Cosmologists tell us many things about the universe, which they believe emphatically, and some they believe with good reason. Others show their faith in general relativity is well beyond the scope of how science is supposed to be used.

The orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars can all be explained using Newton’s Laws, which predicts elliptical orbits for planets. Well at least to a degree, there is some level of error, most particularly Mercury who’s orbit is not precisely elliptical (first discovered in 1859) and requires general relativity to explain more correctly.

This gives us a starting point. Newtonian Mechanics explained why planetary orbits are elliptical, and General Relativity explained why they are not.

Furthermore, General Relativity predicts that light will be bent by gravity, but Newtonian Mechanics calculates gravity using the inverse-square law which requires the mass of the two objects, and as light has no mass so it should be unaffected by gravity. It has been experimentally observed that gravitational lensing does indeed occur as predicted by GR.

Time to produce today’s horrible truth: We don’t know how to calculate gravity precisely using General Relativity. It’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that nobody knows how to do it. I said we can use GR to predict Mercury’s orbit, but there’s a reason that makes it possible. To calculate it we use the Schwarzschild solution, which is the only known way to precisely calculate gravity using GR at present, and it only works when calculating the gravity between two bodies of vastly different size. This is because one of them, the larger one, is always considered to be “stationary”.

So what about two bodies of roughly equal size, like say a binary star orbit. Well, we can predict that using Newtonian Mechanics, it’s easy because Newtonian Mechanics predicts where the “central force” will be. But try doing it with GR, and you can’t even come close to predicting it with the same degree of accuracy as NM! The one thing you can predict, however, with GR is the rate of energy loss (which is not handled under NM). However, there is a further problem: both NM and GR disagree between observables and predictions when it comes to binary systems.

So instead of seeing how we can fine-tune the system, so to speak, cosmologists are happier to assume that there are further unseen forces acting on the system, like say a smaller 3rd object, which causes the behaviour that isn’t predicted by GR.

But really, they should know better. Cosmologists call themselves scientists, yet they are adamant in the correctness of their theories – even in the face of contradictory evidence. Most other scientists know that scientific theories are not necessarily “how the mechanics of the world actually work” but are merely useful models of how the world functions. Indeed, if chemists were as adamant as cosmologists they would still be waiting to find those last two predicted atomic elements. But instead of seeing the existence of 8 out of the 10 predicted elements as rock-solid proof that all 10 will exist, they see it as evidence that the theory was good, but not good enough. Similarly, cosmologists should also be looking at the world under the same scientific conditions; that is they should be saying their theories are “good” but not always “good enough”.

Cosmologists are certain that there is overwhelming evidence for the existence of the Big Bang, there is a consensus on it. This goes to show how absolutely convinced of General Relativity they are. But they go further in assuming the correctness of the theory, they make predictions about the existence of yet more stuff in the universe which is not implicit in any way in GR or any other theory of physics, and which they have been consistently unable to prove.

For instance Dark Matter. It attempts to fill a hole left by our current understanding of the universe. There’s an unexplainable problem that for our current theories, so we’ve decided that something else must exist to explain it! Yes, I’m quite sceptical of Dark Matter and with good reason.

I’ve shown you that General Relativity predicts gravity very well in a vast variety of different situations (although it’s not entirely computable in every situation), there is a problem though. When we look at an even larger scale still like say, an entire galaxy, GR fails us, it also doesn’t seem to work on the quantum scale. And I’ll explain why: galaxies appear to rotate at the wrong speed under GR.

So this is basically a more or less coherent model of how to calculate gravity at present:

1. Quantum Scale: Use Quantum Mechanic’s Gravitons.
2. Human Scale: Use Newton’s Inverse-Square Law.
3. Solar System Scale: Use General Relativity.
4. Galactic Scale: Invent Dark Matter, sprinkle galaxy with desired amount of Dark Matter, then apply General Relativity.

Actually we shouldn’t be surprised that GR has its limits, after all every theory only seems to work in a specific window of reference. But try telling that to today’s cosmologists!

Quasars remain one of the most mysterious intergalactic objects, even though cosmologists have recently decided upon a consensus on the matter. I personally don’t feel a consensus on this matter is beneficial for science, especially when such a consensus pretty much inhibits anyone from thinking for themselves on the matter.

