The book "Before the Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe" by Ernest J
Sternglass outlines the rehashed primeval atom. All the papers etc that
the
new theory relies on or has published are mentioned in the bibliography.

That book is not available in my university library. Could you provide
some of the references, please?

A search for "Sternglass" in the astro-ph section of the Arxiv gives
no results. A search there for "primeval atom" also gives no results.
So apparently Mr. Sternglass and his ideas are not very well-known in
astronomy...

A Google search reveals that he is a "professor of radiological
physics". Doesn't sound as if he is qualified to talk about cosmology...

And judging from the reviews the book got at Amazon, it contains a lot
of nonsense.

BTW, you have not given any evidence that any of these models
predicted any of the observations I originally lined out.

Pages 263-267 contain 'endnotes' which includes references.

I didn't think
much of the book or his theory, but thought no less of it than other books
on the BBT and its variations.

I'm not going to filter out the relevant
references as that would require re-reading sections of the book, which I'd
rather not do.

Earlier BBTs were quite plausible. But as the flaws in each successive
model are revealed, ever less plausible, ever more exotic models are put
up, inflation is but one of these.

If you did not notice: inflation already made some very specific
predictions, some of which have already been confirmed.

Do you mean that Lambda CDM made these predictions, or did some other theory
make these predictions.

Simply referring to 'inflation theory' is
insufficient as not all variations can possibly be right and it is quite
unethical for one variation to claim proof based on the correct prediction
of a different variation.

Thus you must specify either the particular
version of inflation theory that made these confirmed predictions or one
must assume that all variations made the later confirmed prediction.

Additionally, none of the evidences I listed had anything to do with
inflation; they are all based on developments in the universe long
after the inflationary period. They would still support the BBT if it
could be shown that inflation theory is utterly wrong.

There is no viable model, that I am aware of, that does not include
inflation. Therefore, for the BB to have occurred, inflation theory
must also be correct.

That's like saying "evolution can't be true because we don't
understand abiogenesis yet". I.e. a complete non sequitur.

On the contrary.

Natural selection can be shown to occur in bacteria and viruses in the lab.
Natural selection is a process that is occurring today just as much as it
occurred at any time in the past.

Inflation theory, as I understand it, assumes that there is an infinite
space and near infinite universe (depending on the variation of the theory).
The Big Bang Theory originally, as one of its founding tenants, postulated
that the universe is finite

and had a beginning as opposed to the Steady
State Theory that said the universe is infinite and had no beginning.

Inflation theories make very wild claims about what the universe,
particularly our visible universe, must have been like at various times

and
is supposed to explain some of the large scale structure of the universe
such as the distribution of matter and the ripples in the CMBR.

As it turned out, they
were all wrong, the amplitude of the ripples was much smaller than
expected.

Indeed, and now we know the reason: the presence of Dark Energy. It
all fits together rather nicely since this component of the universe
had been discovered.

You mean it has been hypothesised.

Now I know what it must have been like
in the early days of astronomy when astronomers 'discovered' a new
epicycle'. Of course neither you nor I could argue against them unless we
could show that we had studied and understood every epicycle and the math
PROVING its validity.

He speaks about the search
for the ripples as if they must be found to save the theory.

Well, that's true, so where is the problem?

But you claim that the BBT has a number of confirmed predictions under its
belt - why would it need saving??

even if we
have to make up additional never observed dark matter,

Dark Matter was *not* postulated because the BBT "needed" it. It had
been proposed already decades before, due to wholly different reasons.
And Dark Matter models *also* make *testable* predictions, some of
which have already been confirmed.

Of course there is regular dark matter - dead stars, gas clouds and other
space debris. But that only makes up a small portion of this 90% dark
matter (depending on theory, I think I read that your favoured version
predicts about 90%).

Actually, Andreas Albrecht and Joao Mangueijo put up a
theory to challenge inflation. In their theory, the speed of light can
change its rate in the early universe. This is reported in
NewScientist, 24th of July, 1999.

Indeed. So what?

Why would two scientists of their calibre think that there was any need for
a new theory?

