Maggie's Farm

How Sure Are We That The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old?

From the insightful science journal Forbes, no less. That piece is a fairly predictable press release-quality regurgitation - the top few inches of the Standard Model's repeated retail gloss. And, as usually happens, there are scores of bleeding edge findings that call it into question.

Know how the AGW craze has so much momentum? So too does the conventional origins movement. A better title is How Sure is Current Convention That The Universe Is 13.8 Billion Years Old, with the subheading, Why are Astrophysics So Often Contradictory and Inconsistent?

They're all fragmented conjectures on the subject and yet the unfounded 13.8b year confidence is zealously cited as if it were knowledge.

Redshifted Hubble expansion is itself questionable - see the fingers of god effect - as are lightspeed gravity waves for the reasons I gave above. Black holes - that entity that can't exist in a Big Bang universe and vice versa - were disclaimed by Hawking before he reclaimed them. Dark matter has gotten completely out of control (no pun intended) and so on and so on.

For fun look into the CERN findings that perched universes halfway between both leading cosmological models. And G-d chuckled.

We're dealing with various conjectures with great chasms between them. An example of things really getting out of hand is the Genesis allegory becoming synonymous with natural evolution.

Oops, I didn't give the gravity wave conundrum above. It basically asks how these manifestations travel at light speed - and in "spacetime" - while bodies gravitationally orbit the instantaneous positions of their primaries. Or how, in an immaterial, spooky-action-at-a-distance phenomenon like that, an aether, no matter how you define it, does not exist. How do you "warp" a non-entity?

The clattering site robot(s) speak from the depths of its/their considerable programmed rhetoric: Evidently Einstein therefore gravity ergo knowledge, goes its equation. The equally evident fact it's missing 90% of its variables is of no consequence.

The robot(s) hasn't the reference where fields generally cannot exhibit two completely different properties at the same time, especially where no medium for either property is thought to exist - these "perturbations" in "spacetime" would, by the definitions of those two words alone, seem to invoke a conveying medium, say a "fabric" but never the dreaded aether, as would "lightspeed", that tremendously turgid rate of cosmological transmission - in places - with no known medium and therefore no testable field.

Humans know these as the classic disconnects between Newtonian and quantum, for example, or between the LCDM model of the universe and something else. It's the something else that robot(s) are unprogrammed to recognize and it's that something else that human scientists generally accept about their surroundings.

Let's ask the robot(s) about quasars exhibiting no time dilation in a supposedly time-dilated cosmos, for example, and see what it comes back with. Whatever it is the robot(s) cannot reconcile the two domains cosmologists generally concern themselves with.

The thing about programmed robot routines is their predictability. The robot(s) has no known self-awareness module so its hard to justify entertaining it on its own terms - you could get a flippant diversion scooped from its its most-accessed RAM followed by a second scrape through the same addresses when challenged, eventually followed by some accusation from the Handwaving Module. Whichever, engaging it does generally keep it going for hours.

Remind the robot(s) that repeating a slant does not make it so. LIGO, for whatever findings have been made pursuant its stated purpose, can no more claim that it has definitively discovered waves of gravity than it can demonstrate what gravity is. That does not necessarily discredit the foremost presupposition but it does question the highly incomplete cosmological paradigm it runs in, which is the standard model.

This brings us back to only one of scores of similar points robot(s) are immune to: Dark matter is no more or less a "finding" either. It is a conjecture with which to support other things. It is a fudge.

Here, take just this tidbit and show how real world physics and cosmology are unified to the degree that such pronouncements can be credibly made. Can't do it.

I can find you two dozen more areas like it. In fact, I gave the clattering site robot not one but two such incomplete fields in references above, both of which relate strongly to, and in some support of, what the robot(s) only thinks its on about.

And yet, zip. The robot(s) cites as much conventional top gloss as Forbes has. Well, more, actually...

Ha. The clattering robot has, all by itself, flown a sensor to these two black holes, made an observation, and flown them back to collect the data. Or the robot has perfected quantum computing and instantaneous transmission, saving it at least that Warp Zillion return trip.

The clattering site robot(s) has in that fell swoop not only exceeded lightspeed a zillion times over, it has single-robotically proved black holes in a big banger universe, a deeply flawed concept (at least until clattering robotics) and proved their existence regardless. From there it was indeed only a matter of spacetime until the result supported the purported and entirely untested cause.

CSR: Black holes prove gravity waves.

