With this article, Peter gives us this complete acceptance and promotion of worship where he gets all twisted up over the most appropriate and effective mind control techniques. My comment is that worship needs to be disassociated with love. Love always maintains the critical functions of the mind but worship effectively is designed to strip away critical functions and create obedient stooopids. Worship embodies a psychosis and can only create false versions of the world that clash with the reality. It creates through intellectual dishonesty a Goebbels with Nuremburg Rallies to absurd beliefs like the big bang fireworks.

Oliver, you say "What is significant is that background radiation was forecast before it was discovered" and here we agree but this was all without reference to any Big Bang cosmology.
e.g.
In 1896, Charles Edouard Guillaume predicted a temperature of 5.6K from heating by starlight. Arthur Eddington refined the calculations in 1926 and predicted a temperature of 3K. Eric Regener predicted 2.8 in 1933.

However Gamow's predictions with reference to the Big Bang, ranged from 50K to 6 K. Other big bangers had very high predictions too but when the COBE satellite measured it to be only 2.7K, astonishingly all the Big Bang proponents claimed victory. This is astonishing because the Big Bang proponents had NO reasonable degree of accuracy. The fact is that Big Bang cosmology has failed to anticipate any landmark discoveries because it is plainly illogical. i.e. Nothing cannot be the cause of something if there ever was such a thing as nothing which is impossible anyway.

Worship can only misinterpret or ignore or denigrate or deliberately distort evidence. e.g. When the Big Bang high priests found out about the Hubble-Humason redshifts, they decided that those must be Doppler redshifts, to serve as the first and only proof of the big bang expansion. This is the barefaced lie because Hubble, in actual fact, was a life long doubter of velocity being the cause of cosmological redshifts.

Keiran,

An interesting post, but suggest you misrepresent science. If a better model is available scentists have an obligation to work the model. That said, one does not do "U" readily. My limited understanding is that the BB does not have an alpha and omega point, the expanion and contraction [one] solution isn't the universe breathing "into" 3-D space. Rather, 4-D spacetime is created in energy states, from singularities, expnasion isn't into anything in our concept of the 3-D world. Time is created. All of this is a model, and, forecasts [I was taught never say prediction.] based on maths and observations, and, reinterpretation. If you have a better model it is incumbent on science to evaluate it. Alternatively, you can choose to hold a model outside the paradigm [Kuhn] the community of practice [a lonely place].

But, please let me iterate, to the best of my knowledge, we don't believe in infinities is not the case with BB.

In 1919, the prediction that sun would bend light was forecast by other scientists, not on Einstein, and, for different reasons. Einstein, was given the big tick , because he seemed have the better model.

I find the COBE photograph amazing. It is colourised, "usually" showing "uniform" background radiation, except for expected perputations. The structure of the temperature was more important, than the actual the actual temperature.

Defending a good model is good science. Worshipping a model against contrary evidence is bad science. I would hope the BB advocates would drop the model, if a better model came to light.

I don't believe cosmologists are arrogant. They recognise the difficulty of incorporating QM into their models.

Neither, BB or SS, fully addresses first cause, IF first cause is other than causality. A theist might point to their divinity. I would point to (a) some incomprehensible dimensionality, or, (b) comprehensible but yet unknown probability mathematics.

Indeed, one can have very distorted ideas about liturgy, worship if one does not accept the raison d'être of worship, a transcendental Deity, be it the Christian God or what. Equally, one can have only modest, based on popular science and often distorted, ideas about the physics of cosmology, including the Big Bang theory, if one does not understand the relevant mathematics that formulates these theories before they can be verified.

You cannot speak critically about an established physical theory (e.g. gravitation, QM, Big Bang) if you do not understand the mathematics it is based on. [Of course, with theories still in the making (e.g. string theory) also the mathematics might still "have to be discovered" so a layman is even less in the position to criticise.] Infinity, singularity are clear mathematical terms a second year student of mathematics should completely understand, but in physics they appear either as part of the mathematical model underlying a physical theory or as concepts used in popularising the physical theory. After Cantor, both in theology and physics "infinity" has become just an intuitive, not very clear, concept.

I think that similarly, one cannot make critical statements about liturgy or worship, only about its appearance to this or that external observer, if one does not understand - or denies - the metaphysical presuppositions it is based on, as well as the psychological make-up of the worshipper.

