Posted: Nov 19, 2019 2:23 pm
Scott Mayers wrote:The same story is told repeatedly everywhere about Bell Lab's attempt clear the microwave antenna with bird crap presuming they should not be receiving any noise.
This is a horrendous oversimplification. It's not that they presumed that there should not be any noise, but that they should be able to identify the source of any radiation. They went through a painstaking process of removing every potential source, including 'white dielectric material', but failed to find a source, not least because of the way the signal was distributed across the sky.
But why they should or should not expect to find no noise is not clearly justified.
Do you know of that justification?
The justification is that radiation radiates from a source.
It's worth noting that there is no 'the' big bang model. All empirically adequate cosmologies have a big bang in them. The name is a matter of historical contingency but, these days, the big bang is nothing more nor less than the name we have for the observed expansion of the universe.
The more obvious question is why anybody still puts any stock in any flavour of steady state when the data do not support any such model. It fails to align with observations of the evolution of the universe, most notably in the central posit of steady state, namely the constancy of the energy density, which is observed not to be unchanging.
The only sense in which it's 'taboo' to talk seriously about steady state cosmology is in the same way it's taboo to talk about the Noachian fantasy fludd in geology, or baraminology in biology. You can't expect to hang on to a career in science if you support fringe lunacy that's overwhelmingly falsified by observation, or whose origin is nothing more than hanging on to a presupposition, all of which apply to steady state models, because the energy density of the universe is not steady, and the only reason it ever had any serious attention is that the physicists of the early 20th century wanted the universe to be eternal an unchanging (also the source of what Einstein called his greatest blunder).
Not to be believed by a thinking person who has even a rudimentary grasp of the issues.