What do you think?
Rate this book
Bye Bye Big Bang: Hello Reality
A lucid description of Big Bang Theory is first presented. Following that,the long list of older flaws in that theory are reviewed, and some newlydiscovered additions to those are presented. The combined impact of thoseflaws forever destroys the credibility of a Big Bang. But, more importantly,an alternative theory that is based on astronomical data, proven science andlogic is then presented.Common sense denies the possibility of the accretion of matter requiredfor the formation of new galaxies in a relativistically expanding Big Banguniverse. In fact, the possibility of any appreciable expansion is denied.Nevertheless, astronomical observations of recent years show that newgalaxies have been forming for many billions of years.Astronomical observations also show existing galaxies are spewing enormousamounts of matter and energy into intergalactic space, providing evidence oftheir gradual death. However, due to gravitational attraction, that matterand radiation, combined with the hydrogen that pervades all of space, resultsin the continuous formation of new galaxies in violent swirling clouds of"gas and dust."Those intriguing features reveal an ancient, ever-recycling, non-expandinguniverse containing galaxies of various ages, shapes and sizes. This newrecycling universe cosmology (RUC), has been called a masterpiece ofresearch and synthesis.In addition to references to source material throughout, included hereinare several illustrations, appendixes that provide related backgroundmaterial and supporting mathematics, a comprehensive bibliography, and nameand subject indexes.This book succeeds Mitchell s 1995 book, The Cult of the Big Bang, thatwas published with endorsements by allies in the struggle against Big Bangtheory. Those allies included plasma physicist and cosmologist Anthony L.Peratt of the Los Alamos National Laboratories, astronomer and cosmologistHalton C. Arp of the Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany, andProfessor Jayant V. Narlikar, director of the Inter-University Centre forAstronomy and Astrophysics of India.Despite its anti-establishment content, that book has been amazingsuccessful.About the William C. Mitchell was born in Connecticut, on December 28, 1925,attended elementary and high schools also in that state.As a teenager, he spent over 3 years In U. S. Navy as a radar technician.After receiving additional instruction at the Naval Research Labs on topsecret radar countermeasures equipment (the birth of what is now calledelectronic warfare) and taught that subject a for year at the Pacific FleetSchools in Hawaii.He graduated from the University of Connecticut, with a B. S. inEngineering in 1950, elected to honorary engineering societies Eta Kappa Nuand Tau Beta Pi. (By age 24 he had graduated from high school, spent over 3years in the Navy, graduated from college, was married, had an engineeringposition, and a son.)He worked as a radar design engineer at Bendix Radio Corporation inTowson, Maryland and at Gilfillan Brothers and Litton Industries in the LosAngeles area for about 10 years. Later was Chief Engineer of a small companyspecializing in digitally controlled industrial processing, that is,computerization of processes such as automatic gasoline blending atrefineries as early as 1960.The last 19 years of his full-time employment as Sub-Project Engineer, andlater as Project Engineer at TRW Systems in Redondo Beach, California wasprimarily on NASA scientific spacecraft programs. But he also worked (in1975) on such projects as the establishment of technical requirements for anew Pacific Fleet Commander In Chief headquarters (CINCPAC) in Hawaii, and(in 1979 to 1981) on the installation of the NASA Data Tracking and RelaySatellite System (TDRSS) ground station at White Sands, New Mexico.Following retirement from TRW (in 1981), he worked as a consultantengineer on several spacecraft programs, but also on such projects as thecomputerization of FBI Identification Division data information storage andretrieval in Washington, DC.Although never fulfilling requirements for an advanced degree, Mitchellcompleted a number of graduate courses in mathematics, science andengineering during his years of employment.He has in the past been an airplane pilot, with commercial license,instrument rating, and aerobatics training; and a Cessna aircraft owner.Other interests have included, music, swimming, boating, fishing and skiing.Of special interest has been family; including Holly, his wife of 53 years,son, daughter, and grandchildren.He became heavily involved in cosmology in the mid-1980s and, afterconsiderable study, became disenchanted with Big Bang Theory. Since then hehas worked full-time on cosmology, and wrote a number of papers on thattopic. In the early 1990s, he wrote The Cult of the Big Bang, and, for thepast 3 years, has devoted his efforts to the preparation of this book, ByeBye Big Bang - Hello Reality.
