Post by szaleniec on Apr 18, 2009 16:47:41 GMT -5
So said Mark Vuletic in 1997 about the Pathlights Creation-Evolution Encyclopaedia. The first link is worth reading; it exposes the intellectual calibre of what we're talking about here. The phrase "worst creationist literature" is not one to be taken lightly, but this is a fair candidate. Not only are the arguments it presents completely specious, they're not even well presented. If the intro "Here are facts of true science that can help you and others" doesn't give you a chill, it should.
In 2002, I posted to my (now long since defunct) website a list of rebuttals to the claims that the PCEE makes about Big Bang theory and stellar evolution. The document has been gathering dust on my hard drive ever since I shut down the site, but figured FSTDT might appreciate it.
The pages I'm critiquing start here, under the heading "Science vs. the Big Bang". Another bad sign is that the writer invokes "common sense", which as we all know invariably translates as "I haven't got a clue so I hope nobody will notice that I just made some shit up" in the context of a scientific discussion.
The Big Bang didn't explode from combustion (for one thing, there wasn't any oxygen). It is an expansion of space itself rather than an explosion per se; the term "Big Bang" is rather misleading (intentionally so: it was coined by Fred Hoyle, a proponent of the steady state hypothesis) but it has stuck.
There can be energy in empty space. Electromagnetic radiation, for instance. "It takes energy to do work" is tautological, since to do work means to transfer energy. In any case, the Lemaitre-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model is obtained from the laws of physics and produces an expanding universe quite nicely.
Energy is a deceptively difficult concept to explain well, and doubly so in a general-relativistic model. The way it's covered at school resorts to a deeply unsatisfying circular argument: energy is the stored ability to do work; work is the transfer of energy. The accurate definition is that energy is a state function that's conserved by virtue of the system's action function being independent of time, according to a result from mathematical physics called Noether's theorem which states that every symmetry of a system has a corresponding conserved quantity. In simpler terms, the fact that something behaves the same way today as it did yesterday and will continue to do so tomorrow tells us that we can define a function which we call "energy" that remains the same for all time.
I shall leave the consequences of the creationist model to this view of energy as an exercise for the reader.
Hydrogen nuclei don't explode, and consisting as they do of single protons they can't. They join together in nuclear fusion, which is as close to the opposite of exploding as you can get. The mass 5 gap is irrelevant, since it's the fusion of helium-4 which produces heavy isotopes. Two helium-4 nuclei produce one beryllium-8, which is highly unstable but absorbs another helium-4 before it gets a chance to decay, forming the very stable isotope carbon-12.
Of course they couldn't, because explosions produce nothing. As I've said it's nuclear fusion which scientists claim produce heavier elements, as he would know if he bothered to do even a minimal amount of research. He seems to be confusing the nuclear fusion taking place routinely in stars with the neutron-capture process in supernova explosions, which is believed to produce elements heavier than iron. Even there, it's not the actual explosion which produces the elements. The explosion is merely the rapid expansion of a very hot gas cloud.
Stellar rotations and orbits are of the form of approximate conic sections. Gravity works according to an approximate inverse square law, as has been amply demonstrated by experiment. If we solve the equations for an inverse square law force, we get a conic section. It's not difficult, nor is it especially intricate. Historically, it was the observation that orbits were conics with the centre of mass at the focus that led to the formulation of the inverse square law of gravitation.
We'll see this later on that he seems to consider the most mathematically simple geometric forms in the same way the rest of us think of non-Euclidean geometry.
The theory nowhere requires the supernovae to stop. They're happening all the time, it's just that the universe is a big place and we don't see them all.
Again, only a few supernovae have occurred in our galaxy in the past thousand years. We see a supernova within our galaxy shining with the brightness of the full moon in the sky: for a few days, the star outshines the rest of the galaxy. However, other galaxies are considerably further away (the nearest is M31/Andromeda, at 2 million light years away). There are always supernovae.
Once again, vagueness is the order of the day. He doesn't say which set of calculations are too exacting, though he might be referring to the parameter in the LFRW metric that determines whether the universe is spherical, flat or hyperbolic (the term seems very close to flat, too close to call without knowing more about the universe). Didn't he just tell us that the theoretical Big Bang is random and haphazard?
These statements are presented out of their original order since they are mutually contradictory. In the one, there are no elements heavier than "light weight helium". In the other, there are heavier elements.
Does "light weight helium" refer to helium-3? He's talking about the mass 4 gap, then seems to contradict himself by saying that there's nothing heavier than helium-3. This is patently false because under the conditions helium-3 is produced, we also get helium-4 in much greater quantities.
When a gas outflows, it doesn't do so like a balloon with matter on the outside and vacuum in the middle. In fact, that contradicts his own point about gas moving from high density to low density. I think he's misinterpreted the balloon analogy of the expansion of the universe.
The rapidity of rotation is the angular velocity, not the angular momentum. The only "delicate relationship" between mass and angular momentum is the fact that the angular momentum of a particle about a point is defined as the angular velocity about that point, multiplied by the square of the distance from the point, multiplied by the particle's mass.
I should hardly need to add at this point that mass and weight aren't the same thing, because most people learned that at school.
Firstly, neutrinos aren't antimatter. (Antineutrinos are, but there are plenty of them because they only annihilate with neutrinos. In fact, antineutrinos are produced all the time from the decay of radioactive carbon-14 and potassium-40, and other naturally occurring radioisotopes.) Secondly, there is a theoretical basis for matter and antimatter not being perfectly symmetrical.
The Big Bang does not involve inrushing "nothingness" because it's an expansion of the universe! He seems to have confused himself now.
Just so we're clear, by the way, all forms of energy contribute to gravity. Not just matter and mass. And all components of the stress-energy tensor are involved, momentum as well as energy.
Shouldn't younger stars have more heavy elements? I swear he has confused himself with his own attempts at obfuscation.
Or alternatively, 7 reasons why he needs to go back to school.
The Big Bang isn't an event, it's a process. The background radiation is a characteristic of the universe itself, and since the universe is isotropic (the same in all directions) the background radiation will also be isotropic and omnidirectional.
