Ted Bunn (Richmond) and I finished the first draft of a piece on cosmological redshifts today. We argue—against prevailing wisdom—that the redshifts of distant sources can be regarded as kinematic, that is, as due to recession velocities. We hope to be ready to put it on the arXiv soon.
Dear David,
ReplyDeletea poster at Physicsforums named Old Smuggler cast doubt on the Bunn&Hogg paper
http://physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2139217#post2139217
"That paper is built on a simple misunderstanding. They notice that the components of the Riemann curvature tensor is small enough to be neglected. This is true, but the curvature of space-time do not influence spectral shift calculations via the Riemann tensor, but via its effect on the connection
coefficients. This effect is of first order in general, and cannot be neglected.
Since the Bunn & Hogg paper is built on a false premise, their conclusions are wrong and misleading. IMO this is a crackpot paper of the worst kind; it contains a lot of bogus claims and very little sound science. Hopefully it will not pass peer review. However, it would seem that merely by
posting this paper on the preprint server, Bunn & Hogg have made laughing stock of themselves."
What should the response be?
I am dismayed and appalled, but don't know what to do or say. Has the paper been accepted by Am. J. Phys?
well, anonymous, I don't participate in web flame wars, so I won't be responding. But this game is played with calculations, not vague citation of technical terms. Show us the calculation and we can talk.
ReplyDeleteThanks for responding!
ReplyDeleteThe moderators at Physicsforums don't usually allow such vehement language.
I will keep an eye out for notice of acceptance for publication by Am. J. Phys. and will post news of this as a gentle rebuke to Old Smuggler, whoever he might be.
I liked the paper and had made some positive comments about it at the Cosmology forum--also have good associations with your name and that of Ted Bunn. The analysis in the paper seemed helpfully clear to the extent I could follow it. So I was taken aback by this person's ferocity.