The Big Bang in Controversy
For most physicists today, there is no question that the universe originated in a "Big Bang", essentially from nothing, and that what we see today when looking at the stars with our most powerful telescopes is nothing but the remains of that primordial explosion, still expanding and cooling in the process. A universe in inexorable decay, goes the story, that lives from the energy imparted by a primordial explosive event.
Map of temperature irregularities in Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation compiled from COBE satellite data
But more and more observations actually contradict this modern fairy tale, to a point where it becomes exceedingly difficult to continue believing in the Big Bang and for that matter, in much of what physics tells us about what constitutes matter, space and time, and how they interrelate.
Roger Rydin examines the history of the "Big Bang" and some of the more recent observational data that seem to contradict General Relativity's prediction of an essentially uniform distribution of matter in the universe, which is at the basis of Big Bang theory.
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The Big Bang - in Controversy
By Roger A. Rydin, ScD
Associate Professor Emeritus
Of Nuclear Engineering
University of Virginia
The Big Bang has an interesting history.
The theory came first, beginning in 1916, thirteen years before the first confirmed experimental evidence that even suggested that the universe was in "some kind" of motion. A second camp arose, claiming that the universe was static, and they offered an alternative explanation, for the supporting experimental data, called "tired light". Approximately thirty years after the theory was formulated, around 1945, came some theoretical and experimental work that showed that the light elements like Helium were produced by fusion, meaning that there was a hot beginning "of some sort" to the universe.
It took another twenty years, until 1965, before the Cosmic Microwave Background was discovered and "interpreted" as the afterglow of a large cosmic explosion. The Big Bang scenario was thus born, of a prior theory and three subsequent but disparate experimental supporting "facts".
By the early 1970s, more than thirty years ago, scientific "consensus" was reached that the Big Bang was indeed the way it all must have happened. New theoretical ideas came along to support the details: inflation, to quickly move the explosion away from a singularity; baryogenesis, to initially make all the matter from the hot soup; string theory, to explain some of these details; and early fluctuations, to serve as seeds for galaxies. Trouble appeared in the 1980s when it was discovered that galaxies didn't have nearly enough visible mass to rotate as they did. In the 1990s, it was discovered that there was not even enough visible matter to support the experimentally measured expansion rate. More than 90% of the required mass was "missing"! The concepts of dark matter and dark energy were born to account for the discrepancy. Dark matter was also thought to be needed to help make galaxies form; even if the seeds were already there.
And quietly, in the background, astronomers were busy measuring and cataloging as many galaxies as they could find, and making maps of where they were found. This has led to the discovery of great walls and voids, clusters and superclusters, and interesting structural patterns that don't neatly fit with the Big Bang scenario. It has also led to a remarkable spherical symmetry in all directions from Earth that also doesn't fit with a uniform expansion.
Was "consensus" on the Big Bang reached too soon? Has new observational experimental data taken in the modern age of space observatories such as the Hubble telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory, plus the use of computers and digital cameras, provided enough new evidence to reopen the controversy? If the Big Bang falls, what sort of a theory should take its place?
Let us examine some of this history in detail. Let us look at some of the latest data, and its implications for the Big Bang. Let us see what characteristics a new theory has to have to satisfy the constraints of the data now in hand. At a minimum, let us begin a new dialog on the subject of "where did we come from"?
Read the whole paper (PDF format) by following this link:
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New Developments: The Big Bang - in Controversy
In his first article, Roger Rydin examined the history of the "Big Bang" and some of the more recent observational data that seem to contradict General Relativity's prediction of an essentially uniform distribution of matter in the universe, which is at the basis of Big Bang theory. Now there is a new theoretical analysis by the late Dr. Robert Heaston of the physics side of the equations of General Relativity which indicates that a singularity may not be an allowable solution. On its heels comes a new mathematical analysis of the tensor side of the equations of General Relativity by Stephen Crothers, a former PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, which indicates that the differential geometry equations of space-time developed by Minkowski, Einstein's mentor, as used in General Relativity contain mathematical errors that also say a singularity is not a permissible solution. Modern theorists do not seem to be aware of Schwarzchild's original solution, which does not lead to a black hole at all.
These new developments are the subject of this article, and add solid theoretical ammunition to the extensive experimental data that suggest the Big Bang model cannot be correct.
In summary, Rydin finds that
"... the Sloan Survey of galaxy distributions is inconsistent with the General Relativity-based Big Bang model; Einstein made an error using geometrized variables, by setting c = 1 and G = 1, that led directly to the Big Bang singularity, which does not occur otherwise; Schwarzschild's actual solution contains a singularity at r = 0, but nowhere else; Einstein's field equations violate the usual conservation of energy and momentum and are therefore in direct conflict with the experimental evidence."
Download this recent paper here:
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Other related posts:
Penrose: No Big Bang but Cyclic Cosmology
Circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of "aeons". That is the sensational claim being made by University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA's WMAP satellite support his idea of "conformal cyclic cosmology".
Central to Penrose's theory is the idea that in the very distant future the universe will in one sense become very similar to how it was at the Big Bang. He says that at these points the shape, or geometry, of the universe was and will be very smooth, in contrast to its current very jagged form. This continuity of shape, he maintains, will allow a transition from the end of the current aeon, when the universe will have expanded to become infinitely large, to the start of the next, when it once again becomes infinitesimally small and explodes outwards from the next big bang. Crucially, he says, the entropy at this transition stage will be extremely low, because black holes, which destroy all information that they suck in, evaporate as the universe expands and in so doing remove entropy from the universe.