The predictions (presented out of their original order so I can comment on them both at once) rely on knowing not only the way these characteristics change over time, but on how much energy is present in the early Universe. The latter is rather difficult to measure. (Yes, he did say 15 billion, despite it being 20 billion on the previous page. Make your mind up. The actual figure that tends to be cited nowadays is about 14 billion.)
I couldn't leave this without commenting on the phrase "emitting a far higher temperature heat". I can't even tell you what I think it's supposed to mean, because it makes no sense at all. And whilst we're on such matters, it's not "degrees Kelvin" but just "Kelvin" and has been since the 1960s.
How is radiation supposed to absorb light? OK, I know what he's getting at, and in actual fact the wavelengths of the background radiation do match the 2.7 K blackbody radiation curve quite well.
There's this little thing we call "gravity".
(Background radiation doesn't form stars, by the way. By definition, it's the energy left over from the early universe which didn't form matter. The LFRW model has the energy density of radiation dropping off by the fourth power of the radius parameter - this is interpreted as the number of photons remaining the same but their wavelengths being stretched as the universe expands. This incidentally is also used to explain redshift.)
I'd like to know how a star or galaxy is supposed to produce a near-perfect 2.7 kelvin blackbody radiation profile. That's a cold star.
(I see Pathlights is an adherent of the Bush Principle - never use a short word like "efflux" when a long neologism like "outflowage" will do.)
Evolution has no relevance whatsoever to the Big Bang. Stellar evolution is a separate field of study. And it's the expansion of the universe and consequent stretching of the wavelength of the photons that's used to explain redshift.
All radiation is lumpy, in that it comes in lumps. Those of us who actually do know something about the topic call these "lumps" quanta.
The speed theory of the redshift is not the whole story. Theory suggests a redshift caused by the expansion of the universe in addition to the Doppler effect, as I've already said. The speed theory is a simplification used to explain what's going on to those who don't understand general-relativistic cosmology, modelling the galaxies as moving in a static spacetime rather than stationary in an expanding one.
None of which has any relevance to evolution.
Hallelujah! Mainstream science which Pathlights accepts!
Like light slowing down as it approaches us - he does actually suggest this later, as we shall see. Scientific fact? No more solid and known than his mastery of the semicolon.
We'll see about that.
And I've found a glaring flaw already. The gravity of the stars "behind" the light ray will redshift it, but the gravity of the stars in front of it will blueshift it an equivalent amount. Net effect on wavelength: zero.
We observe the universe as being homogeneous (the same distribution of galaxies everywhere) and isotropic (the same in all directions on the large scale). Combining these axioms gives us the LFRW cosmological model, according to which the universe does not and cannot have a centre.
The light decreases in intensity as it crosses space, true. This does not affect the wavelength.
Energy loss does not affect the wavelength. If a photon is absorbed by interstellar matter, the other photons will carry on regardless with the same wavelength as before.
I wonder if this is where Ben Stein got inspiration for the premise of his abortion of a film. (EDIT: Obviously this comment wasn't part of the original document.)
As well as "several evidences" that he failed GCSE English.
All blue stars are young (because they go supernova after a few million years of existence), but it does not necessarily follow that all young stars are blue. The hypothesis that stars start off blue and go through the spectral types from O through to M did exist but it's long since obsolete.
My brain rebooted when it tried to make sense of that logic. Especially the light losing energy at multiples of a speed. Note that 42 mps is 67 kps, not 72. If this incoherent drek is what Halton Arp was proposing, then I'm beginning to realise why he got the sack.
I doubt this very much.
No, people refuse to accept this "fact" because the invariance of the speed of light was shown by experiment in the 19th century and is the basis on which the theory of relativity was constructed. It is evident from literally thousands of experiments that the predictions of relativity are accurate. We see the consequences of an invariant speed of light wherever we look.
By that logic, a searchlight 10 metres away is closer than a firefly 1 metre away, and the Sun 150 million kilometres away is closer than either.
Note that, as bright as it is, the typical luminosity of a quasar is still 10 million times less than the luminosity an object will need to have in order for the radiation density to be sufficiently great to form a black hole. That is the only theoretical upper limit on how bright an object can be.
I've started to get horrible feelings of dread whenever Pathlights uses the phrase "here are several facts".
I've already explained why this is nonsense even by Pathlights standards.
I have a bad feeling about this.
I would like to see his rigorous proof of the assertion that "this just cannot be true". But of course he hasn't got one.
I'm getting the distinct impression that he doesn't know how Lorentz transformations work. The conclusion that the quasar is moving faster than light is mathematically impossible to derive from any redshift data that doesn't involve imaginary numbers.
Anyone who thinks life needs to be purposeful on the cosmic scale evidently has a cosmic-scale ego. This may explain why he thinks he's such a genius despite presenting evidence which proves the exact opposite every time he touches his keyboard. I am perfectly happy with a life which is purposeless on the cosmic scale. I don't find such a life to be a continual misery. I make the most of it, and certainly don't whine about not being significant in the grand scheme of things. "If this were true then this bad thing would be the case" is a fallacy formally known as the Appeal to Consequences (or argumentum ad consequentiam if you prefer the Latin), but I like to call this particular version the Emo Kid Argument.
Now on to stellar evolution.
He keeps confusing his fields. That's a Big Bang question, not a stellar evolution question, and needless to say Big Bang theory does explain this.
Because there's no way that gas moving under the influence of gravity could form such incomprehensible patterns as spirals and ellipses.
How, then, can anyone presume to tell us that Bronze Age camel herders knew the answer?
And indeed we do see them.
Why indeed?
They don't explode into existence, they explode at the end of their existence. Supernovae and all that. What's "evolutionary time" and how does it differ from the regular kind?
This isn't the first time he's come out with this frightful, contrived idea of supernovae suddenly stopping. He assumes that a supernova 100 million light years away has the same apparent magnitude as one in our own galaxy, even though he knows the inverse square law and has actually invoked it in his "quasars can't be that bright" argument.
