Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Errors in the Big Bang Never Happened (#255)

Starting point is 00:00:02 Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Open the podbay doors, please help. Welcome everybody, everybody out on the internet, wherever you may be listening to this, on YouTube, Twitter, elsewhere, or as a podcast, on The Into the Impossible Podcast Network. Welcome to you and to my friend, Professor Garant Lewis. And there's no one I'd rather get into this controversy with, as our guest might say, than you, Garant, who's a phenomenal thinker, a esteemed colleague and an eminent cosmologist. And I'm just delighted that you could join us to talk about these controversies. As you know, I talk quite frequently about the orthodox, but also some of the unorthodox things in cosmology.

Starting point is 00:01:01 So first, I want to ask you, what's life like on Friday, the second of support? September down under. Oh, it's pretty good. Spring is arriving. It's warming up. It's looking very nice outside. Fantastic. Yes, and one of the lottery numbers I should be playing on Friday.

Starting point is 00:01:17 Fortunately, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work that way, unfortunately. Well, it's a delight to have you here, and I thought we'd get right into it and talk about this, this so-called alleged crisis and panic that's taken over our field. field. I don't know if you are suffering from the panic all the way down under, but up here in the U.S., at least, it made quite a splash. I've been quoted in several different venues, and one of the reasons I enjoy speaking with you is I think that you're a sober voice of reason, who, like me, doesn't shy away from controversy and likes to use it as a teachable moment,

Starting point is 00:02:01 both for professionals, but also for the non-professionals, the lay audience that we serve by virtue of our outreach. And you've written so many wonderful books. And we had you on just this past season for your most recent book about where the universe come from. I've got that my bookshelf here. And previously, you wrote a book with Luke Barnes about the steps that one would need to take in order to overthrow the Big Bang.

Starting point is 00:02:28 And the title of that book was the cosmic. revolutionaries handbook. And I think that's a spectacular book for many reasons. The content is phenomenal, but also the kind of rubric that one must apply when assessing claims either in support of or in claimed refutation of an existing paradigm. So I want to ask you, I don't know if I asked you that one in the interview that you in Luke did. It's almost two years ago now. I can't believe it. But can you summarize why did you write that book, the Cosmic Revolutionaries Handbook? What was the purpose behind that book? Oh, well, Luke and I do an awful lot of outreach, and we also, you know, interact with people

Starting point is 00:03:08 through various media. And there's often somebody in the crowd who has a new idea about the universe. So they've heard about the Big Bang, and there's aspects of it that they don't like. And so they've got their new theory, their new idea, their new hypothesis. And we found ourselves repeating ourselves over and over again about. right that's a nice idea but what does it predict how does it deal with this issue and that issue and how is it better than the current big bang picture that we have and of course the people with their ideas they hadn't got past that

Starting point is 00:03:44 first thing of I've got my idea so we decided that we would get all this down and sort of lay out the plan of what it is you really need to do if you want to overturn cosmology so that it was essentially to have something to point to say, oh, this is what your idea should do, but also to get the process of science out there into the broader audience, because I think there's a lot of cosmology books on the market, but not a lot of them talk about the process by which that those cosmological ideas turn into our understanding of the universe around us. So we wanted to make it less of a, look, this is cosmology, and more of a, this is how you do cosmology kind of book.

Starting point is 00:04:26 Yes. And I think what's so spectacular. about that book as well as your other books, is that you're not dismissive. You know, some of our colleagues on Twitter have been less than kind to Mr. Lerner and accused the cosmological community of furthering this censorship and the suppression of heresy and ad hominem attacks. And some did call him names, and I've refused to do that. And we're not going to comment on his other projects, which involve the question. for fusion, et cetera, except to say when necessary what the relevance or irrelevance is of the

Starting point is 00:05:05 cosmological model that he's proffering towards the establishment of cheap, clean energy on earth, which is, of course, a noble goal. But I think the conflation of ideas bears some scrutiny, although it won't be the dominant portion of our conversation. And we might take questions online, even if I assume Eric will be watching, if not listening, he sent me an email asking me to take a look at his most recent video, which claims to refute some of the claims that I made, that Dr. Becky made, Dr. Becky Smithhurst, Anton Petrov made, Ethan Siegel made. And so I've compiled a list of those individuals and their criticism of Mr. Lerner and his Big Bang never happened hypothesis. And you and I put together a few slides to guide the discussion. And I'll post those

Starting point is 00:05:55 slides if you're listening on audio podcast forms. You'll miss out on that, but I'll put a link to download in the show notes for this episode. And I'll also do that in the video text description. For those of you not subscribed yet, please do subscribe to the channel, Dr. Brian Keating. And so some of the, so let me queue up the video. Let me see if I can. get that. Hopefully people can see this. I will add us as inserts only to not go completely crazy, but I will remove the inserts, fear not folks out there. So hopefully folks can see this online. Let us look, yes, I can see this online so other folks can see it too. Okay, so two of us have been talking about this for some time and offline, at least the, the, the

Starting point is 00:06:50 controversy and why it's useful to claim, to push back on claims with respect and, you know, with absence of ad hominem attacks, I have to say, I don't appreciate when debates are held like this. Now, I'm not engaging Mr. Lerner in a debate. I didn't invite him on this channel. He didn't invite me on his channel. But I think it's more important to respond via this calm, collected format where he replied via a PowerPoint presentation. So let's respond to it in that format. So that being said, let us take a look at some of the classical motivations for the Big Bang. And this is just taken from Ethan Siegel's post entitled, Has JWST Disproven the Big Bang?

