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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.