The following is a letter of mine to an acquaintance with regard to Smoots book. It has been slightly edited. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Dear [name withheld] October 09, 1998 I'd like to share with you the material that I told you I wrote to be passed out to the people attending the Smoot talk. The enclosed [a reference to my main page: "Some Big Bang Supporting Assertions Challenged" and another paper with the title borrowed from Grote Reber "The Big Bang is Bunk," 21st Century, March-April 1989 pp.43-9] will be attached to the Assis and Neves "History of the 2.7K [Temperature Prior to Penzias and Wilson"] paper [Apeiron, Vol. 2, No. 3, July 1995]. Now available on the Internet. Click here I'm curious to know if you've read Smoot and Davidson's book Wrinkles in Time? I just recently read it. After many years searching for "wrinkles in spacetime," --what are in reality minor temperature differences in the microwave radiation, they first found a dipole signature. (Robert Roeder, a Canadian astronomer pointed out that the CBR map was aligned closely with the plane of the Solar System. "How he asked, could we be sure the 'anisotropy' wasnt just dust orbiting the Sun!" (p.141) After revealing Roeders analysis and noting other unsettling coincidences with the direction of the warmer part of the signal Smoot writes: "I had no definitive answer, and it was only later that we were able to eliminate Roeders objections." Yet, I did not see in his book any elimination of the objections. I don't believe I missed it. Do you happen to know anything about this?) Then later, they find the really big news of a quadrupole in the radiation. And while they gather more data they model what they expect and hope to find according to the inflationary Big Bang theorists. So they know what they need to find, and therefore when to continue and when to stop doing corrections and subtracting data that they believe to be from our own galaxy, et cetera. The end of their book is quite interesting. The scientists are frustrated that they aren't getting the picture that they want: "By late January and into early February, the results were beginning to gel, but they still didn't quite make sense. I tried all kinds of different approaches, plotting data in every format I could think of, including upside down and backwards, just to try a new perspective and hoping for a breakthrough. Then I thought, why not throw out the quadrupole--the thing I'd been searching for all those years--and see if nature had put anything else there! I guessed this might be a way of determining whether our map was merely the result of noise, a cacophony of random radiation from many sources, or contained a genuine signal of wrinkles in more detail than the quadruple." (p. 277) So, Smoot continues modifying the map through his various software programs, he removes the quadrupole and likes what he sees, then declares that our galaxy has a quadrupole of its own (p.280), opposite in direction to the cosmic signal, not exclusively from the early universe, as they were previously confident about, even though the signal is incredibly weak "very close to noise" (p.276). Whats left in the map is now pleasing for what he expects. Hes ecstatic. Hes found what hes been looking for all those years. Although he has now satisfied his prejudice for supporting evidence for his inflationary Big Bang model, I have to wonder, and perhaps you can give me some input on this, IF OUR GALAXY CAN HAVE A QUADRUPOLE PATTERN THAT THEY PREVIOUSLY SUSPECTED TO BE EXCLUSIVELY OF COSMIC ORIGIN, THEN WHY NOT OTHER FLUCTUATIONS THAT WE DO NOT KNOW THE SOURCE OF? But what of the dipole--someone may reply, this being attributed to the combined motions of our planet, solar system, and galaxy to some "Great Attractor." This, they may say, demonstrates that they know what they are doing. Yet, I note the article by Tom Van Flandern ("Is The Microwave Radiation Really from a Big Bang 'Fireball'?", Reflector, February 1993, p. 4) where he cites the new studies showing that no backside infall was found on the other side of the supposed "Great Attractor." Relative to the microwave radiation, which the Big Bangers use as a reference frame, there is group streaming of "all the galaxies in the nearby universe" which "are flowing in a similar direction relative to the microwave radiation, or the microwave-radiation source is in motion relative to us. Either way, this result is big trouble for the Big Bang." [Also see "Galaxies Keep Going With the Flow," Science vol. 259, 1 January 1993 by Faye Flam.] So, anyway, I have a lot of doubts about this whole business of theirs. It rather reminds me of Steven Weinbergs comments in his book Dreams of a Final Theory (p.96): "As in all experiments, all sorts of corrections are needed. The astronomer makes these corrections the best way that he or she can. But, if one knows the answer, there is a natural tendency to keep on making these corrections until one has the "right" answer and then stop looking for further corrections. Indeed, the astronomers of the 1919 eclipse expedition were accused of bias in throwing out the data from one of the photographic plates that would have been in conflict with Einsteins prediction, a result they blamed on a change of focus of the telescope. With hindsight we can say the British astronomers were right, but I would not be surprised if they had gone on finding corrections until finally their results with all these corrections fit Einsteins theory." So in an area where Smoot and others have so much room for manipulating the data (making corrections) I'm not surprised that at the very edge of detectability where the noise practically swamps the data (one part in a hundred thousand, to less than six parts in a million, close to "foreground interference") that they "found" what they hoped to find. Although it isn't as important to those of us who don't buy the Big Bang story, after all, the minute temperature variations, if real, are to be expected in any cosmological model because our universe is lumpy both locally and cosmologically. If you ask me, Geoffrey Burbidge has it right with his statement (p.242): That the audience had swallowed the big bang story-- "book, verse, and chapter." For Truth, Not Myth-Making, Vincent Sauvé To the main page skeptica@pacbell.net