Starting point is 00:07:42 And really, this is just shown. We'll come back to Dr. Siegel's objections to Mr. Lerner's, at the end when you and I also present some of our constraints and criticism of the plasma cosmology or of the non-expanding universe that he is offering. We won't, we'll start off by talking about support for the Big Bang, the evidence for the Big Bang. Then we'll move into the JWST findings. And then we'll even touch upon some of Mr. Learner's criticisms about the other so-called pillars of the Big Bang. I've made some videos recently about that as well. And we will, of course, take on the claims made that definitively the Big

Starting point is 00:08:24 Bang can be ruled out the classical constraints and observations such as the Tolman test. So I'll leave this slide up for a few more seconds, but basically there's abundant evidence for decades that the Big Bang model meets. And I think it's wise to quote from Jim Peoples, eminent Nobel laureate and all-around wonderful individual, who also had, a huge role in the establishment of the Big Bang and the measurement and the measurement and interpretation of the CMB radiation as well. And that was really no secret. And he's saying that in empirical cosmology, which is what we're trying to do here, there should be a goal not to explain every single observation, but instead to explain the most number of things with the fewest number of input assumptions. Recognizing, and this is a paper that he wrote, recently put out called anomalies in cosmology. So to Mr. Lerner's claim that no one's taking this seriously or taking any criticism of the Big Bang, or my favorite is when people accuse me of making my money from the Big Bang, you know, I don't know about you, Garen,

Starting point is 00:09:31 but how much money do we make from Big Bang, Big Big Big Big Bang? Very little. It's not like big oil. I wish. That would be great. In fact, Mr. Lerner has every right to raise money for his project, which is a fusion project, which he does in his video. So that's fine, but we don't get paid. There's no cabal or consortium as he seems to implot. So People's talks about by this, I mean, empirical evidence that seems likely to disagree with what is expected from the previously accepted theories and ideas. An anomaly might prove to be a better, to give us better appreciation of the predictions of the theory we already have. And then he goes into this 26-page long paper, which is phenomenal, and I recommend it to all my students, and to even lay people,

Starting point is 00:10:16 It's incredibly readable. I'll put a link to it in the show notes later on. And so he's asking, what is the value of criticism? So criticism is to be valued and appreciated. Truly being obstinate, ignoring evidence to the contrary, practicing confirmation bias, et cetera, is not a useful or expected process to get that quote unquote truth. And I always like to say, we know that things in science are, not possible to prove. We cannot prove things the way that we prove, you know, one plus one equals two. But we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt certain elements of the theory. And so this is just showing Luke. Unfortunately, he's got a play button over his face. This is from your

Starting point is 00:11:03 appearance, where you guys went into a construction of a checklist to get your Big Bang alternative. So I wonder if you can talk about what one does if one is trying to come up with a Big Bang alternative in your conception, what should somebody do? And maybe as a useful, less and teachable moment for people like Mr. Lerner, here are some things that should be abided by before you claim that everyone who came before you is wrong and you are solely correct in possession of the truth. Garen, do you want to say anything about this kind of Big Bang Alternative Checklist? Yeah, yeah. So there's a whole bunch of points there. I think the phrase that Luke and I use when we talk

Starting point is 00:11:46 this is that you've got to know your enemy in the sense that you've got to have a proper picture of what the landscape looks like. So you can't really attack a theory with a very pinpointed sort of, oh, there's one little piece here that I find that I can fight against. The Big Bang picture is a set of observations that cover an awful lot of observations from the last, you know, more than 100 years. and your idea has to have a comment on all of them. And it has to at least match what the Big Bang has said with regards to these points, or, and do better if it wants to supersede the Big Bang theory as the leading description for how we understand the universe.

Starting point is 00:12:33 And this is, we go from something very simple, right, from the Obler's paradox, why is the night sky dark? I mean, it's a very, deep philosophical kind of thing to think about the night sky but if your theory that you've worked on over there suddenly says that the night sky should be you know bright and at a temperature of several thousand degrees you know that you've already lost but you've got so you've got to take your theory and you have to be prepared for your theory to confront all observations not just the

Starting point is 00:13:06 ones that you like so yeah that checklist is you've got to work your way through to at least get on par with the big back and then go beyond if you want to supersede it. Yes, and I think that's a phenomenal entree until the next point. And I should say that people have accused Mr. Lerner of so-called cherry-picking, where you take a flaw, a foible, if you will, in previously accepted theory or thought. Then you assail that as being completely dispositive towards the conjecture in which everything else is built upon. And so with the advent of new data, I'm showing here from NASA, ESA, etc.

Starting point is 00:13:49 This is JWST on the right data, same field as Smacks field, and then HST data on the left. And I should point out that I think Smacks is a small portion of the Hubble Deep field. The Hubble Deep field was established in a way to get to basically stare at nothing. It wasn't thought that we'd find evolution of galaxy formation and structure and therefore invalidate the Big Bank, is JWST. I mean, if you look at JWST's science rationale, it wasn't to disprove or to prove the Big Bang, thanks to Big Bang Incorporated. It was to study the properties in evolution of structures, including exoplanets and including planets in our solar system. So we have to look at when there's aspersions being cast at a community, such as a professional community of astronomers, cosmologists,

Starting point is 00:14:36 astrophysicists, planet hunters, exobiologists, that it is scientifically, distasteful to accuse them of having been guided by themselves of the very flaw that you may be guilty of, which is cherry picking, confirmation bias, et cetera. So I'm showing data here. Now, I like to make an analogy, and maybe, you know, you can correct me if I'm wrong or if you don't agree with it. But if we think back to the theory of the origin of the moon prior to the Apollo moon landings in 1960s, this was hotly contested. In fact, it's still not established to the level of, say, the Pythagorean theorem or, you know, Fermat's last theorem. We can't prove things in the context of a of a mathematical, sufficiently adequate format to constitute mathematical proof. We can establish evidence. You know, for example, yeah, as Isaac Asmuff said, if you believe the earth is flat, you're wrong. If you believe the earth is spherical, you're wrong. If you say that the Earth has a quadrupole distortion, you're wrong. In other words, we make more and more distinctions, but you're less wrong if you say the Earth is a sphere than if

Starting point is 00:15:51 you say it's flat, and you're even less wrong if you say it has a value of a quadrupole or distortion, then you are if you say it's spherical. But no one would throw out the origin of planetary solar system dynamics based on the failure of a theory to match the platonic ideal of perfection that people like Mr. Lerner and others seem to require of other people's scientific theories while completely ignoring the lacunae in their own theory. So this is one example. The origin of the moon hotly contested, still not 100% ratified. But until the 1960s, when we got physical evidence, brought back hundreds of kilograms from the moon landing astronauts, we, and we're going back hopefully very soon to the moon and get even more information and

