18 March 2007

Crackpot of the day - CMB not cosmic

One of the benefits of being a science faculty member is that crackpots think you're their key to fame. Take this paper for example. It's only two pages, and I only skimmed the article, but some of the flaws I find are...

  1. Only at the position of the COBE satellite has a nearly perfect thermal spectrum been recorded. Not true, it's also been detected by WMAP (satellite) more recently, and previously by Penzias and Wilson (New Jersey), BOOMERanG (Antarctic baloon), Cosmic Background Imager (Andes, Chile), and many others. It's worth noting that the CMB has essentially won two Nobel prizes at this point in time - one for Penzias and Wilson, and one for COBE.

  2. Given sufficient scattering at all frequencies, at the position of COBE, the signal examined must be isotropic. But it isn't. The very largest effect found in the CMB is a dipole signal due to the Earth's and Sun's velocity through space. It is easily removed with models based upon our known velocity in space. If the CMB were from some source tied to the Earth (such as the Earth's atmosphere or the Earth's oceans), this dipole would not exist at all.

  3. Although the article discusses the possibilities of microwave scattering in the atmosphere and an oceanic source, it does not present models or other tangible evidence linking either hypothesis to reality. This is essentially the same flaw as IDers have.


Feel free to pile on and offer your own criticisms.

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