Re: Reconsidering Halton Arp

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (James Harris) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...

> 
> Real science is data first.
> 

I agree with this.

For example the tens of millions of measured redshifts that agree
perfectly with the Big Bang model. That's DATA for you, in capital
letters. Not to mention the CMB (and in particular the *anisotropies*
in the CMB in perfect agreement with what you'd expect from the Big
Bang). And so forth.

> The problem occurs when people start pushing dogma, 

For example the dogma that there is something wrong with the Big Bang
in the face of all that Data.

> so they challenge
> hard data because they don't like it, not because it's questionable.

Exactly: there's a couple oddball observation in the millions upon
million upon millins that seem to disagree and so they decide to throw
away the millions of consistent observations and start worshipping the
few remaining ones that *they* can't figure out.

And while they're at it, they squeeze these few oddball cases into
roles they never had: taking an object who's redshift seems to place
it outside the hubble flow to pretend that there IS NO hubble flow and
the entire theory explaining it must be wrong.

Certainly such is not science. I agree with this.

> The way science works is that DATA comes first.
> 
> That's it.  No need to philosophize.  No need for protestations or
> claims about discussion versus doing as experimentalist will *happily*
> test the data endlessly, and that's science.

Exactly. And the data is in beautiful agreement with the Big Bang in
so many ways that it boggles themind.

Glad to see you've come around.