Say you’ve discovered something you think is really neat-o. You decide to submit an abstract of your discovery to an unrefereed meeting.
So far, so good. This is something scientists do all the time, and then they get together and discuss and criticize.
Here’s the additional step you take if you’re a crackpot: you buy an advertisement in the Washington Post, announcing that you’ve overthrown all of physics in favor of a Seventh Day Adventist literal interpretation of the book of Genesis, and that pandemonium among big bang cosmologists is soon to come over this discovery, because the world will soon recognize the greatest cover-up ever conceived by physicists.
As a bonus, you also announce that you’ve discovered the location of God’s Throne.
Just curious — were any readers at the American Physical Society meetings in Baltimore a few days ago? Was there pandemonium? I’m kinda imagining people in suits running around, tearing their hair out, leaping out of windows, clubbing each other in a battle to reach the coffee urn between sessions, that sort of thing. I suspect reality is far less bloody, though, and poor Robert Gentry probably disconsolately slogged back home with the sniggers of physicists in his ears.
Ockham’s razor on the hubble shift: therefore goddidit!
That’s some sophistimacated fizziks for sure!
It’s Baltimore, how would I know?
/ba-dum-tiss
He knows the location of God’s throne? But can he tell us if God leaves the seat up?
They laughed at me, at the Academy.
Laughed!
so sad.
That’s a marvelous throne. Loving the deep red.
I wasn’t at the APS conference last weekend, but I went to the one last month. They usually put all the cranks together in one session at the very end of the conference. I wanted to see this talk about using consciousness to prevent mass extinction but unfortunately I had to leave early :-(
Interesting that he has everything ‘receding away’ (as distinct from receding towards????) from the throne of God.
From what I’ve read about the bastard, that’s the most believable thing in the whole spiel!
UnknownEric the Apostate,
Ha.
Poinsettia Pandemonium in Baltimore
http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2014/12/26/poinsettia-pandemonium-at-rawlings-conservatory/
They are a little late. This was in December
I thinks me saw a BINGO winner with all the boxes checked, reading that advertissment. I’m too lazy to listicle the boxes here, but highlight “conspiracy theory”, that the truth is being rigorously covered-up by all the atheists of the scientists; and how the upcoming announcements PROVES what they’ve been covering up, so Atheism will sink, to the deepest depth of the Ocean. dot, dot, dot…
I must be the only one who spells that Razor as Occam’s, that oh so genius scientist in this advert spells it Ockham.
[just to reiterate the common refutation, as I suppose I’m part of this cabal of conspiring, theorist, cosmologist, atheists] When something is expanding uniformly, every point within it appears to be the center of the expansion. Especially when there is no actual “edge” to distinguish. The thing we are IN is bigger than light can travel, so it looks edgeless. … So, of course, we appear to be very close to the center of the expansion. (that difference, from absolute center, is only due to our inaccurate measurement capability)
rereading that advert, I see that it was to be announced April 14!!!! My calendar says today is 17!!!
So, was it really announced? Or was that an ad a piece of crank ephemerum? promises, promises, but never any reveal… If actually announced, what was the response? Groans, or laughter, applause or boos, whistles or hisses? What happened? WE needs to knoese.
pandas have poinsettias in Baltimore?? who knew? …headslap…facepalm…
This article should be read aloud by the actor who played Vizzini inThe Princess Bride.
“I’ve found god’s throne! There will be pandemonium! Inconceivable!”
I have physics envy now: physicists get all the best cranks. In biology, we get boring people like Paul Nelson.
@13 Congaboy
You keep using that word, but I do not think it means what you think it means…..
It’s not too often I see the old school spelling of Occam’s razor in print. Shows he’s really getting down to the origins of everything!
Has he self-published his test setup and the measurements he made? That might be even more fun!
Of course I believe that it was merely a gedankenexperiment and Dog gave him the answer he wanted.
Whaaaaat the fuuuuuuuck.
This isn’t an argument for Christianity. At most it’s an argument for Deism. Why do these asshats always pull this?!