What has star formation got to do with the second law of thermodynamics? Does he even know what the second law of thermodynamics is? Does any creationist, for that matter?
Conic sections (the standard elliptical and hyperbolic orbit paths, to a first-order approximation) naturally result from inverse-square-law gravitation. That's hardly complicated, but we've already seen that he struggles to get his head round anything more geometrically complex than a straight line.
I won't even dignify this crap with an explanation - just do a Google search on "general relativity".
Thanks for explaining what "fuelled" means. Evidently he thinks everyone is as ignorant as he is.
1. Nobody suggests that stars are fuelled by hydrogen explosions.
2. Hydrogen explosions don't form neutrinos.
3. Neutrinos aren't antimatter.
No: stars shine because of nuclear fusion, not hydrogen explosions.
The problem with solar collapse is that there is no way that it can release enough energy to account for the fact that the Earth isn't an iceball at close to absolute zero.
If you call 14 billion years young.
If you call 4.6 billion years very young.
It's these delightfully inane turns of phrase which make me wonder whether Pathlights isn't just someone's idea of a very elaborate and long-running joke.
Rotation and centrifugal force explain why galaxies are flattened rather than spherical.
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Redshift has to do with galaxies, not the stars within them.
Of course it can't, because the stellar evolution theory has nothing to do with galaxies. The "luminous bridges of matter" are nothing more than the galactic haloes merging due to distortion from the gravity of the other galaxy.
I know all these words but I can't parse this.
Suppose a galaxy has existed for (say) 10 billion years. Now let a star come into existence in that galaxy. By Pathlights logic, the galaxy is now only as old as our new star. By three-digit-IQ logic, the galaxy is 10 billion years old. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the mass-luminosity law.
The theory predicts that stars should be mostly hydrogen, and indeed they are.
"Scientific" describes the way the theories about the processes are arrived at, not the processes themselves.
It would be even less possible in the absence of another gravitational field to interfere with the self-gravitation of the gas cloud? How?
Or according to the required size of the gas cloud necessary to make a star. And hasn't he heard of contact binaries? In any case, if you read the accounts then pre-planning isn't exactly the fundie Big Man in the Sky's strong suit.
And here's another case of knowing all the words but having no idea what the hell he's going on about. A physical barrier between the stars? WTF?
I'll give him this - he's managed to restrain himself from actually mentioning the BMITS thus far. However, now that he has, he's lost whatever remote traces of scientific credibility he's been able to retain. The theory less reliant on mythology is that the multiple stars formed in the same gas cloud.
The theory has occurred on Earth, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. And it wouldn't have been formulated had we not made observations consistent with it.
No they don't. Why does Pathlights think we're all stupid enough to derive equations which violate something as fundamental as the laws of thermodynamics?
Note that a brief glance at a high school definition of the first law of thermodynamics should be enough to convince anyone of the impossibility of creation.
The search continues. Creationists desperately continue searching for some scrap of evidence which will really support their theory that the universe originated in a manner consistent with Hebrew mythology. But they labour in vain. Incidentally, nobody suggests that the universe made itself because that would be a paradox. The theory (specifically the first law of thermodynamics Pathlights is so fond of waving around) states that the universe has always existed, but "always" is a finite time believed to be about 14 billion years.
That would be the truly deluded men. No truly great men would demonstrate the horrendous levels of stupidity and ignorance that Mr. Pathlights parades in the name of "science". No word on where women feature in his scheme, but I suspect kitchens are involved.
Depends what he means by "star clusters". If he means a globular cluster, the stars are close enough together as to be an extreme case of a multiple star system. If he means an open cluster, then he's lying because open clusters contain more multiple star systems than average.
I dispute "without ever crashing" - do we have evidence that collisions have never occurred and can never occur between globular clusters and stars within a galactic disc? It would admittedly be unlikely because of the distances involved, but that doesn't indicate the existence of a precise relationship, much less an astounding one.
The centrifugal force and the gravitational force are in equilibrium, so they do not collapse. A force isn't required to bring them together since they are already together.
Besides, the theories are anything but random.
Next up are the galaxies themselves.
This looks suspiciously like circular reasoning to me. "Galaxies disagree with scientific theory because they disagree with scientific theory."
Because they exist in a state of lower gravitational potential energy, and this has nothing to do with stellar evolution.
Far too rapid for what? Undefined terms for the win.
Globular or open clusters? And whichever type he means, how does he decide what "too many" means?
It is by this point obvious that communication skills weren't overemphasised at his school.
Until we factor centrifugal force into the equations.
He goes from one extreme to the other. First, centrifugal force doesn't exist. Now it is strong enough to tear the galaxy apart. Note that the spiral arms may be tearing apart for all we know - the process would take many millions if not billions of years.
Finally, we have black holes.
Enough about creationism. Let's talk about black holes.
The theory of black holes contains no statistical abstractions. It originates from general relativity (which he himself has invoked above) which this is a completely different branch of physics from statistical mechanics. Though we've already established that the distinctions between different areas of physics are too much for him to handle.
This is a totally unverifiable assertion.
The speed theory of redshift also follows from relativity. If the distant stars were stationary relative to us, then any attenuation of the radiation would not affect its wavelength. I've covered this in detail here so see no need to reiterate further.
If they were that reputable, they would at least present some evidence for the amazing generalisation that black holes cannot exist under any conceivable circumstances.
He isn't wrong here. It's globular clusters, not galactic or open clusters, that have black holes at the centre.
By his fanciful expression "star eaters" I assume he means X-ray stars. These emit X-rays in a pattern consistent with a binary system containing a star and a black hole. The black hole consumes matter from its partner, heating it to the point where it gives off X-rays. All observations of such systems are consistent with the black hole hypothesis.
Then the inventors failed. The theory of black holes doesn't do the case for creationism any good at all.
In 2002, I posted to my (now long since defunct) website a list of rebuttals to the claims that the PCEE makes about Big Bang theory and stellar evolution. The document has been gathering dust on my hard drive ever since I shut down the site, but figured FSTDT might appreciate it.
