The Pathological Science of the COBE Satellite

If ever there was a a scientist who fits the definition of an alternative visionary, one who fearlessly goes against the tide of the cosmological mob, it is this man....

Dr. Pierre-Marie Robitaille

Strangely, after doing a search for his name and Sky Scholar here at ATS, no matches came back. Perhaps he has been linked before and I missed that?

In any case, all of his videos are so well made and easy to understand, and his alternative explanations to nearly everything in cosmology and space in general is truly very convincing and his views deserve to be heard here, of all places.

In his latest video, he tears in to the The Microwave Background COBE Satellite results in a very understandable way, and reveals that the billions spent on those programs are wasted, and the science is just more fake news, in part because the Anisotropy Maps they use violate the Third Law of Thermodynamics.

I expect some apple carts to be upset here, but please remember what we are all here for. This is just one more example of the "Pathological Science and Media" that many of us see dominate our world today.

AT ATS of all places, we all need to have an open mind about these things so please give the man a good receptive listen.

a reply to: NeonKnight

Another BS thing? Like the fantasy rockets not working in a vacuum?

I thank the SO’s community for pointing me to Sky Scholar Channel. So much going on in the world of cosmology!! Great resources thank you for posting 👍

a reply to: NeonKnight
Robitaille did some valid work on MRI, but he essentially ends up making a fool of himself, and was discussed in my "Ask any question you want about Physics" thread here. Below is part of the discussion, where KrzYma was a crackpot theorist who didn't even understand the theories he was trying to criticize, and ErosA433 is a physicist who replied, followed by my own comments. There is more in the linked thread.

KrzYma
www.abovetopsecret.com...

you should maybe listen to real experts

"Pierre-Marie Robitaille, Ph.D., is a professor of radiology at The Ohio State University. He also holds an appointment in the Chemical Physics Program. In 1998, he led the design and assembly of the world’s first Ultra High Field MRI System. This brought on the need to question fundamental aspects of thermal physics, including ideas related to Kirchhoff’s Law of thermal emission, and more. These presentations are not endorsed by The Ohio State University."

ErosA433
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Ah... great a real expert on the subject of Astronomy and Dark matter, from a man who appears to have an obsession that thermal physics has the answers to everything and completely throws out whole areas of knowledge because hey doesn't like them... Such as for example in the black hole video there "Objects don't radiate internally" he is bastardisaing the meaning of what is being said, what he is kind of trying to claim there is that light inside a liquid doesn't exist, and radiation pressure doesn't exist... yet... that is absolutely not the case.

There are many issues with his videos and how he explains things... in one video he says that the sun cannot be a gas, because the ideal gas law cant be used since you need a real surface for their to be pressure... which is, blatantly quite incorrect, he also states that radiation doesn't transfer energy within objects... also proven to be an incorrect statement.

He then goes on to say that the sun is made of metallic hydrogen... because it is at high pressure.

Sooooo yeah, this guy, i don't have to prove anything really, he has his ideas and is arguments for arguing against what the accepted models say, are largely equation picking rather than well motivated, something he trips up over so so often.

SO i think Ill stick with the actual experts... you know... the people who have been working on useful things for the last few years rather someone who got fame years ago and clearly lost their mind. Ad Hominim attack? maybe, but his videos are quite problematic in just how ignorantly he brushes aside so many measurements. I almost wanted him at some-point in his videos to claim that fusion isn't the energy source of the sun.... which again would be to ignore so so so many measurements.

Funny too given his disproval of blackholes is "You cant see it, so you cant prove it exists" Id say the same for his motivation for his solar model, "you cant see the core of the sun mate, so you cant say anything about it"

works both ways.

Robataille made a video where he pretended not to know about Einstein's treatment of the topic, but Robataille wrote a paper about that in 2006 so clearly he knows about it and is making misleading videos!

Arbitrageur
www.abovetopsecret.com...

So called "laws" seem to be some of the lowest formulations of accuracy, many based on classical concepts which have since been superseded by a deeper understanding of nature based on quantum mechanics and Kirchoff's law falls into that category which Robitaille himself knows as in his 2006 paper "An Analysis of Universality in Blackbody Radiation" where he references Einstein's treatment of the subject which is a more advanced approach than Kirchoff's law.