Few impressions:
Very long title for a scientific article there.
Exodus 20:8-11 is mostly about keeping the Sabbath holy.
It’s a conspiracy!!!
The greatest atheistic ploy was a theory proposed by a Catholic.
He disproved redshift, therefore redshift proves God?
How does the existence of center mean that the center is God’s Throne? And isn’t a common center from which all galaxies are moving away from also a part of Big Bang Theory?
Using Ockham’s razor based on 90 year old scientific evidence with no indication that you understand any of the advancements in the relevant field is usually a very very bad sign.
I think some of us spend too much time trying to fully understand quantum physics. Not good for one’s connection to reality. I know it’s real. I know it works. But saying that I fully understand it and that it makes sense on an instinctive level? Um no.
Probably well known around here but always a fun read:
The Crackpot Index
Actually no, Big Bang theory doesn’t mandate a common center. All the galaxies are moving away from all the other galaxies. An actual centre is not necessary. The usual explanation involves asking people to draw dots on a balloon, then inflate the balloon, and watch the dots move further apart, and now ask where’s the place on the surface of the balloon tht is the centre.
My first wife was SDA for a time, I got into arguments with her friends all of the time on this junk (I’m no scientist but am fairly well versed in modern cosmology). They actually believed the center of creation was somewhere in the Orion Constellation (or even the Orion Nebula) and that was literally the location of God’s Throne.
Abstract is here. He actually refers to Psalms and Revelation.
Anyone actually attend the talk?
Was there pandemonium?
I’d imagine it would be exactly like that office-mutiny scene at the beginning of “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.”
I think this is the same Robert Gentry who has long been promoting polonium halos in granites as evidence of a young earth. (here is his website article about it: http://www.halos.com/) His take on it is that the short half-life of Po means that the rocks had to be instantly created with radioactive Po already in them, and the halos represent the first moments of the life of the granite. This is obviously the crackpot interpretation, but the halos are actually really cool. When Uranium decays, it creates radioactive daughter products, which then rapidly decay. The emission of alpha particles damages the rock, but it is often away from the original source of Uranium, showing that the particles were migrating in the short time after decay (full talkorigins article: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/po-halos/gentry.html ).
From a mathematical standpoint, there’s no real difference between a Universe where galaxies are moving away from each other due to Big Bang-style expansion, and a Universe where galaxies are moving away from a central point at a speed proportionate to their distance from it. Basically one model is a coordinate transformation of the other.
But what I don’t understand is why the galaxies are all moving away from God’s Throne, especially the ones that are really far away already. If I were a galaxy, I think I’d want to orbit God’s Throne at some respectful-but-constant distance.
I wanted to see this talk about using consciousness to prevent mass extinction…
If animals can stay awake, they can avoid being hunted. Problem solved!
I did my PhD at the Royal Observatory, Edinburgh the director of which until 1990 had the wonderful title of Astronomer Royal for Scotland.
Needless to day, this attracted significant correspondence along the loony lines of the OP, many of which were stored in boxes in the basement of the Observatory’s library. Reading these, and the comments on them from people such as Malcolm Longair, made for an interesting diversion from tracking down older papers or lesser-read books on occasional afternoons.
I spell it Okm. The simplest spelling is usually the right one.
Re: Chaos Engineer @26:
The Fall!
God’s throne is “nearby”? What a stroke of luck!
How the heck did this get on the conference program? And as an actual talk, not just a poster?
I kinda liked that he spelled it “Ockham”. It’s pretentious. (Ockham didn’t invent the concept, or even phrase it the way it is thought that he did, so “Occam” is not wrong.)
But parsimony isn’t proof. The crank has a lot more work to do.
As best I can tell, he seems to think that the redshift is happening because the light, as it travels, is expanding along with the rest of the universe, evenly and every bit of it. He think the light starts off yea long, and gets here yea-and-a-farthing long, because it expanded in flight. Which happens to not be the case.
(If the light were expanding like that, because the universe is expanding, so would we be,
and so would our measuring tools. So nobody would notice. (Maybe.))