The pages I'm critiquing start here, under the heading "Science vs. the Big Bang". Another bad sign is that the writer invokes "common sense", which as we all know invariably translates as "I haven't got a clue so I hope nobody will notice that I just made some shit up" in the context of a scientific discussion.
Nothing to explode it. There would be no match, no fire to explode nothingness.
The Big Bang didn't explode from combustion (for one thing, there wasn't any oxygen). It is an expansion of space itself rather than an explosion per se; the term "Big Bang" is rather misleading (intentionally so: it was coined by Fred Hoyle, a proponent of the steady state hypothesis) but it has stuck.
No way to expand it. There would be no way to push (explode) nothingness outward. A total vacuum can neither contract nor expand. According to the laws of physics, it takes energy to do work, and there is no energy in emptiness.
There can be energy in empty space. Electromagnetic radiation, for instance. "It takes energy to do work" is tautological, since to do work means to transfer energy. In any case, the Lemaitre-Friedmann-Robertson-Walker model is obtained from the laws of physics and produces an expanding universe quite nicely.
Energy is a deceptively difficult concept to explain well, and doubly so in a general-relativistic model. The way it's covered at school resorts to a deeply unsatisfying circular argument: energy is the stored ability to do work; work is the transfer of energy. The accurate definition is that energy is a state function that's conserved by virtue of the system's action function being independent of time, according to a result from mathematical physics called Noether's theorem which states that every symmetry of a system has a corresponding conserved quantity. In simpler terms, the fact that something behaves the same way today as it did yesterday and will continue to do so tomorrow tells us that we can define a function which we call "energy" that remains the same for all time.
I shall leave the consequences of the creationist model to this view of energy as an exercise for the reader.
No way to go past the helium mass 4 gap. It is extremely difficult, and perhaps impossible, for hydrogen to explode past the atomic gap which exists at mass 5 and 8. In the sequence of atomic weight numbers, there are no stable atoms at mass 5 and 8. Because of the mass 5 gap, it is unlikely that hydrogen can change into heavier elements than helium. Because of the mass 8 gap, neither of them can change into heavier elements.
Hydrogen nuclei don't explode, and consisting as they do of single protons they can't. They join together in nuclear fusion, which is as close to the opposite of exploding as you can get. The mass 5 gap is irrelevant, since it's the fusion of helium-4 which produces heavy isotopes. Two helium-4 nuclei produce one beryllium-8, which is highly unstable but absorbs another helium-4 before it gets a chance to decay, forming the very stable isotope carbon-12.
No way to produce enough of the heavier elements. Even if hydrogen explosions could produce heavier elements, there are several other reasons why it could not produce enough of them.
Of course they couldn't, because explosions produce nothing. As I've said it's nuclear fusion which scientists claim produce heavier elements, as he would know if he bothered to do even a minimal amount of research. He seems to be confusing the nuclear fusion taking place routinely in stars with the neutron-capture process in supernova explosions, which is believed to produce elements heavier than iron. Even there, it's not the actual explosion which produces the elements. The explosion is merely the rapid expansion of a very hot gas cloud.
Random explosions do not produce intricate orbits. Haphazard explosions could never produce stellar rotations or orbits.
Stellar rotations and orbits are of the form of approximate conic sections. Gravity works according to an approximate inverse square law, as has been amply demonstrated by experiment. If we solve the equations for an inverse square law force, we get a conic section. It's not difficult, nor is it especially intricate. Historically, it was the observation that orbits were conics with the centre of mass at the focus that led to the formulation of the inverse square law of gravitation.
We'll see this later on that he seems to consider the most mathematically simple geometric forms in the same way the rest of us think of non-Euclidean geometry.
Why did the explosions stop? The theory requires that the star explosions (super-novas) suddenly stopped - conveniently just before light rays could reach us. Yet no adequate explanation is given for the sudden termination. In addition, because of known distant stars, there is not enough time needed for those super-nova explosions to occur - before they had to stop.
The theory nowhere requires the supernovae to stop. They're happening all the time, it's just that the universe is a big place and we don't see them all.
Too few super-novas and too little matter from them. Super-novas do not throw off enough heavy atoms in each explosion to account for all the stars which exist. Only a few super-novas have occurred in the past thousand years.
Again, only a few supernovae have occurred in our galaxy in the past thousand years. We see a supernova within our galaxy shining with the brightness of the full moon in the sky: for a few days, the star outshines the rest of the galaxy. However, other galaxies are considerably further away (the nearest is M31/Andromeda, at 2 million light years away). There are always supernovae.
"Too perfect" an explosion. Many scientists agree that the calculations needed to figure a Big Bang and its aftermath are too close, too exacting to be accepted even by competent scientists.
Once again, vagueness is the order of the day. He doesn't say which set of calculations are too exacting, though he might be referring to the parameter in the LFRW metric that determines whether the universe is spherical, flat or hyperbolic (the term seems very close to flat, too close to call without knowing more about the universe). Didn't he just tell us that the theoretical Big Bang is random and haphazard?
Only hydrogen and helium found in super-nova explosions. The Big Bang theory requires that elements heavier than lithium were set free by super-nova explosions. But analysis of the Crab nebula (a gigantic super-nova explosion in A.D. 1054) reveals there are no elements heavier than light weight helium in the outflowing residual gases from it. Thus it appears that hydrogen explosions cannot bridge the mass 4 gap, no matter what the temperature of the explosion.
Intersteller [sic] gas has a variety of elements. The theory requires that floating gas in space (which is said to be the remnants of the Big Bang) should only have hydrogen and helium from the initial Bang, but research shows that other elements are also present.
These statements are presented out of their original order since they are mutually contradictory. In the one, there are no elements heavier than "light weight helium". In the other, there are heavier elements.
Does "light weight helium" refer to helium-3? He's talking about the mass 4 gap, then seems to contradict himself by saying that there's nothing heavier than helium-3. This is patently false because under the conditions helium-3 is produced, we also get helium-4 in much greater quantities.