There aint no cure for those Redshift Blues. For a while now quasars have posed this problem: they either violate Hubble’s Law, or they appear in places where they shouldn’t. Last year a paper was released showing that quasars are devoid of time dilation. This shocked cosmologists. Even more shocking is that in the face of these problems you have some cosmologists jump up and down shouting “it proves that there’s dark matter”, never mind the little problem that dark matter should affect the light from quasars and stars equally…

I watched as the consensus on quasars shifted; they were like sheep. One minute confidently professing “quasars are all distant objects, and there’s some other explanation to explain away why you found them there”… then the next “many quasars are actually nearby, but we’re still 200% confident that we can still use redshift to calculate the distance of every other galactic object that isn’t a quasar”. It shook them to the core when that paper was released last year showing quasars devoid of time dilation. Of course, if they want to explain it using Dark Matter they run into a problem that Dark Matter now has mutually exclusive properties: on the one hand it has to be more centralized to galaxies to repair some predictions, but for others most of it has to be at the parameter of galaxies.

In addition to the unorthodox use of science as already discussed, cosmologists also love their Big Bang theory, so much so they’ll “change” just about any data to make it work. Inventing dark matter was just the beginning. Cosmologists have said, many times, that background radiation proves the existence of the Big Bang. There’s just one minor mishap – before background radiation was actually measured in the 1960’s, many estimates of what this value might be were made.

Guess what those estimates were? In the 1920’s Sir Arthur Eddington calculated this value as 3°K using classical models of the universe in other words he did not care about any Big Bang “echo” his calculation was related only to galactic objects, the result of simply having stars and quasars etc heat everything up. This is very close to the actual measured value of 2.8°K. On the other hand, Big Bang cosmologists estimated the value as being anywhere between 5°-50°, even the lower estimate of 5°k was still way off by comparison. So when cosmologists triumphantly claim to have found the “echo” of the Big Bang, all they did was measure the background noise of the universe as it is now, as it was predicted to be if there was no Big Bang, and offered no substantial proof that it’s origin was anything but purely galactic, and then claim it as evidence of the “echo” of the Big Bang. What actually happened, of course, is they looked for the echo of the Big Bang and there wasn’t one!

Every time observables disagree with theory in cosmology, cosmologists invent something new to handle it. Dark Matter, Cosmological Constant, etc. They do not allow the Big Bang theory, or indeed General Relativity’s predictions of gravity or other galactic characteristics to be falsified by observations. They don’t even allow Hubble’s Law to be falsified by the new consensus on Quasars. Instead they insist that the theories are correct and that it’s possible to reconcile any problems with them by introducing further assumptions and theories. Because they don’t allow their theories to be falsified, their theories are pseudoscience – much like the theory of Evolution is pseudoscience (and next entry I will fully explain this too).

The universe does not function the way that is predicted by GR. The “curvature of space-time” envisioned by Einstein may well be describing a different process.

I want to point out to those of you who note I’m not an astrophysicist, or even a scientist, and that I probably don’t know what I’m talking about: the method of science is very simple. Any theory that cannot be falsified by observations or by experiments is not science. That isn’t to say that a theory has to be false to be science; rather it has to be testable in a “neutral” environment such that it could potentially be falsified if it were false. I’m not arguing that GR is not science, quite the opposite, I’m arguing that it’s current use in cosmology is a pseudoscience because cosmologists do not treat it as a theory that could potentially be falsified; any “contradictory data” they encounter they simply interpret to mean “GR is correct, and something else is causing that problem with our science”. On the other hand, I am saying that the Big Bang is pseudoscience, and there’s lots of reason’s I’ve already gone through in this post, but my favourite one is the fact that any observation of the universe is claimed as further proving or supporting the theory; even when those observations might have been predicted better by a non-big-bang universe (such as background radiation, but there are also lots of others and if you do your own research you will discover this for yourselves). So I just want to reinforce the point that I am using science as it is intended.

Those of you who thought my comments on the problems with QM and with String or M-Theory were harsh may well be refreshed to hear me point out the problems with General Relativity. It doesn’t mean I think the theory is unhelpful, I just don’t think it’s as true as cosmologists think it is, in fact most scientists would not treat it the same way that cosmologists treat it; they would treat it as a theory, and not as a truth. I’m not claiming to be smarter than physicists, I’m simply pointing out some of the errors in their methodologies (or if you prefer “scientific disciplines”).