The cosmological revolution of 1993 ended before it began. In The Astrophysical
Journal, one of the most prestigious publications in their field, three prominent theorists presented an alternative to the Big Bang, the creation myth that has dominated cosmology since the 1960s. The
Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge on the beach near their home in La Jolla, California. They believe that galaxies like the ones in Stephan's Quintet, superimposed behind them, beget other galaxies.
reaction of their peers wasn't antagonistic. It wasn't even argumentative. It was worse—so dismissive that the new theory might as well not have existed at all.
Geoffrey Burbidge was one of the authors of that paper, and he still rages at the response. "Do we know all the laws of physics?" he asks, sitting in his office at the University of California at San Diego. "Apparently so!" Just down the hall, Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, his wife for nearly six decades, sits at her desk, silently reviewing transparencies she'll be presenting the following day at a conference up the coast in Berkeley—data that she says support her view that the Big Bang might never have happened. However dissimilar the Burbidges' styles (a colleague once described them as "a lady with a very outspoken husband"), their sympathies are the same, as is their sense of urgency.
Geoffrey was born in 1925, Margaret in 1919. Neither teaches now, but both hold research professorships. Every weekday morning they show up at their offices together just past nine o'clock and leave for home together promptly at five. In between, they continue to refine their alternative theory to the Big Bang, but in recent years the emphasis of their argument has shifted. What's at stake now isn't merely how the universe came to be; it's who gets to decide such matters, and how—nothing less than the integrity of the scientific method itself.
The Burbidges first came to most astronomers' attention in 1957, when they
helped launch an earlier, far more successful revolution. That year, in a 104-page tour de force in the journal Reviews of Modern Physics, they and two collaborators did for the origin of elements what Darwin had done nearly 100 years earlier for the origin of species. They declared that nuclear reactions within stars rip apart the basic building blocks of matter and put them back together again to create new and more complex elements. As they phrased their conclusion, echoing Darwin's last line in On the Origin of Species, "The elements have evolved, and are evolving." Or, as Joni Mitchell put it in her song "Woodstock" more than a decade later, "We are star dust."
The reaction to "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars" was immediate: praise, press conferences, a consensus among their peers that the Burbidges, Willy Fowler, and Fred Hoyle—or B2FH, as scientists to this day call them—had produced one of the seminal papers of the century. Geoffrey was only 32, Margaret 38. They soon received the Helen B. Warner Prize, the American Astronomical Society's highest honor for young astronomers.
The B2 part of the collaboration had begun a decade earlier. In 1947, while sitting next to each other during a physics class at University College London, Geoffrey Burbidge and Margaret Peachey discovered they shared interests in tennis, politics, history, theater, and opera. One passion they didn't have in common was astronomy. "As I always tell students," Geoffrey says, "I got into astronomy by marrying an astronomer."
Margaret married Geoffrey in 1948, then left the country with him three years later in search of "better telescopes, better instruments, clear skies," as she later wrote. A brief stop at an observatory in France resulted in the 1951 publication of the first paper that future generations could cite as "Burbidge and Burbidge." Then the couple scrounged enough Fulbright and other funding to travel to the United States. More Burbidge and Burbidge papers followed, as did a change in their research.
As a child, Margaret had often pondered: How far away are the stars? As an astronomer, she focused on what they're made of. In 1954, after Geoffrey delivered a seminar on his and Margaret's research on how stars create elements, a cheerful American, Willy Fowler, introduced himself. "I like that kind of work," he said. Fowler had begun researching the problem at the instigation of the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, whom the Burbidges had met several years earlier in France. Burbidge, Burbidge, and Fowler left for the Kellogg Radiation Laboratory at Caltech in 1955. Hoyle joined them the following spring. Over an 18-month period, they worked in a windowless room, scribbling on a blackboard, feverishly figuring out how nuclear reactions in successive generations of stars could create the elements in the periodic table.
"We were full of all these processes," Geoffrey remembers. One nuclear process that takes a long time to make a new element was named s for slow; another that works quickly was named r for rapid. "Those names have persisted all these years," Margaret says, shaking her head and laughing, "nearly 50 years."
Just as Darwin explained how single-celled creatures could evolve into species after species, so B2FH explained how single-proton atoms could eventually form everything in the universe. What they couldn't figure out—what nobody has yet figured out—is where those original hydrogen atoms came from.
BIG BANG OR LITTLE BANGS?
Graphic by Moonrunner Design
The Big Bang (top) is the dominant theory in cosmology, but a few venturesome astronomers have conjured alternate schemes for how the universe works. The quasi steady state theory espoused by Geoffrey Burbidge is a rejiggering of the steady state theory first proposed by astronomer Fred Hoyle and his colleagues in 1948. That theory described a universe that churns out matter continuously, without beginning or end. In the newer version, the universe expands and contracts in hundred-billion-year cycles, creating matter within galaxies in "mini Big Bangs."
At the time, there were two leading hypotheses. One was the Big Bang. If you accepted the American astronomer Edwin Hubble's observations of galaxies as evidence that the universe is expanding, as many astronomers did, and if you followed the logic of an expanding universe backward, then you arrived at the Big Bang—an infinitely dense point that explodes to form the universe as we know it.
But what if the absence of empirical evidence for such an infinitely dense, physics-defying point bothers you? What if you try to develop an alternative theory? Then you might posit that the universe creates new matter not from one source but from many sources at many times. Then you'd have a universe that exists, and always has existed, in a more or less steady state—the theory that Hoyle espoused.
Although the B2FH paper on the elements in stars didn't address cosmological ideas like the Big Bang, it did carry cosmological implications. The paper argued that physical processes in stars can spew forth new types of matter. If that's true, perhaps vast collections of stars, undergoing an unknown physical process, can eject even greater collections of matter. As Geoffrey once wrote, perhaps "galaxies beget galaxies."
In 1963 astronomers discovered a candidate for such primordial collections of matter: brilliant, compact objects called quasars. At once, some observers like Margaret Burbidge began hunting down quasars, while some theorists like Geoffrey Burbidge began calculating how galaxies might go about creating such bizarre objects.
Unfortunately for the Burbidges, that same year—the year they accepted dual appointments at U.C. San Diego and settled in the then sleepy hills of La Jolla, the promise of successful careers stretching far into the future—researchers also made a discovery that tilted the battle between Big Bangers and steady staters. It came in the form of a faint radio-wave glow emanating from all directions in the heavens. Big Bang theorists called it the cosmic microwave background and declared it a remnant of the universe's birth. They had earlier predicted that in the eons since the Big Bang, the universe should have cooled down to an average temperature of about 2.7 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. At that temperature the cosmos would radiate microwaves of exactly the wavelength that researchers had discovered.
The Big Bang bandwagon, as Geoffrey Burbidge calls it, had begun to roll.