Pile of poo.
To question the big bang theory as the origin of our universe appears to be heresy at times.
Any good articles that dismember the big bang persuasively?
Depends on what you mean by the big bang theory. People who talk about the popular term aren’t necessarily using it as scientists do. The big bang and inflation are not quite the same thing.
However, here’s a critique of inflation from Scientific American.
Note that it says the actual big bang must be real because of the evidence from the cosmic microwave background.
Fred Hoyle proposed a few theories about a steady-state/continuous-creation universe, that hoped to fit the observational data, but they never really got any traction.
He was the one who coined the phrase “Big Bang”, somewhat ironically.
The Big Bang theory is the best fit to the observations we have in hand … but it’s not set in stone, folk are allowed to modify it and what not as new observations come in … it’s a scientific theory, not a scientific law, there’s a difference …
I’m not aware of any argument that dismisses the Big Bang theory as a pile of poo, mainly because of two things - Hubble and Cosmic Background Radiation.
Edwin Hubble (admittedly working on earlier works, like most scientists) discovered that space itself is expanding. In other words, if you stick an imaginary flag at some point in space, and stick another imaginary flag at some other point in space, say 50 thousand light years away, and both of these flags never ever move, what you find is that the distance between those flags is increasing. The flags aren’t moving. The space between them is increasing.
Rewind that, and the further you go backwards in time, the closer and closer your imaginary flags get, until all of the imaginary flags all over the universe scrunch down to a single point. This is the Big Bang.
If you want to discredit the Big Bang, you need to come up with an alternate theory that also explains the expansion of space, plus other things like cosmic background radiation which is basically the leftovers from the Big Bang.
A steady-state universe doesn’t fit the observed facts. Space doesn’t expand in a steady-state universe and a steady-state universe has no reason for the existence of cosmic background radiation.
You can go the creation route, but there’s no evidence to back it up. It’s difficult to disprove creation, because when you get down to it the only thing you can really prove is “I think, therefore I am” and for everything else you have to make some assumptions based on what you observe. If you assume that something can somehow magically create universes, that something could be able to create a universe that appears to be 13.7(ish) billion years old, when in fact it could only be a few hundred years old.
Another theory that is difficult to disprove is the Matrix-type theory, in that our entire universe is a simulation of some sort. Again, difficult to disprove, but there’s no evidence supporting it.
If you can actually come up with a theory that disproves or at least sheds serious doubt on the Big Bang, that would be a very big deal, because so far, no one has been able to come up with an alternate theory that fits the observable facts of our universe.
If you’re the one dismissing the Big Bang theory, then surely you should be the one bringing the counterarguments?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Really the only way to disprove a theory like the big bang is to find a prediction it makes that is wrong.
That is mostly because evidence supports the concept.
http://www.schoolsobservatory.org.uk/learn/astro/cosmos/bigbang/bb_evid
Unless you can invalidate the evidence gathered, and form a theory that does a better job of fitting with the evidence people are going to support the big bang theory.
However, what caused the big bang still seems to be up for debate. I’ve heard multiple theories on that, but I don’t know how anyone would test for any of them.
One thing I’ve always wondered about the beginning of the universe: Why can’t you have a big bang and expansion without a singularity? Why does running the direction of time in reverse necessarily lead to single point? If you use the analogy of an expanding balloon, it behaves somewhat like the expansion of the universe, and if you run that analogy in reverse it doesn’t lead to a singularity.
mc
Oh, and just to make it clear: Serious scientists, who are taken seriously by other serious scientists, question the Big Bang Theory (and other well-established theories) all the time. That’s pretty much exactly what scientists do. It just so happens that for some theories, when you question them, the answer you keep on getting is “yes, the theory works”.
Your use of the word “heresy” is misguided. Scientific theories gain traction and endure because they are supported by evidence, not because they are the dogma of the establishment. Fame and fortune, not excommunication, awaits any scientist who proposes a successful new theory. So scientists do propose new theories all the time, including in cosmology.
The wikipedia article summarizes the numerous independent lines of evidence that support the Big Bang Theory.
But you will see that it also summarizes the unresolved problems in cosmology that the basic Big Bang Theory does not yet explain. There is no dogmatic agenda to cover up these problems - these are the questions that many cosmologists work on.