Starting point is 00:16:38 perhaps more that was not really understood. Maybe the moon was captured. Maybe it was formed at the same time. Maybe it was an asteroid, et cetera, et cetera. And now we think it's from a giant impact, this thing called Thea, et cetera, et cetera. Now, it may be that there's some elements of these other models that are still correct. But we are converging upon a model. And to say that once we went to the moon, that overthrew our knowledge analogously to what he's saying, about the JDDST data being of higher quality, higher caliber, more refined, and more precise. It in no way disparages the Big Bang model, even though it wasn't designed to measure the Big Bang. So I don't know if you have any other analogies, Garant, that you'd like to drop on people

Starting point is 00:17:20 for how you refine a model and a departure from its platonic ideal of perfection is in no way a condemnation of the underlying model itself. I don't know, Gareth, do you have any? Oh, yeah, sorry, we have a little small glitch set. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think this is something that people outside of science don't realize that it's always building on what came before and making more accurate and accurate predictions about the universe

Starting point is 00:17:54 by modifying your theories. And it's always at every stage you hold up your evidence at that time to nature and say, you know, are we getting interested? better, is our model description getting better? And so, you know, just because we now have Einstein's general... You say this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it

Starting point is 00:18:41 matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. Okay, I lost your audio. Can you, do you hear me, Geron? Oh, yeah. I just lost the last five seconds. Okay. I was just saying that we, now that we have Einstein's general theory of relativity as a description of gravity, that doesn't mean that we've completely put Newton in the bin. We know the regime. which Newton works in and is accurate in, and we don't need to use relativity, but we also know the places where relativity starts to matter, and that's where we want the more accurate predictions. So it's always building and always gathering evidence, asking nature, how are we doing? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, now when we look at some of the evidence that's claimed from Mr.

Starting point is 00:19:31 learner's second video, which he made this week and kindly sent to me. This, you can send me messages, by the way, on my mailing list, Briankeating.com slash list. Please take advantage of that. And the video that he's showing here, let's see if this will get to play. I don't know if he'll be able to play it. So in this video, and I put a link to it on the show notes below, he's talking about the problems of tiny galaxy. and smooth discs. So that brings us to his main complaint and an argument against the Big Bang, which he published in the Institute for Art and Ideas News website,

Starting point is 00:20:17 and that's sort of a philosophy journal in the UK. They host a festival which Mr. Lerner will be appearing at called How the Light Gets in a couple of weeks. In the UK, I was invited to it. I cannot make it this time. I hope to be there later in 2023, hopefully. And I'm quoting from his paper. So he says, what do we find in this paper?

Starting point is 00:20:40 What do they really show? And he says, lots of surprises and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper, and by the way, that is, first of all, kind of betraying a lack of knowledge about what scientists are actually endeavoring to do. So to say something's not pleasant means that you had an expectation, you have confirmation, and some of your happiness is invested in the confirmation of your pet theory. So I think that that is, again, not a genuine critique of science. In fact, one could accuse Mr. Lerner of essentially arguing the same way,

Starting point is 00:21:16 because he has been making these exact same arguments, as I pointed out in my first video two weeks ago now, that since 1991, since his book by the same name, the Big Bang never happened. And that was thoroughly debunked, if you will, by Professor Ned Wright. It was a National Academy member, member of the Kobe team, leader of the Wise mission. This is eminent cosmologist at UCLA. Now, what he did in that paper was comment on some of the, not only the Tolman test,

Starting point is 00:21:46 which we'll hopefully get to in a minute, but also on the structure formation. And what was happening at that time, Garant, as you know, in the 1990s, was the Hubble Deep Field was coming out. and this was supposedly time for panic because it showed the galaxies could form, say, 500 million years after the Big Bang, which, according to Mr. Lerner, of course, didn't happen. So it presented a great crisis for Big Bang adherence, but not for him, who believes in infinitely old, not expanding static universe. And so in this thing, he's retrying astronomers as deeply investing their happiness in the confirmation of the Big Bang. So, and then, of course, he famously said that the paper title begins with the candid exclamation panic. Now, of course, I already debunk that. That was in the previous video.

Starting point is 00:22:35 Dr. Becky debunked that. That's a playful pun, which that paper that he's referring to, which is called panic at the disks, which is about the preponderance of disks relative to expectations before JWST. Now, that was also, not coincidentally, also some of these phenomena were evident in the Hubble. data, which provides a source of great comfort to those that are wanting to believe in the accuracy of the web data. In other words, if you saw something radically different, in other words, you saw there was a disk in Hubble that JWST also saw, but it didn't see it as a disk, then you'd start to truly have some grave concerns, I believe. In this case, we see similar structures,

Starting point is 00:23:16 as I showed in this slide here, these images, wherever Hubble could see and resolve a disk, as these authors went through in this paper, like this disc right here, we see it in this image by Web as well, except we see it with much higher resolution. And in fact, that should be a good thing because it would allow you to trace the rotation curve properties of the disk, et cetera, et cetera. The authors of the panic, so-called panic paper are really looking at the morphology. How many of these disks are here? Now, if you saw this was a disc with Webb, but it wasn't a disk in Hubble, then you would perhaps start to question. The fact that you see where Hubble had the sensitivity, resolution, and wavelength coverage, you see the exact same structure, and it was adequate to detect a disk at a given redshift. You see the exact same structure in Web. There's absolutely no tension between them. And I think that's, again, portraying a rather large misunderstanding of what the Hubble data show versus the web data. So now I'm showing the slide that you made up. The cows are small, but the ones out there are far away.