Easy enough to call in experts to pull it apart:-

"These are the simplest assumptions for a consistent, physical model of
cosmology. However, ?CDM is a model. Cosmologists anticipate that not
all of
them will not be borne out exactly when more is known about the
fundamental
physics. In particular, cosmic inflation predicts spatial curvature at
the
level of one part in ten or one hundred thousand. It would also be
surprising if the temperature of dark matter were absolute zero.
Moreover,
?CDM says nothing about the fundamental physical origin of dark matter,
dark
energy and the nearly scale-invariant spectrum of primordial curvature
perturbations: in that sense, it is merely a useful parameterization of
ignorance."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lambda-CDM_model

1) Why do you think that the above "pulls apart" the model?

2) Why do you think this was written by an "expert"?

and you are an expert?

No doubt theorists, or their apologists, still
claim that the theory correctly predicted the CMBR, discovered more that
30 years earlier.

Hint: a prediction in science does not necessarily have to come before
the observation.

You can prove the consistency and validity of a theory by showing that it
models known outcomes, but to prove a theory generally it must predict
something that has not been observed.

A good example of this would be the
prediction of the age of galaxy clusters at extreme distance (at the limits
of Hubble's deep space probes). Cosmologists predicted that new structures
would be found, but old structures were actually discovered, though too few
have been observed to discount the hypothesis regarding new structures (as,
to my knowledge, all that was predicted was the average or typical age
range).

If we talk of the BBT/Lambda-CDM we are talking about a model just a few
years old, not a model that was cooked up by Gamow or anticipated by
Einstein.

We are talking about a model which was initially devised by Einstein
and over the decades more and more refined by the cosmologists.

Rubbish.

Einstein did not propose any model currently used by cosmologists.

He only considered the Milky Way, as this was once thought to be the entire
universe.

And he was wrong about the Milky way - the Milky way does not
have to either expand or contract, it rotates.

Einstein's 'model' considered matter moving through space,

which is nothing like the expanding space model.

Lambda CDM includes inflation - are you trying to devest yourself of the
shakier parts of the model??

For the 10th time: inflation is not important for the predictions I
listed above, so why do you keep harping on this instead of finally
providing evidence for your original silly claim?

My original claim was:

Comment:
Predictions made by the Big Bang model have been consistently wrong, either
wholly or by orders of magnitude eg:
The magnitude of the ripples in CMBR (predictions were not even close);
The rate of the deceleration of the expansion of the universe (it is
accelerating);
Prediction of average age of galaxies at the greatest distances viewable by
Hubble (around 10 billion light years - the two furthest galaxies have both
been found to be old galaxies, not young forming galaxies as predicted); the
complete list is far too long to catalogue here.

My subsequent claim was that no model is complete - you gave a list of
predictions made by the Lambda CDM model, but there are other predictions
that were made, including what the very early universe was like and that
inflation occurred - I include not just the limited list you gave, but the
complete list of predictions ever made by models under the BBT banner.

Inflation is part of the Lambda CDM model. If you were to tell me that
there were two models, one of the early universe and one of the universe
after a certain age, then you would have a case. But the same model covers
both eras, so you can't excise the bits you don't like and still claim
advocacy of this model.

Interesting. None of the models I read about, mostly in '98, included
an infinite universe, so this concept must be quite recent.

Absolute utter nonsense. That the universe could be infinite has been
known almost right from the start of the theory, for decades.

Thanks for showing *yet again* that you have no clue what you are
talking about.

Infinite universe was not always the accepted norm in cosmology.

Of course
there were theories that said the universe is infinite - the steady state
theory.

Olber's paradox was put up as proof that this could not be so.

Anyway, pre-inflation cosmology had the entire universe compacted in a small
space.

I'm sure I've read of some versions that have a pre-existing
infinite space, and some that don't (that space expands into nothingness,

or
expands only between particles). And some were advocating an infinite yet
bound universe.

Of course you ignore all the older models that are not consistent with
Lambda CDM and pick out only those ideas consistent with the current
formulation,

so creating the illusion of a long lineage.

George Smoot, in 'Wrinkles in Time', describes the following: "Remember, the
universe did not expand into existing space after the big bang; its
expansion created space and time as it went" (p.283 of the paperback.) He
also speaks of the universe "generating space and putting it between
galaxies." P.177

Infinite space was
included in some but not all models.

You just said that *none* of the models you read about included an
infinite universe. Care to make up your mind?

Infinite space as opposed to infinite matter filled space.

Or is the story that Linde like to tell about a an atom in your nose
could
potentially expand into another (visible) universe correct?

That's quite garbled version of what Linde actually says, and we don't
know yet if his ideas are true.

But they are no less credible than inflation, right?