> I guess my only insight is, I'm not sure why you relate the number of revolutions that the Milky Way has made to its complex and symmetric structure. The spiral arms that you see in a galaxy like the Milky Way do not rigidly rotate with it, they are more like... This is complicated, but they are more like regions where star formation is going on, and therefore the galaxy is brighter rather than regions where there's more density or anything like that. So if you're worrying how the spiral structure forms. It can form pretty easily in one or two revolutions, I don't see why it would take even 68, much less, but need more than that.
[1] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/10/09/ama-...
"Mickey Mouse degrees", https://xkcd.com/793/, the attitude displayed by the bully in "Zero for Conduct" and similar IRL dismissals of the entire ME area in the post 9/11 discourse, mid-Brexit politicians saying the country had had enough of experts, some of my fist girlfriends' anecdotes from her childhood, town v gown, …
Sean jumps on the hype train all day long. I'm skeptical. I don't think this illustrious dark matter or big bang mean anything. So it's like that telephone game where Sean is the last person and gets to tell you what the first person said and he's always very excited but baseless. Really do like his energy. I just don't think he's much of an independent thinker.
I think he's easy to dismiss because much of his exposition deals in philosophical physics, it's really his specialty. There's levels of solidity. Experimental physics is reality. Theoretical physics is an explanation of reality, sometimes attempting to extend to predict the next experiment. Philosophical physics takes theoretical tools and expands them to explain everything in the Universe, including the Hard questions. I don't think it's a problem that they do it, someone should be thinking of this stuff. Do you have much experience with theoretical physics or cosmology. I have some and the math really helps make these things comprehensible and reasonable. Theoretical physics without math is indeed just continuous excited, but baseless assertions. The math fixes this
I prefer alternative theories. Plasma physics. Electric universe models.
There's Gareth Samuel on YouTube, See The Pattern. He just explores various theories. Treats them as merely theories (instead of facts) and I like that approach. It's very historic and really fleshes out ideas. Then you got the Lerner himself, author of The Big Bang Never Happened, which I think has been overwhelmingly falsified so you mean you can take Sean and his amazing fantastic firework singularity that blew up from a dimensionless point and yeah blah blah blah blah blah inflation blah blah blah acceleration blah blah blah and it makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
I'm really good at math. At least compared to most people. I'm 38 and really only started questioning the big bang maybe in the last decade, and then I found Eric Lerner and well, now I can firmly say the big bang never happened.
Professor Dave Explains has a lot of scientific debunking videos where he thoroughly discusses these kind of popular alternative theories. For example about the electric universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9q-v4lBGuw&t=0s
And yes it is an incomplete theory, like all the theories we currently have. But it is currently the theory that matches our observations in experiments the closest.
It could always be that we're on the wrong path, and that a completely other paradigm is necessary. And it is good to be open to such posibilities and to think about it. But as long as an alternative theory doesn't do a better job at predicting the observations we get in experiments, you can't dismiss the current theory.
You really can't. And aren't. If you could, you would be, and people with credibility would be listening and taking you seriously. They would have to, because seriously composed arguments aren't ignorable by individuals who understand and care about the subject matter.
This is the purpose of mainstream scientific work: to take serious arguments seriously and to dispense with those that don't hold up.
Being a contrarian with crackpot theories is far easier, since the only people listening are people who don't know what they are talking about, and so all you get is false validation in response to any output.
In general, if a theory isn't endorsed by professionals in a field, it's because the theory is wrong.
Regarding the spiral arms: the arms itself do not really move, but stars move through the arms. The arms contain a lot of gas and when stars move through them, they can collect more gas and result in supernovas creating new stars.
The stars move through these waves (traffic jams), and in these high density areas new star formation and supernovas happens mostly (because there is more stuff to collect). The stars move through the gas & dust faster than the gas & dust themselves, because the stars are more massive and need more velocity to stay in stable orbit. The illusory movement of the waves is also slower than the stars, because the illusory waves move as slow as the dust & gas that forms them, and the stars are faster.
Apart from that, you also have dark matter which influences the rotation speed of objects based on it's distance from the galaxy center. It causes objects at the end of the spiral arms of the galaxy to rotate at the same speed as the ones close to the center, or anywhere. That is a mysterious area, and actually caused the requirement of dark matter into the equation. Because in Einstein's relativity theory, objects with same mass that are farther away from the galaxy center, need to move slower to have a stable orbit, which is the case in our solar system and other solar systems we observe. But in galaxies the case seems to be different. That is why dark matter was introduced, and makes it more complicated.
[1] "Mapping tree density at a global scale" https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14967
In fact, even if we're talking elements themselves, there are elements with halflives of picoseconds. I can't know for sure but i'd bet those elements are more rare than wood. And since I'm extending the analogy, how do we know wood is the rarest? We can't really get a good look at exoplanets yet, they're still just fuzzy balls to us like pluto used to be. Trees could be an evolutionary essential step.
Anyways, it's a nice thought but could probably be phrased in a way to defeat pedants like me. Merry Christmas <3
My follow-up fun fact is that even though "tree", like "fish", is a term of common parlance, there is no universally recognised and precise definition of the category, either botanically or in common language.
In botany, a tree is a perennial plant with an elongated stem, or trunk, usually supporting branches and leaves. In some usages, the definition of a tree may be narrower, including only woody plants with secondary growth, plants that are usable as lumber or plants above a specified height.
In the words of Justice Potter Stewart: "I know it when I see it." (1964)
That means that if the sun existed from the big bang to now, it would have only done ~63 complete revolutions around Sagittarius A*. If you account for the Milky Way's creation, that number gets even lower. I'm no expert, so maybe this makes sense to someone who knows more about this, but it definitively feel weird to me.