Normals: But how do you prove black holes, CSR?

CSR: Gravity waves prove black holes.

Normals:

CSR: [zzzzZZZT Pop! Snap! Smell of ozone.]

As has been said, but math isn't physics. And evidently clattering site robotics ain't thought.

Apparently Einstein existed and was a pretty solid mathematician, notes the CSR. As it turns out, there's scant disagreement with that allegation.

Then there was that thing where Einstein (and Hawking and even CERN) rejected black holes. Apparently an original singularity cannot preexist a singularity universe and vice versa. Or along with denying the laws of thermodynamics and some other critical things it also overcame its own nature, the very properties it's defined by. The Great Exploding Implosion.

The CSR cannot grasp that quasars alone refute the notion of purported LCDM space and its cult of Einsteinian revisionism. The CSR finds that math really is physics, testable or not.

Anyway, the CSR argues on, immune to the conflicts it's been fed, not least among them the abuses of Einstein himself lodged by grant-seeking standard model types. The CSR should attend that coffee I mentioned and receive new data.

Incidentally, note how the CSR waded right past its many conclusions of material fact - black holes and gravity waves and whatnot being uniquely to the CSR known entities - to thrust a contradiction upon an unsuspecting world:

Science doesn't deal in proof, like mathematics, but evidence, in particular, hypothetico-deduction.

Ah, well science is an open-ended pursuit of knowledge, sure enough (one oddly uninformed by philosophy for about a century, it presumably preferring the unreasonable robotic output of convention and its own momentum) of which knowledge the CSR has spoken definitively.

For example, we know black holes exist and we know the Universe is 13.8 billion years old because mathematics. These are confirmed because LCDM and because Einstein.

Therefore science has "proved" this or that, to a reasonable consensus per present standards, because the formal Mathematical Proof advises such. From this we know black holes signal "perturbations" at lightspeed in "fabrics" of "spacetime" - even though in actuality they're mathematical abstracts looking for knowledge of a physical state or property.

Ergo, to the CSR math proves reality and to the degree it's convenient, vice versa.

So. The CSR has spoken of proofs of reality, not to be confused with Mathematical Proofs (which are enormously incomplete but not universally so, a sin about which the CSR accuses me of heresy). However in citing the Mathematical Proof as supreme, the CSR has given itself the authority to make claims on reality. Like this:

CSR: Black holes prove gravity waves.

Normals: But how do you prove black holes, CSR?

CSR: Gravity waves prove black holes.

Remember, both are mathematical constructs and nobody knows what gravity is. Its properties have been somewhat or even largely fleshed out. Using what's said to be gravity to refer back to a completely unobserved, untestable entity? CSR calls that reality, or close enough.

And then,

CSR: Because Einstein.

Normals: Einstein did some math, true enough. Wow, did he do some math.

CSR: SEE!

Normals: He didn't actually run around about black holes much, though.

CSR:

Normals:

CSR:

The CSR needs to stop Google-cosmologizing and come back to those first principles it's sometimes on about.

And finally, the CSR has admitted that an observation is as good as a phenomenon, a theory only needs a single point of apparent confirmation to become reality, the time-dilated, 4-dimensionsl universe really is a static 13.8 billion years old, and indeed Einstein is, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable with the GUT that's yet to appear.

Told you. It's a cult, even when programmed into a CSR, its insentient carrier. Little use in flooding the poor thing with all that data it cannot find for itself, with no disrespect to Google intended.

CSR thinks I'm doing arithmetic. I'm asking if it's plausible that science, as CSR abuses the word, is self-correcting. Among other things I'm asking this.

Hopefully nobody's wasting time watching the CSR do what it always does, which is to extract an argument where none existed, divert whatever the subject was - in this case that the universe can be reasonably dated by "scientific" means, which obviously it cannot - Lie by claiming a new purpose, and harangue the unwitting into compliance with this new, preprogrammed, robotic goofiness. Having done that, the CSR then lodges accusations and repeats itself endlessly.

Normal humans know this and do not engage the CSR directly. Can't actually tap into a sentient, integral aim or purpose with a machine, goes the thought. So let's try a test, now that we're way down here in the weeds. Let's see if the CSR can actually absorb even a layman's-level commentary that summarizes very real science and very real evidence in a very real history as it regards one particular aspect of this solar system of ours.

