Is the Big Bang Theory Doomed?

Factual Questions
1

Paging Chronos…

In this thread yBeayf posted a link to this site where a physicist by the name of Alexander Mayer makes (to me) some remarkable claims… (Including the universe is not expanding and that the big bang (and inflation) theory is fundamentally flawed).

First off, my education in relativity theory consists of roughly a year of modern physics during my undergraduate education in the early 90s. That said, I am a working scientist and what he has published on the above site looks plausible to me. It would take me a day or twelve to go through his lectures with my old textbooks, Mathematica ™, the Web of Science, etc… for me to be confident that what he is claiming is correct and even then I might be way off base as this is definitely NOT my area of interest…

So, I have several questions for those (many on this board) who are better than me at this…

  1. Is this theory plausible? If not, why not?
  2. Is this theory new? (Why have I not heard about this before?)
  3. Who is this guy (A. Mayer)? He does not seem to be a professor at Stanford, and Google brings up nothing that I can connect to him (The only physicist I can find with this name seems to be into transport phenomena in semi-conducting materials – I’m not at work though, this is with a quick Google search).
  4. If this is legit, why is he posting it on the web and not publishing it to a peer reviewed journal (or is he doing both)? On the plus side, his lectures look pretty professional (a lot of time spent by someone with an education), plausible (nowhere does he mention the time cube), and are posted on a Stanford site (this does not mean anything, though he is listed as a visiting scholar to the physics department). On the minus side, it looks to me that there are (at the least) several papers (perhaps even a couple of PhD theses ) in these lectures, why are these not published in the Physical Review or something? Or are they?
  5. Finally, Is the Big Bang Theory doomed?

Mods, feel free to move this as you see fit…

2

He doesn’t appear to be a published physicist, so far as I can tell. (At least, I couldn’t turn up any papers of his at www.arxiv.org) The web page you linked to comes up as “access forbidden” to me, but at any rate if he has web space at stanford.edu he must be affiliated with the university in some way. Without being able to see the site, my best guess is he’s some random student (not necessarily in physics) who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

3

Me too, but I found theGoogle cache..

4

Other galaxies are redshifted (except the closest few): they are getting further away from us. So either new galaxies are continually appearing in the space between the others, or the universe was once compressed into a highly energetic state from which it has since expanded.

If the latter is true, there should be a background of radiation throughout the whole universe, as those initial high energy waves get stretched to microwave length. If we were to find such radiation, it would demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the universe used to be in a highly compressed state whose expansion we call ‘the Big Bang’.

Voila.

This guy is indulging in what might be interesting speculative straw-clutching, but until thre unexpected predictions are as successful as the CMBR was, I call “attention seeking peer-review dodger”.

5

What few people understand about science, and mainly because they never have this explained properly to them in the popular media, is that there are challenges to every theory, notion, idea, and hypothesis in science. For the more complicated theories and, to be blunt, for the more popular attention-getting ones, like the Big Bang or the Standard Theory, there are literally dozens if not hundreds of alternatives put forth.

This is critical because after the fact, after a paradigm shift takes place and one major theory replaces another, the public always wonders why scientists didn’t just compare one to the other and see that the latter was superior. But while the challenge is going on, scientists never have so simple a choice.

There are tens of thousands of physicists working on these problems, in hundreds of subdiscliplines, each with their own journals, conferences, seminars, and ways of approaching the problem. It’s incredibly difficult just to keep up in one’s field, let alone with all the new research coming out in the other disciplines.

And remember that these findings are written not in simple English - the Big Bang didn’t happen - but in math. To study a competing theory means quite literally going over a paper line by line, symbol by symbol, graph by graph, data by data, to determine whether the paper makes any sense. Because there are so many approaches to any problem, reading a paper might involve learning an entirely new area of advanced math.

One example of this is the theories proposed by Burkhard Heim. Even though he first worked on them over 50 years ago, they have been rediscovered because they give an answer to a major question that Standard Theory cannot: what makes the masses of the basic particles what they are. So why has this theory been neglected? Mostly because it’s incomprehensible to almost everybody, and Heim is dead and can’t answer questions about it. Is it right? Does it simply happen to give a good answer to one question but not to any other? Nobody knows right now, and it will take top physicists probably years to work through it to understand enough just to start applying it to the rest of the hundreds of answers that current theory already gives to many decimal places. No matter if Heim is correct or not, his theory has to give all of these same answers and more to start being taken as a serious competitor.

And this is just one theory. Now multiply this by hundreds and the OP’s questions are answered.

Is Mayer’s theory plausible? If he’s a true crank, it will be easy to so no. But if he’s for real, it might take huge amounts of work to say anything at all.

