Saturday, December 18, 2004

Cosmic Strings - Super String Theoreticians Become Desperate

Regarding the "cosmic string" Lubos meantioned. It merely shows how desperate super string theoriticians are in trying to find some observational evidence, any thing, that may remotely justify their stuff. When you have that kind of desperation, you tend to OVER-INTERPRET your data.

See this link from where I quoted Lubos:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2004/12/astronomers-prove-string-theory.html

Lubos said: "The team has observed a pair of galaxies 10 billion light years away and gravitational lensing is supposed to be the origin. The angular separation of the pair is roughly 2 arc-seconds."

Note the two key numbers, 10 billion (10^10) light years distance and 2 arcseconds (9.7x10^-6 radian angle) angular separation. At that distance and that angular separation, if these are two galaxies their center barely separated by 9.7x10^4 light years.

A typical galaxy like our galaxy, has a diameter of 2x10^5 light years. If what they observed are two images of a typical size galaxy, they barely separate half of their diameters.

i.e, what they observe is instead one concrete image from the two half of the same galaxy, but be mis-interpretted as two images. It's that simple!

The distance from the center of one half of the galaxy to the other half happen to be about 1x10^5 light years, which is the angular "separation" they reported.

How desperate they have become? They reported that with an area of the sky merely 16 square arc seconds (4 arcseconds x 4 arcseconds) they found 11 pairs of such identical galaxy images. That visual size is barely only the size of one galaxy at a distance of 10 billion light years. They must have counted each individual photons received as individual images :-)

Quantoken

5 Comments:

Blogger Luboš Motl said...

Dear Quantoken,

you totally misunderstood the whole issue. Sazhin et al. are not string theorists. They are astronomers, and they think that they have observed something amazing (I repeat: amazing, not "desperate"), namely a huge cosmic string 100 astronomical units in size.

Regardless of the type of that string, one would need an explanation if the observation is confirmed. String theory obviously offers several explanations - from the ordinary ones (cosmic strings from spontaneously broken gauge group) to the super-exciting ones, namely the fundamental superstrings grown to a macroscopic size.

To some extent, various particular stringy models PREDICT(ed) the existence of cosmic strings created after inflation, and this could very well be an experimental confirmation of these predictions. Polchinski estimate the a priori probability that such cosmic superstrings may exist to be 10 percent.

Yes, if you open the papers by Sazhin et al., you will see the specific pictures of the pair of galaxies - they are like two circles in the digit "8" and almost touch each other. You can still distinguish that these are 2 objects. The theory that there is one image only - without lensing - is safely ruled out.

If you looked at the papers with the explicit pictures, you could have avoided writing complete stupidities. You know, I am putting the links to the papers at arxiv.org because I expect the average reader to open these papers. By this sentence I want to say that you are much much worse than what I expect to be the average reader.

I think that the average people who happen to visit your blog are much better than you, and they will be able to open the Postscript or PDF files with the papers by Sazhin et al.:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0302547
http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0406516

Consequently, they will be able to see the pictures with the pair of images, and see how stupid you must be if you were not able to open the arXiv web page and rule out your silly theory yourself.

Best
Lubos

8:03 AM

 
Blogger Luboš Motl said...

Too bad that no one attends your idiotic blog, is not it? Could not you please at least try to learn the important fact that you are a total idiot who is simple uncapable to say anything reasonable about physics? Honest fools are OK, but pompous fools is something that I simply cannot stand.

7:15 AM

 
Blogger Quantoken said...

Dear cosmologist:

Thanks for providing that link. I checked out both of the two links and did not see any new argument that I have not seen.

You said: "Asking WHERE star radiation GOES or whether it MIGHT be the CMB is a fair enough question". But your links does NOT provide a fair answer to that fair question. No one has faced up to and answer this very question "where does star radiation go?"

This is not just a fair question, it is a mandatory question that any correct theory must answer to, or fail. Because it is beyond proof that stars do radiate energy and the amount of star radiation energy do account for the amount of CMB energy correctly. And CMB energy account for the bulk part of all the radiation there is in the universe. After you take off CMB, there is a bit of other radiation spectrum left, but not much and not being able to account for star radiation energy.

