Talk:Alternative cosmology

This Astronomy related article has been awarded BRONZE status for quality. It's getting there, but could be better with improvement. See RationalWiki:Article rating for more information.

Archives for this talk page:

<1>

, (new)

Some other theories for the fringe section[edit]

Forests (talk) 22:22, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Little bang theory[edit]

You will laugh at this one:

"One morning, a few years ago, I woke up with this idea: maybe the universe is expanding because the force of gravity is slowly diminishing. And why should that be so? Because gravity is slowly being converted into matter.

After giving it some more thought, I found this simple idea has quite a lot going for it. First and foremost it does away with the horrible Big Bang theory. But it has a lot more explanatory power!" link Forests (talk) 22:31, 21 January 2013 (UTC)

Other references to add[edit]

Forests (talk) 01:27, 23 January 2013 (UTC)

Laws of thermodynamics[edit]

This website here is claiming that the Big Bang contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. We could mention this on the article, as it appears to be a main claim of those who oppose the Big Bang. Forests (talk) 23:10, 13 February 2013 (UTC) Transferred to the "Page" July 2014 Forrest Noble (talk) 03:39, 10 September 2014 (UTC)

I am not working on this article anymore as I have left this site, but if anyone gets the chance you can add some of the sources I have collected. Cheers. Forests (talk) 00:34, 20 February 2013 (UTC)

Forrest Noble's edits, again[edit]

Another reason to be concerned about this article's history showing a full page of Forrest Noble's edits: he's citing it on third-party sites: http://www.sciforums.com/threads/maybe-space-isnt-expanding-at-all.142685/page-3#post-3229838 --ZooGuard (talk) 17:01, 4 October 2014 (UTC)

I'm going to remove his edits again as he seems to be biased and pushing a fringe theory. --TiaC (talk) 03:38, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Justification for removal: My objections were that there was a long string of mislabled minor edits that cast doubt on solid science and lend credence to badly supported theories. This was followed by addition of an unsourced section that claims to have cast serious doubt on widely accepted science. On top of this, Forrest Noble is the author of the alternative cosmology in question so without citations I find it hard to take what he says at face value.--TiaC (talk) 03:49, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

I concur. --Inquisitor (talk) 03:53, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Fair 'nuff. MarmotHead (talk) 03:57, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Looking back farther, this article seems to have mainly be edited by him ever since he joined. He consistently marks his edits as minor and isn't good at using refs. This article seems to just be a mass of fringe theories with little examination of their validity or even indication that anyone other than their inventor cares about them. I suggest that we nuke most or all of the content under Other models. --TiaC (talk) 04:15, 7 December 2014 (UTC)

Is the purpose of this article to describe only well known alternatives or to include the crank versions, too? I'm not trying to LM777 you. I just don't know. My cosmology knowledge can only impress high school freshmen. At first glance, the other models look to be more cranky. Even if the other models stay, there's a lot of work to document them and RWify them. MarmotHead (talk) 16:44, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

The sad thing is I think he actually had proper qualifications on the subject matter. Ikanreed (talk) 16:50, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

Reading the article, I have no idea how valid or accepted most of these theories are. It is too much about the theories instead of their implications.--TiaC (talk) 20:48, 8 December 2014 (UTC)

In my opinion, that makes it a kind of project article for someone to add in the relevant implications, piece by piece, thus becoming RW's designated cosmologist-in-chief. MarmotHead (talk) 16:41, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ But that's exactly what led us here. No one was keeping an eye on things, so the cosmologist-in-chief ended up being the creator of some unsupported theory who was giving undue weight to unsupported theories.--TiaC (talk) 17:55, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

If you could read my mind (or if I'd written more clearly), you'd know that I meant that I preferred the status quo, but no longer felt strongly. I won't fight other changes that differ from that opinion. I hate to see someone's voluminous work deleted, but, practically, I won't fight it. I am not that cosmologist and have no cosmological aspirations. MarmotHead (talk) 18:53, 10 December 2014 (UTC)

He's at it again. He's watering down the article's language on the acceptance of the Big Bang.--TiaC (talk) 22:04, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

I just read one of these entries (Pan Theory) and the supporting paper summarizing it. By that theory, stars that appear to be moving away are, instead, just getting smaller. I give that points for creativity! MarmotHead (talk) 22:39, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

When this article first started getting larger, I supported the edits because they appeared to be treating these alternative cosmologies as fringe theories, and there weren't so many of them. Now I'm no longer so sure, as it no longer seems clear to me that the article treats these cosmologies as fringe theories. - Grant (talk) 22:46, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

I'd guess there's 3 types of alternative theories: mainstream alternative, fringe alternative with some following, PIDOOMA fringe. I can't tell the difference between the last two categories and, clearly, the last one shouldn't be covered here. Can anyone discern the difference? MarmotHead (talk) 22:54, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately my knowledge of cosmology stops after somewhere around the beginning of graduate school. Given that astrophysics is a relatively nebulous field with multiple competing cosmological theories floating around as it is, I'm not too sure how to differentiate your latter two categories either. - Grant (talk) 22:57, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

My best guess is that, if I, a non-physicist, can understand the math, it's probably the latter. In this theory, by over-smoothing a curve until it becomes a line, the Pan Theory can emerge: PIDOOMA. MarmotHead (talk) 23:01, 12 December 2014 (UTC)

A proposal[edit]