Robitaille comes across as extremely ignorant in that youtube video, as if he doesn't even know about the Einstein treatment, but as his 2006 paper shows he clearly does know about that so I'm trying to figure out what he's doing by acting more ignorant than he is. My hypothesis is that his video is targeting a particular audience (including electric universe followers) who are widely known to lack understanding of mainstream science, and which followers appreciate the ego boost that comes with nodding in agreement to anybody saying anything that disagrees with mainstream science so they can feel like they are smarter than all the smartest scientists in the world.

So Robitaille is not as dumb as he appears in that video, but still there are some really dumb things in that video that he may even know are dumb but he's targeting an audience who won't know the difference, just read the comments, which mostly say things like "I don't know much about science, but I'm really impressed with your work. Maybe mainstream scientists will finally wake up now and get as smart as you and me now that you showed them they are all wrong".

Read Robitaille's paper "An Analysis of Universality in Blackbody Radiation" from 2005, written before he kept going further and further off the deep end. Robitaille is now making videos that don't even acknowledge Einstein's work, which Robitaille discussed himself back in 2005!

a reply to: NeonKnight

Vids not working for me.

a reply to: andy06shake

Here is a link while I try to figure out why the YT feature is not working for me.

www.youtube.com...

a reply to: Arbitrageur

OK fine. Even if he was wrong about something before, that does not prove he is wrong about this.

But you seem to have a closed mind already, so someone like Robitaille is probably not for you.Probably you should keep with the establishment view, after all, they've never been wrong before right?

originally posted by: NeonKnight
a reply to: Arbitrageur

OK fine. Even if he was wrong about something before, that does not prove he is wrong about this.

But you seem to have a closed mind already, so someone like Robitaille is probably not for you.Probably you should keep with the establishment view, after all, they've never been wrong before right?

Actually there are some problems with mainstream science, and scientists will admit the problems they know about, and there may be more problems they don't admit or haven't figured out yet.

In contrast to that, let's say 100 people come up with 100 mutually exclusive alternative ideas, of which at least 99 must be wrong, and possibly all 100 are wrong.

So the fact that mainstream science is wrong about something, does little to support any one of those 100 alternative ideas. Each must be evaluated on their own merits and each has a likelihood of being wrong from 99% to 100%.

The problem with Robitaille is the way he just throws out measurements he doesn't like, which you can't do if you're really seeking the truth.

So no don't assume all mainstream science is correct, it's probably got some things wrong in terms of theory. But in no way does that support anything Robitaille says. If you look into it you find out he's even more wrong, and is working on things outside his area of expertise. He claims blackbody radiation theory is wrong, yet there is lots of experimental evidence showing observations are consistent with theory, and anyone wishing to believe Robitaille has to contend with that and other measurements he just chooses to ignore:

archive.briankoberlein.com...

Robitaille makes several wild claims about astrophysics. He claims that the cosmic microwave background isn’t due to the thermal remnant of the big bang, but rather due to microwaves reflected off the surface of Earth’s oceans. He claims the Sun isn’t powered by nuclear fusion in its core, but is instead a layer of liquid metallic hydrogen at 7 million degrees...

How do you begin to counter such ideas? Well, we could start with the fact that the blackbody law has been confirmed experimentally in numerous ways, or that the cosmic microwave background matches a thermal blackbody to extreme precision, or that stellar temperatures derived from the blackbody law match temperatures found by atomic line spectra. We could point out that the CMB has been observed by satellites millions of miles away from Earth, and aimed away from Earth’s surface, or that reflected microwaves wouldn’t give a blackbody curve due to absorption bands in both water and Earth’s atmosphere. You could point out that his liquid-metal Sun model relies upon thermal blackbodies to be impossible, that his argument in favor of a liquid photosphere is that it looks liquid, and that his main argument against gravity-driven solar fusion is that the model uses mathematics.

a reply to: NeonKnight

Ta.