The links you provide, like all other textbook explanations of CMB, rule out CMB as star radiations, based on the reasoning that star radiations would not have provided a uniform blackbody spectrum like what we see in CMB. But an implied assumption in such reasoning is that we should see star radiations the same as they were and nothing has transformed the spectrum in any way or form, during billions of years of journey to reach the earth.

That assumption is wrong. The radiation do transform during the long journey. At least we know there's redshift. There may be other things that transforms them.

One simple but very plausible explanation for the uniform black body spectrum. We presume the solar system is a second generation star which is formed after a supernova before the Sun was born. Such supernova would necessarily resulted in a dust cloud surrounding our solar system. But so far we don't see it.

But actually we do see it, but merely in the wavelength of CMB. The CMB radiation is actually radiate by that dust cloud surrounding us. The dust cloud was baked by star radiations to the universe background temperature, and then glows and release blackbody radiation in the form of CMB that we observe. The dust cloud only absorb and radiate at microwaves so we don't see it in the visible light spectrum.

The point I want to make is there are alternative explanations to the question why CMB is such a uniform black body spectrum. But there is simply no alternative explaination for where does the bulk of star radiation go and why instead of star radiations we see CMB, and it happen to be of the same energy as the expected star radiation energy.

Science took a wrong turn when the discoverers of CMB did not know that Eddington had long ago predicted the 3K CMB radiation already. Later when it was learned, misconception has already formed unfairly leaning towards Big Bang. There may also be religious needs to attribute things to Big Bang because it would logically require a being beyond the universe to make the Big Bang happen and turn universe into existence.

I am not going to do censorship on my blog. Any different opinions can ve expressed freely here. I believe it is important for different views to be told and discussed, for us to find the scientific truth. Censorship has nothing to do with science. I am very open minded and more than happy to correct my own mistake if I see convincing reasons why I was wrong and the other reasoning was right. One thing I reject firmly is to automatically took everything on the textbooks as granted without questioning.

Quantoken

4:47 AM

 
Blogger Quantoken said...

I checked out your second link more carefully. I think it has made a fatal mistake. It failed to point of one fact that at CMB wavelengths, it is impossible to distinguish individual galaxies at remote distance, nor is it possible to distinguish between microwave radiation from inside individual galaxies, or from the empty space of the universe.

The reason is simply, the microwave wavelength is simply too long to provide the kind of resolution needed to distinguish individual galaxies. The best CMB observation data available today has a resolution angle of 7 degrees when trying to determine "ripples in CMB". That's a far cry from the arcsecond resolution required to see individual galaxies billions of light years away.

My calculation from star light model gives the exact CMB temperature, matching to well within the observational margin of error. If it is a coincidence, it is too much a coincidence to be true. Especially considering that the CMB model from Big Bang provides a CMB temperature cooling down with time. Then we would have too much luck living at an era where the CMB energy density happen to account for star radiation energy exactly, and any one before or after us would not have the same luck.

Not only that, it also happen to very coincidental that the universe also happen to be expanded to the correct size that my simple calculation from alpha reveals. And the baryon density happen to correct also. If everything are so coincidental, then maybe everything in science are all wrong and we are so incredibly lucky that everything just amazingly coincidentally matches observations.

I do not think it is coincidental at all.

Quantoken:

Here is quoted from your web page:
The density of radiation at position B would be relevant to the CMB if there were dust grains which could absorb this radiation and if these dust grains were able to radiate efficiently at the millimeter wavelengths of the CMB. We can estimate the radiation at B from our location at A if we carefully subtract out all the "red" photons to determine the Cosmic InfraRed [and optical] Background Radiation (CIBR). However,

The CIBR is much smaller than the CMB, so there is not enough energy.
We see galaxies at great distance in the IR, so there are not enough dust grains to absorb and reradiate the CIBR.
The dust grains in the Milky Way do not radiate efficiently at millimeter wavelengths.

5:18 AM

 
Blogger Luboš Motl said...

Could you please stop contaminate my blog by your idiotic excrements? If every moron like you were doing it, the blog could not work.

8:31 AM

 

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