Second Puzzle: Big Bang or Big Problem?

Energy transfer of photons to a transparent medium

It is well known that the main evidence and origin of the big bang idea is the redshift, which was discovered by Hubble in 1929. Of course then people first thought it was actually a doppler effect,  but since this would mean that earth would have to be the center of the universe (which is obviously not very likely), the consensus is now that instead of objects moving away, space (time) itself is expanding, causing a red shift.

Of course, there are other reasonable explanations for red shift. The doppler effect for instance is still a known cause of a red (or blue) shift (for instance galaxies that move towards us are blue shifted), as is the gravitational red shift – in fact there are many other possible mechanisms as listed by Louis Marmet in this paper . Yes, many of them have some issue or other, such as light might be scattered (making the stars blurry, which they are not) or other, but still, I have always wondered if it is really scientifically correct to simply dismiss all possible explanations and assume (almost religiously), that the universal red shift must be space expansion and can have no other explanation, period. No alternatives are expected or even investigated.

That is, until I spotted this paper from material science (so not in the context of astronomy at all), about an issue with the momentum of light, entitled “Photon mass drag and the momentum of light in a medium”.

In essence it says that, as light moves through any (non -dispersive, transparent) medium, some of the energy of the photon is passed onto the medium (an optoelasic effect), which results in a mass density wave in the medium itself.  So the photon loses some of its energy as it travels through a medium. A medium can also be interstellar gas, for instance. (Space is not completely empty). When a photon loses energy, it gets red shifted. The cool part about this is that it looks like it might soon be possible to actually do an experiment in a lab to detect this mass density wave, which would prove it once and for all. Of course, the implications for the big bang theory is that if there is even a minuscule amount of interstellar gas that can act like such a medium, this would at least explain some if not all of the currently observed red shift.

If any amount of the observed red shift can be explained by other means, the big bang model has to be revisited, as a lot of it depends on the z value (and in fact the original reason to come up with this model was the red shift… so what is the big bang without it?).

Inflationary Model based on polarized light patterns

It’s was all over the news: proof that the inflationary model is true. This revelation is based on the observation of (B-mode) polarized light patterns in the cosmic microwave background.

This polarization pattern is supposedly caused by gravitational waves – and not just any gravitational waves: waves from the Big Bang event itself. And not only that, based on the pattern of the polarization, scientists say that this is proof of an inflationary model, that at approximately

“0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the Big Bang, it suddenly went through an accelerated expansion that drove it to become one thousand quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion quadrillion times bigger than it previously was” (wired)

This is much faster than the speed of light, by the way. Yes, we all know, nothing can go faster than the speed of light, neither light nor matter, nor even information, except of course, the universe itself. For some reason, this does not count…

./b_over_b_rect.eps

I guess I don’t sound very convinced – what I am not convinced of is that there is really no other reasonable explanation for the polarized CMB pattern. Does it really, explicitly proof both gravity waves and also inflation? What exactly is the logic that leads one from this conclusion? Based on Wayne Hu, an expert in the field, it sounds like there are many possible foreground causes for this polarization, including scattering on dust, radio point sources, Bremsstrahlung and galactic synchrotron emissions – all of which have to be excluded. And of course, there is gravitational lensing, which is also a cause for B-modes. And is this really a complete list? Do we truly know all possible causes?

(Add-on: in the meantime, there is more and more doubt about this result, see for instance: Backlash to Big Bang Discovery Gathers Steam, http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/backlash-to-big-bang-discovery-gathers-steam/)

I have actually been one of those fierce defenders of the Big Bang Theory most of my life, and was convinced that scientists new it all down to a fraction of a second, and even wondered that some people wouldn’t “believe” this – after all this is science, and not religion, right?

Well, that was before the addition of dark matter, dark energy, and super luminal expansion. It just got too much to take at some point, and I started to ask questions, which led to more questions, which never got properly answered. In this “Puzzle” I discuss some of those questions.

New Tired Light Model

Lyndon Ashmore has developed a new tired light model that does not result in scattering. It is based on the notion that there are electrons in the intergalactic space that interact with photons, which lose energy due to a recoil action. If you like youtube, here is an explanation of this, and if you prefer the paper, you can read it here.

Big Bang Puzzle Piece I: Seeing Red
Big Bang Puzzle Piece 2: Older than Legally Allowed
Big Bang Puzzle Piece 3: Static Universe?

Links related to Big Bang

Links on CMB polarization

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