For those who instinctively feel the Big Bang Theory is wrong.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/online_videos_Thornhill_NPA.htm

so lambda is zero?

woah just watched part of it, when he started defamig Einstein & Co he qualified as blithering *****. Also, most of the stuff he says later on is bullshit. I stopped watching it.

Really.
o.O

a good alternative to "the big bang theory":
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0487831/

O ... kay ...

I wonder if matter was created or recycled. if at anychance matter was turned completely to energy somehow.... some sort if infinitely powerfull nuclear explosion.... i havent really looked up if that makes any real sense but i figure mass changes to large amounts of energy.

Just because he makes fun of popular science makes you stop listening? That's not any different than Lawrence Krauss making fun of Christians who have their own ideas about the universe. If you would like them to be open to different ideas even though those ideas are told with a sneer to their own believes, and I suppose you would, you should do the same with this, then. Just filter the entertaining parts and use the useful ones.

I'm quite sure you have more knowledge on the subject than me. His claims of energy unable to exist without matter sounds interesting to me, but I am not able to calculate wether this is true or not. But I do trust your judgement, is it false?

It is false, as for example photons have energy, but no mass.
And they really don't, to an extremely high precision. If they had, the electric field would go something like ~ 1/r^2*exp(-a r) for some a>0, but actually it goes like ~1/r^2 without the exponential factor. Because the electric field is so strong, this can be tested very easily. So when he claims "no energy without mass" I'd like to see some evidence.
And it goes on like that. Electromagnetic radiation does not require the presence of matter. And Äther-theories have long since been falsified, as they break Lorenz invariance.
Earth formerly had a lower gravity? Seriously?
Also, his statement that we cannot ignore the electric force in the universe is, true. No cosmologist ignores any of the known long-range forces. It's a matter of fact, though, that there are two electric charges: positive and negative, and only one gravitational charge. That's why, even though the gravitational force is some 10^37 times weaker than the electric force, it dominates on cosmological scales, because it can accumulate.

Sure, I can only state theories, but at least they've been tested. It's not as if he was talking about the ultimate frontier of current research.

You're right in telling me off for my harsh words, but I don't like people ignoring basic facts without proof for their "better" theories.

edit: just looked him up. Funny how they create their own scientific world outside of the "mainstream". Their own journals, medals, etc.. if they'd be really convincing, I'm sure they could publish to serious journals. Somehow this looks like Uri Geller who doesn't want his "magic" to be acknowledged.

It seems like there's lots of Uri Geller practices evolving from university studies, kind of creating jobs for those who didn't quite make it into the mainstream fields of research. Since not many people could say or judge they're wrong as they simply dispute or talk around average Joe's questions with little facts that do hold scientific ground, but when looking closer they don't really prove their claims. Meanwhile they run away with government money to perform research on fields that make no sense in the first place... if doing research with it at all. Or why else hold this talk full of nonsense to elderly gentlemen where at least some must know the truths and lies?

On the other hand, perhaps there is some truth in his claims, and the facts you stated hold true for him as well, but could not exist without the existence of mass in the universe? Photons have no mass, and have to travel by the speed of light. But can they only exist because there is mass around in the first place? Just coining something up.

If there's one thing I experienced during the first year of physics on university is that there are a lot of explanations for things that seem unreasonable when you start digging deeper. To find such explanations you need new insights and ideas and then prove it with calculations. I failed to master the latter in the time given and had to drop out though :P, and figured understanding the universe in words would suffice over recalculating the facts. But finding out what's true and not is a bit harder without knowing all the basics. That's why we have this forum though .

About the true meaming of E = MC^2 I dont think he said neither something wrong nor rivolutionary
On the contrary , in my opinion, many people misunderstood the real meaning of the equation
Mr Thornhill claimed that mass and energy are property of matter
This is, at least, what I understood myself when I studied this stuff at school

The common mistake is the to assume that mass is a synonimous with matter
and consequently to assume that in a nuclear reaction matter is annihilated and turned into pure energy

The confusion matter == mass is due to the fact that mass had been supposed to be a constant for hundred years
Same as, before Newton, weight was supposed to be a constant and consequently a synonimous with matter,too

The claim :

The mass of photons is null

It is not complete, you must add

The mass of photons is null, at rest

A photon in motion has a momentum
It can collides with electrons same as it were normal material particle
In conclusion, quite often you read


Matter is frozen energy

Right, but also

Energy is diffused matter

Many of those people are downright charlatans though. They might not even have the degrees they claim to have, let alone be in the know of the common scientific lingo and methods.

They usually do their own thing indeed, which is very typical for pseudo-scientists. Doesn't mean they are all wrong by definition and skepticism is good, but most of them are pretty much just loonies.