Contrabang! #30 Silencing The Doubters

8 Fast Facts You Must Know About Mercury’s Last Transit Until 2032 (link)

If you make the effort to see it for yourself, you can reap a unique set of both visual and scientific rewards. On November 11, 2019, Earth will witness Mercury transit across the Sun.

This in an article dated Nov 18. Why are his alerts about upcoming celestial events always after the fact? It's almost as if having a blog that is theoretically useless is not enough, and he insists on having one that is pragmatically useless as well.

Digging in, it looks like his Medium blog lags the Forbes version by a week. Thus the Forbes version of this article came out on November 11. Perhaps he has some sort of contract agreement with Forbes, but surely there's some way to rework things so that the Medium blog is not totally useless, such as by doing astronomical event notifications a week earlier.

This Is How Astronomers Will Finally Measure The Universe’s Expansion Directly (link)

And if the data is good enough, we can determine that it’s accelerating directly, too, silencing the last remaining doubters.

That's what this blog is really all about: silencing others, telling them what they can and cannot say. There is a reason he always sides with the authoritative consensus in all subjects: he wants to be able to tell you that you're wrong and you should shut up, and he is willing to upend all logical principles to do so. In this case, he is vowing that a proposed scientific experiment should banish all doubt of the theory of dark energy from public discourse. But that's not how science works. We seek to disprove hypotheses, as no theory can ever truly be proven.

Where is the converse of his boasting. What if the experiment fails, will proponents of dark energy be silenced? Of course, we know how they handle contradicting evidence already, as it is a routine occurrence. What is remarkable is that normal routine - where experimenters show surprise and cite the need to question basic assumptions, whereby the theoreticians and their cheerleaders like Ethan swoop in to claim everything is okay and there is just some more complexity we didn't know about - has been been replaced by tacitly admitting that they have no intention of acknowledging any possible contradictions at all. Head I win, tails...there is no tails.

The occupation of science requires there to be mystery in the universe and the ethos that we can never be entirely sure about what we think we know. The priest, on the other hand, must profess full knowledge of everything and seek to silence the doubters and heretics who by their existence challenge his position of status.

If you want to understand what the Universe is made of, what its fate is, or how long ago the Big Bang occurred, there are just two pieces of information you need. According to the science of physical cosmology, all you need to measure is:

• how quickly the Universe is expanding today, and
• how the expansion rate changes over time,

and that information allows you to reconstruct the Universe’s composition, history, and evolution as far into the future as you like.

He thinks he can create a comprehensive model of the universe using just two measurements. He would be more credible to say that he can turn lead into gold by finding the proper incantation to recite.

Up until now, there’s been a tremendous amount of controversy surrounding all of these issues, as different teams using different methods arrive at different answers. But they all have one thing in common: all of their measurements rely only on indirect methods of determining how the Universe has expanded over time. But with a new generation of telescopes arriving in the 2020s, astronomers will at last gain the capability to measure the expansion rate directly. Here’s the incredible science behind it.

Measuring the expansion rate directly, if that could be done, would largely dispel the theory that redshifts are caused by something else in addition to relative motion. It would not necessarily support the theory of dark energy, but it would make the case against dark energy a good deal weaker. One of the biggest arguments against dark energy we have is that there is no evidence at all for it; it is merely a proposed theory to explain observed redshifts. Thus, an experiment to verify or refute the relative motions implied by observed redshifts would be interesting. Let's see what that incredible science is.

The ELT is expected to come online in the mid-2020s, and should be capable of measuring the redshifts of individual objects with about a factor of 10 improvement in precision over today’s best instruments. With thousands to tens of thousands of quasars expected to be discovered and well-measured at the large distances needed to see this effect, the ELT should be sensitive to changes in redshift that correspond to additional shifts of just 10 cm/s in overall magnitude.

This represents an improvement of a factor of 10-to-20 over existing telescopes, and means that if we wait just a decade (or perhaps a decade-and-a-half) once the ELT comes online at full power, we should be able to measure the expansion of the Universe directly.

The key term you’ll want to remember as we move into the mid-2030s, the earliest possible time this detection could robustly be made, is redshift drift. By measuring how cosmic redshifts change over time — something we’ve never been able to do to date — we’ll be able to test a magnificent array of aspects about our Universe. 

Clearly Ethan was incorrect when he spoke of an ability to measure the expansion of the universe directly. The new approach is still dependent on redshifts. However, the additional capability will be the ability to measure the rate of increase of redshifts that we can detect. I would have to predict that the expected redshift drift will not be seen. Then, Ethan will talk endlessly about the "missing" redshift drift, how it is one of the biggest mysteries in all of science, and how only robust public funding will solve the pseudo-dilemma.

This Is How Your Old Television Set Can Prove The Big Bang (link)

For decades, one of the Big Bang’s greatest predictions was shrouded in doubt. The answer was always there on Channel 3.

The gist of this article is that a small portion of the white noise on your television set emanates from the cosmic microwave background.

Channel 03 was — and if you can dig up an old television set, still is — simply a signal that appears to us as “static” or “snow.” That “snow” you see on your television comes from a combination of all sorts of sources:

• human-made radio transmissions,
• the Sun,
• black holes,
• and all sorts of other directional astrophysical phenomena like pulsars, cosmic rays and more.

But if you were able to either block all of those other signals out, or simply took them into account and subtracted them out, a signal would still remain. It would only by about 1% of the total “snow” signal that you see, but there would be no way of removing it. When you watch channel 03, 1% of what you’re watching comes from the Big Bang’s leftover glow. You are literally watching the cosmic microwave background. 

So all you need is a way to filter out 99% of the noise to find the desired signal. That sounds a lot like what is happening at LIGO these days. By today's standards, using a TV to discover the CMB in the 1960s would have been easy. Create a model of what you think the signal should look like, apply filtering until you achieve the desired signal, and then claim success.