[Phys-L] Re: ID defenders

[hhaskell at MINDSPRING.COM (Hugh Haskell)]

At 13:41  -0400 8/26/05, R. McDermott wrote:

> In the case of the
> "Big Bang" we have taken observations and extrapolated to a cause for those
> observations.

Not true. Ralph Alpher's PhD dissertation, in the late 1940's
predicted the existence of the cosmic microwave background, based on
the hypothesis that the big bang occurred to start things off. That
was at least 15 years before Penzias and Wilson actually observed the
CMB (and that was an accident--they were merely testing a new
low-noise antenna, and kept getting this hiss in their reception that
they couldn't account for, until they asked the folks at Princeton
what was going on). So the CMB is hardly the result of circular
reasoning. It started out as a classic "If this were true, then that
must be a result." And when "that" turned out to be the result, it
fairly quickly put to bed the "steady state" hypothesis of Fred
Hoyle, and since his hypothesis and the "big bang" were the only two
kids on the scientific block, and the CMB was clearly based on the
big bang idea, that meant that the big bang pretty much won the match
by a knockout.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
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<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

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