The players include a variety of conventional model assumptions:

The purported few billion year old solar environment
The conjectured Ort Cloud
Interplanetary objects and their purported behaviors
Basic chemistry
Official findings
Official reports and releases

To this is contrasted:

Copious physical evidence
Copious alternative theory
Basic electrochemistry
Plausible counter theory
Reasonable conclusions

Now, given that what follows is incontrovertible - that it reports real facts and real findings in a real history and that it encounters real conflicts with standard assumptions, most of which in this case are a scant half century old - can a normal human still conclude that this particular standard theory is valid, at least in this single case? I propose that a normal human cannot.

And if it's no longer plausible, and if the alternative is virtually as convincingly formed as the previous theory is flawed, and if the new theory also includes a fundamentally greater force than gravity as the explanation, is it also plausible that the LCDM that encompasses the standard, now-falsified model of this one phenomenon is flawed elsewhere, say, in its gravity-centric conjectures about the cosmos? Because, just between us normal humans, that's kinda proving to be the case.

Note how conditionally I offered that premise, and note how many outs and opportunities to interject meaningfully and consistently I intentionally gave the CSR in it and in my preceding posts. It utilized none of them; not one. In this last and final case we'll see if the thing can even absorb a non-technical report on an entirely real history of real scientific findings.

Or, the CSR has no fundamental interest except to inject unfiltered noise into the signal.

And could the CSR absorb something as basic as this and glean some modicum of new, normal-style perspective? Maybe when it's done running its arithmetics.

Yeah, and back comes the clattering site robot(s), condescendingly banging on about how its pet observation(s) - in reality its usual dirt-in-the-air diversion(s) - constitutes some sort of supreme knowledge(s) of cosmology and how anyone who insists on 1) keeping to the original point, and 2) who points out the canyon-sized holes in any such standard model - of anything from the age of the cosmos or climate and a dozen other topics - is, and I quote, beyond help(s).

Maybe it's the Norks running some bizarre, cultural experiment. The CSR seems built to project itself(s) as the font of knowledge(s) and appointed arbiter(s) of how it'll be dispensed. If it were human you'd think there's a clinical name for all that, what with the nosism(s) and all...

Away we go again. The CSR conflates so many things it's hard to separate them all again, but in this case it gets GR wrong, uses it to confirm Einstein universally in some wild post hoc manner, uses that false conclusion to bolster anything it can Google faintly related to this collection of random assumptions and projections, and so on and so on forever.

Of course, gravitational lensing is one untestable - but plausible - mathematical theory about the above the CSR has hung its hat completely on, unaware that the physics of refraction can be substituted, fit the phenomenon, and had already constituted a valid alternative in this cosmological realm.

Let's examine that. Let's also assume that Einstein is right - whatever that could mean, given the abuse of his work and words by now - and that gravity is ensconced in the sciences as the Prime Relativistic Mover such that gravitational lensing is real and imaginary matter is real and all the other theories of the standard model are true - notwithstanding that they cannot be tested and are increasingly full of holes and do not actually constitute science in its more proper definition - and let's look again at refraction. Refraction is a tested, repeatable, physical property concerning matter and light. We need to write no special formulas about it in order to explain its observed phenomenon until we can test it, it's already a done deal, in the books, on the record, stands to reason and fact and history and test and method and yes, arithmetic.

Now, in this paradigm, where Einstein is presumed to enjoy the infallibility the CSR wields to Science! its projected, argumentative universe, which theory do we accept as more plausible, the gravitational lensing theory that needed sophisticated math just to allow a theory concerning, or the tested phenomenon that hews to classic, cataloged, proves, tested, repeatable physics and cannot therefore be more rooted in real knowledge?

But there's a problem. Einstein's output rightly enjoys a lot of success but it does not enjoy that special success. So now which is the more plausible of the two, especially to armchair enthusiasts of such things and to CSR(s), assuming they possess a curiosity they've yet to exhibit.

Is it sensible to insist on a fealty to Googled theory? Probably not. It's also not sensible to argue endlessly with it like some idiot.

From here, among scores of similar such standpoints, the simple fact that the CSR's weird abuse of Einstein (and GR and CO2 in atmospheres or whatever) does not actually constitute anything more than that are obvious. Using a theory to confirm a theorist in order to demand allegiance to another somewhat related theory in order to uniquely invoke science - which correctly defined is knowledge of a tested, confirmed, repeatable kind - is, well, robotic(s).

And this is the tip of that iceberg.

Clatter, clatter, clatter it said to itself(s) about itself and about its own clattering clatter, forever...