A truly great article appears in this month's (February 2017) Scientific American. The article ("Pop Goes the Universe") addresses recent data gathered by the European Space Agency Planck Satellite. This satellite measured the cosmic background radiation with greater precision than ever before. A poor camera capture of the basic thesis is presented below.
Article pdf linked below.
Pop Goes the Universe
These guys are heavyweights, and what they say obviously took a great deal of courage. Basically they are telling the entrenched cosmology establishment that they are likely to be full of shit.
I have been a critic of the "big bang" for quite some time. My doubts were based entirely on the missing mass needed to make the theory hang together. These people, the cosmology community, have been looking for dark matter and dark energy for almost 50 years now without any success whatever. A reasonable person might well conclude that neither exists. That is certainly my conclusion.
In any case, it is a great article IMO, and well worth picking up and reading. I was particularly struck by comments at the end of the article that suggest that scientists, in particular cosmologists, now appear willing to discard one of science's key properties. That is empirical testability, in exchange for immunizing the "big bang" theory from experiments that seem to suggest that it is incorrect. A sign of the times I suppose.
Going on with my irreverence I will transition to evolution and AGW. It is easy to show that the rate of genetic mutation and the known age of the earth are more than an order of magnitude incompatible with the diversity and specialization of the creatures occupying the earth. You can show this disconnect on the back of an envelop, yet no one seems to be terribly bothered by it. AGW falls in the same category. No one really knows if the prevalent conjectures are true. I am inclined to believe Duncan Steel's view (brilliant paper that he wrote, BTW).
So we are busy teaching our young people that the "big bang", evolution, and AGW are established scientific facts. Never mind that the average California high school graduate reads at the fourth grade level. Why are we educating youngsters to participate in "party conversations" instead of emphasizing basic skills like reading and math. It drives me crazy. Is it any wonder that the US ranks about 17th in tests that evaluate language and math skills worldwide?
