Dear American Gypsie

In reply to AmericanGypsie for the comment given several posts ago:

Grey dust has been eliminated by the observation of the magnitude/redshift relation for very distant SNe Ia supernovae. Their spectra, brightness and redshifts are all concordant with calculated great distances.

Interstellar gas will not cause redshifts unless it is ionized, like a plasma. But, the existence of a plasma would eminate from all distances so that the distribution of locations of plasma emmision sources would not match the observed emmision source locations. And, the CMB power law (a type of frequency distribution) across the sky and across the spectrum, would not match the observed CMB (you know, that pretty sky chart showing the red and blue patches got from the WMAP satellite).

The disparity between the radius, radius of curvature or Hubble radius derived from H naught and the the magnitude of the scale factor got from application of the Friedmann equations is very large. This lack of agreement stems from the fact that the Friedmann equations calculate the scale factor of the entire universe, not just the "observable" universe.

The inverse of H naught gives the Hubble radius or the approximate size of the observable universe (U). There are other ways to calculate this dimension depending on the type of observation that is made. But, they are in good agreement. For instance, the size of U is a bit smaller because the value of H naught that is obtained for X-rays by the Chandra X-Ray Observatory is a bit larger (77 km/s/Mpc) than the value for H naught got from ancient SNe Ia (72 km/s/Mpc). Brightness measurements alone indicated the universe is very large and very old.

X-ray redshifts will be very different from microwave redshifts and would occur by different mechanisms if it was caused by interferences and not by virgin emmision from the the time of "recombination" after the Big Bang.

It's funny that you suggest scientists may be Christians in disguise. They are mostly atheists or agnostics.

The Plasma panacea that has been proposed to account for everything is being pushed by Fundamentalist Christians as indicating that U is much younger, say, about 6,000 years old. They want to debunk the Big Bang and all it entails because it indicates age in the billions of years.

They will never succeed and they should give up.

Your comments are very good and I appreciate the thought that you have obviously given to this issue. If only certain scientists would give it the same.

However, I surely would not call general or special relativity mere scientific popularism. The Principles of Relativity are the second best validated pillars of all science.

The first best validated Principles are those regarding quantum mechanics and particle physics' quantum chromodynamics (the God Particle type of a merger between quantum science and relativity).

Because popular books have been written does not mean that they have no serious basis just because they are popular.