Big Bang Theory Takes Another Hit

Hubble Space Telescope

https://www.thenational.ae/uae/science/have-we-been-wrong-about-the-age-of-our-universe-all-along-1.894032

Until recently, such findings would have barely caused a stir, as the age of the cosmos was thought to have been revealed a decade ago by studies of the heat left over by the Big Bang.

By measuring the spread of that heat across the night sky, orbiting satellites had shown the primordial explosion must have taken place about 13.8 billion years ago, plus or minus a few tens of millions of years.

 [...]

In 2013, astronomers using the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope estimated Methuselah was about 14.5 billion years old, give or take about 800 million years. That’s hard to square with the latest estimates of the age of the universe.

It does not look good for our Big Bang theory, which is - as we might remember - a theory inspired by Abrahamic religion and brought up by the Catholic priest Georges Lemaître who wanted a scientific foundation to justify the need of creation. Before that the commonly accepted cosmological theory was a steady state universe with neither beginning nor end. 

The steady state theory did not deny the expansion of the universe, but assumed that the First Law of Thermodynamics (preservation of energy) could not apply to the universe, since it is infinite and therefore no closed system. Not the total energy is preserved, since it is infinite in an infinite universe, so that no finite amount of energy added or deducted could change this, but the amount of energy per volume of space measured over large distances is constant. So if space expands, energy (or matter) also have to increase at the same pace in order to keep the average density of energy constant. Instead of being created in a singular event (Big Bang) it was assumed that matter and energy are created constantly by the expansion of the universe due to quantum fluctuation of space itself.

The Big Bang theory changed this and gave the universe a beginning. In order to keep this mathematical model alive, which was not consistent with empiric measurements, new strange phenomena had to be introduced into the theory, among them Cosmic Inflation, a theory that is unable to provide any cause for it other than that it is needed for the equations to work, while it assumes the absurd concept of speeds faster than light. Other phenomena that had to be introduced in order to save the equations were dark matter and dark energy, of which neither was ever observed, while it would be responsible for the majority of mass in the universe. The Big Bang theory also set the age of the universe at 13.7 billion years, neglecting the fact that globular star clusters around our galaxy had almost the same age. Recently more and more galaxies have been discovered that must have been come to existence shortly after the Big Bang, which does not really fit into our understanding how galaxies are born.

And now we have a star that seems to be even older than the universe itself. 

Astrophysics should finally admit that we do not know how and if the universe began and if and how it was ever different from now. We do not even have a working theory for gravity, which would normally be the first step of developing a cosmological theory.

Besides all this we will even in the future have publications by stubborn astrophysicists that take the Big bang as a proven fact and build their weird speculative theories on top of it. 

Why can we not just start over, go back to what we really know and do research about things that we can know and that have an effect on us, so that we can experimentally measure them? Let us free science from religious beliefs and speculative theories (e.g. the entire branch of theoretical physics) and make it trustworthy and solid, as it once was.

Socrates once said: I neither know nor think that I know.

And this is one step ahead of all those scientists that think that they know, but actually do not know either.

Back Holes II - Best Explanation So Far

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2019/07/10/sorry-black-holes-arent-actually-black/#20d5ae265c02

Sorry, Black Holes Aren't Actually Black

[...] At the event horizon itself, space is moving at the speed of light. Which means, to someone infinitely far away, time at the event horizon no longer appears to pass.

When you observe something else fall into a black hole, you'd see that the light emitted from them would get fainter, redder, and their position would asymptote towards the event horizon. If you could continue to observe the faint photons they emitted, they'd appear to get stretched out in space and stretched out in time. They'd experience gravitational redshift, with the light emitted from them going from visible to infrared to microwave to radio frequencies.

And yet, it will never disappear entirely. There will always, infinitely far into the future, be light to observe from their fall into a black hole. Even though photons are quantized, there is no limit to how low their energy can be. With a large-enough telescope sensitive to long-enough wavelengths, you should always be able to see the light from anything that fell into a black hole. As someone falls in, their light never completely goes away.

Finally someone got the physics of Black Holes right. This is an article worth reading. 

I have pointed out so many times that time comes to a standstill at the event horizon of a Black Hole so that nothing can ever cross it, but hardly any scientist seems to understand it. Almost all articles about Black Holes mention a crossing of the event horizon, that matter reaches a point from which it cannot return anymore. General Relativity does not allow that. This point-of-no-return can never be reached. Nothing can disappear in a Black Hole during the existence of the universe. This removes entirely the information paradox that Stephen Hawking desperately tried to understand during his hole life. There is no paradox. Information never gets lost in a Black Hole.

Right-Wing vs. Left-Wing

Right-Wing and Left-Wing have got a new meaning. In the past Left-Wing meant support of the lower class and Right-Wing support of the upper class.
Today Right-Wing means defending democracy, free speech and human rights; and Left-Wing means destroying all that.

So Far-Right means a freedom extremist, and Far-Left a totalitarian extremist.

What has remained the same is that the Right wants to preserve the status quo, while the Left wants to overthrow it. However if the status quo is already quite good for everyone, its overthrow will be bad for everyone.

