Astronomers and collider collide
Crisis in Cosmology 2 conference summary
Media release
Friday, September 12, 2008 - For immediate release
For more information contact Tom Van Flandern, 360-504-1169 (Sequim, WA),
Port Angeles, Wa – This week, dozens of leading astronomers, researchers and other scientists from around the globe met for a Cosmology conference. [1] The conference provided eight panels composed of experts in every facet of cosmology including the reality of expansion, quasars, dark matter, dark energy, “black holes”, and the true nature of the microwave radiation from space. One astronomer made his presentation live from Germany using video-link technology.
Organizer Tom Van Flandern said “This was a thrilling success. We heard and discussed three new mechanisms explaining redshift and a new equation modifying our understanding of gravity. If any of the redshift proposals passes experimental tests that would mean we do not have an expanding Universe; that the Big Bang theory would be without its strongest foundation.”
Physicist John Hartnett from the University of Western Australia said “It’s amusing that our conference occurred just as they fire up the Hadron Collider in Europe. Most of our presenters showed the deep problems with the Big Bang while a 40 billion dollar project starts up to trying to find an elusive particle to keep the Big Bang story from collapsing.”
Redshift in the light from galaxies led to the belief that the universe is expanding, and this belief has persisted for 80 years. But modern observational evidence, especially from NASA European Space Agency space telescopes and satellites, has clouded the picture and raised many doubts. In 2004, an open letter was published in New Scientist magazine, and has since been signed by over 500 endorsers. It begins: “The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed-- inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory.” (http://cosmologystatement.org)
From the many lines of evidence presented at the conference, It now appears that those concerns were justified. Presenters also outlined the principles that a good cosmology should be based on. Chief among them is that it should not require a series of miracles to remain viable.
[1]Cosmology is the study of the largest structures and dynamics of our universe.