🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3rt438$s4s@chaos.aoc.nrao.edu>,
Chris Flatters <cflatter@nrao.edu> wrote:
 
> I don't understand why some people display such blind antipathy
> towards the standard cosmological models.  The bottom line is that
> they are not dogma.  There is no scientific priesthood promoting the
> big bang as a kind of scientific Nicene creed to which every
> cosmologist must subscribe on pain of excommunication.  The big bang
> survives as a scientific model because of its success in accounting
> for what we observe.
 
It's very common among crackpots to attack and try to "disprove" the
currently most successful and well-established scientific theories.
 
Today they attack Big-Bang because it's successful.  If, in the
future, Big-Bang should be replaced by a better cosmology, then
expect the crackpots of that time to attack that new cosmology and
to defend Big-Bang !!!
 
If you can get it, I can recommend reading Martin Gardner's excellent
book "Fads and fallacies in the name of science".  It's a few decades
old, but crackpots haven't changed very much during these decades.
There you can read that, before Einstein, many crackpots were
violently anti-Newton -- they opposed his mechanical laws and in
particular the concept of inertia.  They wanted to replace it with
other stuff (such as "whirls", "pushes", "pulls" and other nonsense).
 
After Einsteins theory of relativity had appeared and become accepted
by the scientific community, something happened among the crackpots:
they ceased to attack Newton, instead they started to attack Einstein
and to "defend" Newton!  Einsteins theory of relativity suddenly
made Newtonian mechanics acceptable to the crackpots!
 
Gardner's book is still available through Dover Books, and is well
worth reading.
 
-- 
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Paul Schlyter,  Swedish Amateur Astronomer's Society (SAAF)
Nybrogatan 75 A,  S-114 40 Stockholm,  SWEDEN
e-mail:  pausch@saaf.se       paul.schlyter@ausys.se