There are stars and galaxies all through space. If the Big Bang had really occurred, the stars and galaxies would only be found along the outer edge of the gas flowage instead of throughout space.
When a gas outflows, it doesn't do so like a balloon with matter on the outside and vacuum in the middle. In fact, that contradicts his own point about gas moving from high density to low density. I think he's misinterpreted the balloon analogy of the expansion of the universe.
Angular momentum and momentum-mass relationship. Origin theories cannot explain the delicate relationship existing between mass (size and weight) of an object and its angular momentum (rapidity with which it rotates.)
The rapidity of rotation is the angular velocity, not the angular momentum. The only "delicate relationship" between mass and angular momentum is the fact that the angular momentum of a particle about a point is defined as the angular velocity about that point, multiplied by the square of the distance from the point, multiplied by the particle's mass.
I should hardly need to add at this point that mass and weight aren't the same thing, because most people learned that at school.
There is not enough antimatter. Any type of initial origin-of-matter theory requires the simultaneous creation of matter and antimatter (neutrinos, etc.). But only a few neutrinos and other antimatter are found in space. In addition, at the Big Bang, the matter and antimatter would immediately have destroyed one another. An equal amount of each would have been made, and then the two would have united, blotting out both.
Firstly, neutrinos aren't antimatter. (Antineutrinos are, but there are plenty of them because they only annihilate with neutrinos. In fact, antineutrinos are produced all the time from the decay of radioactive carbon-14 and potassium-40, and other naturally occurring radioisotopes.) Secondly, there is a theoretical basis for matter and antimatter not being perfectly symmetrical.
No theoretical "infinite point" for matter. Only in theory can everything unite in one point. In reality, it cannot do that. First, the inrushing nothingness would not stop, but go on past the central point. Second, there would be no gravity (because no matter supposedly existed!) to pull it in. Only when there is matter, is there gravity.
The Big Bang does not involve inrushing "nothingness" because it's an expansion of the universe! He seems to have confused himself now.
Just so we're clear, by the way, all forms of energy contribute to gravity. Not just matter and mass. And all components of the stress-energy tensor are involved, momentum as well as energy.
Low and high metal stars. According to the theory, younger stars should be in the center of galaxies, and they should be "low metal stars"; that is, have less heavier elements. Yet all stars are found to have far too much "metal."
Shouldn't younger stars have more heavy elements? I swear he has confused himself with his own attempts at obfuscation.
7 reasons why background radiation does not support the Big Bang.
Or alternatively, 7 reasons why he needs to go back to school.
It is omnidirectional. Background radiation flows toward us from all directions; yet it would come from only one direction if it was from the Big Bang.
The Big Bang isn't an event, it's a process. The background radiation is a characteristic of the universe itself, and since the universe is isotropic (the same in all directions) the background radiation will also be isotropic and omnidirectional.
It is too weak. The radiation should be between ten and a thousand times more powerful than it is.
Its spectrum should be far hotter (5 degrees K) than it actually is (only 2.73 degrees K). If the explosion had occurred 15 billion years ago, the background radiation should now be emitting a far higher temperature heat.
The predictions (presented out of their original order so I can comment on them both at once) rely on knowing not only the way these characteristics change over time, but on how much energy is present in the early Universe. The latter is rather difficult to measure. (Yes, he did say 15 billion, despite it being 20 billion on the previous page. Make your mind up. The actual figure that tends to be cited nowadays is about 14 billion.)
I couldn't leave this without commenting on the phrase "emitting a far higher temperature heat". I can't even tell you what I think it's supposed to mean, because it makes no sense at all. And whilst we're on such matters, it's not "degrees Kelvin" but just "Kelvin" and has been since the 1960s.
It lacks the proper spectrum. The radiation does not have the ideal "black body"; that is, it should have total light absorption capacity.
How is radiation supposed to absorb light? OK, I know what he's getting at, and in actual fact the wavelengths of the background radiation do match the 2.7 K blackbody radiation curve quite well.
It is too smooth. Research proves that this radiation is definitely too smooth to agree with the Big Bang theory. It is not clustered enough, and even if it was, it could not produce stars. Gas in outer space (and on earth) always pushes outward, never inward.
There's this little thing we call "gravity".
(Background radiation doesn't form stars, by the way. By definition, it's the energy left over from the early universe which didn't form matter. The LFRW model has the energy density of radiation dropping off by the fourth power of the radius parameter - this is interpreted as the number of photons remaining the same but their wavelengths being stretched as the universe expands. This incidentally is also used to explain redshift.)
What is the source of the radiation? Everything in the universe is lumpy, except the gas in outer space: (1) background radiation (which is microwave radiation) and (2) infrared radiation. It appears that the source of both types of radiation is nothing more than the outflowage [sic] of radiation from the stars and galaxies on all sides of us.
I'd like to know how a star or galaxy is supposed to produce a near-perfect 2.7 kelvin blackbody radiation profile. That's a cold star.
(I see Pathlights is an adherent of the Bush Principle - never use a short word like "efflux" when a long neologism like "outflowage" will do.)
According to how far away they are, light from the stars is pushed toward the red end of the color spectrum. The amount of skewing is proportional to the distance to the star which sent the light ray to us. What is the cause of this shift toward the red? Evolutionists rely on a disproved theory (the speed theory) of the redshift in an effort to show there was a Big Bang. Accepting the speed theory makes it appear that the universe is expanding (the expanding universe theory). The evolutionists need an expanding universe, because their theory teaches that everything flowed outward from the Big Bang?which is proven by the fact that the universe is still moving outward. But the speed theory is incorrect, so the universe is not expanding.
Evolution has no relevance whatsoever to the Big Bang. Stellar evolution is a separate field of study. And it's the expansion of the universe and consequent stretching of the wavelength of the photons that's used to explain redshift.
Claims of a lumpy background radiation
All radiation is lumpy, in that it comes in lumps. Those of us who actually do know something about the topic call these "lumps" quanta.
and the foolish "speed theory of the redshift" are the two primary evidences used to prove that there once was a Big Bang. But, like claims for background radiation, the speed theory is false evidence, based on a misinterpretation of the data. There are other theories which explain the redshift much better.
