(c) Copyright 2008-2010 David Dilworth

Science Based Cosmology is limited to ideas which meet the minimum criteria for a scientific claim.

Cosmology is the study of the largest scale structures and dynamics of our universe.

Our universe's largest known structures are called Filaments, Supercluster complexes, Lyman Alpha (gas) Blobs, Voids, Walls, and Bubbles. Some of them appear as large as 3.5 billion light years across. That's about a quarter of the distance to the farthest objects we can see and some 35,000 times larger than our Milky Way galaxy. How these structures move and change shape are some of the dynamics.

Cosmology involves the study of phenomena including redshifts, galaxy surface brightness to distance ratios, diffuse millimeter radiation, supernova rise and decay curves, gamma ray burst dilation, galaxy rotation curves, Olbers paradox, and light element abundances. As of today these are measured only by observing the wavelengths, brightness, location and polarization of their "light" and how these change over time.

Cosmology includes the study of ideas, models and theories which do not have a beginning as well as those that do.

"Science based Cosmology" is limited to ideas which meet the minimum criteria for a scientific claim -

While ordinary conversations can use the words "theory" and "hypothesis" nonchalantly, science has strict limits on the use of those terms.

1. No one can claim to have a scientific theory or hypothesis until it is fully and un-ambiguously described.
2. A hypothesis or theory must also be testable to qualify as a scientific claim.

We can refer to ideas which do not meet these simple criteria as "models," conjectures, concepts or stories.

The "Big Bang" concept, often called "the Standard Model ¹," does not yet meet the minimum threshold for a scientific claim.

The Burden of Proof is on the proponent of a claim (such as the Big Bang model) - not on a skeptic.

While this is not strictly correct (all scientific claims require the same threshold amount and quality of repeatable evidence from testing), it nevertheless dramatizes that in science the proponent of an idea, not a skeptic, is responsible for providing clear, unambiguous claims for the idea, all necessary definitions, the evidence and rationale.

Definitions

Superclusters are a concentration of galaxies; large groups of smaller galaxy groups. The Shapley Supercluster is the largest one we recognize situated about 600-650 million light years from us.

Filaments are paths of galaxies forming the boundary between two voids. They are the largest known structures and contain almost all the galaxies.

Voids (and Supervoids) are large volumes of space with very few or no galaxies. The largest known void is about 3.5 billion light years across.

Lyman Alpha Blobs are huge volumes of gas as large as 400,000 light years across.

Walls are filaments which are significantly (that's ambiguous) larger along their largest axis than their second largest axis. The largest reported is the "Great Wall" at about 750 million light years long.

Cosmology fascinates me because of the many astounding, natural phenomena beyond our planet. The Geller and Huchra video showing 3-Dimensional structure of bubbles, voids and filaments captivated my curiosity and never let go. So when invited to take a 4000 level physics class in Cosmology at the Naval Postgraduate school by the esteemed Professor Emeritus of Physics Kai Wohler (a student of Heisenberg) - I jumped at the chance.

While I can crawl through a fair bit of math, I'm not one of the handful who can claim complete fluency with all the half-dozen higher level mathematics used by Cosmology Theorists. However, after studying more than a hundred Cosmology books and many hundreds of papers I believe I have a pretty good grasp of most cosmology dynamics and principles and whether they meet the minimum thresholds for a scientific claim. You will be the judge of whether I can clearly explain all this in plain English for the heart of this website -- the (almost math-free) non-superficial science-based Cosmology Glossary.

* Fully appreciating how some friends and colleagues might consider this blasphemy ;-) it is this author's opinion -- that in the same way that you can successfully drive a car without needing to understand the math of vehicle dynamics, it is similarly not necessary to understand the many fields of higher mathematics to understand Cosmology's principles, dynamics, and physics. What little math is included - you can safely ignore, and even then I try to put it in terms and units familiar to ordinary science enthusiasts (like furlongs per fortnight ;-)

If you can spend a little time examining and thoughtfully considering the evidence and reasoning compiled and summarized here you should easily appreciate how some cosmological ideas are way outside boundaries of the scientific method; how more than a few cosmology claims contradict fundamental physics or "prematurely" reverse the Burden of Proof away from their own claims.

The biggest prestidigitation may be that so many of the pieces of the Big Bang models fail to meet the minimum threshold for a simple hypothesis, a complete (clear and unambiguous) hypothesis.

I was chosen to give a talk on this website's subject at a 2008 conference and the associated paper was published in 2009. In part, this website is intended to give you a look at what parts of cosmology are reasonably categorized as science, and to unemotionally and objectively separate them from the science-fiction claims. The second list is uncomfortably long.

Perhaps this is why so many Astrophysicists agree with the observation I call (with tongue firmly in cheek) Dilworth's Hyper-Certainty Principle (the less data - the stronger the advocacy).

PS I welcome corrections and suggestions for improvements for this website, and of course - science humor.

1. The most cited author of Big Bang concepts, Princeton's P.J. Peebles does not refer to the "Big Bang" as a "theory," he correctly calls it a "model." Many popular authors ignore this important distinction.

Note: One can find reasonable but conflicting arguments on whether astrophysics or astronomy are subsets of cosmology -- or the other way around.

David Dilworth is one of only a handful of lifetime members of the organization Committee for Scientific Inquiry (formerly known as CSICOP).

His 2009 paper "Ground Rules for Cosmological Physics" was published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in the 2008 Cosmology Conference "CCC2" Proceedings.

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