Maybe that intelligent cosmology post I did a few months back wasn't so far off the mark. Not satisfied with the religious right's "its only a theory" approach to evolution, political muckymucks at NASA are now taking the same approach to the big bang. Sigh...

And since we're talking about mad science here: GIP!

ETA: More from Pharyngula.

ETA2: Muckymuck caught lying on résumé, resigns.




Comments:

two_star:
2006-02-05T06:15:59Z

I know that I was a little too young and impressionable when I read Eric J. Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened, but it still seems to me that big bang cosmology is resting on a small base of evidence that plasma cosmology explains in a way that is at least as elegant.

11011110:
2006-02-05T07:36:27Z

I don't know what plasma cosmology is... Does it predict the microwave background radiation temperature and subtle nonuniformity, and the cosmic hydrogen/helium ratios, as well as (inflationary) big bang does? A quick Google search found this description of the controversy, but it doesn't say anything about how their theory leads to better predictions, only that we haven't finished learning all there is to know about cosmology yet, which is hardly an argument for why their theory is an improvement.

Anyway, I can hardly complain about a little skepticism about current scientific dogma. But advancing competing theories from a scientific point of view, even if those theories are sometimes a little wacky, is very different from what's going on in the links I posted here. It's explicitly stated in the letter from the NASA official, pushing terminology that emphasizes our uncertainty about the big bang dogma, that the reason for doing this is not scientific but religious.