No Big Bang?

https://dailygalaxy.com/2019/06/big-bang-vanishes-quantum-theory-describes-an-eternal-universe/

It seems we have an alternative theory for the universe without a Big Bang. This is similar to a post that I made some years ago about a new steady-state model of the universe.
Quantum fluctuation allows for a continuous creation of particles due to the expansion of the universe, because the vacuum energy needs to remain the same.
It is certainly too early to say, but we should consider the possibility that there is no need for a Big Bang. This would also explain why the universe is completely euclidean (i.e. "flat").

So once again Epicurus was right about the universe: It is infinite in space and time. There are logical reasons for it as Epicurus explained, because any finite model would lead to a logical self-contradiction.

The Fire of Notre Dame

The fire of Notre Dame today marks the end of France and probably of European civilization. Although it was just a church and therefore dedicated to religious superstition it is also the probably most important symbol of European culture after the decline of Rome.

The cathedral was built during the High Middle Ages and is probably the apex of medieval architecture. During the French Revolution it became the Temple of Reason and later the place where Napoleon was crowned Emperor effectively ending the Western Roman Empire and replacing it with modern Western society. The cathedral of Notre Dame was far more important to Europe than the World Trade Center ever was for America, since the latter one was a rather modern building.

Although the destruction of a symbol has no real effect, the Fire of Notre Dame comes to a point in history, where the French identity is completely replaced by North-African culture, the United Kingdom is ruled effectively by Saracen sharia law and has left the European Union, and Germany is collapsing under an unprecedented Saracen invasion since 2015.

Europe is broken. It has no will for survival anymore. The most powerful European nations have been lost to Saracen invaders. The national leaders are puppets of the Saracens. And the last decent Europeans feel ashamed for the degeneracy of their own homelands that makes them unworthy of being defended.

In the face of such a situation a symbolic event becomes significant. Its importance might be abstract, but historiography is something abstract. It needs key events to mark the end of an era. The Fire of Notre Dame is such a key event. 

Today we have seen the end of European culture in France. And considering the importance that France had for modern Europe, it might very well be the event that future historians will take to give a date to the end of European civilization as a whole.

The Photography of a Black Hole

First photography of the supermassive Black Hole in the center of M87

https://www.space.com/first-black-hole-photo-by-event-horizon-telescope.html

Black Holes have finally been dragged out of the shadows.

For the first time ever, humanity has photographed one of these elusive cosmic beasts, shining light on an exotic space-time realm that had long been beyond our ken. 

"We have seen what we thought was unseeable," Sheperd Doeleman, of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said today (April 10) during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

I am not sure, what is supposed to have been proven by this picture?
It is a massive object and its center appears darker, but as I predicted for many years it is not black, but dark red due to the gravity-related redshift.

We know from General Relativity that time slows down in the proximity of a so called Black Hole until it comes to a complete standstill at the event horizon. From this follows that nothing can ever fall into a Black Hole, i.e. cross its event horizon, because all the time of the universe would not be enough for this to happen. This means no photon will ever reach the point of no return and disappear in it. Instead light escaping from the proximity of a Black Hole will be extremely redshifted all the way down to the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum. And this is exactly what we see. The center of the alleged Black Hole is dark red.

Of course this effect is probably due to the low resolution of the picture, but if the resolution is too low to distinguish anything with certainty, then what are we supposed to see there?

Climatology as a Modern Version of Neo-Luddism

The popular anti-rationalist pseudo-science of »Climatology« and its demand of a reduction of CO2 emissions seems to be a revival of the 19th Century Luddite movement.
The Luddite were radical textile workers that protested against modern technology, especially mechanical stocking frames and had a mystical and probably fictional leader called »Ned Ludd«. The name »Luddite« became since then a trademark for everybody opposing modern technology. Another famous Luddite of the 20th century was the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski who wrote an interesting manifesto called »Industrial Society and its Future«.
Today we have another incarnation of this movement that manifests itself in the fight against Global Warming. It is directed against any form of actually totally harmless CO2 emission, which is a way to quantify the degree of industrialization. The more CO2 something emits, the more industrial it is considered and therefore attracts the wrath of the modern Luddites. Even a new charismatic leader of the Neo-Luddites has emerged in the person of the 16-years old Swedish girl Greta Thunberg and her »Fridays for Future« movement. The fact that a child with no expertise at all on the matter is leading this movement staging a school strike, the symbol of science and reason, shows its general aversion against any form of rationalism. It is hereby very unfortunate that even well established scientists have been corrupted to support the neo-Luddites with absurd theories about threats to the global climate by returning fossilized carbon into the natural cycle where it originally came from.
But we can see that this current phenomenon of climate hysteria is not unique in human history. It had its predecessors that sporadically re-emerge driven by a subconscious skepticism of humans against technological advancement, which they feel they are not prepared for. So the current climate hysteria is not a new kind of the collective madness that has spread in the western world, but part of human nature, which will hopefully be overcome like earlier incarnations of the Luddite movement.