Starting point is 00:24:22 He makes a huge deal, Garen, about the presence of so-called small galaxies. I wonder if you could talk about that. I have some slides that discuss this as well. I wonder if you could explain the Tolman test, which before you do, I cannot resist chiding Mr. Lerner for demonstrating perhaps an intentional a lack of knowledge of what redshift actually is. And I'll call that up while you're, while you explain this issue of the so-called small galaxies.

Starting point is 00:25:00 Garen, can you explain what this means, the spirals being far away? Yeah, so there's a couple of issues here. So first thing you have to remember, at the moment from these images, all we have are images of these particular galaxies, and we are inferring their distances. So we know from their apparent colours that we see,

Starting point is 00:25:26 we can sort of work out where they are in particular redshift range, but we do not know specifically where everything is. And to essentially nail down the distances, we've got to go and get spectra, right? We've got to get the spectra of these galaxies so we can measure the red shifts. And that will tell us more precisely where these objects are. So at the moment we see in these particular disks,

Starting point is 00:25:46 and we're trying to work out where they are because you need that to infer what their actual sizes are. And we don't really know. There's a significant uncertainty in there. And if I could imagine that in the future when we get BWACRA data, there will be, you know, it will be that some of them are a little bit closer, some are a bit further away. But it won't be until that point that we will really know the distribution of where these discs are. Because all we have is what this picture on the sky. And we need more information to do those kinds of measurements. Now, yeah, now one of the key things that, I mean, I think a lot of the argument that's been presented here is over the angular size of objects on the sky, right?

Starting point is 00:26:31 So this is one of the key cornerstones of the arguments in Eric paper, etc. is that in his static universe, then you have this obvious thing that happens as you take objects further away, they will look smaller and smaller, whereas in an expanding universe, the relationship between the redshift, which we infer as a distance, and the angular size of an object becomes much more complicated, because the universe has expanded in the time that the light has left from the object to here. So we just have to be very careful with just the raw images that we have about working out exactly what the size of these objects are. But we do know that for a lot of the objects we see, if the expanding model is right, and these objects are in the redshift range that we're inferring,

Starting point is 00:27:24 they were relatively small and relatively bright, which is what we expect over, in a very hand-wavey kind of way, in our pictures of our... galaxies form and evolve right we we spoke about this when I was in graduate school back in the 1990s that you know galaxies form hierarchically they start off small and they get bigger and bigger and bigger and we also know that's the rate of star formation has not been the same over the 14 billion years and the universe was much more vigorous when it was younger driven by the mergers a lot a lot of it driven by the mergers that again that um that um Eric was sort of against, as galaxies have built up over time. And we've got these beautiful charts of the history of star formation.

Starting point is 00:28:15 We know that the vast majority of stars have already been made and all this kind of stuff. So we know that the past was a different country, right? Things were done differently there because the universe was evolving in a different way. So the fact that there was small galaxies seen in JWT is not not, not, not, What am I trying to say? It doesn't conflict with the overall picture that we have that galaxy start up small and grow larger. Right. Right.

Starting point is 00:28:43 In fact, you know, if you would, one would have to ask questions about the evolution in a static universe at all. And the age of a static universe, or purported age of a wiser, any evolution, not to mention the absence of creation of matter that's required to counteract the collapse of a, of a pureline. matter-filled universe as purported in Mr. Learner's work, which brings me to another effect, and I have to point out, as I said, he's talking about this here. This is what he claims in his most recent video is the definition of redshift. Now, I don't know about you, Karen, or what you teach your students. I don't start by teaching the Tollman test as the definition from which you can extract the red shift, what we call the red shift, as the ratio as defined in his equation here. So I think for a layperson, someone who's not an expert, this might be very convincing.

Starting point is 00:29:39 But to an astronomer, this just looks very unprofessional, Eric. And I would say that this is intentional cherry picking of, you know, if you imagine like, what does it mean to say the size of a galaxy? These things are not like standard rulers that exist. And even if they do, to the extent that they have some large number, he makes this big deal of these things that he calls Mighty Mouse galaxies, et cetera, again, a terminology that's not professionally used or accepted, this as somehow dispositive, that the Big Bang is wrong. Again, if you look back on this image, I'll even take it from his own article. There we go.

Starting point is 00:30:16 So there are many different types and sizes of galaxies. By the way, some of the gravitational lensing that's exhibited here is a direct consequence of Einstein's theory of general relativity, which presupposes the expansion of the universe is driven by a universe with composition according to ordinary matter alone or radiation alone would be sufficient to cause it to either expand or contract, but not stay static. And of course, that was the reason Einstein came up with this famous fudge factor, apocryfully called his biggest blunder. Mr. Lerner dismisses that, apparently, entirely. Although I don't know how in his plasma cosmology can explain gravitational lensing, which is concomitant with, and maybe even a lesser of lesser relevance for his arguments, than the actual expansion itself. And he, as I'll show later, he has no explanation for the expansion, which he admits. He admits he has no explanation for the redshift. And what he's doing is using these measurements supposedly to prove that the universe is not indeed expanding. Another kind of... I just... Yeah, could I just add a little point. So I think I mentioned this a little bit later

Starting point is 00:31:21 on my side. So gravitational lens in, which is an area I've worked in a lot, I mean, that brings together so many aspects of Einstein's general relativity, right? The deflection of light and the cosmological expansion. So you need to use angular diameter distances to work out lens in. And they all come together, right? So if you start to say, oh, I don't trust the angular diameter distances, but I'll keep the gravitational

Starting point is 00:31:50 lensing part, it doesn't work anymore. The relationship between red shifts and sizes doesn't work. So it fits together very, very neatly. And so if you want to say that lens in, I want to play around and do something else. What you're doing is you're multiplying up those extra bits and pieces that you're adding to your theory to get things to work. And that is a path that is very bad for theories. Can I just do a little historical aside here?

