You are the one who started being absurd, I only showed you how absurd you were being with your previous comment.
Corrections are never fun, but always appreciated. Thank you.
Funding for astronomy is difficult because the experiments are so costly when compared to the other fields of physics. I know Clemson University is building the worlds 6th or 7th electron beam ion trap for about $1.75 million, whereas the SWIFT mission (for detecting gamma ray bursts) cost about $200 million to build and about $200 thousand per annum to operate. Seems like the issue is consensus for investigations and cost of the mission, not quite the reasons you put forth.
Based upon ten years involved working for a NASA funded university program, I must disagree. The first space telescope contained separately designed instruments at the top and bottom ends of the tube. The primary instrument was designed by university scientists and constructed by an engineering company for about $175,000 per pop. (A prototype plus two pops were required, since the first launch failed.) It worked for 4 years and did a UV catalog for 30,000 objects, and was still working when NASA shut the instrument down. The secondary NASA-designed instrument cost about $5M, delivered worthless data, and failed completely within three weeks.
NASA spent unnecessary millions on a specialized control room for this instrument, and its expensive failed follow-on devices. They paid a crony software contractor $3 mil to develop the telemetry handling software, which only became functional 6 months after launch. The six months was the time required for those clowns to copy the primary experimenter’s software, which was developed on a $20,000 computer with a staff overhead of another $10k.
I continued to work on gov’t funded things for about 15 years and found that the patterns of spending lots of money for incompetent work was a way of life in the experimental science industry. NASA does not like bargains, because its budget is a function of project costs, and they want as large a budget as possible. The organization is run by bureaucrats and politicians, and anyone who wants grants needs to play the big-money game or be the cousin of a rich political donor.
Theology of Christ’s teaching is still under the thumb of the Catholic Church.
Actually, I think that if you read the three most relevant N.T. books carefully you’ll find that Christ did not teach theology, which is, after all, about the nature and properties of any gods and creators. Christ taught behavioral and moral standards and by implication, that if followed, these would please Yahweh, the God of Judaism in which his followers already believed. Thus he changed the religion, but added nothing new to theology itself.
That was subsequently done by Augustine (borrowing ideas from the Gnostics and Zoroastrians) and later by Aquinas. The Church’s theologians are mere men. not Jesus Christ.
Science funding is dictated by bureaucrats at the NSF (who could be ‘the science establishment’) who rely on elected officials to give a budget. I imagine you do not read the pre-prints on arXiv, as you would regularly see conflicting opinions on data sets between several groups of scientists (dark matter is one hot topic for a lot of paper wars). The development of science is not under anyone’s control except the researchers themselves.
No, I do not read that stuff, for the very same reason that I do not watch
Real Housewives of New Jersey. Squabbling between people coming from the wrong places, people whose core beliefs are clearly false, and whose opinions are derived from a blend of dumb beliefs and shallow egos, does not interest me.
I’m currently engaged in a squabble with a mathematician who believes in God, and who agrees with me that God is neither omnipotent nor omniscient. As you know from physics, it is only possible to have a competent discussion if the objects of discussion have limits. Ours is an interesting (to us, anyway) squabble, and civilized because logic is more important than ego.
This is more than I suspected. But it also explains a lot. Not everyone accepted the big bang theory, even Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven denied it unto his death (despite the COBE mission results and the CMB discovery being published before his death). The evidence for the big bang theory is enormous, you should investigate it more fully before continuing your outright denial of the second most tested physical theory.
I have investigated it well enough to be certain that the theory is absurd. I see no particular point in continuing to investigate a theory which has already failed. Would you expect me to become more expert in phlogiston theory, for example? Life is too short to spend sorting through garbage bins for peanuts of truth when buffet tables nearby are laden with untasted goodies.
Hopefully the errors I have caught will prevent you from continuing them.
The real errors will not be repeated. There are areas in which you’ve not convinced me (and the converse is 100% true), so I will continue to repeat what you regard as errors, on the assumption that your opinions may not be as good as mine, until better evidence applies. Simply asserting that your ideas are superior because they have a large measure of scientific agreement does not impress me. I know the history of science too well to be fooled by the concerted agreement of extremely bright nincompoops.
And of course I will continue to make new and different errors as I continue to explore the edges of human understandings about reality and its origins.
Legitimate references indeed:
Cosmic microwave background:
Dicke estimated it to be <20K in 1946 (see
here for ADS listing)
Gamow estimated the CMB to be ~50K in 1948 (see this
Google book published in 1961)
Gamow re-estimated it to be ~7K in 1953 and ~6K in 1956
Dicke re-estimated it to be ~40K in 1960
Penzias and Wilson discover it to be ~3K in 1965
Note that the CMB was
discovered in 1965, about 40 years before the WMAP data.
Here is a Universe Today article citing the discovery of the cosmic
neutrino background with the prediction coming before then. There is
an arXiv paper published in 2004 that predicts a number density and the 7-year WMAP (from 2010) data confirms a close value to it.
Lemaitre predicted an expanding universe (see a PBS review
here) a few years after Friedmann discovered it himself. It was not until Hubble stole Lemaitre’s predictions 2 years later that people began believing it, and, as the PBS review states, the matter was ended when Penzias and Wilson discovered the CMB: the big bang theory was true.
I consider myself blessed, even inundated with data. Thank you! And I notice that those estimates of CMB do bounce around a lot, bracketing a range well outside the finally observed 3K.
As a prediction, that’s like a psychic telling a client that an elephant has snuck into her home while she was gone, and is eating her food. The client rushes home and finds a mouse on the kitchen counter, nibbling at some cheese scraps. You would claim that the psychic was right because she was close enough, having predicted the existence of a hungry mammal. I prefer finer distinctions, having found them helpful to critical thinking.
Nonetheless, you know a lot more about this stuff than I ever want to, and I’d rather have you as a consultant than an antagonist. Let’s try that.
Here’s a question that I’ve been unable to find a reliable answer for: What, exactly, is (or was, since we are looking at ancient radiation) the source of the CMB energy? Was it radiated from leftover atoms, meaning that we are actually observing those atoms just like we observe the matter in stars by measuring its radiation? If so, what atoms or molecules are we observing?
Cosmologists talk as if we are observing pure radiation no longer attached to emitters, but that seems impossible. What’s your knowledge on this, please?
(continued…)
Christians believe God is a loving Father who cares for **all **his creatures from the greatest to the least - even the humble sparrows that were sold for next to nothing!
).