What is actually happening, as best I understand it, is that the universe as a whole is expanding, but not each individual bit within it. So the galaxies are mostly moving away from each other, but each galaxy is not expanding to speak of.
An object moving away looks funny, because it is travelling away, but the light travels to us at light speed. So the frequency of the light’s departure seems slow (each pulse comes from further away and arrives here later), which looks redder to us.
(It’s a whole science, and there is a guy named Doppler, and brass bands on trains, but the science is sound. (Literally sound, as the sound of a vehicle approaching is higher than the sound of a vehicle going away, and the principle is the same.))
So the Gentry there has constructed some straw science out of his own misunderstanding, and then quite rightly refuted it. And then gone howling off in the wrong direction entirely.
Watch out, Mr. Gentry.
Like Brer Rabbit, PZ secretly wants to sink to the lowest point of the Marianas Trench. I’m sure lots of weird critters live there.
Menyambal
Closest old Ocky Bill got was “pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate”
(Now that’s pretentious!!!!)
slithey tove @10:
That refutation doesn’t actually apply in Gentry’s case, since his ‘solution’ is spherically symmetric, with a definite centre and a thin shell of hydrogen surrounding the observable universe. Some elucidation and debunking here.
A good example of Gentry’s cluelessness/dishonesty is his contention that, if the universe is expanding, the galaxies themselves should be expanding a swell. (link). He says the force between two clusters separated by 10^8 ly is 10^10 times the force on the sun from the Milky Way (which is correct). So, he argues, if the distance between clusters is affected by expansion, certainly the size of the galaxy should be as well. Problem; he’s comparing microbes to elephants. The force on a cannonball much larger than the force on a pea, but their acceleration is the same. The relevant comparison should be between the corresponding gravitational field strengths, not the forces. The field strength for the clusters is about 10^-4 times that experienced by the sun in the Milky Way.
@richardelguru#35
What’s this about Ocky’s ponderous pudenda?
Menyambal @33:
That’s correct, and it’s called cosmological redshift. We see both Doppler (caused by relative speed of source) and cosmological (caused by expansion of intervening space).
kevinalexander
Excellent!
From now on, me too.
Okm
Okm
Okm
Thought experiment time: It’s 1928. We do some measurements and we discover the universe is expanding. We do some more and we discover that it is expanding away for a physical center. The universe, it seems, is 3 dimensional and expanding like loaf of bread with a physical center. Great! That’s an interesting result. “Wait,” says someone “doesn’t that mean God must exist?” “Um,” says another, “how do you figure?” “Well, um, if something is measurable and locatable it means certainty and, uh, certainty is the same thing as God, right?” … crickets… “I mean when we declared a meter to be precisely one 10 millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, didn’t we trip over God’s toenail when you got out the yard sticks?” “Yes,” concedes the other, “that was a huge and disgusting thing. And when I gave directions from the store from the gas station I stumbled over one of His eyelashes. Precise measurements and a physical center *do* imply God. So we must vote, do we publish that we found God, yet again as we have every single time in the past when we measured something in relation to another, or do we cover this up and say there is no center just as we covered up and outlawed the existence of maps?” They vote to cover it up.
And that is why there was no pandemonium in Baltimore; no body could find the damned place because the atheists kept the location a secret.
Menyambal @33:
Just caught this (I should read more carefully).
No, because a wavelength is just a distance separation in space, so is subject to spatial expansion. We, on the other hand, are bound by strong and electromagnetic forces, which easily swamp gravitational effects. Even gravitational binding (on the scales of the solar system, and galaxy) can swamp expansion effects.
Rob Grigjanis, thanks. I learn something new here all too often.
I just realized that Gentry is part of the reason that I went to college. I was arguing with a creationist, and I didn’t know about the polonium halo business. I figured it was shite, but I couldn’t explain how. (I could come up with answers to his philosophical bits, but science requires science.) So I went to school to learn more science.
(I wound up in other fields, and unemployed, but I did enjoy the science classes.)
Scientists? Pandemonium? Here’s a more likely reason.