I don't know or understand enough about physics to pass comment on the content of the video, but when I see a comment like this:

the tide of the cosmological mob

and

Pathological Science and Media

I question whether we are getting any of this:

we all need to have an open mind about these things

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: NeonKnight
a reply to: Arbitrageur

OK fine. Even if he was wrong about something before, that does not prove he is wrong about this.

But you seem to have a closed mind already, so someone like Robitaille is probably not for you.Probably you should keep with the establishment view, after all, they've never been wrong before right?

Actually there are some problems with mainstream science, and scientists will admit the problems they know about, and there may be more problems they don't admit or haven't figured out yet.

In contrast to that, let's say 100 people come up with 100 mutually exclusive alternative ideas, of which at least 99 must be wrong, and possibly all 100 are wrong.

So the fact that mainstream science is wrong about something, does little to support any one of those 100 alternative ideas. Each must be evaluated on their own merits and each has a likelihood of being wrong from 99% to 100%.

The problem with Robitaille is the way he just throws out measurements he doesn't like, which you can't do if you're really seeking the truth.

That is quite funny, since that is exactly what Pierre says the cosmologists are doing. Pathological Science (Man, I love that term, it has been around since the 30's according to this video. Perfect for our times and ATS.)

Perhaps you should watch his latest video now that I have it linked above.

Because Robitaille points out that scientists rarely if ever admit they are wrong. In fact they usually come up with statements just like the quote from the video coming from the BICEP2 press conference in 2014...

"If we are to be criticized, it should be for over-interpreting our data, not for being wrong." Professor Clement Pryke

You can say a lot of things about science with data, but even better, with enough data, you can't be criticized for being wrong!

That is exactly what is meant by Pathological science, and that is what we appear to be getting from the COBE group as well as cosmology in general.

I know this for sure. Almost everything we think we know now about cosmology will be proven wrong in the long run. We just need to stop circling the wagons around these billions of dollars of grant money with gigabytes of the wrong data.

originally posted by: NeonKnight
I know this for sure.

You've already damaged your credibility by asserting you find Robitaille credible, so you saying that means nothing.

Almost everything we think we know now about cosmology will be proven wrong in the long run.

I think it's likely some part of cosmology will be proven wrong. For example, we have a crisis in cosmology over the Hubble Constant giving us two different measurements using two different methods. That's a serious problem, and everybody knows it and admits it, so something is likely wrong in our models that needs to be fixed, unless it's a data problem, but so far it doesn't look like a data problem. So, if you posted a video of someone harping on the problem with the Hubble constant measurements and saying those proved a huge problem with mainstream cosmology, I'd be agreeing.

You're totally off on a wrong tangent thinking I'm defending mainstream science. I'm not; it has some problems, and that's just one example. But to repeat since I don't think it has sunk in for you yet, saying mainstream science is wrong does absolutely nothing to change the fact that while scientists know they have serious problems like the Hubble constant conflicting measurements, they know for certain that Robitaille's ignoring the data to propose his ideas is not the solution to anything, and that's why his cosmology claims are almost completely ignored by scientists except for the rare post like the one by Brian K Oberlin I posted above pointing out all the factual data Robitaille ignores.

If another Einstein comes along and says "Here's a new model, it solves your Hubble constant measurement problems and other problems", scientists would welcome the change if it really worked to eliminate the problems with the current models. Even if the "pathological" science claim is true, what you don't seem to get is that doesn't make any of the 100 crackpots that come along with 100 crackpot ideas any more credible. What makes them crackpots isn't that they don't agree with the mainstream, it's things like Brian K Oberlin points out in his post above of simply ignoring all the data that proves the crackpot ideas wrong.

By the way it's not just crackpots which have problems with available data proving their ideas wrong. We have so much data that can prove so many things wrong, it poses a challenge for mainstream theoretical physicists too, as explained by theoretical physicist Nima Arkani Hamed at time 44:30 in this video:

www.youtube.com...

Even without a single new experiment, just agreement with all the old experiments, is enough to kill almost every idea that you might have...

