The Scientific Worldview

This is a blog that takes the name of my magnum opus on scientific philosophy called "The Scientific Worldview." Reviewers have called it “revolutionary,” “exhilarating,” “magnificent,” “fascinating,” and even “a breathtaking synthesis of all understanding.” There is very little math in it, no religion, no politics, no psycho-babble, and no BS. It provides the first outline of the philosophical perspective that will develop during the last half of the Industrial-Social Revolution.

20240226

Largest Cosmological Object Found—So Far

PSI Blog 20240226 Largest Cosmological Object Found—So Far

Infinity assumes the Infinite Universe has no “largest object.”

“An illustration of the recording-breaker quasar J059-4351, the bright core of a distant galaxy that is powered by a greedy supermassive black hole. (Image credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)”

With infinity, the Eighth Assumption of Science, we claim the universe is infinite, both in the microcosmic and macrocosmic directions. In other words, not only are the constituents of the Infinite Universe infinitely divisible (as Aristotle claimed), but they also are infinitely integrable (additive). The records we keep are made to be broken, and Infinite Universe Theory predicts this will not long remain the largest cosmological object.

“Brightest quasar ever seen is powered by black hole that eats a 'sun a day.'”

Here is a quote from Robert Lea’s article:

“A newly discovered quasar is a real record-breaker. Not only is it the brightest quasar ever seen, but it's also the brightest astronomical object in general ever seen. It's also powered by the hungriest and fastest-growing black hole ever seen — one that consumes the equivalent of over one sun's mass a day.

The quasar, J0529-4351, is located so far from Earth that its light has taken 12 billion years to reach us, meaning it is seen as it was when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was just under 2 billion years old.

The supermassive black hole at the heart of the quasar is estimated to be between 17 billion and 19 billion times the mass of the sun; each year, it eats, or "accretes" the gas and dust equivalent to 370 solar masses. This makes J0529-4351 so luminous that if it were placed next to the sun, it would be 500 trillion times brighter than our brilliant star.”

Of course, this is just another case of an “Elderly Galaxy” being discovered in the cosmogonical crib falsifying the Big Bang Theory. A black hole 18 billion times the mass of the Sun and 500 trillion times as bright: Just imagine how long it would take for that to form! In order to fit the Big Bang Theory, the claim here is for it to be less than 2 billion years old. Our own 13.6-billion-year-old Milky Way has a black hole with a mass equivalent to 4.3 million Suns—which means that the black hole in this so-called “quasar” is 4186 times as big. At the Milky Way accretion rate, this would mean J0529-4350 is about 57 trillion years old!

One could invent an ad hoc assuming the accretion rate for this quasar was over 4186 times faster than the one for the Milky Way. That seems unlikely in view of what it takes to form a cosmological object in the first place. Like all objects in the Infinite Universe, it would have to exist in an environment containing sufficient ingredients. In general, those ingredients are complexes of matter formed from aether particles as explained in my “Infinite Universe Theory.”[1] Although the densities of the aether medium vary somewhat, I doubt it is anywhere near the 4186 times needed in this instance. The formation of anything proceeds one converging aether particle at a time. That is a lengthy process characteristic of evolution in general: the bigger a microcosm is, the longer it has taken to agglomerate. Cosmologists and other evolutionists observe this all the time. Thus, for instance, the tree in your backyard may form a 1-cm thick ring each year. But you would be shocked to find a 4186-cm thick ring after cutting it down. Cosmogonists are simply being super naïve in hypothesizing super-fast galactic development. Looks like they need to get out the office more. Barring that, maybe reading “Infinite Universe Theory” wouldn’t be a bad idea.

PSI Blog 20240226

Thanks for reading Infinite Universe Theory! On Medium.com you can subscribe for free to receive new posts and be part of the “Last Cosmological Revolution.” There you can support PSI financially by clapping 50 times and responding with your questions.

[1] Borchardt, Glenn, 2017, Infinite Universe Theory: Berkeley, California, Progressive Science Institute, 337 p. [http://go.glennborchardt.com/IUTebook].