George, love always maintains the critical functions of the mind and does not cripple Eros but worship certainly does a pretty good job with various degrees of destructiveness and depression where we see it can only create false versions of the world that clash with the reality. i.e. Lesson 1, don't ever become a worshipper, Keiran.

Keiran as an example of love. As a thirteen-year old I had this remarkable teacher with an interest in astronomy. He gave a few extracurricular lessons at the end of the year and that is where I first heard of the big bang hypothesis. I can remember saying to the teacher that it didn't make any scientific sense. Like how can you have a bang in a vacuum if indeed a vacuum could exist?

George as an example of worship. Fifty years later we see this absurdity, the big bang hypothesis, not as a theory but as an official religion. Like all official religions, it requests funding to spread its message. Here, the modern person saw this as good fairie dust because we can retain a sense of pride in this new cosmology with its high priests. (i.e. intellectually dishonest mathematicians with their old “gravity-only” theories and non-falsifiable hypotheses). Of course, the downside is that future historians of science will judge this era insane.

Lesson 2
Love is the source of real breakthroughs while worship embodies a psychosis and delivers at a cost nothing but very phony, cosy environments for those who conform (which is akin to Thanatos).

Keiran,

The BB is an improbable [not impossible] thermo-entropic event given certain parameters in phase space and symmetries in the extremely early universe. Roger Penrose states that these symmentries when they stabalise [the universe cools to only billions of degrees K!] create the environment for spacetime and known nuclear forces. Physics debate about the threshholds and caps but the aftermouth has been measured by looking back in time. In Penroses chapter there is a diagram. Here, the is a line, a bit like a Gausian curve. Unlike a normal distribution curve, several standard deviations is illustrated cross-sectionally by severval intercessions at separate intervals. In the early unstable [but incredibly stable from the referential frame of phase space], the entropic deviations are large but progressively settle down overtime. What is happening here not like a fire cracker exploding in a vaccuum. Rather, the increase in entropy is a metaphorically a "flash" into nothing creating spacetime and allowing the second law of thermodymics to be sustained for billions of years.

You seemed have had a good educator when you were young, especially his/her own time to work with you. Good. When I was in high sschool, there was question: How states of matter are there? If I recall, I answered, three [what I was taught by teachers], solids, liquids and gas, even though I had read outside of the curriculum about ions being a state of matter.

Good scientists will both defend and challenge the BB. Some will try to make complex equations appear more refined (called eloquent], meanwhile, others will throw-in complications, e.g., spin/momemtum. Ask questions, Is there enough matter to eventually arrest the expansion? This is science. Holding to the SS posit is science too, but, it is not supported by key peers, within the current generation astrophysists and cosmologists. Ulimately, the BB could be shown to by flaw/incomplete but it is the existing working working model in the accepted paradigm [Kuhn].

Oliver, you know when you are dealing with finite systems people when they talk about "inside the universe", expansion of the universe, age of the universe, or something referred to as a multiverse. Whilst we can talk about systems of all types, simple or complex, we are only in fact making quite arbitary assumptions about closures/boundaries and starts/ends. Daily we are in fact systematic but that should not exclude other possibilities nor ignore connectivity. If we are seeking to understand existence then models, cosmologies and exclusive systems are plainly irrelevant and history says so. For myself the default hypothesis will always be an infinite material universe not as some closed or set of SYSTEMS but as a connected whole ENVIRONMENT. Why?

We really do not need old faked up, gravity-only, closed cosmological models that simply thrive on absurdity after absurdity and all shrouded in nonsensical mathematics delivered by high priests like Einstein, Hawking, Davies, Smoot, Mather, even Dawkins. We see an entire zoo of invented fictional entities and forces tossed to the media .... such as a speck appearing instantaneously from nothing, an expanding universe or is it inflating, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, accretion disks, ultradense objects, gravity warping of space-time, "visions of God", string theory, multiples of dimensions, time travel, etc, etc.

One of the glaring oversights of these high priest's gravity-only model is an assumption that electricity doesn't do anything. Just how terribly wrong can one really be? Take Halton Arp, who worked with Edwin Hubble and who has been called a latter day Galileo, has shown that active galaxies give birth to quasars, which in turn become companion galaxies. Galaxies are the largest plasma discharge formations in the visible universe where stars are the cosmic electric street lamps that light them. He has shown that the intrinsic redshift of galaxies is quantized which spells the end of the big bang hypothesis. He says "After all, to get the whole universe totally wrong in the face of clear evidence for over 75 years merits monumental embarrassment and should induce a modicum of humility."