http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/060905104549.htm

I know there's already a thread, but this might steer the discussion away from the original purpose...

I don't really know if I need to add anything to this. I never bought the big bang garbage to begin with, so this isn't so much of a surprise for me.

Perhaps we can have some thoughts on it. I'm no physicist, so I couldn't dream up any explanations that could save the big bang in a million years, but I'd imagine someone will try. Either way, any alternative explanation will undoubtedly be no better, but I suppose even atheists need their creation myths.

That was me, by the by.

It isn't that atheists need a creation myth, but everybody who's spent enough quiet time with their thoughts will wonder: "Where did it all begin?"

Science rarely (never?) has easy answers. And every answer it finds creates even more questions (not least of which is "Is this the right answer?").

Any "scientist" that tells you he has all the answers is smoking that special "science crack".

EDIT: just read the whole article. LIke i said in the moral relativity thread. No origin point. No co-ordinates. No absolute positions.

This is apparently hard to understand for religious fundamentalists: Science is not a religion. It is not a fixed doctrine, but a permanent gaining of knowledge.

Observations that seemingly contradict previous theories come out every couple of weeks, especially in astronomy. Usually, the solution is found quickly. Sometimes however, astronomic observations lead to a modification of a theory, the development of a new one or - the last time in 1905 - even to abandoning a well-established theory.

This is however not to be expected for this one. Galaxy shadows on the background radiation are extremely weak. They can not be observed directly, but only indirectly through many assumptions and tricks. So the fact that they aren't found with a certain method can have a lot of reasons and is not so exciting at first.

I'd rather be shopping for shoes!

I think The original poster has some problems understanding this article.. it doesnt "prove" that the big bang never happened. Certainly the conclusions call the current cosmology into question, but all it proves is that certain predicted phenomena dont exist in all cases. (specifically shadows in microwave background).

One study like this doesnt yet disprove the big bang cosmology. It does show us how little we really know about the larger universe however, and current cosmology is likely to be very incomplete.

For myself I'm not big suporter of a single universal "Big Bang". The extent of the universe may be much more vast than such a theory predicts. it seems at least concievable that there have been many big bangs in many regions of the universe, each creating galactic super-clusters or even larger structures we know nothing about.

Whether or not the amount of matter in the universe is actually infinite I dont know; certainly there is an amount vast enough that it cant be easily understood. The universe may not be exactly infinite, but it may be indefinite.

The interesting thing about cosmology is that it is a wide-open field, and we can expect many more discoveries and controversies for a long time to come, as methods of seeing farther and with more precision are developed.

In case you haven't understood that article, here's a brief explanation.

The microwave background was radiated when the universe became transparent 400,000 years after the big bang. The radiation had a temperature of 3000 K back then, but meanwhile cooled off to around 3 K.

The background radiation reaches us from all directions. However when a galaxy is in the way, it absorbs a small percentage of the radiation. Therefore there's a "shadow" in the background radiation at that position.

Because galaxies mostly consist of empty space, the shadow effect is too weak for direct observation. However when a galaxy moves perpendicular to us, the shadow "lags behind" the image of the galaxy. In this case it can theoretically be observed.

Unfortunately the radiation absorption by a galaxy is very small, like 0.0001 percent, while the background radiation can only be measured with much less precision - like 0.1 percent. Therefore the shadow is still unobservable, however with a lot of tricks and statistical methods some scientist groups have claimed to have observed those shadows in the past years using data from the COBE satellite.

The group mentioned in the article tried to measure the shadows of some galaxies with data from the WMAP satellite, which has a 3 times better precision than COBE. They didn't find shadows. So we have now observations from the COBE and from the WMAP groups that contradict each other.

Unfortunately science has no infallible pope. Thus further observations are necessary to find out which group was right. After 2007 we'll probably know the answer. The PLANCK satellite is then launched, which is 3 times more precise than WMAP.

Contradicting measurements are very common in science, and are always explained sooner or later. Thus I'm afraid the creationist hopes of abandonment of science will be once more disappointed .