20240219

“JWST Sees More Galaxies than Expected”

PSI Blog 20240219 “JWST Sees More Galaxies than Expected”

Excuses being made up for the “elderly galaxies” being found in the cosmogonical crib.

The galaxy CEERS-93316 was originally determined to date from 250 million years after the big bang. Astrophysicists have since revised this number to 1.2 billion years after the big bang. Photo credit: S. Jewell and C. Pollock/University of Edinburgh.

Thanks to George Coyne for this heads up. He says: “I thought you would find the recalculation of the age of the galaxy to be as amusing, unjustified and silly as I did.”

https://physics.aps.org/articles/v17/23?fbclid=IwAR1spJLTCBicncmQMv6Lc9lG_-1JX_vqMiOK357KNSelpeszC-uX8S8uk7Y

As most readers know, the Big Bang universe is supposed to be younger and younger as we look back in time. Not so…

More serious ad hocs (theoretical add-ons designed to save a faltering theory) are now appearing. First you do some recalculations. Then you hypothesize some never-before seen special properties to help maintain what is left of your theoretical mess.

Remember that is what Einstein did in his famously well received hypothesis that light was a particle and not a wave. The result was his “Untired Light Theory,” which assumes light is a massless particle filled with perfectly empty space traveling perpetually through perfectly empty space. There is no evidence for any of that, but it remains the foundation of the ridiculous expanding universe interpretation. The cosmological redshift is mostly a result of energy loss over distance, with very little of it being a result of the Doppler effect and none of it being the result of the magical >c expansion of perfectly empty space.

It's not my theory, so I haven’t studied the recalculations used to drop the redshift from what was once thought to be z=16.7 to z=4.9. But here is a salient quote from Katherine Wright’s article:

“So far, only about 10 of the high-redshift galaxies found in the initial JWST images have had spectroscopic follow-ups. Among them is CEERS-93316. That more detailed view led Donnan and his colleagues to revise the galaxy’s redshift down to 4.9, which came as a relief to the researchers. ‘If CEERS-93316 had kept its high redshift, that would have been very difficult to reconcile with the models,’ says Pablo Arrabal Haro, the lead researcher…”

Let’s all hope the “more detailed view” doesn’t lead to a recalc of our own Milky Way, which has been a proud 13.61 Ga (billions of years old) for quite some time.

We now have 23 falsifications of the Big Bang Theory. Most of those are ad hocs like the first one I listed,[1] which is a violation of the Fifth Assumption of Science, conservation (Matter and the motion of matter can be neither created nor destroyed). The ad hoc is the Fifth Assumption of Religion, creation (Matter and motion can be created out of nothing).

PSI Blog 20240219

[1] [That is the one David Balogun used to best Neil deGrasse Tyson in a short debate.] https://medium.com/@glennborchardt/nine-year-old-genius-calls-out-cosmogonist-neil-degrasse-tyson-on-the-falsity-of-the-big-bang-ec9ee58a27e5

20240212

Aliens, Faster than Light Travel, and the Mysterious “Zero-point Energy”

PSI Blog 20240212 Aliens, Faster than Light Travel, and the Mysterious “Zero-point Energy”

A PSI member has some popular questions.

Oumuamua, a 400-m long cosmological object best avoided during high-speed interstellar flight. Photo credit: NASA.

Thanks to Rick Doogie for his comment:

“Thanks for your work. It's always a pleasure to read your articles, especially when you are interacting with someone new who has questions for you.

Two suggestions; Here's a popular "science" topic. What do you have to say about zero-point energy? And how about faster-than-light travel and/or communication? My conspiracy-minded friends love suggesting that the government has this technology that it is keeping secret. Of course, they reverse-engineered it from crashed alien spacecrafts. (I laugh to think that aliens have the tech to traverse many light-years, but they crash easily once they are in the Earth's atmosphere.)”

