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The universe has existed for as long as Man, matter and energy have existed. In the short span of time since his arrival
and curiosity have bloomed, he has looked at it with all of his senses, through microscopes, telescopes and all manner of
scientific apparatus, instrument and experimental measure. When he reached the limits of his initial instrumentation, he
redesigned and constructed even more powerful versions to peer further into his abyss of ignorance. Only through continuing
technological improvements has he pushed his view into previously unimaginable realms of the universe and its underlying makeup.
But this progress has not always been successful on its first outings. Often the telescope lens was not designed to theoretically
maximum perfection and limited and distorted images resulted. At times he did not apply the Scientific Method rigorously
enough and let bias and prejudgment lead him down blind alleys of understanding. With an incomplete understanding of the entire
house of cards upon which a scientist attempts to uncover and understand new knowledge, an incorrect analysis is a frequent
outcome.
It is very curious that orbital mechanics appear to act in similar ways at so many scales. They can be found between
any two or more proximal bodies in motion. Whether these bodies are electrons captured by and moving about an atomic nucleus,
a planet captured by and revolving about a star, or a huge number of stars and their non-luminous planetary bodies plus gases
and dust revolving about a supermassive black hole at the center of some galaxy, the basic pattern of a larger body surrounded
by smaller bodies seems to be repetitive in a self-sameness fashion at many different scales.
When the early telescope makers provided Galileo and other earlier scientists they discovered that the relatively close
and bright planets were actual bodies in a much larger space and not simply lights in the sky. As astronomers designed and
built ever-larger telescopes and began equipping them with more sensitive light and image recording detectors, our limits
of perception grew further and further out into the cosmos. There is nothing precluding us from constructing telescopes that
can gather even more light than the Hubble or Webb Space telescopes and thus extend our viewing and distance to 50, 500 or
5,000 billion light years from us. When that is demonstrated, then the Big Bang theory will have met the brick wall it has
been racing towards for most of the last century. The one main observation that has given rise to the currently popular Big
Bang type of cosmology theory is Edwin Hubble's finding of an apparent red-shift in the spectra of distant galaxies which
is proportionate to that light source's distance. But rather than explaining the cause of the red-shift through a Doppler-motion
mechanism, light passing through a very sparsely occupied space and interacting with tiny particles of matter floating there
could be apparently shifted due to well-understood molecular and atomic processes having nothing to do with Doppler.
Read about a more common and likely mechanism for red-shifting spectra
Read how the physical chemistry of ordinary matter already contains the necessary theoretical basis for a comprehensive, self-consistent
cosmological theory.
(C) Copyrighted 2008 by Joseph H. Guth, Ph.D.
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