It's almost impossible to solve these problems, precisely because we know so much already that anything you do is bound to screw everything up. So if you manage to find one idea that's not obviously wrong, it's a big accomplishment. Now that's not to say that it's right. But not obviously being wrong is already a huge accomplishment in this field. That's the job of a theoretical physicist."

Hamed's job as a theoretical physicist is to presume current mainstream models are wrong and come up with better models, so theoretical physicists like him are not married to the old models, they only go into the profession they do because they think the current mainstream science models are wrong (or at least incomplete), and they think they can come up with better models.

originally posted by: Arbitrageur

originally posted by: NeonKnight
I know this for sure.

You've already damaged your credibility by asserting you find Robitaille credible, so you saying that means nothing.

Very persuasive technique. Convincing!

You've now convinced me that engaging with you is a waste of time and effort. You've also convinced me to skip reading any of your replies.

Bye Bye

originally posted by: NeonKnight
Perhaps you should watch his latest video now that I have it linked above.

I did, though I think you should question your own technical abilities when you can't figure out how to follow the simple instruction in the ATS embedding script which says "please insert video number here", you pasted the entire link! Do you think an entire link is a video number? People do this all the time so you're certainly not the first, but they don't make claims like "Almost everything we think we know now about cosmology will be proven wrong in the long run." such as you did, so if you think your believing Robitaile wasn't good enough reason why you should doubt your claim, reconsider based on your own inability to follow a simple instruction, so why should you believe your own statement about cosmology, which certainly requires a much greater degree of technical competence to understand than inserting a video number?

Anyway thanks for posting a link even if you never figured out how to embed the video, I watched it from your link.

Because Robitaille points out that scientists rarely if ever admit they are wrong. In fact they usually come up with statements just like the quote from the video coming from the BICEP2 press conference in 2014...

"If we are to be criticized, it should be for over-interpreting our data, not for being wrong." Professor Clement Pryke

Scientists and individual experiments are wrong all the time, and that quote is from 2014. Eventually they did admit they detected a valid signal, but it wasn't from the cosmic microwave background like they initially thought, it was from some dust, and in that respect, yes they were wrong, and they admitted it!

My team thought we’d proved cosmological inflation. We were wrong. By Brian Keating April 19, 2018

That's a fascinating expose of what went on inside the BICEP2 team, and the author says he did raise some issues with the team leaders about the data they used from another team (Planck team) to rule out the dust. The team leaders replied it wasn't their only source of data, so they went forward with the announcement, but the Planck data was an important source of data which nearly the entire scientific community realized, which is why most scientists were skeptical of the BICEP2 announcement and waited for the Planck data to come out to see if it either validated or contradicted the BICEP2 results. It eventually did the latter.

Contrary to the claim by Robitaille and the vast majority of the scientificaly illiterate commenters on that youtube video who think this is evidence all of cosmology is wrong because scientists don't know what they're doing, quite the contrary, the episode in its entirety is a good example of the scientific process and how it works, and it worked pretty darn well in this case, overall. We can see inside the minds and thoughts of physicists at the time the BICEP2 data was out, but the Planck data wasn't released yet, and as a community they were very skeptical of the BICEP2 results.

You might find it interesting to go back and read various blogs from that time which I have done, but I'll just quote from one of them by Professor Matt Strassler who was not directly involved but like most physicists was very interested in the results of the experiment.

Will BICEP2 Lose Some of Its Muscle?

From the very beginning of the BICEP2 story, I’ve been reminding you (here and here) that it is very common for claims of great scientific discoveries to disappear after further scrutiny, and that a declaration of victory by the scientific community comes much more slowly and deliberately than it often does in the press. Every scientist knows that while science, as a collective process viewed over time, very rarely makes mistakes, individual experiments and experimenters are often wrong. (To its credit, the New York Times article contained some cautionary statements in its prose, and also quoted scientists making cautionary statements. Other media outlets forgot.)

Did you get that brilliant statement that “Every scientist knows that while science, as a collective process viewed over time, very rarely makes mistakes, individual experiments and experimenters are often wrong.”