Starting point is 00:32:17 Yeah, of course. So what this reminds me of is Fred Hoyle and Sedy State. And Fred Hoyle is a hero of mine. I read lots of his work. I like his stuff. but of course he got into his particular rut on his steady state universe. And what was happening as the steady state was proposed in the 40s, and as more and more evidence came in,

Starting point is 00:32:43 from the existence of the CMB, the evolution of galaxies, etc., he had to jerry-rig new little pieces everywhere to try and stay on par with the Big Bang Theory. And so his CMB was created by iron whiskers, aligned by magnetic fields, etc. And the entire complexity of his cosmological model just exploded, just exploded, whereas the standard Big Bang basically is the same equations written down in the 1920s that we use today. So this multiplication of, I will just insert another thing here to describe this thing is not the way that a good theory develops. Yeah. And when you look at, so no, so George Grubbs is saying, let's stick to the objective. Sure, here, I'll put George up. Let's stick to objective analysis. So one of my listeners, by the way, you can listen and you can send me feedback on my channel, Dr. Brian Keating on YouTube. I take comments and questions on Twitter as well.

Starting point is 00:33:46 No, George, we can't stick to the analysis of the data. It's not casting aspersions to use his own flaws in his reasoning logic. the accusations that he's making, again, the truth that these papers don't report, this is what he's saying, that we are not reporting the truth. Science is censoring him. He is casting aspersions himself. So unless you want to be totally hypocritical, George, you open yourself up when you ascribe motivations to a class of professionals, not individuals saying, you know, I'm not saying Eric's a bad person, he's evil, he's not, I'm saying, here are the flaws in his analysis. Here's another one. He purports to be this, an expert, maybe self-trained. maybe not. And that's fine. You can be self-trained. But when I talk about the critics of the

Starting point is 00:34:32 disagreements with the status quo, I just reported from a Nobel Prize winner, Jim Peoples. It was a paper about anomalies in the Big Bank. You can't get more conventional than someone who's won the Nobel Prize than that. So I think you're missing the point. But thanks for your comment here. So anything that he puts in his written work or his published work or his YouTube is fair game. Here's another example. He defines here a parsec as being three light years. Now, if I wanted to be cherry-picking, I'd say he doesn't understand the very definition of the first rung in the distance ladder, effectively the first run of cosmological distance ladder, which would be used to establish a plot of redshift versus distance. And so he sets up a straw man, which is very convincing to those of you who are lay people. He gets the math wrong. Here he doesn't understand the definition of a parsec. And it's incomplete. He mischaracterized the, definition of redshift to suit a purpose to claim that there's disagreement and invalidity of the Big Bang model, which is not the common definition of redshift, which is stretch and wavelength due to the Doppler shift, which we'd known about for 300 years. It happens for light,

Starting point is 00:35:38 as well as it happens for sound. And this has been known, as I said, for hundreds of years. So for him to say that that's the definition astronomers use, again, go back to this image of Mr. Lerner is quoting, you know, from NASA. What's the size of these galaxies? assume the ones that are the same color are roughly at the same distance. There's huge variation in their sizes. So not accounting for any form of evolution, and just saying they're all standard of rulers effectively, and then saying that's the Tollman test,

Starting point is 00:36:07 and that's a definition of redshift. Astronomers don't know what they're doing, I think, is not a professionally acceptable way to treat these data. Then he's got this paper from 2018. He claims that he's been censored. People are hiding the truth. Here's the actual definition. provide it below. Angular size relation. I'm covering it up. Here, I'll uncover it. There it is.

Starting point is 00:36:27 So there's the actual angular size, redshift distance relationship. In a non-expanding universe, you would expect to see as the diagonal lines in the upper right plot show, in a non-expanding universe, you would expect to see your steady-state universe, this slowly monotonically decreasing size of galaxies as you move farther and farther away, if indeed they had some uniform distance. But notice the plot. This is a professional plot. This is from a textbook on the bottom, similar data. They don't agree, first of all, with the static, steady state universe. Second of all, they have error bars. And what troubles me about when Mr. Lerner seems to do there's never any error bars associated. He's got this miraculous fit to a straight line, a constant angular, amine radius of galaxies. No error bars described to it. Now, how this got published in monthly notices is sort of a question. I wasn't the referee of it. But it shows two things. It shows that he's not following professional standards. There's nothing about being a critic of the Big Bang that precludes you from using error bars, right, Gert? I mean, anybody can use it, and there are error bars in it, and the sign of a good scientist, I tell my students,

Starting point is 00:37:34 is not what you know that you know. It's how you accurately characterize what you know you don't know. And here on the right are professional astronomers showing that there is a minimum galaxy size, which you do not expect in a steady state static model like Mr. Learners. And he's just going on saying no this isn't true and ignoring the data i don't know do you have a comment on on this garret well um yeah yeah i sort of agree i i did read the paper from uh 20 2018 okay yeah so this this entire question of the size of galaxies and doing this particular test we we know if if the universe was just filled with one meter rulers scattered throughout then cosmology would be easy, right? If we did have a real standard ruler, but the big problem is that galaxies are like

Starting point is 00:38:24 people, right? And they're more diverse than people because they come from being really tiny to really, really big. And when you construct a sample of galaxies and say, what is the size of these galaxies? There are biases in, you know, what can you telescope observe? What sample of galaxies do you have in there? Are they clustered together? Or are these galaxies? is out on their own because their sizes are different again. So it's actually a very complicated experiment to do because you've got to work out, right? Am I really dealing with the same objects if I'm going to declare that these things have the same size? That's right.

Starting point is 00:39:06 And it's it's, it's, well, I haven't followed the growth of the cosmological distance ladder and cosmological tests. These are all difficult tests because the universe has changed over time. The universe a billion years ago, five billion years ago, is not the same as the universe today. And so we cannot compare apples here to oranges there very easily. Right. And you say accurately and properly that the Big Bang theory was never created, nor was it intended, nor does it really include the growth or structure formation of galaxies in individual properties of individual galaxies, whether they're disc or irregular or roidal.

