People who find it difficult to understand that recession is without limit usually make the mistake of thinking that the receding galaxies are projectiles shooting away through space. This is an incorrect view; the correct picture consists of galaxies at rest in expanding space. Edward R. Harrison, Cosmology - The Science Of The universe, p. 216
There is nothing that makes the Oracle of Ottawa cringe more than when a media cosmologist uses the expanding balloon or the raisin cake cake analogy to explain the expansion of the universe. Accepting this very simplified view is the cause of many problems farther down the road so to speak.
It is also very strange that the current Big Bang cosmology has a very big reliance upon the continual expansion of the universe. They claim that it is one of the simple proofs that the universe popped out of a singularity at a specified time in the past, some 13.8 billion years ago, sort of the 20th century version of Bishop Usher all over again.
But it is also very strange that the Steady State universe also requires an expanding universe, but as far as the Oracle of Ottawa is concerned the reason why the Steady State expansion actually happens is so much simpler to understand. We will discuss this in detail more in a future post.
This is all pretty disturbing stuff to someone who has been alive long enough to remember the shock that there was quiet likely to be more than one galaxy. This idea didn't really start coming into standard thinking until the 1960's. Now at the time of this writing there are observed to be at least 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe.
And the Oracle of Ottawa hates to tell you Dear Reader, but this figure will greatly expand in your lifetime, as a matter of fact I will even go so far to predict that it will not be long that the only conclusion one can come to is that the Universe is infinite and unbound after all...
Science does not build its theories by a single line attack. Sir Fred Hoyle, The Frontiers of Astronomy, p. 126
This blog was kicked off by watching videos late into the night at the University of You Tube. And one night I happened to come across one entitled Universe - The Cosmology Quest. Not only did it have rare and unknown footage of my childhood hero Sir Fred Hoyle, but it included all the heretics of that wild and wonderful time of my well misspent youth. And many that I have never heard of before and some more that I had no idea that they were involved with the cosmology quest.
Sir Fred Hoyle
I will never forget that part where Halton Arp was describing his theory of how a galaxy gives birth, and there was that animation of it as he talked of it. Well Dear Reader, it took the top of my head right off so to speak. Something just clicked deep inside. It one of the most important hallmarks of a valid theory in that it was self similar. Halton Arps theory of a galaxy giving birth looks exactly like a corral spitting forth a seed. There was no mention of these things in my high school physics texts.
Halton C. Arp and Jayant Narlikar
All the heretics were present, too many to name in this short writing. But I was amazed that they somehow got Jayant Narlikar to appear. And he was most interesting and I am sure someday soon to be proven right for all eternity. The Oracle of Ottawa was so set on fire that he dug up all his Fred Hoyle books from the stacks finally realizing that the time has come to get the reading in and done. And as providence does provide I found a mint new copy of A Different Approach To Cosmology in mint condition in hardcover, with the dust jacket, unread. It is not unread now. It was by Hoyle, Burbidge, and Narlikar, hail the gang was all together one last time.
Now the Oracle of Ottawa has been to college and why he even graduated! So A Different Approach was not that hard to get through. The end result of that was to read Ernst Mach's most famous book 'The Science of Mechanics', and would you believe that I had a fresh facsimile copy that I bought years ago and kept for that time when I had time. The time came and the book was wacked in no time, and I can understand why it is so often mentioned even today. I will riff on it in this blog in the near and probably into the distant future...
Of course the contemporary 'Big Bangers' say that all these heretics are ancient history. Sir Fred Hoyle has been gone from us since 2001. But somehow much to the chagrin of the bangers the Universe keeps getting older and bigger around. Objects that are of several million solar masses are being found where it is impossible for the Big Bang to have placed them. The Very Large Telescopes of the European Space Agency are detecting objects being ejected from galaxies near and far, like God was pitching batting practice.. And you often are starting to hear that nightmare quip that puts the fear of God, that can't possibly exist, into every bangers heart: The text books are going to have be re written...
All science is cosmology, I believe, and for me the interest of philosophy, no less than of science, lies solely in the contributions which it has made to it. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 15
It was sometime in 1970, just after Christmas, that the Oracle of Ottawa, set up his first observatory on the trunk lid of a 1967 Chevy Belair, in Pembroke Ontario, after I convinced my Mom that the legs of the tripod would not damage the paint. I can't remember if I got the telescope for Christmas or if I "sourced" it myself with the Christmas tips from my paper route. I was twelve years old at the time.
This was all started from watching the Apollo 11 Moon Landing on July 20th 1969. It is one of those events, that even at the time of this writing, I can remember with total clarity. The whole family watched the whole thing, my Mom declared a special event dispensation as regards to the usual rules of bedtime. I remember thinking, hell, if I am only twelve years old and we are walking on the Moon, the future is surely unlimited. Why in 2015, which seemed eons away, the Oracle of Ottawa should be surely getting regularly smashed at some bar at the end of some galaxy.
Dominion Observatory, Ottawa Ontario
I remember how well prepared I was for the big night. I read all I could get my hands on, I had my model of the command module, with matching lunar module that I carefully constructed from a kit that I ordered in the mail. And even though I was just a kid, I knew how risky this was, and if successful, what triumph it would be for all time...
With my crappy little refracter telescope set up, I picked the brightest object in the sky, and put my eye to the scope, and was pretty bummed that the image in the eyepiece was the same as looking with the naked eye, just bigger and somewhat brighter. And it was damn hard to focus a draw tube telescope, (twist and draw..), but I never even conceived that you could get one with a rack and pinion focus. Spirits lifted in later observation sessions when the moon was out. All my brothers and sisters lined up for a look, even my Mom came out and was truly amazed. My Dad of course took a pass. He assured me that he would always take my word for it that the Moon was still there... Oh, and did I mention how cold it could get in Pembroke Ontario in the middle of winter? A very early conclusion was that astronomy was very hard work.
Later on in the early 1970's, our family had moved to Arnprior Ontario, Consolidated Paper refugees, as my Dad took a job at the Gillies Mill in Braeside Ontario. It was a happening little town back then, and a mere half hour from Ottawa, the Oracle of Ottawa's horizons sort of widened, to say the very least. One example of that was when our boy scout troop went to the Dominion Observatory in Ottawa for a tour, and if the weather was favorable, a moment for everybody at the eyepiece of a real professional telescope! But as luck would have it rained cats and dogs for the whole evening and it all looked pretty hopeless until the clouds unexpectedly parted just long enough for everyone to get a peek at Venus, which was just like I saw it with my telescope but bigger and brighter.
Then came the teenage years, first jobs, first rock concerts in Ottawa, that just happened to be a golden time, for concert goers. And yes the Oracle of Ottawa saw Queen in their first appearance in the western hemisphere, you can check that... It was a trial run before the official tour started in the US. Interest in astronomy and all that hard work took a bit of a back seat. But as to the origins of it all, the Oracle of Ottawa was always interested. And my favorite cosmologist was Sir Fred Hoyle. I have always believed he was right. The most admirable thing of the man was that he went his own way and stuck with it no matter what the world thought.
Lately the comments about the stupidity of the Steady State universe are not so confident as they once were. And even though Sir Fred is long gone from us, the Universe just seems to be getting older and bigger... We will talk about that in postings to come...