Aliens

Ever since the first stranger was sighted, humans have been curious and fearful about strangers: Was that new creature good or evil? Peaceful or warlike? That was nothing new. You only have to take a walk in the woods to observe animals in the wild who are always on the lookout for who or what might get them. It is why we now have door cameras and we look out our windows to see what other folks are up to. It is why some folks are fearful of anything “alien,” with immigrants or those who look different being good examples.

The alien hysteria that received great impetus after World War II seems to have been stimulated by the great fearfulness that continues today. It is no wonder. That war killed 60 million of us. Cosmological observations and communications have broadened our horizons. With an estimated 20 trillion galaxies, each containing upward of one trillion stars, it is a near certainty that there are aliens on other “Goldilocks” planets. We just won’t be meeting any of them soon.

So far, there is no concrete evidence that such visits have occurred during the last 3.8 billion years that the earth has existed. That includes a lot of observations of the sedimentary rocks all over the globe. Not a single crash site or other evidence of alien contact has been confirmed. All the UFO[1] sightings, tall tales, science fiction, “superheroes saving humanity movies,” and conspiracies are simply products of our usual Dreams and Imaginings™. We have been examining our sister planets, with no sign of life on any of them so far. SETI has been a big disappointment—seems no one even wants to talk to us. Still, someday those efforts might succeed, providing a huge shock to those who still think everything in the universe was created just for us.

The nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is over four light years away and we don’t even know if any of its planets contain life, much less, being capable of sending some of it here. It would take our fastest, long distance rocket (Voyager) 74,000 years to get there.

Faster Than Light Speed

That’s what it would take to make a trip to the nearest star possible in reasonable time. I don’t subscribe to Einstein’s “speed limit,” because that is only for wave motion through the aether medium. We are talking particles here, that is, rocket ships. I am no rocket scientist, but it seems the main problem is that traveling at anything near or greater than c would be disastrous for a rocket that collides with even a small cosmological object. That could be why we have not been visited yet by an alien ship.

What the Heck is Zero-Point Energy?

Wikipedia has the answer here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

That’s a pretty long and sophisticated answer from folks who don’t even know what energy is. Truth be told, energy simply is a calculation we use to describe the motion of matter. It neither exists (like matter) nor occurs (like motion). The subject comes up in theoretical physics most often with regard to quantum mechanics and Einstein’s assumed perfectly empty space.

It is somewhat hopeful that the wiki article mentions aether, which has been banned from theoretical physics ever since Einstein. His treatment of Maxwell’s E=mc² as the conversion of matter into some kind of ghostly matterless motion underlies the confusion, as I explained in:

Borchardt, Glenn, 2009, The physical meaning of E=mc², Proceedings of the Natural Philosophy Alliance: Storrs, CN, v. 6, no. 1, p. 27-31 [10.13140/RG.2.1.2387.4643].

In brief, the motion of submicrocosms within a microcosm (portion of the universe) can be transferred to its surroundings. The surroundings can be anything, but the aether is especially important, as indicated by the bi-directional use of the velocity of light in the equation. There is nothing magical, mysterious, or difficult to understand about it. It is simply the transfer of the motion of internal matter to external matter. Without the aether particles in the aether medium, the equation would not work much of the time.

Note that the equation works in reverse, such as when the motion of aether particles in light waves is transferred to the submicrocosms in a microcosm. That is the approach Maxwell used in developing the E=mc² equation in 1862 to understand the absorption of light by plants and the otherwise unfathomable increase in some of the mass.

Remember Martin Gardner’s wise dictum: “When the coffee cools, mass is lost.” As with Maxwell, the reverse is true: When the coffee is heated, mass is gained. Also remember that mass is the resistance to acceleration by already existing matter. That “already existing matter” is assumed by the Fifth Assumption of Science, conservation (Matter and the motion of matter can be neither created nor destroyed), which underlies Infinite Universe Theory.

