Talk:Tolman surface brightness test

suggestion for new references

I would love to see inclusion of the below references and a discussion of their validity since they claim that current data, interpreted correctly using the Tolman surface brightness test, support a non-expanding universe.

2005: Evidence for a Non-Expanding Universe: Surface Brightness Data From HUDF

2014: UV surface brightness of galaxies from the local Universe to z ~ 5

--PeterVermont (talk) 16:33, 29 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

fringe-ness?

This article may be here to promote a fringe theory. It seems to imply some kind of Steady State universe, which is generally considered to have been disproved. Vultur~enwiki (talk) 17:10, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

By article do you mean this Wikipedia article, or the references cited within it? The Tolman surface brightness test is absolutely standard within Big Bang cosmology, but finding objects of known surface brightness at cosmological distances to carry out the test reliably is very difficult. It is fairly straightforward to carry out the test naively in ways that overlook changes in surface brightness over redshift (for example because of evolution over redshift), or that use samples of galaxies that change in character over redshift due to selection effects. TowardsTheLight (talk) 18:59, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ok... it's just that a couple of of the sources quoted are by fringe-y scientists, and the tone of the article seems kind of "this is a problem for the Big Bang theory". Vultur~enwiki (talk) 23:10, 12 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't read those papers, so I'm not going to comment on them. But the Tolman test is difficult to carry out reliably for various technical reasons, so it's not particularly surprising there are results that are superficially inconsistent with the Big Bang model. It would be easy to perform the test wrongly, and difficult to get it right. I'm not saying that's happened with the cited studies, but I wouldn't read too much into unexpected results that may in reality prove very little. TowardsTheLight (talk) 20:00, 13 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not that I have any answers, but I would venture that the Tolman test is the least of cosmology's problems right now, given the JWST high-z abundance/mass/interactivity/metallicity findings, Lithium problem, H₀ and S₈ tensions, non-detection of dark matter after decades of experiments, and so on. — Jon (talk) 03:25, 14 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, sure, there are tons of huge open problems in cosmology. But I don't think that's necessarily relevant to the tone and sourcing of this specific article.

The problems I see are that:

1) for a supposedly mainstream test that's been around for nearly 90 years, 2 out of 5 references are Eric Lerner (known for The Big Bang Never Happened) as lead author);

2) the editorializing that the test has been underappreciated Vultur~enwiki (talk) 22:38, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I'm not saying these papers disprove the Big Bang! I think the article's tone is misleading, is all... Vultur~enwiki (talk) 22:24, 23 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed; there's nothing controversial about the test itself.—Jon (talk) 23:40, 11 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]