Starting point is 00:39:52 And part of the reason that JWST is, A, motivated for its technological and scientific capabilities, but B, was not designed to do cosmology. That's my realm. And actually, Mr. Lerner undoes some of his credibility in a different fashion by saying that if the Big Bang were true, we'd expect to find an epoch at which there were no galaxies. And in fact, we do. And it's called the epoch of recombination and the formation of the cosmic microwave background. So how does he deal with that? He's not unintelligent. He has another theory for the evolution and for the appearance of the cosmic microwave background. It's so-called

Starting point is 00:40:33 monopole. He has zero things to say about its antisotropy, its polarization, or its other properties, which have been studied to many, many decimal places in just the last 20 years. Again, this is all sort of not, was not maybe as precisely understood when he wrote his book in 1991. But since then, there's been tremendous growth of our knowledge and improvement in technology, and he still has not updated his original hypotheses, explanation for the CMB, et cetera, et cetera. Next, you talk about galaxy evolution and what the general properties of galaxies should be. Can you say something briefly about this? What would we expect?

Starting point is 00:41:16 Well, so I mean, I think we have this overall expectation that galaxy, the universe started of relatively smooth, and galaxies grew, so they were smaller and they're getting larger. So we have that overall picture. But what is really needed is the detail. This is part of why HST is looking at these most distant galaxies is because that initial stage of galaxy formation, it's complicated. And it's complicated because there's an interplay between the dark matter. which is providing the gravitational sort of framework for the universe,

Starting point is 00:41:50 and the barons, the gas, the atoms. And that gas physics, or gas for physics, as I've written there, that is very complicated. Even understanding it in our own Milky Way, right? Because what we've got is a galaxy, which is 100,000 light years from side to side, and we have gas doing stuff on the scale of individual stars. And we're trying to encompass all of that.

Starting point is 00:42:15 And imagine that in a universe, where there's an awful lot going on. So part of the reason that we've got these JWST images is so we can work out what is going on in the early universe to tie it to the evolution of galaxies over all of cosmic time. And so there's a big uncertainty there, and I'm not surprised that our models of the initial stages of galaxy evolution don't really match what we see in the telescopes.

Starting point is 00:42:41 They're not radically wrong, right? But there are definitely a few issues that we will need to sort out. And you probably, you know this, Brian, that give the guys with supercomputers a little bit of time, and everything will be perfectly explained anyway, because they will just say, oh, what we needed to do was this efficiency of star formation there, and giant stars do this, and voila, we get the universe as seen by JWST. Right. And quoting more from this so-called panic paper and so forth.

Starting point is 00:43:10 I think this is instructional to show. Let me swap us back. Oh, sorry. Let me go back to our shot together. So this is from the panic, so called Panic Paper, where Mr. Lerner claims, Galaxy structure and morphology are key aspects for understanding galaxy evolution and will be a key measurement that Jadiris T.WMet will make throughout its lifetime. Following the first service mission to Hubble, galaxies started to have their structure revealed in the mid-90s.

Starting point is 00:43:36 And galaxy distances became more peculiar and irregular than local. Peculiar doesn't mean it doesn't fit in. It's just an astronomer name for a certain approach. appearances of different galaxies. Then they had this Hubble sequence, so-called Hubble sequence. When Redshift became available, first with the Hubble Deep Field, it was clear, so this is when the Hubble Deep Field, this is 30 years ago, that galaxy structures evolved strongly and systematically with Redshift, such that peculiar galaxies dominate the population Z greater than two and a half. So he's talking about there being this panic because we didn't expect this with JWST has revealed

Starting point is 00:44:08 this shocking new information. Their paper, which he didn't apparently read thoroughly, shows that JWST not only confirms some of the observations, as I showed you visually, but it also agrees and confirms the appearance of phenomena that Hubble saw, and there is regions of overlap where they agree here in spheroidels. There's some versus Redshift. We look at error bars, including error bars. There is agreement. This is Hubble versus HST. This is exactly what the panic, the paper by Ferraria et al, are talking about. So they're saying that, there is some more evolution. There is nothing in these data that cause, have anything to say about the origin of the formation of the light elements, which is what we astronomers and cosmologists are

Starting point is 00:44:55 referring to when we talk about the quantitative aspects of the Big Bang. There's nothing quantitative relative to the Big Bang. There's something quantitative to the measurement, the data of galaxies, but not about the underlying theory in the background expansion of space time, which we call the Big Bang. So they go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. I think I noted on the previous slide, I mean, if the Big Bang was in fear every time a galaxy galaxy evolution model doesn't work, he would be terrified all the time.

Starting point is 00:45:28 Because as I said, these things are complicated and more information comes in and you have to rework your models, etc. It's just part of how it goes. That's right. So, and that's a good thing. In fact, one of the things that he quoted and and got, you know, these people to call him names, which again, I'm not calling him any names, you know, to those like George that are particularly sensitive to any sort of criticism of the ideas.

Starting point is 00:45:54 We're not criticizing the human. We're criticizing these ideas. And we can also criticize the tactics and techniques that are used. If you have a viral post in which you accuse astronomers of acting intellectually dishonestly because they are being or contradicting the truth that these papers are. are willing to hide, as he says here. Another thing that he said is Allison Kirkpatrick, who is a phenomenally successful professor at Kansas University, University of Kansas rather.

Starting point is 00:46:25 He said in the second point, this is a quote from Allison, Professor Kirkpatrick. She says, right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning and wondering if everything I've done is wrong. And then this is a quote from Jack Ryan, I think, his article in C-NET. This cherry-pick quote isn't indirect reference

Starting point is 00:46:42 to the Big Bang Theory. Rather, Kirkpatrick is reckoning with the first data coming back in JWT about the early evolution of the universe in particular. It's the galaxies that she's talking about. It's true there are some puzzles for astronomers. So far, they aren't rewriting the beginning of the universe to do so. She has stated that her quotes are misused by Mr. Lerner and change her Twitter name to Allison. The Big Bang happened Kirkpatrick. So there's a picture of her Twitter profile.

Starting point is 00:47:08 So to my knowledge, he hasn't apologized for taking that out of context. Again, it's cherry-picked. Is it trying to get headlines? Is that unfair of him, you know, should he not be held to the same standard that others are asking him to be held into? I think it's only fair. So the last couple of quotes, I just want to show you, how far back does this go with Mr. Lerner? Well, it goes back pretty far. This is from 2003.