Back to zero-point energy. As in my study and eventual explication of the E=mc² equation, I suspect most of the mystery surrounding that concept involves the motions of aether particles. Much of the consternation involves philosophy because most theoretical physicists are afflicted with aether denial. Theories breaking away from that are unlikely to be accepted without some surreptitious, back-door maneuvers never mentioning the word “aether.”

Thus, we have claims of “energy” coming in and out of existence. We have claims of “virtual” particles magically appearing and disappearing to produce the universe out of nothing.[2] Some have thought the imaginary Big Bang itself was produced by one big quantum fluctuation.

So, what to make of zero-point energy? Individual aether particles in the aether medium obviously are in motion—possibly as great as 1.5c. In any case, Einstein’s imagined perfectly empty space does not exist. If it did, the intergalactic temperature would have been 0 degrees instead of the 2.7 degrees Kelvin that was actually measured. Temperature, of course, is the motion of matter. Any fluctuations in temperature are due to those motions. I suspect quantum fluctuations simply are the result of collisions with unseen matter, with aether particles being likely at the smallest scale. Like other microcosms, aether particles accelerate other microcosms, becoming decelerated in the process, producing fluctuations with each collision. In any case, quantum fluctuations cannot be the result of matterless motion in perfectly empty space.

Rick, thanks again for the interesting questions. I enjoyed your humorous contradiction involving imagined crash sites of high-tech visitors smart enough and desperate enough to travel over 4 light years to visit us. Hope your friends stop being afraid of aliens and don’t interfere with top secret military inventions that inevitably have a few mishaps during development.

PSI Blog 20240212

[1] I like West’s invention of LIZ (Low Information Zone) for this. He points out that to be designated “unidentified,” observations of an object must be at the limit of resolution. Cameras and telescopes have improved, but, each time, the improved equipment produces photos of UFOs that are always fuzzy [West, Mick, 2023, Inventing skeptical language: Skeptical Inquirer, v. 47, no. 4, p. 28-30]. This is predicted from Infinite Universe Theory, which in particular, is founded on the Third Assumption of Science, uncertainty (It is impossible to know everything about anything, but it is often possible to know more about anything). Because the universe is infinite, there always will be causes for effects we will not be able to explain. Nonetheless, the whole UFO nonsense was put to bed by the Condon report over a half century ago [Boffey, P.M., 1969, UFO study: Condon group finds no evidence of visits from outer space: Science, v. 163, p. 260-262.] The most recent investigation pushed by the latest gang of conspiracy theorists came to the same conclusion [Kirkpatrick, Sean, 2024, Here’s What I Learned as the U.S. Government’s UFO Hunter: A forthcoming investigational report from an office of the Pentagon has found no evidence of aliens, only allegations circulated repeatedly by UFO claim advocates, Scientific American, Accessed 20240128 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-what-i-learned-as-the-u-s-governments-ufo-hunter/).]

[2] Krauss, L.M., 2012, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing: New York, Free Press.

20240205

Why Everything Must be in Motion if the Universe is Infinite

PSI Blog 20240205 Why Everything Must be in Motion if the Universe is Infinite

But not necessarily in motion if it is finite.

Portion of Photo by Gabrielle Meschini on Unsplash

Thanks to Rex Kerr for this claim:

“It's a thought experiment illustrating how you could have a lack of relativity (e.g. because a fixed ether[1] provides a universal reference frame) regardless of whether the universe was finite. A thought experiment is sufficient to disprove your claim linking infinity and relativity.

I don't actually mean that there's ether, as per the Michelson-Morely experiment.”

Inperiments

A thought experiment ("inperiment"[2]) is a hypothesis suggesting what results would be obtained if an experiment could be performed. It actually is an oxymoron, with the “thought” being internal and the “ex” being external. Inperiments prove nothing until the experiments have been carried out. They often are used when that is impossible. Inperiments are fine as long as they do no not violate the "The Ten Assumptions of Science."[3]

Rex, in hypothesizing that ether might be fixed, you are assuming the Fourth Assumption of Religion, separability (Motion can occur without matter and matter can exist without motion).[4] There is no evidence for either of those although neither inseparability nor separability, being fundamental assumptions, are completely provable in the same way neither infinity nor finity are completely provable.