It would be a daunting and tedious task for any single editor to look into all of these "alternate cosmologies" and run all their sources to ground... but as a group effort, it should be manageable. For example, I'd tackle 5.1-5.7, then somebody else can take on 5.8-5.15 and so on. Anybody with me? --Inquisitor (talk) 00:30, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

The delete and rollback buttons are the new black. Nutty Roux (talk) 02:01, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Yeah, that's appealing, but I think we missed the optimal window a while ago. For this article, I won't fight that approach anymore. MarmotHead (talk) 15:44, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

I could help in making any desired changes for those interested in understanding my editions or the alternative cosmologies. These cosmologies are mostly very different from each other. I have been studying mainstream and alternative cosmologies for more than 50 years, but all of these generally unknown models were on this site before my editions which were mostly changes thought to be better wording. A few of these models were transferred from this talk page by me where they were entered by others, but only one was added since then on the main page by another editor. I have added no new generally unknown or lesser known cosmologies and have not added any unsupportable text.

I believe this article is a good tool for researches of this subject since no other single source that I have found better summarizes alternative cosmologies.

Note that the article concludes that nearly all cosmologies here as well as the Big Bang model, will be in jeopardy of being disproved for reasons explained, once observations of the James Webb infrared space telescope become operational, the largest ground based radio arrays become fully functional, and computer connected scopes from all over the world can perform synchronized observations concerning the most distant observations. Forrest Noble (talk) 03:04, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

Delete most of it[edit]

This is not "Fringe Theory Wiki". As non-specialists we are "stuck" with peer reviewed accepted standard science. We should not become the reservoir for fringe theories owned by one expert. We run the risk of becoming a low-brow citizendium.--Weirdstuff (talk) 20:56, 13 December 2014 (UTC)

People's innate ability to sniff out b.s. is not centered around the title granting provided by Universities. Roo (talk) 16:02, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Roo... you're replying to a post from 2014. It's OK. They're gone now. (And for the record, we are "Fringe Theory Wiki".) Reverend Black Percy (talk) 16:04, 17 August 2016 (UTC)

Alternative cosmology vs. alternative medicine[edit]

One of the reasons I've registered has been the desire to clear this confusion.

Alternative medicine is what it is mainly for ethical reasons (not entirely, we can discuss that). That medicine "works" or not is first and foremost an ethical question. Which is the reason, among other, that various placebos are taken seriously. The ethical issue is entirely absent from the cosmological discourse. Which is enough to make the analogy spurious.

One can go much further, however, in the direction of epistemology. While there is a sense in which medical research could sometimes be construed as theoretical, the meaning of "theoretical research" is substantially different from the one in cosmology. In cosmology, we are almost always dealing with issues which are not empirically accessible, some of them being inaccessible by the very definition (e.g., cosmological inflation and other processes within the first second of the Big Bang). Therefore, the emergence of the paradigm - or "standard" something - in cosmology is much different from the analogous process in medicine. And by the same token, strictures about criticizing, or even entirely disregarding, the paradigm are justifiably looser in cosmology.

So, the analogy should either be excised entirely, or the issue expanded to include the paradigm emergence and possibly some of the epistemic properties of the standard cosmological model. What do you think?

Full disclosure: I've recently coauthored a paper on the topic, it's currently in press (and the uncorrected preprint is at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1705.07721). ^{— Unsigned, by: Arioch / talk / contribs}

On talk pages, please sign your comments using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking on the sign button:

on the toolbar above the edit panel. You can also indent successive talk page comments using one more colon (:) for each line. Thank you.

It's certainly true that cosmology is an observational science, not an experimental one (we can't make galaxies in labs yet). That being said however, what we mean by "alternative cosmology" is something more akin to "woo cosmology" or "pseudoscientific cosmology"; i.e., cosmologies that aren't problematic by virtue of 'differing from the paradigm' (as it were), but which are crap by virtue of being in blatant conflict with known processes, cover stories for religiously motivated trash, completely out of the question, ????, etc. It's quite possible that we may need to refine the comparison made in the article, but a comparison can certainly be made. In a sense, the very name of the article is a bigger problem than the article's contents (AFAIK). Just changing the article name to "Patently crappy cosmologies" (...you get the idea) would solve things in a jiffy. Reverend Black Percy (talk) 01:50, 2 June 2017 (UTC)

Very interesting article (paper, I mean), by the way --Panzerfaust (talk) 22:44, 13 June 2017 (UTC).

Shade thrown[edit]

Cirkovic MM, Perovic S.Alternative Explanations of the Cosmic Microwave Background: A Historical and an Epistemological Perspective. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 2017. DOI: 10.1016/j.shpsb.2017.04.005.

There are many dangerous preconceptions in popular controversies of science and pseudoscience (such as those related to global climate change or universal vaccination), which could and should be easily dispersed by investigations of “science at work”. Interestingly, the defenders of science often use misplaced and misguided arguments which are easily demolished by detailed analysis of the history of philosophy of specific case studies, such as we do here. For example, at least one influential web encyclopaedia explicitly devoted to “[a]nalyzing and refuting pseudoscience and the anti-science movement” regards “alternative cosmology” as belonging to the same pseudoscientific category as “alternative medicine” (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Alternative_cosmology, last accessed June 11, 2016). Apart from the similar sound, there is no parallel between the two in either an epistemological or an ethical sense.

More like IRRATIONAL-ly-using-phonetic-similarities-as-proof-of-logical-similarity Wiki! Fuzzy "Cat" Potato, Jr. (talk/stalk) 18:07, 25 November 2017 (UTC)