disproved, at least regarding lithium-7 as per the 2013 paper, Standard Big-Bang Nucleosynthesis After Planck, and by the admission of Physics World editor, Hamish Johnston that, "the amount of lithium-6 observed in today's universe is so different from the amount that theory predicts..."
* The Traditional Cosmological Lithium Problem: The lithium isotope ratio problem described just above is in addition to the traditional cosmological "lithium problem" which has been updated in a 2014 paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The traditional cosmological lithium problem is that, regardless of isotopes, the amount of observed lithium where theory attributes it to the big bang itself is inconsistent with big bang nucelosynthesis (BBN). Earlier, a secondary assumption was that the inconsistency was possibly a "local problem", perhaps only manifesting itself in our own or similar galaxies. So the authors asked:
...is the Li problem a local problem, limited to our Galaxy, or is it independent of the environment? The analysis of the RGB stars in M54 confirms the findings in ? Centauri (Monaco et al. 2010), considered as the remnant of an accreted dwarf galaxy: the Li problem seems to be an universal problem, regardless of the parent galaxy.
Thus Mucciarelli, et al., conclude:
Our result shows that this discrepancy is a universal problem concerning both the Milky Way and extra-galactic systems. Either modifications of BBN calculations, or a combination of atomic diffusion plus a suitably tuned additional mixing during the main sequence, need to be invoked to solve the discrepancy. MNRAS, 2014
* The Transparency Problem: Surprised astronomers are seeing objects that are apparently far more distant than any that they expected to be able to see. Scientists using NASA's FERMI telescope have recently exacerbated the "transparency problem" because, comparing observation to big bang predictions, there is a tremendous amount of missing "infrared light between galaxies", apparently, billions of years worth. According to New Scientist, this "may call into question our understanding of how galaxies are born", which of course was rather questionable already.
As noted above, this transparency problem may exacerbate the problem of where to hide all the additional regular matter allegedly created in the big bang, the equivalent of "twice the amount of material we can see in stars and hot gas. Where are those particles?" Yes. Where?* Shock and Awe: The above list contains just a few of all the failed predictions of big bang theory. Our popular List of Evidence Against the Big Bang documents the big bang's falsified predictions regarding:
- where mature galaxies could not exist
- nine billion years worth of missing metals in a trillion stars
- that distant galaxies must have less surface brightness
- spiral galaxies missing millions of years of collisions
- arms of spiral galaxies rotating far more rapidly than expected
- distant galaxy clusters existing where they should not
- superclusters of galaxies existing where they should not
- missing Population III stars,
- and dozens more.
Then, more broadly speaking, 10,000 discoveries have falsified evolutionist predictions. Yet with the relentless barrage of evolutionists quoted as ”shocked" by wildly unexpected discoveries that contradict their most fundamental suppositions, evolutionists, like Lawrence Krauss, typically pretend that no such pattern of falsified predictions exists. As with the discovery of hot Jupiters and the sequencing of the chimp's Y chromosome, a thousand times over, naturalistic scientists are baffled by what they find, which repeating pattern, of discovery and shock, discovery and shock, discovery and shock, is actually an ongoing experiment of prediction and falsification, of their claim of naturalistic origins. An open-minded evolutionist should be willing to re-evaluate his materialistic assumptions. "Rejection of a Creator is not a conclusion from science, but a bias forced onto science," said Bob Enyart.
* Hundreds of Scientists Reject Claims of Confirmed Big Bang Predictions: Hundreds of scientists, including many at world-class institutions, have publicly signed the Cosmology Statement as published in New Scientist to show the growing dissent in scientific circles regarding the increasingly awkward and superficially propped-up theory of the big bang. For RSR's full list of the thousands of scientists who doubt the big bang, see rsr.org/scientists-doubting-darwin#and-the-big-bang. Specifically though, many of the signers of the Cosmology Statement work at leading institutions including the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics, Sheffield University, George Mason University, Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech, Cambridge University, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, Penn State, Cal State Fullerton, University of Virginia, European Southern Observatory, and scores of other prestigious institutions, and as recorded at CosmologyStatement.org they have stated:
...the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation. The successes claimed by the theory's supporters consist of its ability to retrospectively fit observations with a steadily increasing array of adjustable parameters, just as the old Earth-centered cosmology of Ptolemy needed layer upon layer of epicycles.
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