Nobel Prize awarded to Big Bang proponents as evidence vanishes

As this issue was going to press in early October, the Nobel Prizes for 2006 were announced. The prize in physics was awarded to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot for the discovery of the blackbody character of the microwave radiation in space with the COBE satellite. The significance of this finding, according to the citation, read as follows:

“The COBE results provided increased support for the Big Bang scenario for the origin of the universe, as this is the only scenario that predicts the kind of cosmic microwave background radiation measured by COBE. These measurements also marked the inception of cosmology as a precise science.”

Our regular members and readers will recall that the simplest explanation of the microwave radiation is the “temperature of space”, as correctly calculated by Eddington in 1926 and verified with greater accuracy by later authors: 2.8°K. This is the minimum temperature that anything bathed in the radiation of distant starlight can reach. No Big Bang proponent ever came close to predicting the correct temperature of this radiation, its dipolar asymmetry, or the tiny size of its fluctuations.

A glance at our article "The top 30 problems with the big bang" shows 30 of the ever-increasing list (now over 50) of fatal problems for the Big Bang theory. The article is replete with citations, including those for both correct and incorrect microwave temperature predictions. [MRB 11:5-13 (2002); http://metaresearch.org/cosmology/BB-top-30.asp; Apeiron 9 (2002): http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V09NO2PDF/V09N2tvf.PDF.]

            The blackbody character of the microwave radiation was an important observational finding, and its discoverers deserve credit for that (despite trying to attach religious significance to it themselves). But the significance of the finding weighs heavily with the Nobel committee in deciding which discovery was the most important. Because the committee’s justification contains egregious errors (alternative explanations work better, and true support for the Big Bang is almost non-existent), the award tends to devalue the prestige of the entire Nobel process and make it appear to have become just another propaganda wing of mainstream science. This is why we include this Nobel Prize award as another example of Specious Science.

            As if that were not bad enough, the following new results about the microwave radiation were just released in September. [http://www.physorg.com/news76314500.html; ApJ 648:176 (2006)]. “The apparent absence of shadows from galaxy clusters where shadows were expected to be is raising new questions about the faint glow of microwave radiation once hailed as proof that the universe was created by a ‘Big Bang.’ In a finding sure to cause controversy, scientists at the University of Alabama in Huntsville found a lack of evidence of shadows from ‘nearby’ clusters of galaxies using new, highly accurate measurements of the cosmic microwave background. … Up to now, all the evidence that the microwave radiation originated from as far back in time as the Big Bang fireball has been circumstantial. However, if you see a shadow, it means the radiation comes from behind the cluster. If you don't see a shadow, then you have something of a problem. Among the 31 clusters studied, some show a shadow effect and others do not. Taken together, the data shows a shadow effect about one-fourth of what was predicted - an amount roughly equal in strength to natural variations previously seen in the microwave background across the entire sky. So either it (the microwave background) isn't coming from behind the clusters, which means the Big Bang is blown away, or ... there is something else going on. Maybe the clusters themselves are microwave emitting sources. But based on all that we know about radiation sources and halos around clusters, this kind of emission is not expected, and it would be implausible to suggest that several clusters could all emit microwaves at just the right frequency and intensity to match the cosmic background radiation.” The shadow effect is better known as the Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect, or “S-Z effect” for short.

Just over a year ago, published results of another study using WMAP data looked for evidence of "lensing" effects which should have been seen (but weren't) if the microwave background was a Big Bang remnant. So evidence continues to mount that the microwave radiation is a relatively local effect, such as Eddington’s “temperature of space”.

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