Big Bang & a Crisis in Cosmology

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

Well…this is a fun one I read tonight. I didn’t know that any cosmologists had such problems with the Big Bang already.

The Big Bang never happened but fusion will

EL : Hubble – who made the first observations of the red shift a hundred years ago – himself never believed that it was due to the expansion of the universe. He believed that he was observing a new and as yet unexplained physical phenomenon. This is what we have to look into.

There would have to be a new phenomenon that explains how electromagnetic radiation loses energy as it travels.

Well…would traveling through a negative energy medium do that?

I checked the link within the article to Lerner’s page:

The Scientific Evidence Against the Big Bang - LPP Fusion

Observation : Based on observations of thousands of galaxies, surface brightness is completely constant with distance, as expected in a universe that is NOT expanding.

@thoughtful

Also if negative energy dark matter or some other theory is true, I don’t think the universe has to be expanding.

Observation : The CMB is smooth on such large scales that , in a Big Bang there would be too little time for regions that we now see in different parts of the sky to reach equilibrium with each other, or even to receive energy from each other at the speed of light.

If only someone would suggest this:

@thoughtful

I have been picturing a circle of transparent liquid, made up of all of the those building blocks God would ever use in the rest of the creation week, as I thought about what the “waters” could be in Genesis 1:2. To me, this is the singularity that physics describes. Perhaps this is quark-gluon plasma, but some kind of stuff made out of the standard model of particles, held together without electrons.

The latest crisis : Based on the data from the Planck satellite, the best fit to the CMB predicts a Hubble constant (the ratio of redshift to distance) in conflict with observations based on Supernovae. The best fits imply a curved universe, in conflict with the predictions of inflation for a flat universe. And they predict a density of dark matter far greater than any measurements derived from the motion of galaxies.

@thoughtful

An AdS / CFT and wormholes/negative energy non-spacetime universe Woot. I’m excited; can you tell?

To solve all these problems between cosmologists, I think someone should suggest a pretty simple explanation of creation in stages: a flat disk-universe full of particles that was later stretched to an AdS / curved shape. Sort of like a tent. Sort of like what Psalm 104 says.

What do you think @structureoftruth? If you say it’s extreme concordism, I think I’ll take it as a compliment this time

[jammycakes (James McKay)]

@thoughtful

Well…this is a fun one I read tonight. I didn’t know that any cosmologists had such problems with the Big Bang already.

This quote from the article gives you some insight into who had such problems:

The co-signers of the letter included, besides Eric Lerner himself, some famous scientists who made major contributions to astrophysics and astronomy, such as Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Jayant Narlikar. Since then, over 200 additional astronomers and physicists have added their signatures to the Open Letter.

Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold were two of the cosmologists who, along with Fred Hoyle, came up with the Big Bang’s rival: the Steady State Theory, which held that the universe had never had a beginning but that new matter was continually being created, and along with it new stars and galaxies. Most cosmologists settled for the Big Bang after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson, but there have always been a minority who have held out. However, the alternatives they are trying to come up with propose a universe that is infinite, not one that is significantly younger — they were uncomfortable with the idea that the universe had a beginning. Jayant Narlikar was another cosmologist who worked with Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Burbidge in the 1990s to try and resurrect the Steady State theory in some form or another. They came up with a “quasi-steady-state” model in which there was not just one Big Bang, but many.

@thoughtful

To solve all these problems between cosmologists, I think someone should suggest a pretty simple explanation of creation in stages: a flat disk-universe full of particles that was later stretched to an AdS / curved shape. Sort of like a tent. Sort of like what Psalm 104 says.

That would be an interesting suggestion, but you’ll only get cosmologists to take it seriously if (a) you can provide a mathematical basis for it, and (b) it makes testable predictions.

[thoughtful (Valerie (non-scientist))]

@jammycakes

Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold were two of the cosmologists who, along with Fred Hoyle, came up with the Big Bang’s rival: the Steady State Theory, which held that the universe had never had a beginning but that new matter was continually being created, and along with it new stars and galaxies. Most cosmologists settled for the Big Bang after the discovery of the cosmic microwave background in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson, but there have always been a minority who have held out. However, the alternatives they are trying to come up with propose a universe that is infinite, not one that is significantly younger — they were uncomfortable with the idea that the universe had a beginning. Jayant Narlikar was another cosmologist who worked with Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Burbidge in the 1990s to try and resurrect the Steady State theory in some form or another. They came up with a “quasi-steady-state” model in which there was not just one Big Bang, but many.

Thanks for the history! It is interesting. I just enjoyed that their problems with the Big Bang made sense to me and what I’ve been thinking about, even though I obviously believe the universe still has to have a beginning.

Maybe they will win the day after all if negative energy dark matter fits more observations because I think that may mean the age of the universe is unknowable (at least for a while). Then they can call it eternal if they want to. Everyone will be happy with their own POV. Or not Either way the next 10 years will be very interesting in cosmology…