As PZ says, biology conferences get mostly boring types, but maybe it is because they screen the quality of abstracts prior to acceptance. On the other hand many things do get through as long as they do not infringe human or animal ethics. Working in the vision field, an abstract that really tempted me a few years ago “bunjee cord jumping related eye damage” – I had an image of someone reaching the end of the elastic and their eyes continuing to descend on the optic nerves. Or unfortunate people who miscalculated the length of the rope so their heads (and thus eyes) smashed into the ground at high velocity. The real poster was much less exciting.
William is said to have come from the town of Ockham in Surrey; Occam is the Latin form. When William joined the Franciscan Order, he would switched to the Latin form.
photoreceptor #44
So the author wasn’t Coyote, W.E.?
“would have switched to”
@Menyambal #42:
To give it some context, think about how much the Milky Way would be expanding by even if it wasn’t held together more strongly by gravity. Hubble’s Constant is currently measured too be about 72km/s/Mpc (where 1Mpc = 1 million parsecs = 3.26 million light years). In other words, if we measure the diameter of the Milky Way now and conclude that it is 100,000 light years across, in one second’s time its diameter will have increased by about 2,200 metres. Again, it needs context for the human brain to make a meaningful comparison between those two figures, so think of 2,200 metres as the distance light can travel in 7 microseconds, and compare that with the galactic travel-time of 100,000 years. Because Hubble’s Constant represents an acceleration, the figures do add up to something significant over many, many seconds, but it takes a long time to make a measurable difference even on the scale of our pretend gravity-deficient galaxy.
Whoops, saying it’s an acceleration isn’t right, but the observed effect sort of boils down to that. Kind of.
As I recall, anyone can join the APS and every meeting there is a special session where they put all the goofball papers and those who attend listen politely and even ask a gentle question or two. So your average physics crank can honestly tell his friends that he presented a paper at a scientific meeting and no one said he was wrong. This is brilliant since the cranks are happy, and the physicists are happy that the cranks leave them alone. As one of my professors said: “Don’t argue with him, there is no point and all you want is to get him out of your office. Tell him he is right and he will go away and leave you alone.” Craziness is so much easier to deal with if it isn’t backed by religion.
These antics (as well as the batshite goofy physics, astronomy, et al.) sort-of reminds me of Velikovsky after Worlds in Collision was published: He apparently demanded he (paraphrasing) “be admitted to the ranks of the world’s greatest scientists”.
“That’s right, laugh! They laughed at Lenny Bruce!”
“Yeah but he was funny.”
@gardengnome #3
Of course God left the seat up. He’s a man, donchaknow??
Chaos Engineer @26
A proper galaxy moves away from all the other galaxies. Now we know why you’re not allowed to be a galaxy.
What does God need with a star throne?
Oh, wait, guess gardengnome figured it out.
Since for any point in an universe expanding at the speed of light said universe is expanding at the speed of light in all directions, the theory of relativity states that any point in the universe can be described as being in the center of the universe.
According to Christian scripture and theology, God is everywhere at once and God sits on his throne. Therefore the throne must everywhere at once.
According to Mr Gentry the throne of God il at the center of the Universe. Since it has already been established that God’s throne is everywhere in the Universe then it follows that every points in the Universe are at the center of the Universe.
Here you have it: Christian theology confirms the Theory of relativity.
