Reply To: Global Warming

[Impaler]

Lets distinguish between two things.

First the falsification of the current paradigm theory (BB) which occurs when the theory makes predictions irreconcilable with observations. Lerner’s recent Tolman surface brightness work dose this in my opinion, no possible modification of BB theory can accommodate this because he’s basically disproved the metric expansion of space and that IS the heart of the theory.

Second Lerner’s counter theory Plasma Cosmology which is really just a structure formation theory based on Plasma physics, not really a full Cosmology in my opinion. A full cosmology within which his plasma structure formation occurs would need to explain why their is no entropic heat death in an eternal universe and provide a detailed round-trip analysis of all mater and energy such that a universe resembling our own is maintained eternally (or at least periodically).

Disproving BB obviously dose nothing to establish the truth of Lerner’s theory unless his theory made significant and accurate predictions on the observation in question which invalidated BB, the classic example was Einsteins prediction (with high accuracy) of the deflection of starlight near the sun, it simultaneously disproved Newtonian cosmology and proved his own cosmology. Even if one agrees with Lerner’s Tolman brightness results it’s not a significant enough prediction of his theory that space is non-expanding, lots of other non-expanding cosmologies are possible.

Dark matter is kind of the same thing, Plasma Cosmology doesn’t have it, but neither do lots of other theories like MOND, disproving dark matter just disproves BB (or forces BB theories to create a Dark Matter free version of the theory which would be very hard because it would ruin Baryogenesis). So far Dark Matter has become a kind of whipping boy because it highlights so well the sloppy ‘epicycles’ logic of BB theory, “BB theory must have extra matter so theorists find the first plausible place where it might be, dig their heels in and if it can’t be detected just claim the matter is progressively weirder and more undetectable ad-infinitude.