Starting point is 00:47:34 I talked about this in my first video. I'll have a link to it in the video description. This is from Professor Ned Wright, an eminent, incredibly. accomplished cosmologist, astrophysicist, professor at MIT and UCLA, talks about the errors. Going back with the formation evolution of structures, he's claiming that the absence of the need for dark matter is a flaw and that the CMB is too perfect to be a black body. All these have been completely superseded, completely shown demonstrably to be completely incorrect. There's 400 Sigma agreement that the CMB is a black body and that there are fluctuations in the background intensity,

Starting point is 00:48:16 so-called antisotropy, which is part of what I study, and polarization that are completely consistent with not only the Big Bang, but with the Cold Dark Matter paradigm. In fact, some of the strongest evidence we have for the Big Bang for Dark Matter comes from the existence of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, a subject that Mr. Lerner is completely mute upon. He doesn't have any explanation for why there's polarization in the CMB. And I guess that shouldn't be surprising. Again, he doesn't have an explanation for Redshift. He doesn't believe that Redshift takes place. So he has to resort to things like tired light interaction with matter particles, ordinary matter particles, he doesn't believe in that. So let's conclude in the last 10 minutes.

Starting point is 00:48:58 I took, you know, only one question. We both have to leave in 10 minutes. And I think we've done Yeoman's work if I don't tip my hat. us, Garant. Here's Ethan Segal's general kind of criticism of the model that Mr. Lerner has. So some of my audience will say things, oh, you shouldn't criticize him, just the Big Bang has all these flaws in it. Well, we've pointed out the details, and actually we glossed over some of the glaring successes of the Big Bang, which Mr. Lerner has no explanation for the abundance of these elements, except for things that were ruled out in 2003 by Ned Wright, and you can look those up there. He has no explanation for the formation of the light

Starting point is 00:49:42 elements, and that hasn't been debunked by Professor Ned Wright. But let's get to Ethan's. So Ethan is now commenting on, this is Dr. Ethan Siegel, who runs a very popular outreach, and he is a trained astrophysicist. So Dr. Siegel talks about things are really bad for plasma cosmology advocates fast. if they dare to genuinely confront their ideas with observations of the universe. So it doesn't oscillate. We didn't talk about oscillatory universes. In most conceptions, Mr. Lerner, the oscillatory period and his models are extremely long,

Starting point is 00:50:20 maybe even infinitely long. So I didn't spend too much time in that. He also was talking about for decades, including in the article that is the errors found in his book by Professor Ned Wright. He is talking about these large, transverse velocities. He talks about those that they should be prevalent in the plasma cosmology. They don't exist. We don't see it.

Starting point is 00:50:43 It would also lead to very large-scale effects in the polarization of the micro-ray background that I'm an expert in in the study. We don't see any evidence for that. There's strong constraints to rule it out completely based on this. Now, he apparently, according to Ned Wright, I don't know if you knew this, Garrett, but he disavowed his association with Hannes-Alvin's plasma cosmology before, but it sounds like he's resurrected it. Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot.

Starting point is 00:51:11 It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill, four-burner gas grill, on special buy for only $199. And entertain all season with the Hampton Bay West Grove seven-piece outdoor dining set for only $49. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot. While supplies, price-in-valed May 14th or May 27th. U.S. only exclusions apply. See Home Depot.com slash price match for details. Okay, no, I hadn't heard that.

Starting point is 00:51:39 Yeah. And he talks about the cosmic web that performs this, Dr. Siegel, performed some of the best evidence possible for the universe. In his article, it goes over in simulations. And he talks about the CMB, the background radiation, can either come from a series of hot objects, which is what Mr. Lerner, at least Alvin, had claimed as the oral reflected starlight. And you mentioned this earlier, Garrett, it can't be whiskers, polarized whiskers, those would be seen very easily by CMB. We don't see. see it. This last observation was enough to falsify Alphan's idea more than a year before he even proposed it. The plasma cosmology was literally dead on arrival. So that's Ethan.

Starting point is 00:52:18 I have a list of other problems, as I've already said. There's no explanation of C&B polarization, no explanation of C&B antisotropy. Again, this is the Nobel Prize in 2006. No explanation of blue shifts and transverse velocities. And no explanation of red shift. He says all processes can be explained by lab-tested physics. This is his slide. You can see Mr. Learn in the upper right. I'll move it over. Hopefully you can see it.

Starting point is 00:52:47 And there he is. I'm a little more. Except for the Hubble process. So he's saying everything can be explained or tested at least. Now he's saying he can explain all the cosmic so-called cosmic processes that otherwise seem to indicate expansion. They can all be explained except for the Hubble process. that's a pretty big exception. That's literally the foundational pillar

Starting point is 00:53:10 on which the expanding universe is predicated by people who didn't want to believe in it. Even LaMaitre didn't want to believe in it. And actually Alphane, who Mr. Lerner supports purportedly or did, he hated the idea because it seemed to apply a biblical congruence between the biblical Genesis 1-1 narrative.

Starting point is 00:53:29 So Mr. Alfane or Dr. Alvane, Nobel laureate, he was against the big bang on extra scientific, non-scientific, a-scientific, agenda-driven ideas. But anyway, he, Mr. Lerner, cannot explain the key ingredient in all of cosmology, which is that galaxies, every galaxy with an exception of 10 or 20 handful of local ones,

Starting point is 00:53:52 all seem to be expected. That's a pretty big gap, wouldn't you say, Gareth? Yeah, yeah. Again, it's taken with the totality of the evidence, right? Again, the framework for cosmology is relatively simple. The ingredients that you add for Big Bang nuclear synthesis, etc., again, relatively straightforward, and you explain a whole wealth of observations. And having to add all these other little bits and pieces to try and explain C&B over here

Starting point is 00:54:22 or galaxy evolution over there, it's not good for theories, right? It's multiplying the factors unnecessarily. So in reality, we need the scales of justice for theories, and we need to weigh them based on how well they explain their evidence. And the Big Bang does very, very well, which is why it's hard to unseat. That's right. Not because we love it. Lots of people hate it, but it works. That's the point.