The speed theory of the redshift is not the whole story. Theory suggests a redshift caused by the expansion of the universe in addition to the Doppler effect, as I've already said. The speed theory is a simplification used to explain what's going on to those who don't understand general-relativistic cosmology, modelling the galaxies as moving in a static spacetime rather than stationary in an expanding one.
The speed redshift. Also called the "Doppler theory of redshift" this speed theory supports the evolutionary position, and therefore is tenaciously clung to by the evolutionists. According to it, the farther that stars are from our planet, the faster they are moving away from us.
None of which has any relevance to evolution.
The other explanations of the redshift better agree with the facts. Now all agree that the distance of our planet to the star has something to do with the redshift.
Hallelujah! Mainstream science which Pathlights accepts!
Aside from the speed theory, there are three other possible explanations. The speed theory has several flaws; but each of the following three possibilities are based on solid, known scientific facts.
Like light slowing down as it approaches us - he does actually suggest this later, as we shall see. Scientific fact? No more solid and known than his mastery of the semicolon.
Singly or together, they provide a much better explanation of the redshift:
We'll see about that.
[1] Gravitational redshifts. Light rays from the stars must travel vast distances to reach us. It has been proven that the pull of gravity, from the stars the light rays pass, could indeed cause a loss in light-wave energy - thus moving that light toward the red on the spectrum. Einstein was the first to predict that gravity would affect starlight, and this was shown to be true in the 1960s.
And I've found a glaring flaw already. The gravity of the stars "behind" the light ray will redshift it, but the gravity of the stars in front of it will blueshift it an equivalent amount. Net effect on wavelength: zero.
[2] Second-order Doppler shift. It is known that a light source moving at right angles to an observer will be redshifted. Compare this fact with the known fact that all stars are definitely circling galaxies. In addition, many scientists suspect that, just as all planets and stars are kept in position by orbiting, so, for purposes of stability, the entire universe is probably circling a common center!
We observe the universe as being homogeneous (the same distribution of galaxies everywhere) and isotropic (the same in all directions on the large scale). Combining these axioms gives us the LFRW cosmological model, according to which the universe does not and cannot have a centre.
[3] Energy-loss shift. Light waves could themselves lose energy as they travel across the long distances of space. This is called "tired light." The energy-loss shift is probably the primary cause of the redshift.
The light decreases in intensity as it crosses space, true. This does not affect the wavelength.
The Arp Discoveries. *Halton C. Arp, of the Mount Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories, made several discoveries which threaten to overturn stellar evolutionary theories, especially those concerning the speed theory of the redshift. Here are several of them [...] Summarizing the Arp discoveries. Arp has found differential redshifts associated with over 260 galaxies, and has published a catalog of hundreds of discordant redshifts. But his work has been ignored. Arp says that energy loss ("tired light") is the cause of the redshifts.
Energy loss does not affect the wavelength. If a photon is absorbed by interstellar matter, the other photons will carry on regardless with the same wavelength as before.
Getting rid of the opposition. Halton Arp was eventually fired for presenting evidence contrary to the Big Bang theory.
I wonder if this is where Ben Stein got inspiration for the premise of his abortion of a film. (EDIT: Obviously this comment wasn't part of the original document.)
There are several other evidences that the speed theory is incorrect:
As well as "several evidences" that he failed GCSE English.
Slight blueness of distant galaxies. According to evolutionary theory, the bluest stars are the youngest, and, therefore, the most distant stars should be the bluest. But they are just like the nearest ones.
All blue stars are young (because they go supernova after a few million years of existence), but it does not necessarily follow that all young stars are blue. The hypothesis that stars start off blue and go through the spectral types from O through to M did exist but it's long since obsolete.
Redshift distance multiples. An oddity has been discovered that does not agree with the speed theory, but could fit into the energy-loss theory: Stars tend to be most often located at certain distances from us! This totally defies the speed theory. But it may be that starlight loses energy as it travels, and this weakening especially reveals itself at multiples of 72 kps [42 mps].
My brain rebooted when it tried to make sense of that logic. Especially the light losing energy at multiples of a speed. Note that 42 mps is 67 kps, not 72. If this incoherent drek is what Halton Arp was proposing, then I'm beginning to realise why he got the sack.
Photons slow down. Arp and his associates have shown that photons (unit pieces of starlight) actually do slow down as they travel toward us.
I doubt this very much.
Evolutionists refuse to accept this fact, because it would destroy their "expanding universe" theory.
No, people refuse to accept this "fact" because the invariance of the speed of light was shown by experiment in the 19th century and is the basis on which the theory of relativity was constructed. It is evident from literally thousands of experiments that the predictions of relativity are accurate. We see the consequences of an invariant speed of light wherever we look.
Quasars may hold the key to an understanding of the redshift. According to the speed theory of redshift, quasars must be the most distant objects in the universe. Yet light from them is quite bright, and some can be seen through optical telescopes; therefore, they cannot possibly be very distant.
By that logic, a searchlight 10 metres away is closer than a firefly 1 metre away, and the Sun 150 million kilometres away is closer than either.
Note that, as bright as it is, the typical luminosity of a quasar is still 10 million times less than the luminosity an object will need to have in order for the radiation density to be sufficiently great to form a black hole. That is the only theoretical upper limit on how bright an object can be.
Here are several facts about quasars which help disprove the speed theory:
I've started to get horrible feelings of dread whenever Pathlights uses the phrase "here are several facts".
If the speed theory is correct, quasars are far too bright. The fact that quasars can be seen through optical telescopes, yet are supposed to so far away, violates the inverse-square law. They just could not possibly be so far away, and yet so bright.
I've already explained why this is nonsense even by Pathlights standards.
If the speed theory is true, quasars travel too fast, and some go faster than the speed of light!
I have a bad feeling about this.
16 percent. In 1962, a quasar was found which, according to the speed theory, is moving away from us at the amazing velocity of 16 percent of the speed of light! This just cannot be true, and thus disproves the speed theory of redshift.
