Big Bang Theory: Exploring the Creation of Atoms

[peter.mason3]

where two concordant theories are competing and one is clearly falsifiable and the other not, I believe the falsifiable one has the edge as far as good scientific practice is concerned.

If we live in an infinite steady state universe...

There's your problem. The infinite universe is unproven, and comes with a number of problems - contradictions - known since Newton's time. Newton proposed God held the stars from universal gravitational collapse. Trying to get round Olbers paradox, as Turbo-1 tried to do above, leads to some tricky, unproven stuff. Ditto gravitational collapse.
Now the infinite universe can in theory be falsified, although it cannot be proved. But it appears that the steady state theory(s) (by the admission of Hoyle, for instance, himself) have to keep being altered.
Now Hoyle is (was?) a great scientist, but once you start moving backwards, from the BB and from GR, towards Newton, in the face of an accumilation of evidence, which in historical terms will be seen as relatively new, I wonder if the steady staters' infinite universe is an attempt to disprove Popper, not prove him.
Pete

 

[turbo]

There's your problem. The infinite universe is unproven, and comes with a number of problems - contradictions - known since Newton's time.

Every cosmological model is unproven.

Newton proposed God held the stars from universal gravitational collapse. Trying to get round Olbers paradox, as Turbo-1 tried to do above, leads to some tricky, unproven stuff. Ditto gravitational collapse.

At the time of Newton, physicists were thinking of an ether as a rather passive thing. There was no inkling of quantum physics or of the physical properties of the quantum vacuum. The vacuum happens to have a couple of competing qualities that cancel to an incredible precision (~120 OOM). One is that the gravitational equivalence of the vacuum should have crushed the entire universe to about the diameter of the Earth, and the other is that the expansive pressure of the vacuum energy is 120 OOM larger than observed. If these estimates are to be believed, we must contend with the possibility that the expansive and gravitational forces of the vacuum are always and everywhere in dynamical equilibrium, and that the universe is stable against both collapse and the "big rip".

As for the "tricky" stuff, if light is redshifted by interacting with the EM fields in "empty" space, at some distance light will be redshifted out of detectability. What's tricky about that? The concept is very simple and fundamental and is entirely concordant with classical physics. I personally believe that light is redshifted as it traverses the EM field of the quantuum vacuum. Others have proposed that cosmological redshift results from inelastic collisions with molecules in the rarified plasma of "empty" space.

 

[peter.mason3]

Hi Turbo,
"Every cosmological model is unproven."

But you would admit that many cosmologists consider the standard big bang model proven, whether you agree or not with this.

But my point was rather that infinity is pretty unprovable.

Your solution to Olbers paradox seems tricky in the sense of both unproven, and sounds a little difficult to prove also.

As for the balance of quantum forces in the vacuum, as Newton said, re gravity, its a bit like imagining an infinity of needles balancing on their points.

I don't buy equilibrium.
cheers
Pete

 

[Phobos]

Interesting tidbits, but the OP has been answered and now we're getting into non-mainstream & personal theories which, in accordance with PF policy, are to be presented in the IR forum.