So, this is part of the problem with you and the other people who commented on that youtube video saying things like ""Almost everything we think we know now about cosmology will be proven wrong in the long run." You don't seem to realize that a single wrong experimental result in cosmology doesn't prove all of cosmology wrong. In fact if you dig into this and read all the skepticism in the scientific community of the BICEP2 results you may learn to appreciate the rigorous process that such announcements must endure to get accepted by the scientific community. Prof Strassler further explains how the scientific process works:

Science, Inc.

What you are getting a glimpse of, if you are following this story, is the scientific process in action. In physics — I can’t speak for other sciences, and I know there are some where it is not true — the assumption by the experts is that every claim of a scientific result, especially a major discovery, is wrong until proven right. Every result, especially one of particular significance, is poked and prodded, scrutinized and questioned, and subject to a battery of stress tests. Of course the scientists doing the measurement do this first, as best they can, knowing that it’s better to discover mistakes in private than in public. Then their colleagues do the same, checking the details of the measurement, repeating it (more or less), and trying to do even better measurements of the same effect. Anywhere along the way during this process, an experiment can fail to pass muster.

So I had to post this explanation because it's something Robitaile and most of the commenters on his youtube video don't seem to get, this BICEP2 thing isn't an example of how science is broken, it's an example of how science actually works! What Strassler says doesn't just apply to BICEP2, it applies to every new, significant discovery in science. After any team announces a new, significant result, give the rest of the science community a while to digest it, poke it, prod it, criticize it and put it through the stress tests. One of the comments in Strassler's blog points this process out:

RhEvans | May 22, 2014 at 9:07 AM |

Another excellent discussion of the skepticism over the BICEP2 results. As Matt correctly states in the penultimate paragraph, what we are seeing here is the scientific process in action. A discovery is always treated with a certain amount of disbelief by the scientific community, and the more spectacular the discovery the more this is the case. BICEP2’s result is now being analysed, scrutinised and picked apart by cosmologists around the World, and it will not be treated as correct until other experiments confirm the result, and if they don’t or if a flaw is found in the BICEP2’s analysis, then the result will be treated as a false detection.

originally posted by: NeonKnight
You've now convinced me that engaging with you is a waste of time and effort. You've also convinced me to skip reading any of your replies.

That's fine, skip my replies, should I be any more offended than all the cosmologists are when you say "Almost everything we think we know now about cosmology will be proven wrong in the long run." As I said, some things in cosmology are likely wrong, but almost everything? So, that's fine, I won't expect any replies from you then, but rather these posts are an update for anybody else who reads the thread, that I did watch the video after you posted a working link, and contrary to the BICEP2 saga proving cosmology is wrong which seems to be a main focus of the video, the BICEP2 saga shows the great lengths to which scientists go to challenge each other, especially when making new significant announcements.

Regarding the claim of "pathological science", while Langmuir who coined the term didn't intend for it to have a precise definition, he did state some criteria and one of them was you think something is there when it really isn't, one example being the "canals" on Mars. It turns out there weren't any canals on Mars, and that's how the other examples that Langmuir mentioned worked. So while the BICEP2 team was wrong, I don't think it quite falls into that category because everyone agrees they did detect something that was really there, to a high confidence level. So you see it's not really like the canals of Mars etc or detecting things that aren't really there. The problem with BICEP2 was that they had a real signal, but they were just wrong about the source of that signal (Their signal was from dust, and not the CMB). It's not quite the same thing as what Langmuir called pathological science.

Other contradictions to Langmuir's explanation are that pathological science refuses criticism and insists they are right. The BICEP2 team admitted they were wrong about the source of their signal eventually, and even in their initial papers there were cautions about possible sources of error, and they even admitted their "sketchy" source of data from another team, they didn't try to hide that. So I think it fails to meet Langmuir's "pathological science" in several ways. Langmuir did have a point that pathological science exists, and that's why scientists don't trust other scientists, instead, they trust science, which is not the same thing, a difference which may be hard for the layperson to appreciate, but it's rather the point of what's in these two posts, so I hope some people can appreciate it besides scientists.