Cosmology is in many ways unlike terrestrial sciences, where we can propose and demonstrate isolated mechanism in a laboratory.  If we think we understand how cells synthesize ATP, we will test the idea by deleting the proposedly requisite structures and observing the outcome.  This sort of tinkering trims down the uncertainty in various aspects of our hypotheses for a wide range of biological, chemical, and physical phenomena.  Cosmology, on the other hand, can be likened to an even more obscured version of paleontology.  

In archeology, we have sparse fossils, which we presume indicate the former existence of various biological lifeforms from a distant past.  We are rather certain, for lack of alternative explanations, that the skull-shaped rock signifies the presence of an actual skull at some earlier point.  We use this indirect evidence to stitch together a narrative of what life may have looked like on ancient Earth.  Cosmology, like archeology, takes indirect evidence and reconstructs the distant past.  The difference is that the indirect evidence touted by cosmologists is much more ambiguous than a fossil of a dinosaur skull.  

In cosmology, the apparent evidence is necessarily interpreted before entered into a hypothesis.  For instance, the apparent shift of distant galactic light spectra is generally regarded as evidence for recession of those light sources, though there are countless alternative explanations. An even more extreme, yet popular, interpretation of this “redshift” is expansion of the space itself between us and the distant light sources.  Again, all that is apparent in this case of “redshift” is that a diffractive prism on Earth refracts less luminous starlight at an adjusted angle.  The rest is interpretation.  But this conversion of what is apparent into what it signifies is a risky leap that is rarely encountered as necessary in more terrestrial-based sciences.  

The idea of cosmology as a hard, empirical, science is a relatively new conception.  It was not until the 1930s that serious technological advances provided foundational evidence to be encapsulated into a theory like the Big Bang.  The discovery, in the mid 1960s, of a rather uniform black-body radiation appearing in radio telescopes was also only recently made possibly by the advancement of relevant technologies.   Together with the luminosity-redshift relationship, these two pieces of indirect evidence comprise the basis for what is considered the standard cosmological interpretation.  

The observation of black-body radiation was assigned a role in the cosmos in the very same year it was discovered, in the very same journal.  Actually, the the cosmic interpretation report preceded the discovery publication in that issue of the Astrophysical Journal.  The blackbody spectrum apparent in telescopes is actually called the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as if its cosmic origin is a foregone conclusion.  But remember, all that is apparent is that there is a rather uniform blackbody spectrum in the microwave band of radio telescope spectra recorded at or near Earth.   This goes to show how quickly the signifier is converted into the signified in order to justify a hypothesis.  And unlike terrestrial labs, we cannot go an take apart a cosmological hypothesis experiment by experiment.

If the indirect evidences advanced in the Big Bang’s hypothesis, like the redshift/distance relationship, or the CMB, are in fact due to some other phenomenon, then we still will never falsify the Big Bang with those alternative interpretations, no matter how spot-on they prove.  Instead, our best hope is that if we can identify a source of these phenomena that does not involve the creation of existence 14 billion years ago, then our faith in this fantastical theory should begin to waiver significantly.  Readers will recall that I’ve criticized the Big Bang in the past for lacking mechanism from the outset. Today, let’s see what else could be causing the CMB — Bang or otherwise.  But first, what exactly did Wilson and Penzias discovery with their radio receiver on that day in Holmdel, New Jersey? 

Hoping to build an experimental radio telescope, the two astronomers noted an omnidirectional source of blackbody noise in their spectra. This observation, later interpreted as cosmic in nature, was preceded by a related hypothesis – a prediction of the redshift-driven cosmology of the 1930s.  George Gamow and his team of mathematicians had run with the Big Bang explanation of the redshift paradigm and determined that a very hot initial state of existence must have been opaque and that the subsequent recombination would cause light with adiabatically decreasing temperature.  In other words, a black-body temperature signature.