I would like to see his rigorous proof of the assertion that "this just cannot be true". But of course he hasn't got one.
Eight times faster than the speed of light. Three quasars have been found which, according to the speed theory of redshift, would be moving eight times faster than the speed of light! As of 1990, over thirty faster-than-light quasars have been found.
I'm getting the distinct impression that he doesn't know how Lorentz transformations work. The conclusion that the quasar is moving faster than light is mathematically impossible to derive from any redshift data that doesn't involve imaginary numbers.
Thoughtful scientists admit that, if [mainstream scientific] theories of the origin of the universe were true, life would be purposeless and a continual misery.
Anyone who thinks life needs to be purposeful on the cosmic scale evidently has a cosmic-scale ego. This may explain why he thinks he's such a genius despite presenting evidence which proves the exact opposite every time he touches his keyboard. I am perfectly happy with a life which is purposeless on the cosmic scale. I don't find such a life to be a continual misery. I make the most of it, and certainly don't whine about not being significant in the grand scheme of things. "If this were true then this bad thing would be the case" is a fallacy formally known as the Appeal to Consequences (or argumentum ad consequentiam if you prefer the Latin), but I like to call this particular version the Emo Kid Argument.
Now on to stellar evolution.
Where did the gas come from? Hydrogen gas is supposed to have made itself into stars, but where did the hydrogen come from?
He keeps confusing his fields. That's a Big Bang question, not a stellar evolution question, and needless to say Big Bang theory does explain this.
How could random gas movements produce stars and galaxies? The intricate design and balance of the galaxies renders the theory impossible.
Because there's no way that gas moving under the influence of gravity could form such incomprehensible patterns as spirals and ellipses.
The birth of a star has never been observed. How then can anyone presume to tell us how it came about?
How, then, can anyone presume to tell us that Bronze Age camel herders knew the answer?
We should see exploding stars today, since the theory requires that billions and billions of exploding stars occurred.
And indeed we do see them.
Why would they have stopped exploding?
Why indeed?
There is not enough evolutionary time for the stars to be formed. The theory requires that they all explode themselves into existence
They don't explode into existence, they explode at the end of their existence. Supernovae and all that. What's "evolutionary time" and how does it differ from the regular kind?
and then stop exploding just before their light could be sent for us to see.
This isn't the first time he's come out with this frightful, contrived idea of supernovae suddenly stopping. He assumes that a supernova 100 million light years away has the same apparent magnitude as one in our own galaxy, even though he knows the inverse square law and has actually invoked it in his "quasars can't be that bright" argument.
There is a universal law requiring star degeneration, not star formation. It is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
What has star formation got to do with the second law of thermodynamics? Does he even know what the second law of thermodynamics is? Does any creationist, for that matter?
Explosions could not produce what we find in the skies. All about us are the complicated orbits and careful balancing of the stars around galaxies.
Conic sections (the standard elliptical and hyperbolic orbit paths, to a first-order approximation) naturally result from inverse-square-law gravitation. That's hardly complicated, but we've already seen that he struggles to get his head round anything more geometrically complex than a straight line.
The theory does not explain the working of gravity, yet, if it is a comprehensive theory of self-originations, it should do so.
I won't even dignify this crap with an explanation - just do a Google search on "general relativity".
The theory requires that stars are fueled (shine)
Thanks for explaining what "fuelled" means. Evidently he thinks everyone is as ignorant as he is.
by hydrogen explosions, but that cannot be true since not enough neutrinos (subatomic antimatter) are formed.
1. Nobody suggests that stars are fuelled by hydrogen explosions.
2. Hydrogen explosions don't form neutrinos.
3. Neutrinos aren't antimatter.
Stars shine because of solar collapse, not hydrogen explosions.
No: stars shine because of nuclear fusion, not hydrogen explosions.
Solar shock waves (160-minute oscillations) on the sun's surface, support the concept of solar collapse.
The problem with solar collapse is that there is no way that it can release enough energy to account for the fact that the Earth isn't an iceball at close to absolute zero.
Abundant evidence points to a young universe
If you call 14 billion years young.
and a very young Planet Earth.
If you call 4.6 billion years very young.
Wrapping-up factor. The galaxies cannot be very old because the galactic magnetic field would cause a too-quick wrapping-up of the stars.
It's these delightfully inane turns of phrase which make me wonder whether Pathlights isn't just someone's idea of a very elaborate and long-running joke.
The usual saucer shape of galaxies defies explanation by the laws of physics. They should not hold together as they do.
Rotation and centrifugal force explain why galaxies are flattened rather than spherical.
If the evolutionary redshift theory were true, stars within galaxies would fly apart, but they do not do so. (See The Origin of Matter, for an explanation of the redshift.) [Which of course has nothing to do with evolution. It's not the best debating strategy to misuse your terms constantly. szaleniec]
Redshift has to do with galaxies, not the stars within them.
Some galaxy groups are joined by luminous bridges of matter. This cannot be explained by the stellar evolution theory.
Of course it can't, because the stellar evolution theory has nothing to do with galaxies. The "luminous bridges of matter" are nothing more than the galactic haloes merging due to distortion from the gravity of the other galaxy.
Hydrogen gas in outer space cannot possibly stick together.
I know all these words but I can't parse this.
Each galaxy must be as young as its youngest stars, because of the mass-luminosity law and the fact that all types of stars are found in each galaxy.
Suppose a galaxy has existed for (say) 10 billion years. Now let a star come into existence in that galaxy. By Pathlights logic, the galaxy is now only as old as our new star. By three-digit-IQ logic, the galaxy is 10 billion years old. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with the mass-luminosity law.
All stars are chemically similar, yet they should not be if the theory was true.
The theory predicts that stars should be mostly hydrogen, and indeed they are.
Outflowing gas cannot possibly clump together into stars. There is no scientific way it can happen.
"Scientific" describes the way the theories about the processes are arrived at, not the processes themselves.
Stars should not exist at all. There is simply no mechanism by which they could form. Gas on earth would never push into itself; it would expand. In the vacuum of outer space, it would be even less possible.