They did the usual: he’s the last in the session on the microwave background at 12:30, so everyone can go to lunch. they figure he’ll not show up but just reference the citation for evermore. It’s better when they’re in an afternoon session because then the wacko talks overlap with cocktails. It can be good for the other speakers as sometimes there’s a huge crowd. The lensing guy may have felt like a star…
Session X2: Cosmic Microwave Background
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
10:45AM – 10:57AM X2.00001: Instrumentation Assembly, Characterization and Deployment of the Multichroic Detector Array for ACTPol Shuay-Pwu Ho
10:57AM – 11:09AM X2.00002: Measurement of CMB Polarization with the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, Emily Grace
11:09AM – 11:21AM X2.00003: Atacama Cosmology Telescope: Polarization calibration analysis for CMB measurements with ACTPol and Advanced ACTPol, Brian Koopman
11:21AM – 11:33AM X2.00004: SPTpol Results from the First 100 Square Degree Survey,Abigail Crites
11:33AM – 11:45AM X2.00005: Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clusters Identified in the 2500-square-degree SPT-SZ Survey, Lindsey Bleem
11:45AM – 11:57AM X2.00006: A measurement of gravitational lensing of the Cosmic Microwave Background by galaxy clusters using data from the South Pole Telescope, Eric Baxter
11:57AM – 12:09PM X2.00007: Richness-Mass relation and Optical-SZE Positional Offset Distribution for SPT Selected Clusters, Alexandro Saro
12:09PM – 12:21PM X2.00008: Mapping matter jointly with CMB lensing and Large Scale Structure
Kevin Huffenberger , Felipe Maldonado , Aditya Rotti
12:21PM – 12:33PM X2.00009: Disproof of Big Bang’s Foundational Expansion Redshift Assumption Overthrows the Big Bang and Its No-Center Universe and Is Replaced by a Spherically Symmetric Model with Nearby Center with the 2.73K CMR Explained by Vacuum Gravity and Doppler Effects, Robert Gentry
Abstract
Disproof of Big Bang’s Foundational Expansion Redshift Assumption
Overthrows the Big Bang and Its No-Center Universe and Is
Replaced by a Spherically Symmetric Model with Nearby Center with the
2.73K CMR Explained by Vacuum Gravity and Doppler Effects1 ROBERT
GENTRY, Orion Foundation | Big bang theory holds its central expansion redshift
assumption quickly reduced the theorized radiation
ash to 1010 K, and then over
13.8 billion years reduced it further to the present 2.73K CMR. Weinberg claims
this 2.73K value agrees with big bang theory so well that \…we can be sure that
this radiation was indeed left over from a time about a million years after the `big
bang.’ ” (TF3M, p180, 1993 ed.) Actually his conclusion is all based on big bang’s
in-
ight wavelength expansion being a valid physical process. In fact all his sur-
mising is nothing but science ction because our disproof of GR-induced in-
ight
wavelength expansion [1] denitely proves the 2.73K CMR could never have been the
wavelength-expanded relic of any radiation, much less the presumed big bang’s. This
disproof of big bang’s premier prediction is a death blow to the big bang as it is also
to the idea that the redshifts in Hubble’s redshift relation are expansion shifts; this
negates Friedmann’s everywhere-the-same, no-center universe concept and proves it
does have a nearby Center, a place which can be identied in Psalm 103:19 and in
Revelation 20:11 as the location of God’s eternal throne. Widely published (Science,
Nature, ARNS) evidence of Earth’s at creation will also be presented.
1The research is supported by the God of Creation. This paper [1] is in for
publication.
Chaos Engineer @ 26, Al Dente @ 54
Don’t despair Chaos, you can still be a galaxy, albeit a dwarf:
http://www.iflscience.com/space/nine-possible-dwarf-galaxies-discovered-orbiting-around-milky-way
And while on average galaxies move away from each other there are local variations. Many images of colliding galaxies and Andromeda galaxy is heading our way and should arrive about the same time as our sun is reaching the end of its life cycle
Because it’s not Yahweh that sits upon that proverbial throne…
“In biology, we get boring people like Paul Nelson.”
But, but, but … how could you forget about the epic Evolution of Balloon Animals?
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/07/12/lifecode/
http://www.wired.com/2007/08/pseudoscience-n/
I love how these guys use books written for the general public as references, like Brief History and First 10 Minutes. They’ve never even READ any of Hawking’s or Weinberg’s refereed journal articles.
And PZ, you can HAVE some of the astronomy cranks, if you like. But diet and even medicine have a lot more and a lot worse than astronomy. And they can do definite HARM to their followers.
Here’s what gets me: it really shows how much they’ve gutted truth-in-advertising laws if anyone can pay a newspaper to print full-page nonsense without repercussions.