Comments for Blogging the Planck Mission

Comment on In the News by Dave

Dave — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:53:48 +0000

I knew about slashdot, but not the others. Thanks for the info!

Comment on In the News by Teque5

Teque5 — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 08:36:26 +0000

You were also picked up on some of the largest science & tech sites on the net: Slashdot Space.com Ars Technica Maybe this is just me, but perhaps the journal Nature should have come first on your list...

Comment on In the News by Dave

Dave — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:57:08 +0000

WMAP was 1.5 million kilometers away form the Earth so any such contamination would be greatly reduced compared to COBE. Was there any difference in the anisotropies? No. The COBE and WMAP anisotopries agree with ground-based results as would be expected for a cosmological signal, not for ‘the oceans. The dipole is clearly cosmological as it’s due to the Earth’s motion through space – both in its orbit around the sun and the sun and galaxy’s motion in space – the yearly variations from the orbit can be seen, so this is clearly an extraterrestrial signal. The CMB results match other indications form large scale structure, nucleosynthesis etc. to form a consistent picture of a hot big bang which would not happen if the source were water. The SZ effect is clearly associate with clusters of galaxies seen in X-rays and is seen as an anisotropy in the CMB. This would not happen if it was a terrestrial effect.

While I might not be a radio engineer and thus not have understood everything you claim is in this paper, the author of that paper and yourself do not understand modern cosmology or the interlinking observations that form a consistent picture. Answer some of these points rather than just regurgitating the contents of a non-peer reviewed paper in a fringe attempt at a journal and I might provide a further response. Otherwise I consider this correspondence closed.

Comment on In the News by fromthesideline

fromthesideline — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:45:56 +0000

There are MAJOR worries here. The papers by Robitaille assign the CMB to the oceans of the Earth, and so the signal is EMB (Earth Microwave Background). The COBE satellite, other than the dipole, produced no scientific data, and WMAP produced no valid scientific data either. There is no CMB signal for PLANCK to detect. DAVE has not understood the papers by Robitaille. Both WMAP and COBE are little more than space junk, and PLANCK will amount to little more than space junk. Water is a significant absorber and emitter in the far infrared and microwaves bands, as experience at sea in submarines and at home with microwave ovens attests. WMAP and COBE teams have falsely claimed to have extracted a signal from a contamination that is ~1000 times stronger than the signal sought. It is impossible to extract such a signal without having a priori knowledge of the source and/or ability to manipulate or alter the source, as laboratory experience attests. WMAP and COBE have at best a signal to noise ration of about 1.5, and so they can’t distinguish their alleged signal from noise. The alleged anisotropies obtained by Smoot when he removed the dipole, the galactic foreground and the quadrupole produced systematic ghost signals which he and his colleagues mistook for data. His “wrinkles in the fabric of time” are nothing but systematic ghost signals, not data at all. PLANCK will add nothing new to the CMB (EMB) because the signal is not cosmic, but from the oceans of the Earth.

Comment on Number one! by Dave

Dave — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:13:07 +0000

Thanks!

Comment on In the News by Dave

Dave — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:45:14 +0000

The number of downloads a paper gets is no indication of its veracity. Having glanced at this paper I don’t see that it offers any new deep insights into the CMB, something that has been studied by many more instruments than COBE’s FIRAS which is all it deals with. All of these studies conclude that the CMB is cosmological in origin. If it wasn’t, things like the SZ effect, the distortion induced in the CMB as its photons pass through a distant cluster of galaxies, would be very difficult to explain. And there are many other such confirmations.

So no worries here!

Comment on In the News by Alex

Alex — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 20:56:46 +0000

I hear that Pierre-Marie Robitaille’s paper on COBE has had in excess of 10,000 downloads; http://www.ptep-online.com/index_files/2009/PP-19-03.PDF. Could be a serious worry for the Planck team.

Comment on Number one! by loneplacebo

loneplacebo — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 03:39:54 +0000

Congratulations! You deserve it.

Comment on Tracking Planck and Herschel by Zwei “UFOs” begleiten Herschel & Planck – und verschwinden allmählich « Skyweek Zwei Punkt Null

Sun, 24 May 2009 22:55:45 +0000

[...] jüngste Stand der Ermittlungen, eine etwas frühere Zusammenfassung mit Lichtkurven, ein früher ESA Press Release und ein KosmoLogs-Artikel sowie Amateurbilderseiten [...]

Comment on Tracking Planck and Herschel by cenorth

cenorth — Sat, 23 May 2009 10:20:33 +0000

Thanks, Bill – this is fascinating. I’ve made a note in the main post.