- GenresScience
446 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2002
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 12, 2024
Bye Bye Big Bang - by William C. Mitchell
Full disclosure, I am a Big Bang skeptic who is attracted to alternate cosmological theories. Thus I was naturally attracted to this book. In its subtitle, this book promises to provide “an understanding of Big Bang theory in a few short chapters,” and then learning “about its many flaws,” and finally the “true story of cosmology based on logic and facts.”
The book has proven to be a great disappointment, and I would not recommend it.
The first few chapters, devoted as they are to explaining the origins, logic, and persistence of the Big Bang Theory (BBT), do a very poor job. To be charitable, I’m probably no more of an expert on the BBT than Mitchell is, but I bet I could explain it better. In his explanations, this author uses (and mis-uses, sometimes by mistake) too many acronyms, terms of art that are not explained, and appears to go on the assumption that you already know a lot about the BBT. But worse, these first few chapters seem incoherent and provide no understanding. So the first promise in the subtitle is not honored at all. Some of the explanations are so convoluted, that I must doubt even the author understands what he’s writing about.
Regarding “terms of art” ...some of the discussion about the BBT must naturally include an explanation of how astronomers determine distances, ultimately to come up with a size of the universe (i.e. the farthest distances yet seen). There is a concept called “standard candles” or the “distance ladder” that relates a variety of different techniques for determining distance to the stars and galaxies in our universe. The bottom-most rung of this distance ladder is the most accurate, using simple geometry in determining the distances to the nearest stars; it is called finding the parallax of a star.
To understand the various rungs in the distance ladder, you must first understand this first rung: how parallax is observed and measured, and why it is so accurate. Indeed, a common unit of distance - the parsec - is based on this very method of distance determination. Mitchell fails utterly to describe this very simple, first rung of the distance ladder. He had two opportunities: first, when he describes the various “standard candles” or rungs on the distance ladder, and then a second, when he attempts to define the unit of distance called the parsec. I can think of two reasons why this is so; either Mitchell himself hardly understands what a parsec (or parallax) is, or he has a terrible editor (or no editor). Probably it’s a combination of the two, and it does not bode well for the rest of the book.
Aside the bad writing, throughout the book I am irked by the claims made, or evidence presented, referenced to articles in the popular press, like Scientific American, or Sky and Telescope articles. Not only is it more difficult to fact-check such references, I rank them generally as unreliable, like getting your information third-hand - basically hearsay. Science writers in the popular press are typically not experts, and might well get something wrong if explained to them by the originating scientists.
This worried me, and so I was very happy to finally discover a reference to the peer-reviewed literature, that Mitchell used to make a claim that some low-mass white dwarf stars might be hundreds of billions of years old - vastly older than the supposed 15 billion year (Byr) age of the BBT universe. This was in the middle section of the book, where Mitchell presents evidence that contracticts BBT.
I doubted this claim myself, so I looked this one up eagerly - a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, “The End of the Main Sequence” by Laughlin (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...) - and found what I half expected... a completely different result/claim in the paper from what Mitchell claims. The paper described the nuclear chemical modeling of low-mass white dwarf stars, and concluded that such stars could continue burning hydrogen for indeed hundreds of billions of years. But this was no claim that such stars were now that old. Mitchell had completely misunderstood the meaning of this paper.
I skipped forward in the book to a small section devoted to Arp’s observations of the anomalous red-shifts observed in quasars, and further to the evidence that observations show quantized red-shift values. This is an area in which I have more knowledge, having read some of Arp’s books for myself. Here too, Mitchell’s treatment seemed inadequate and unclear, as if he’d read only the liner notes on one of Arp’s books, but not really understood his observations, nor their importance.
As much as I’m a Big Bang skeptic, I have no need to fill my head with notions that are at best poorly formed, and at worst flat-out wrong. So I admit that about halfway into this book, I gave up on it. I never made it to the third part where it would provide me with the “true story of cosmology based on logic and facts.” Since I had thus far read little of logic, and detected a poor grasp of the facts, I felt that I had little to lose by skipping the last half of this book.
