I take it you believe that being intelligent and seeking answers is some sort of defect?
It appears that you don’t really understand either subject.
Andromeda is moving toward us. Presumably if the universe weren’t expanding we’d see Andromeda moving toward us a little faster. However we have no way of measuring the two effects independently. It’s only when objects are really far away and cosmic expansion comes to dominate that we can observe its effects.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. Objects are increasing their separation distance, but there’s not a *force *(in the strict sense of physics) driving it. Strictly speaking, they’re not even *moving *-- they’re not Doppler shifted, they’re not bound by the speed of light, and they’re not subject to other relativistic effects. Space itself is stretching, carrying all the stationary objects along with it.
Nope. You can point a telescope at the sky and SEE the hot cloud of plasma that formed after the big bang.
But you can’t hop in a time machine and go see Jesus. He might just be make believe, for all you know.
Well…to be precise, it’s not an either/or kind of thing. Theoretically, dark energy is everywhere, even in the room you’re sitting in right now. It’s just that the effect is, in a practical sense, only visible when all other forces are diminished. Gravity is the largest scale force there is, and so to get to a point where there’s close to no gravity, you have to get pretty far away from any galaxy. These are the regions where dark energy takes hold. In a sense, it’s kinda like the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. The emptiest parts of space inflate and become emptier, while the more dense regions conglomerate together. In the far future, the Milky Way will merge with Andromeda and the other galaxies in our Local Group, while all other galaxies will be pushed so far away we won’t be able to see them anymore.
I’m pretty sure the CMB cold spot is anomalous for its size, not for its temperature variation. Its temperature variation is still very small.
It doesn’t make the BBT “automatically right”. It makes the BBT “the best we’ve got so far”. That’s all any scientific theory is. A lot of people seem to have trouble with this point philosophically. Science is not about claiming absolute truth. It’s about the path toward truth, and getting as close as we can as time goes by. The trouble is, we’re never sure how far from it we are. Even if we could arrive at the absolute truth, we’d never know it, and we’d never be able to prove it.
Against my better judgment, I looked back in this thread.
Jon, I’m not really sure what your aim is, here. If you’re going to assume the BBT is false, you need to be able to explain all the observations with a comprehensive framework. We don’t accept the BBT simply because we have nothing better. You have it backwards: We have nothing better because the BBT is the best model that fits the evidence.
There’s nothing wrong with citing counterevidence, but it needs to actually be compelling counterevidence and not merely cherry-picked examples that SEEM contradictory on the surface but rely on some fundamental misunderstanding of basic cosmology/physics in order to make your point.