Cosmology

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Wikipedia Dispute: wikipedia:Cosmology

This Natural Philosophy wiki page disputes content found on Wikipedia page wikipedia:Cosmology

Cosmology is the study of the universe as a whole — its structure, its history, and on the standard account its origin. It is the branch of physics in which the ratio of theory to observation is highest, and the branch this wiki disputes most comprehensively.

Category: Cosmology catalogues nearly 700 items. This page is a map of that literature; the arguments themselves are set out on the topic pages linked from it.

For Hermann Bondi's 1952 monograph of this name, see Cosmology (Bondi book).

Cosmology or cosmogony?

A distinction drawn repeatedly in this literature is worth taking first, because it frames everything else. Cosmology is the study of the universe; cosmogony is the study of its origin. Glenn Borchardt argues that the two have been conflated, and that the second is not a legitimate scientific subject at all:

IUT denies that cosmogony, the study of the origin of the universe, is legitimate. The word "cosmogony" has not seen popular use in cosmology. To do so would imply that an alternative view was possible. … The creation of something from nothing is clearly a religious assumption, not a scientific one.

— Glenn Borchardt, "Infinite Universe Theory" (2007)

On that view the question is not which origin story is correct but whether an origin story is required. The alternative — an Eternal Universe, infinite in space and time — dissolves the problem rather than solving it, and is the position of a large part of the literature here.

The standard model and its critics

The mainstream account is the Big Bang: an expanding universe some 13.8 billion years old, beginning hot and dense, with structure growing under gravity from primordial fluctuations. Its principal supports are the redshift–distance relation, the cosmic microwave background, and the abundances of the light elements.

The criticism catalogued here is extensive and is set out in full on the Big Bang page, which indexes it by line of argument. The recurring structural complaint is that the model has been repeatedly rescued from conflict with observation by adding unobserved ingredients — inflation, dark matter and dark energy — none of which has been detected independently of the discrepancy it was introduced to remove. The 2004 "Open Letter to the Scientific Community", signed by Halton Arp, Tom Van Flandern and some thirty others, put it this way: "In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation."

Redshift: the load-bearing assumption

Almost everything in modern cosmology rests on reading redshift as recession velocity and therefore as distance. If that reading fails, the distance scale, the age, the expansion and the beginning all fail with it. This is the single most disputed point in the literature here, and the alternatives are several:

• Intrinsic redshift — Halton Arp's position, argued from physically associated objects with discordant redshifts: part of the shift belongs to the object, and is a function of the age of its matter rather than its distance.
• Tired Light — photons losing energy over distance, in various proposed mechanisms.
• Absorption and interaction — redshift produced by light traversing a tenuous medium, developed by Paul Marmet and others.
• Plasma Cosmology — the programme of Eric J Lerner and Anthony L Peratt, in which plasma processes rather than a primordial explosion shape the universe.

See Red Shift for the general treatment.

Tests and anomalies

The observational material catalogued here clusters around a few results. The Hubble Deep Field and its successors are argued to show galaxies too mature too early, and — in Eric J Lerner's surface-brightness work — a Tolman test that a non-expanding universe passes and an expanding one does not. Type Ia supernova dimming, the usual evidence for acceleration, is contested. The microwave background is reinterpreted as thermalised starlight or as a property of the medium rather than as a relic. Quantised and periodic redshifts are reported.

Alternatives catalogued here

Besides the plasma and infinite-universe programmes, the wiki holds Quasi-Steady State Cosmology, the Eternal Universe literature, static and Euclidean models, Tuomo Suntola's zero-energy Dynamic Universe, scale-expanding models, and cyclic and matter-creation cosmologies. The concept of Energy itself is disputed by some of these authors, who hold that treating it as a substance with a density is the error that produced dark energy in the first place.

Disagreements among the critics

These programmes are rivals, not a bloc, and the article would mislead if it implied otherwise.

• Halton Arp rejected tired light — the mechanism most other critics rely on — on the grounds that objects at the same path length show very different redshifts. His alternative is variable particle mass.
• Static is not the only alternative. Scale-expanding and matter-creation models accept a changing universe and reject only the singular beginning.
• The numbers differ. On surface-brightness dimming, Tom Van Flandern's tired-light model predicts one exponent and Eric J Lerner's static Euclidean model another. Both are offered against the standard prediction; they cannot both be right.

Recording this is not a weakness of the case. A field this large that spoke with one voice would be less credible, not more.

Researchers on this wiki

Substantial cosmological work here comes from Halton Arp, Eric J Lerner, Glenn Borchardt, Tom Van Flandern, Paul Marmet, Tuomo Suntola, Anthony L Peratt, Reginald T Cahill, Hector A Munera, Jean Pierre Vigier, Milo M Wolff, Paul Wesson, Roger J Anderton, Vladimir S Netchitailo, J Marvin Herndon and Raymond H Gallucci, among many others.

See also

• Big Bang
• Red Shift · Intrinsic redshift · Tired Light
• Plasma Cosmology · Quasi-Steady State Cosmology
• Eternal Universe · Infinite Universe Theory
• Dark Matter · Dark Energy · Energy
• Hubble Deep Field
• Cosmology (Bondi book)