Starting point is 00:54:50 So the last thing I want to comment on, if he doesn't have a plausible explanation for abundances, and yet his adherents, his proponents, etc., including people in the chat, are saying, Well, okay, you've explained the support for JWST observations that aren't inconsistent with the Big Bang. You've explained that the properties of galaxies are consistent between Hubble and JWST where there is sufficient technological overlap and wavelength and sensitivity and angular resolution. And so that would be a huge hurdle that the Big Bang model, if you like, to whatever extent, it does make predictions about evolution or structure formation, could have failed, but did not. We know that Mr. Learn doesn't have an explanation for abundances, but he's pointed out that astronomers don't understand the lithium problem.

Starting point is 00:55:39 This I get a lot, a lot of this stuff. Lithium problem is the key thing. We're hanging our hat now on this. Okay, so here's abundances. Here are the elemental abundances measured by multiple dozens of different teams with different telescopic tools, ranging from the early part of the evolution of the universe, using the cosmic microwave background that I study and the Planck Satellite studied, and predictions and observations from astronomers looking at stars in our galaxy and even our own sun.

Starting point is 00:56:14 And these are four or five of the lightest elements on the periodic table and their isotopes. So this is showing primordial helium abundance, helium four. There's another isotope of helium called helium three. We actually use that to cool down our detectors to sub-calven temperatures. Deuterium, which is heavy hydrogen. I'll have a video, by the way, on my channel about you'll see me drinking deuterium oxide, which is heavy water, and see if I live or not. And then there's lithium. And there's also hydrogen, which is not shown on here. This is relative to hydrogen. So for hydrogen, helium, isotope of helium of hydrogen, and isotope of helium of four different isotopes or elemental abundancies. Four of them, agree, and you can't even see the error bars. Now, the one that's known the worst with the bigger green band sort of at the bottom is lithium 7. And it is true that the plank value, if you will, differs from the stellar abundances and observations by several sigma. So this is, you know,

Starting point is 00:57:17 a few parts in a thousand chance of being a statistical fluke. It could be real. But the amount of information that, first of all, in the three and four, including hydrogen and isotopic helium, two, that those preponderate, the preponderance of evidence is that we have an exquisite understanding from multiple avenues, looking at the sun to looking at the cosmic microwave background, a difference in time of 13.8 billion years, difference in scale of 10 to the 20th, power. This is incredible, and we should be proud of it. And Mr. Lerner is pointing cherry-picking, as some have called it, the one value, which is discrepant, but the reasons for its discrepancy could be manifold and related to deficiencies, lacuna, and observational astronomy, having zero,

Starting point is 00:58:06 zero absolutely to do with cosmology. Karen, do you have anything to say about these abundances and whether this causes any loss of sleep or panic? No, no. So, yeah, I think a lot about the lithium difference, but lithium is a fragile element, and we don't understand all the pathways that it could be processed through stars and multiple generations of stars. So maybe this is telling us more about our lack of understanding of stellar revolution than it is of the production of lithium in the Big Bang. But, you know, lots of people,

Starting point is 00:58:39 lots of people are thinking about this and when the answers there will all go, oh yeah, okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that's right. And the last thing I want to say is, you know, he also talks about the Hubble crisis, the Hubble tension. I too would like people to stop using the term, you know, crisis and Hubble tensions and so forth. But in reality, we, um, we, understand from phenomena measured at early times, 370,000 years after the Big Bang. We have an observation of the expansion rate, a prediction what the expansion rate should be 13.8 billion years later. And it agrees to within 10% of the value measured by local objects in the expanding universe, which Mr. Lerner has no explanation for, but for the redshift

Starting point is 00:59:20 distance relationship, over a variety of different stars and different stellar objects from globular clusters, tip of the red giant branch stars, type 2, type 1A supernovae, and from Cepheid variables, going out over a whole host of ranges and scale from megaparsecs to gigaparsecs, all the way back to the big bang. So late formation, early formation, zero explanation in Mr. Learner's model, complete agreement to the 10% level. And even Jim People says that is, even though it's an anomaly, in other words, these two different methods disagree at the 10% level.

Starting point is 00:59:53 It's a stunning triumph, perhaps one of the most confidence-inspiring ideas and measurements ever made. And that's what we do as scientists, right, Garant. We are observational and we are driven by empirical and epistemologically humble and having humility. And I think we expect that from critics as well. It's not that we don't like criticism. We welcome it. Sometimes as Nobel laureate, Jim People says, it provides you some information avenue to further refine and build up credulity and confidence in your model. Professor Lewis, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Starting point is 01:00:26 I know we both have to run, and I think it was great. Keep the comments coming. I have a link to more information. I'll put a link to my previous videos, and you can check out Mr. Learner's videos, and I'm sure Mr. Lerner, if you're listening, you'll have some response. But I don't find debate particularly valuable in the sense that there's nothing that he can't say live, that he can't say, you know, on a channel. And he actually is going to be debating Professor Priya Narotigen at this How the Like Gets in Festivals.

Starting point is 01:01:00 So she is even more capable than I am, at least. I won't speak for Professor Lewis, of defending the Big Bang or at least providing the same argument. So look for that video. I'm sure that'll be up at some point. And we're in capable hands. And we welcome constructive criticism. And I think ascribing and not being apologetic and properly humble, and our approach is not the best approach.

Starting point is 01:01:25 Anyway, Garrett, thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day. I'll put some links and videos and the slides up as well. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, bye. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Starting point is 01:01:49 Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocal, of Demi Lovato on May 17th and the signature Southern Country Rock

Starting point is 01:02:05 of Eric Church on July 19th. Tickets on sale now at yamava Theater.com, only at Yamava Resort and Casino, celebrating its 40th anniversary. UN must be 21 to enter.

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating - Errors in the Big Bang Never Happened (#255)

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.