Various groups traded estimates of this residual temperature of the Universe and these values ranged from 5-50K.  The final expected value, calculated by P&W’s collaborators, Dicke & Peebles, just prior to the famed discovery was 40K.  Interestingly, the value attained by P&W was an order of magnitude lower than the contemporary theory.  Nonetheless, there was a wide theoretical framework welcoming the findings and champaign glasses clinked.  P&W shared the Nobel Prize in ’78 for the observation. 

To objectively evaluate the apparent microwave observation, however, we must go back to Gamow’s predicating expectation of blackbody echo from the Big Bang.  Pierre-Marie Robitaille, a former radiology professor at OSU, has recently cast doubt on this possibility, suggesting that blackbody radiation is only even possible if both the emitter and receiver present a physical lattice. Robitaille insists that the primordial Universe proposed by the Big Bang does not satisfy this requirement.

The nascent Universe does not constitute a physical lattice in thermal equilibrium with the present Universe.  It is because of Kirchhoff’s Law that most astronomers disagree.  Kirchhoff derived that the material properties of the blackbody walls do not need to be taken into consideration, but his work was entirely mathematical and referenced no observational evidence.  If Kirchhoff’s derivation were indeed universally valid, however, modern lasers would not work since they depend on reflectivity to generate standing waves.  In other words, not all opaque enclosures can be treated as black and absorbing.  

We should note, before proceeding, that Dr. Robitaille’s perspective is far from accepted by astrophysicists and cosmologists far and wide. But it is intriguing. Robitaille asserts that astronomers have been led astray in more ways than one by this resort to Kirchhoff’s Law, including such hypothetical structures as black holes and gaseous stars. The most interesting part of Dr. Robitaille’s work, however, is not his criticism of CMB research but rather his alternative explanation for the observations by P&W — measurements which were later replicated by rockets, balloons and satellites such as the COBE-FIRAS project.  What Robitaille suggests is that there is a large elephant in the room capable of producing these curves without the need for extravagant cosmological explanations:  water from the Earth’s own oceans perpetuates the famed signal.

We all know, from experience in the kitchen, that microwaves are strongly absorbed by water.  Stewart’s law, empirically derived, shows us that a body which absorbs in a particular range also emits in that range.  Dr. Robitaille wrote a paper outlining his oceanic origins of the CMB, where he describes how water is capable of emitting radiation, not simply due to the O-H bond but also due to short-range hydrogen bonding when the water is found in liquid phase.  Though O-H emission tends toward the infrared, Robitaille believes that in the context of the pressurized ocean, the H-bonding emission is shifted to the exact position of the the apparent CMB observations, while the O-H vibration holds steady.  Reached by email, Dr. Robitaille commented:

“The hydrogen bond in the water lattice has a much lower force constant and it acts to shift the emission from the infrared to the microwave for that bonding system.  The hydroxyl bonding network still emits in the IR.  That is the key point.  When a substance has vastly different bond strengths, these bonds end up being essentially decoupled from one another.  You can treat them as separate systems.  That is the lesson from microwave absorption by water.”

Robitaille has also gone to great lengths to dismantle spurious interpretations of COBE and WMAP satellite data.  I recommend his YouTube channel, SkyScholar, as a great place to dig into his unique ideas.  Each episode’s relevant papers are linked in the descriptions, so I won’t bother with posting them here, individually. 

Note that, like the redshift observation, there have been countless alternative interpretations of the apparent radiation over the years.  Cirkovic and Perovic have done an outstanding review of the history of unorthodox interpretations of the CMB spectrum here.  Alternatives range from radical to conservative, including Hoyle’s assertion of photon scattering due to differential local mass layers throughout the cosmos, discrete radiation sources, and the existence of undiscovered elements.  There are also light on light proposals and nuclear mechanisms said to occur in the hearts of distant stars.  In my estimation, however, none come close elegance and simplicity provided by Dr. Robitaille’s oceanic echo theory.  I will continue to seek and solicit failures of Robitaille’s mechanism, but until those become apparent, Occam’s Razor rules the day here.