It would be even less possible in the absence of another gravitational field to interfere with the self-gravitation of the gas cloud? How?
Stars never get closer than a certain distance. This appears to be according to preplanning.
Or according to the required size of the gas cloud necessary to make a star. And hasn't he heard of contact binaries? In any case, if you read the accounts then pre-planning isn't exactly the fundie Big Man in the Sky's strong suit.
A physical barrier exists between the smallest and largest stars; the red giants and the white dwarfs they are supposed to evolve into.
And here's another case of knowing all the words but having no idea what the hell he's going on about. A physical barrier between the stars? WTF?
Over half the stars are binary or multiple star systems. How could they possibly originate from random gas movements and star explosions? Only God could make two stars encircle each other, without crashing into one another.
I'll give him this - he's managed to restrain himself from actually mentioning the BMITS thus far. However, now that he has, he's lost whatever remote traces of scientific credibility he's been able to retain. The theory less reliant on mythology is that the multiple stars formed in the same gas cloud.
No evidence exists that evolution theory has occurred anywhere in the universe.
The theory has occurred on Earth, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it. And it wouldn't have been formulated had we not made observations consistent with it.
The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics are powerful and cannot be broken. They deny the possibility of stellar evolution.
No they don't. Why does Pathlights think we're all stupid enough to derive equations which violate something as fundamental as the laws of thermodynamics?
Note that a brief glance at a high school definition of the first law of thermodynamics should be enough to convince anyone of the impossibility of creation.
The search continues. Evolutionists desperately continue searching for some scrap of evidence which will really support their theory that the universe made itself. But they labor in vain.
The search continues. Creationists desperately continue searching for some scrap of evidence which will really support their theory that the universe originated in a manner consistent with Hebrew mythology. But they labour in vain. Incidentally, nobody suggests that the universe made itself because that would be a paradox. The theory (specifically the first law of thermodynamics Pathlights is so fond of waving around) states that the universe has always existed, but "always" is a finite time believed to be about 14 billion years.
Conclusion. The truly great men are those who acknowledge that God made the universe and everything within it.
That would be the truly deluded men. No truly great men would demonstrate the horrendous levels of stupidity and ignorance that Mr. Pathlights parades in the name of "science". No word on where women feature in his scheme, but I suspect kitchens are involved.
There are no binaries in star clusters, yet nearly all stars outside of clusters are binaries. Evolutionists cannot explain this.
Depends what he means by "star clusters". If he means a globular cluster, the stars are close enough together as to be an extreme case of a multiple star system. If he means an open cluster, then he's lying because open clusters contain more multiple star systems than average.
The [globular] clusters orbit up and down through the orbiting disk, without ever crashing. Such precise relationships are astounding.
I dispute "without ever crashing" - do we have evidence that collisions have never occurred and can never occur between globular clusters and stars within a galactic disc? It would admittedly be unlikely because of the distances involved, but that doesn't indicate the existence of a precise relationship, much less an astounding one.
Globular clusters exist, without collapsing in on themselves. Yet this disagrees with random, accidental formation theories. Any force bringing them together should crush them.
The centrifugal force and the gravitational force are in equilibrium, so they do not collapse. A force isn't required to bring them together since they are already together.
Besides, the theories are anything but random.
Next up are the galaxies themselves.
Here are 7 facts about galaxies which disagree with evolutionary theories:
Their existence and formation defies evolutionary answers.
Their existence and formation defies evolutionary answers.
This looks suspiciously like circular reasoning to me. "Galaxies disagree with scientific theory because they disagree with scientific theory."
The existence of super-clusters is opposed to stellar evolution. Galaxies are clumped together into still larger formations.
Because they exist in a state of lower gravitational potential energy, and this has nothing to do with stellar evolution.
The motion of outer stars in disk galaxies is far too rapid.
Far too rapid for what? Undefined terms for the win.
Elliptical galaxies have too many clusters in them.
Globular or open clusters? And whichever type he means, how does he decide what "too many" means?
The largest central disk galaxy will be axially the same as the others.
It is by this point obvious that communication skills weren't overemphasised at his school.
Galaxies should never be disk-shaped.
Until we factor centrifugal force into the equations.
The outer arms of disk galaxies should tear apart.
He goes from one extreme to the other. First, centrifugal force doesn't exist. Now it is strong enough to tear the galaxy apart. Note that the spiral arms may be tearing apart for all we know - the process would take many millions if not billions of years.
Finally, we have black holes.
A strange story. The theory is totally imaginative; something that exists only on paper.
Enough about creationism. Let's talk about black holes.
Black holes are a theoretical extreme. This theory is actually a statistical abstraction
The theory of black holes contains no statistical abstractions. It originates from general relativity (which he himself has invoked above) which this is a completely different branch of physics from statistical mechanics. Though we've already established that the distinctions between different areas of physics are too much for him to handle.
carried to an extreme. It has no reality, and could not possibly be true.
This is a totally unverifiable assertion.
Black holes are needed in order to protect the stellar origins theory against the reality of quasars. The truth about quasars destroys the speed theory of redshift, which in turn is needed to prop up the Big Bang theory.
The speed theory of redshift also follows from relativity. If the distant stars were stationary relative to us, then any attenuation of the radiation would not affect its wavelength. I've covered this in detail here so see no need to reiterate further.
Reputable scientists declare black holes to be non-existent.
If they were that reputable, they would at least present some evidence for the amazing generalisation that black holes cannot exist under any conceivable circumstances.
They are neither star eaters nor galactic cluster centers.
He isn't wrong here. It's globular clusters, not galactic or open clusters, that have black holes at the centre.
By his fanciful expression "star eaters" I assume he means X-ray stars. These emit X-rays in a pattern consistent with a binary system containing a star and a black hole. The black hole consumes matter from its partner, heating it to the point where it gives off X-rays. All observations of such systems are consistent with the black hole hypothesis.
Black holes were only invented to salvage a worthless theory of origins.
Then the inventors failed. The theory of black holes doesn't do the case for creationism any good at all.