Why haven’t you heard of him? Because he’s one of hundreds just like him.

Why is he posting this on the net? That’s almost always a sign of crankdom, but I don’t know whether he’s peer-reviewed anything.

Is the Big Bang doomed? Maybe. Maybe not. But if it is, it won’t be because one guy or a dozen or a hundred say so. It’ll be doomed when the consensus of tens of thousands of physicists in hundreds of subdisciplines all agree that it is and some better explanation accounts for all the known data. This will be a process of decades.

6

There are some significant anomalies in physics. Consider the horizon problem, dark matter, dark energy, the Pioneer anomaly, and not-so constant constants in this list:

http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=mg18524911.600

Who knows what this means? There probably will be a significant reorganization in physics fairly soon of approximately the same order as the transition to relativity and quantum physics in the early 20th century. That doesn’t mean any random person’s theories about this are likely to be true.

7

Sir Fred Hoyle never accepted the big bang theory. (In fact, I believe he invented the name as a putdown, but it got adopted as the name.) He first proposed the theory of continuous creation of matter to explain the redshift. In fact, I am not sure why this could explain it, but this was apparently true enough. What his theory could not explain was the cosmic background radiation and he kind of gave up on after that was discovered. In fact that had been a prediction made in the mid 40s but at that time it was undetectable. And when Penzias and Wilson did discover it, they were only trying to get rid of the last vestiges of static from a microwave antenna. One of the things they tried was cleaning all the bird dung from the antenna. Finally, they asked a Princeton astronomer and the whole story came out (and they won a Nobel prize).

But I digress. Sir Fred then came up with the idea that there was no expansion but instead the universe was static but the gravitational constant was changing with time. His main point seemed to be that the mathematics was equivalent, so it would seem that there was no experimental data that could distinguish them. In that case it is hard to see why Sir Fred kept it up.

Bottom line: it is going to take a lot to kill the big bang theory.

8

My Ph. D. dissertation was in relativity, and without contacting Chronos or looking at that web site, I can say the guy is almost certainly a crack pot. (Sadly, now I just program computers, because it pays so much more. Relatively speaking.) Relativity and quantum mechanics draw huge numbers of these guys. They just can’t accept reality. (My grad school host an internation conference on gravity and GR. We got a submission from the “Emperor [or Prince, I’ve forgotten] of Spacetime Absoluteness” :rolleyes: ).

Before I begin, let me explain that “everyone” knows GR breaks down at extremely small distances, because it is inconsistent with quantum mechanics. Second, some suspect - and I am one of these guys - that GR might not be entirely right at large distances. (See, first we posit Dark Matter to explain things like the rotation of galaxies, then we posit Dark Energy to explain the acceleration of expansion and …) That said, GR is obviously a pretty good description of how things work, and may, in fact, not require any modification. Things like Dark Matter and Dark Energy might very well have the exact properties they appear to when using GR.

How do we know GR is close to right? Believe it or not, there is a framework for examining alternative theories. This framework ends up with a bunch of parameters that can take different values for different theories. To date, GR is the best match with the data, and whatever the correct theory is, it is close to GR. That means the values GR predicts for these parameters is within experimental error of what we’ve measured. If GR requires a modification, it will be, in this sense, small.

Here is why the guy is almost certainly a crack pot. Let us suppose that his alternative theory can explain the microwave background, and the redshifts of galaxies. In many ways, his theory must resemble GR. For example, I’m sure it is a “metric theory”, essentially one in which distance has meaning, and the distance from A to B is the same as B to A, and you ignore something called “torsion”. One of of Hawking’s claims to fame was a proof that under certain pretty reasonable assumptions, GR solutions have a singularity. It doesn’t have to be a big bang, it could be a big crunch, but there will be one. Since there is strong evidence that GR is close to right, and that the universe will never cease expanding, there had to have been a big bang.

9

This site:

http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/space/01/08/galaxies.find/index.html

10

He’s listed as a “visiting scholar” in the physics department at Stanford. Doing a bit of Googling, I came up with this (outdated) personal website. If that’s the same guy, he’s definitely a legitimate, published physicist, albeit with a specialty in something other than cosmology.