Full disclosure, I am a Big Bang skeptic who is attracted to alternate cosmological theories. Thus I was naturally attracted to this book. In its subtitle, this book promises to provide “an understanding of Big Bang theory in a few short chapters,” and then learning “about its many flaws,” and finally the “true story of cosmology based on logic and facts.”
The book has proven to be a great disappointment, and I would not recommend it.
The first few chapters, devoted as they are to explaining the origins, logic, and persistence of the Big Bang Theory (BBT), do a very poor job. To be charitable, I’m probably no more of an expert on the BBT than Mitchell is, but I bet I could explain it better. In his explanations, this author uses (and mis-uses, sometimes by mistake) too many acronyms, terms of art that are not explained, and appears to go on the assumption that you already know a lot about the BBT. But worse, these first few chapters seem incoherent and provide no understanding. So the first promise in the subtitle is not honored at all. Some of the explanations are so convoluted, that I must doubt even the author understands what he’s writing about.
Regarding “terms of art” ...some of the discussion about the BBT must naturally include an explanation of how astronomers determine distances, ultimately to come up with a size of the universe (i.e. the farthest distances yet seen). There is a concept called “standard candles” or the “distance ladder” that relates a variety of different techniques for determining distance to the stars and galaxies in our universe. The bottom-most rung of this distance ladder is the most accurate, using simple geometry in determining the distances to the nearest stars; it is called finding the parallax of a star.
To understand the various rungs in the distance ladder, you must first understand this first rung: how parallax is observed and measured, and why it is so accurate. Indeed, a common unit of distance - the parsec - is based on this very method of distance determination. Mitchell fails utterly to describe this very simple, first rung of the distance ladder. He had two opportunities: first, when he describes the various “standard candles” or rungs on the distance ladder, and then a second, when he attempts to define the unit of distance called the parsec. I can think of two reasons why this is so; either Mitchell himself hardly understands what a parsec (or parallax) is, or he has a terrible editor (or no editor). Probably it’s a combination of the two, and it does not bode well for the rest of the book.
Aside the bad writing, throughout the book I am irked by the claims made, or evidence presented, referenced to articles in the popular press, like Scientific American, or Sky and Telescope articles. Not only is it more difficult to fact-check such references, I rank them generally as unreliable, like getting your information third-hand - basically hearsay. Science writers in the popular press are typically not experts, and might well get something wrong if explained to them by the originating scientists.
This worried me, and so I was very happy to finally discover a reference to the peer-reviewed literature, that Mitchell used to make a claim that some low-mass white dwarf stars might be hundreds of billions of years old - vastly older than the supposed 15 billion year (Byr) age of the BBT universe. This was in the middle section of the book, where Mitchell presents evidence that contracticts BBT.
I doubted this claim myself, so I looked this one up eagerly - a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, “The End of the Main Sequence” by Laughlin (https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10...) - and found what I half expected... a completely different result/claim in the paper from what Mitchell claims. The paper described the nuclear chemical modeling of low-mass white dwarf stars, and concluded that such stars could continue burning hydrogen for indeed hundreds of billions of years. But this was no claim that such stars were now that old. Mitchell had completely misunderstood the meaning of this paper.
I skipped forward in the book to a small section devoted to Arp’s observations of the anomalous red-shifts observed in quasars, and further to the evidence that observations show quantized red-shift values. This is an area in which I have more knowledge, having read some of Arp’s books for myself. Here too, Mitchell’s treatment seemed inadequate and unclear, as if he’d read only the liner notes on one of Arp’s books, but not really understood his observations, nor their importance.
As much as I’m a Big Bang skeptic, I have no need to fill my head with notions that are at best poorly formed, and at worst flat-out wrong. So I admit that about halfway into this book, I gave up on it. I never made it to the third part where it would provide me with the “true story of cosmology based on logic and facts.” Since I had thus far read little of logic, and detected a poor grasp of the facts, I felt that I had little to lose by skipping the last half of this book.
April 29, 2024
Nit sure this aged well. Not sure my comment will either. This stuff is so ambiguous it makes me wanna 😩
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews