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Old 4th October 2004, 16:46
scandinavian scandinavian is offline
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For so sayes Hannes Alfvén, winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics, acknowledged as one of creative and intuitive intellect's of the 20th century.

Hannes Alfvén is a pioneer in describing the fundamental nature of the universe.

***

Alfvén VERSUS THE BIG BANG

For 30 years, based on plasma physics, Alfvén and his colleagues proposed an alternative cosmology to both the Steady State and the Big Bang cosmologies. While the Big Bang theory was preferred by most astrophysicists for nearly 30 years, it is being challenged by new observations, especially over the last decade. In particular, the discovery of coherent structures of galaxies hundreds of millions of light years in length and the large-scale streaming of superclusters of galaxies at velocities that may approach 1,000 kilometers per second present problems that are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the Big Bang theory.

To Alfvén, the problems being raised were not surprising. "I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation."

The problem with the Big Bang, Alfvén believed, is similar to that with Chapman's theories, which the scientific community accepted mistakenly for decades: Astrophysicists have tried too hard to extrapolate the origin of the universe from mathematical theories developed on the blackboard. The appeal of the Big Bang, said Alfvén, has been more ideological than scientific. When men think about the universe, there is always a conflict between the mythical approach and the empirical scientific approach. In myth, one tries to deduce how the gods must have created the world - what perfect principles must have been used."

To Alfvén, the Big Bang was a myth - a myth devised to explain creation. "I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory," he recalled. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing.

But if there was no Big Bang, how -and when- did the universe begin? "There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time," Alfvén explained. "It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago."

"Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion he said. An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not, he admited, be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200" he noted. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science."

Alfvén admited that his plasma universe theory may take a long time to penetrate the popular consciousness. "After all," he asserted to a group of physicists, "most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe." The group, at first incredulous, quickly nods in agreement as Alfvén continueed, "every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy."

***



The full article:
http://public.lanl.gov/alp/plasma/people/alfven.html
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Old 14th November 2004, 02:01
venator venator is offline
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Yes, it is depressing that the pagan cult of astrology is so persistent.

But why should the Universe be as it is?

Why not a vast compacted mass of neutronium, which it would tend to become under the influence of gravity, given unlimited time?

Also, this assault on Catholicism puzzles me- is not Genesis also a Jewish text? Does calling Jewish belief into question render Alfven and/or science "antiSemitic"? Finally, if science is declared "antiSemitic", should it be abandoned?
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Old 19th December 2004, 05:43
Mamie Mamie is offline
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well it is only a theory lol and Aleksander Friedman(n) had already published a similiar theory 5 years earlier and some people think Lemaitre only "rediscovered" his work

and on top of this there are 3 models of the universe within the scope of the Big Bang theory

if you do a web search on the origins of the universe you can get over a million pages - now how long would it take to read all the truly unique ones I wonder




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Old 19th December 2004, 17:46
venator venator is offline
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Welcome to the board, Mamie.

What I submit to you is: Is the cult of science "antiSemitic", and why or why not?
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