11

I remember coming accross a paper when I was and undergrad that posited that the universe was not expanding, it was shrinking. That is, the size of atoms (electron shells and all) and the distances between atoms was growing smaller as the universe aged. This theory was then used to expain the redshift observed for objects far away as the electronic transitions that produced the visible light corresponded to a smaller potential energy differential than is observable today. This paper was published in a peer-reviewed journal by two physicists (penn state IIRC - but this was years ago) that were trying to make a point about the Big Bang theory, inflationary theory, WIMPS, MACHOS, etc… Explicitly, they were trying that while the current theories worked, they had started to seem somewhat contrived and overly complicated. Sort of like adding epicycle after epicycle to explain the observed motion of a planet…

Anyway, I had many red flags when I saw this. Namely, why the hell was this posted on the web and not in a peer reviewed journal where a serious theory belongs. Also, who is this guy that is listed as a visiting scholar on the Stanford physics department web site but has not published anything in the past on this topic. Thus my OP.

Finally, is anybody here (cough, cough, Chronos) conversant enough with general relativity to speak to excess radius (which seems to be the foundation of his theory) of the rotating coordinate frame (i.e. is this new? Plausible? Flawed?)? How about the redshift of radiation over paths transverse to the reference frames acceleration from his accelerating rocket thought experiment (Is this new? Plausible? Flawed?)? The rest of his stuff seems to follow from these two gedanken experiments…

12

Oops, a couple of replies while I was typing (welcome SlowMind, just the person I wanted to see). Thanks yBeayf, this is the guy I found by Googling also…

Anyway, SlowMind, you say he is probably a crackpot, but what I am looking for is someone with your experience and training saying that he is definately a crackpot…

13

Yes, the big bang is doomed, because it was never true.
The proof of that is the uniformity of the cosmic rays.
The whole expansion idea is based on the notion that stars show a red shift when they are far from us because they are receding (the train whistle analogy).
The actual answer is they are redder because of the increasing amounts of dust between us and them, reducing the amount of light we get. This is seen as a change in frequency.

14

And the simplest demonstration of that is the reddening of our own star as it sets. It gets redder because of the increased atomosphere it must travel thru.

15

Sigh.

16

Huh?

17

Please explain how dust can shit the position (wavelength) of emission lines.

18

Sigh indeed.

However, somebody will come along and ask for more details about why this is wrong, so the Wikipedia entry is a good enough place to start.

19

Well, it all has to do with how much fiber it had for breakfast…never mind.

Anyway, Big Bang Theory is hardly “doomed” because one person (regardless of his credentials) makes public a non-peer reviewed hypothesis that challenges the standard paradigm. As SlowMindThinking says, the notion of a supersingularity at t=0 fits in very nicely with General Relativity, and GR works very well at coherently describing many of the phenomenon we observe. GR is certainly incomplete, and the explanations of dark matter and dark energy are just placeholders for aspects of GR that we do not yet properly understand, but this doesn’t mean that the whole theory is bolsh (though there is a small chance that this could be the case); most likely it just requires extension or refinement.

Ad hoc challenges to GR and the so-far successful inflationary theory such as that provided by she sells sea snails are scarcely worth picking apart except as an intellectual entertainment. A legimate challenger to established theory should start by satisfying all previously described phenomena plus filling in holes that current theory e.f.'s.

Stranger

20

Well, I don’t have the time to look into this idea (I won’t call it a “theory”) in any great detail. But just from his starting point that the number of time axes is a local phenomenon, I can say that he’s going to have a hell of a time satisfying any sort of continuity conditions. And if the state of his variable-number time axes is not continuous, I’d sure expect to see some evidence of the discontinuities.

If GR requires a modification, it’ll be either very small, or absolutely huge. A non-metric theory of gravity would not necessarily be describable in terms of the post-Newtonian parameters, and there are, in fact, a few non-metric models one occasionally sees bandied about (the most common is probably Milgrom’s Modified Newtonian Dynamics, but I’ve seen a few others). A shift from GR to a non-metric theory would be pretty big, but personally, I don’t expect it to happen: Metric theories of gravity are just too elegant.

Dust reddening is a real effect in astronomy, and is an entirely different effect from the “tired light” model discussed in that Wikipedia entry. It is, however, entirely distinguishable from Doppler or cosmological redshift. Dust reddening occurs because interstellar dust (or atmospheric dust, for that matter) will more effectively absorb or scatter blue light than red light. Preferentially absorb blue light, and what’s left will appear more reddish. she sells sea snails is correct that this is why our own Sun appears reddish as it’s rising or setting, because it’s then shining through more dust. However, this will not shift the position of spectral lines. Some lines might become shallower, but they’ll stay in the same place. By contrast, gravitational redshift, Doppler shift, and cosmological redshift will all move spectral lines. In the actual data that we observe, distant galaxies have their spectral lines shifted, which must be accounted for by gravitational, Doppler, or cosmological shift. Or, of course, by some other mechanism, but there’s no other known mechanism for shifting spectral lines, so this is rather speculative.