The State of Modern Science

Top French Scientist Admits Photo He Tweeted of ‘Space Telescope Image’ of Nearest Star to the Sun Was Just a Slice of Chorizo

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/top-french-scientist-admits-photo-tweeted-space-telescope-image-nearest-star-sun-just-slice-chorizo/

Top French scientist Etienne Klein tweeted a photo of a slice of chorizo and told his nearly 100,000 Twitter followers that it was a ‘space telescope image’ of the nearest star to the sun.

Tens of thousands of people believed him without questioning anything.

The tweet has received tens of thousands of ‘likes’ and ‘retweets.’

“Picture of Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun, located 4.2 light years away from us. It was taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This level of detail… A new world is unveiled everyday,” Klein said on Sunday.

“In view of some comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of amusement. Let us learn to be wary of arguments from authority as much as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images….” he said.

This is an example how easily people are willing to believe, whatever is sold to them as "science". The story reminds a lot of the famous photos of the black holes that have recently been published, pictures that have been rendered by a computer and where it remains unclear, what they actually show. Still everybody is convinced that they show pictures of black holes, because some scientist said so.

We should stop believing alleged "observations" that cannot be reproduced. Reports of singular observations are not science. Science is either repeated observations or experiments, whose controlled conditions can be reproduced. It is also necessary that scientific theories have to be able to make true predictions.

Black holes and other singularities do not fulfill these conditions. They are too remote to affect our lives. We are unable to conduct any experiments on them. We have instead theoretical hypotheses based on very few observations and far-fetched interpretations that we cannot follow or verify. The ring representing a black hole could be anything from a CGI product to a trivial object photographed in a low resolution and out of focus, just as the alleged photo of Proxima Centauri was actual a chorizo. 

Science should be about things that surround and affect us. About these things we have lots of data. Remote cosmic objects do not affect us and we have therefore extremely little data available. We cannot derive a theory from them that would allow us to make predictions, whose truth can be verified by us.

While Socrates said: "I know that I know nothing", in fact we know all that we need to know. Because if something affects us, then we have plenty of information at our disposal to form our theories about it. If something affects us only a little, then we have little information to form a theory, but it is also of little concern to us. If something does not affect us at all, then we have no information about it to form any theory, but it is also of no concern for us.

Coincidence? Hubble Horizon = Age of the Universe

Let's start with a short overview of the Hubble Horizon taken from this website: Cosmic Horizons – Explaining Science

The Universe is expanding. The further away an object is the faster it is receding from us.

There is a clear relationship between the recessional velocity and the distance of a galaxy. This relationship is known as Hubble’s Law and is written as

v = HoD

where v is the velocity an object is moving away from us
D is the object’s distance
Ho is a constant known as the Hubble constant. If v is measured in kilometres per second and D is in megaparsecs (Mpc) (1 Mpc =3.26 million light years) then Ho is approximately 70 km/s per Mpc. The Hubble constant measures how fast the Universe is expanding. In reality, the Hubble constant changes over time (it is generally believed to be decreasing) and so is more correctly called the Hubble parameter H(t). The Hubble constant is the value of the Hubble parameter today. However, the current rate of change of the Hubble constant is very small. It will take hundreds of millions of years to fall by 1% from its current value.

Assuming that Hubble’s law is valid at all distances, at a separation from us of more than 4,300 Mpc (or 14 billion light years) a galaxy will be receding at a velocity greater than 300 000 km/s which is the speed of light. In which case any light it emitted today could never reach us. The Hubble sphere is an imaginary sphere centred on the Earth of radius 4,300 Mpc. If the Hubble parameter didn’t change over time, we could only see objects which emitted light today located inside the Hubble sphere.

Now what a strange coincidence! The distance in which the speed of the expansion of the universe reaches the speed of light is around 14 billion lightyears. The age of the universe according to the Big Bang hypotheses is more or less the same, i.e. 13.7 billion years. So for some strange reason we live today at the exact point of time when the last light of the Big Bang becomes invisible, because it passes the Hubble horizon.

If we had lived a few billion years earlier, the Big Bang would have been taken place well within the Hubble sphere and we could observe everything in all its glory. If we lived a few billion years later from now the Big Bang would have happened far beyond the Hubble sphere, and we would have no idea that it ever happened.

Luckily it happened exactly at the border of the Hubble sphere, so we can still observe it in Cosmic Background Radiation, which led to the estimate of the age of the universe being 13.7 billion years. This is an amazing coincidence considering the unimaginable time that the universe will exist and has already exited.

However I am not willing to believe in such statistically almost impossible coincidences. The only rational assumption is that the alleged age of the universe is an effect of the Hubble horizon. What we see in the cosmic background radiation has nothing to to with the alleged beginning of the universe, it's just the effect of the expansion of the universe reaching the speed of light (No the expansion of space cannot exceed the speed of light, it can only asymptotically approach it. Special Relativity remains valid here.). The universe is therefore either far older or, more likely, has no beginning at all. What appears to us as the Big Bang happening 13.7 billion lightyears away is nothing but the effect of the expansion of the universe reaching the speed of light and hereby compressing all the infinite universe beyond into the Hubble horizon. The Cosmic Microwave Background equivalent to a temperature of 2.7 K simply reflects the average energy of the universe. Since we can see the infinite universe compressed together at the Hubble horizon, it becomes so diffuse by the effects of Special Relativity that it becomes the CMB.

The Big Bang happening exactly 13.7 billion years ago is incompatible with the fact that the Hubble horizon is exactly the same, but derived from entirely different parameters. That kind of coincidences do not exist in the real world.