Relativity

Relativity is the principle that all things in the universe are in motion. Variations of the idea were mentioned by Aristotle, Lucretius, Newton, Galileo, and others who looked at the night sky systematically. The use of the telescope in support of Copernicus set cosmology on a never-ending confirmation of relativity and inseparability. We may disagree with most of Einstein’s claims, but not his popularization of the principle of relativity, with which his name resides.

The relationship between infinity and inseparability

Now let me go through the logic of how the principle of relativity can be derived from infinity. First, there are two kinds of infinity: macro and micro. Second, my assumption logically includes both kinds as the Eighth Assumption of Science, infinity (The universe is infinite, both in the microcosmic and macrocosmic directions). In other words, scale is irrelevant, as infinity implies there is no beginning or end to the progression in either direction. Each portion of the Infinite Universe contains other portions within and without, ad infinitum. As with all fundamental assumptions this never can be completely proven in the same way we can never completely prove there are causes for all effects.

Infinity seems especially difficult for most folks to understand, although both ends of the spectrum continually receive confirmation. The JWST photos of elderly galaxies at the current limit of observation support macro infinity and accelerators support micro infinity with no end in sight.

Interconnection

The Tenth Assumption of Science, interconnection (All things are interconnected, that is, between any two objects exist other objects that transmit matter and motion) is consupponible[5] with infinity, being easily deduced therefrom. Objects continually subject to such transmission (i.e., collisions) obviously cannot be without motion. Thus, infinity implies inseparability.

Similarly, finity implies the Tenth Assumption of Religion, disconnection (There may be perfectly empty space between any two objects). This, in turn, is consupponible with the Fifth Assumption of Religion, creation (Matter and motion can be created out of nothing). Einstein’s popularity and the popularity of its derivative, the Big Bang Theory, was set in motion with his rejection of aether and his assumption light was a massless particle filled with perfectly empty space traveling perpetually through perfectly empty space. Although there is no evidence in support of this “Untired Light Theory,” its acceptance and promulgation by regressive physicists fits humanity’s evolutionary pattern.

Being myopic and self-centered, humanity unconsciously and necessarily began emphasizing matter, but downgrading motion. First there was the supposed creation of all things one could see, with the unmoving Earth created just for us being surrounded by the stars fixed upon a rotating celestial sphere. Remnants of those assumptions remain with us today, with a few folks still believing in geocentrism and flat-earth theories. Others even have hypothesized a fixed ether with each particle considered to be absolutely motionless. Some have realized that particular absurdity, building an imaginary framework to keep the particles from moving around,[6] which is not much better. Others have thought of ether as an imaginary immovable solid or as a liquid. In Infinite Universe Theory we consider aether to be a theoretically necessary quasi-gaseous medium for wave transmission. It must have interparticle motion akin to everything else in the universe described by the relativity principle and the Ten Assumptions of Science.

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[1] Note there have been two different spellings used for the luminiferous medium. The proper spelling that I now use derives from Descartes and begins with an “a.” I reserve the ether spelling for the fixed version Michelson and Morley essentially proved nonexistent.

[2] My suggested replacement for the phrase.

[3] Borchardt, Glenn, 2004, The Ten Assumptions of Science: Toward a New Scientific Worldview: Lincoln, NE, iUniverse, 125 p. [https://gborc.com/TTAOS; https://gborc.com/TTAOSpdf].

[4] Borchardt, Glenn, 2020, Religious Roots of Relativity: Berkeley, California, Progressive Science Institute, 160 p. [https://go.glennborchardt.com/RRR-ebk]

[5] A word coined by R.G. Collingwood for fundamental assumptions that don’t contradict one another.

[6] Grantham, RG, 2010, The fabric of space as an electron-positron lattice and its implications for GRT. ver2. Aug2010: [https://vixra.org/abs/2112.0150].