The challenge, then, is clearly laid out. If an alternate theory is to be taken seriously, it must first account for all of the evidence that the Big Bang Theory explains at least equally well. For it to supersede the Big Bang Theory, it must also account for one or more of these unresolved problems.
Given how many independent lines of evidence the Big Bang Theory explains so perfectly, it’s vanishingly unlikely that the basic theory will ever be overturned. More likely, supplementary ideas like cosmic inflation will be incorporated as modifications to the basic theory.
Finally, bear in mind that the Big Bang Theory is a theory of the evolution of the universe after it began, it says nothing about its origin. We have strong evidence for the way in which the universe evolved from a fraction of a second after it began; we have only speculative hypotheses (that are not part of the Big Bang Theory) about how our universe began, or about the existence of other universes.
Not quite true. Steady State theory is about an expanding universe. What doesn’t change is its density. It has a continuous creation of matter to keep the density constant.
This is true and it’s the main evidence that caused cosmologists to switch from SS to BB.
Expansion means that the distances to faraway galaxies increase as a function of time. In simple models this can be described by the scale factor a(t) which by definition is equal to 1 in the present day, and when the distances to faraway galaxies were half what they are now a(t) = 0.5. and when they will be twice what they are now a(t) = 2, etc, etc. Expansion means that the scale factor is an increasing function of time and the big bang singularity is when a(t) = 0. Your question can be rephrased as is there a function a(t) which is increasing, but is never equal to zero (ignoring the possibility of a future big crunch)? It is of course easy to find such a function and a(t) = e[sup]Ht[/sup] (where H is just some constant) would be an example.
So it is fairly easy to come up with a model for an expanding Universe without a big bang, but the question is: is such a model realistic? The answer is that if you insert a realistic mass-energy contents for the Universe then such models are easily ruled out. Such simple models though have themselves an unrealistic nature in that they have perfect symmetries that our Universe does not have and for a number of decades it was thought that the big bang singularity may be an artifact of these perfect symmetries. However Stephen Hawking showed in about 1970 that under a number of reasonable assumptions an expanding Universe means there must’ve been a past singularity, even without perfect symmetry.
It must be noted though that these models are purely classical and don’t factor in things like quantum physics or inflation and it is perfectly feasible, even likely, that the initial big bang singularity is just an artifact of trying to apply classical physics to an early Universe that should be described by as yet unknown quantum gravity.
And in fact there are some models which are taken seriously, like the eternal inflation models, which don’t have an initial singularity. Are those models correct? We can’t tell yet, because nobody’s managed to come up with and carry out a test to distinguish them from other models. But they do have some good arguments in their favor.
The speed of light is slowing down over time … it’s not that distant galaxies are moving away from us … rather the light emitted by these galaxies is traveling faster …
The evidence for this is that iron atoms in the early universe had electron orbitals a little wider than today … although there may be some instrumentation errors trying to measure a couple of nanometers from 10 billion light-years away … so a couple nanometers ± 100 million light-years …
Crackpot claims require crackpot evidence …
Cite. Cite. Cite, cite, cite. Cite.
Who is the crackpot in this supposed to be?
It should be noted that even the scientists who published the papers about the fine-structure constant maybe changing acknowledge that their results are extremely weak and far more likely to be measurement error than an actual effect. That tends to get lost in the popular-press accounts, though.
Be careful with c-decay arguments: The Creationists have latched onto them to explain away the “starlight problem”, which is one of those problems which pokes major, irreconcilable holes in their cosmology, so they try to “fix” it by introducing even stranger and less-supportable notions about changes in the fundamental geometry of spacetime to save their theology.
In a nutshell, Creationists like c-decay because it allows starlight from stars billions of years away to have reached us in the time between now and 4004 BC, which, to any good Christian of their stripe, is when the Universe was created.
Now, I don’t doubt that some honest scientists think that c-decay might be occurring in nature, but none of them would possibly be stupid enough to posit such a severe decay slope to allow the photons from our furthest deep space imagery to have reached us in 6000 years. That would involve measurable decay in the recent past, something we’d have been sure to notice.
So watch out with arguments someone’s latched onto for dishonest reasons unless you’re very sure you can distinguish their crap from reality.
IF the speed of light was such that the universe was actually created around 4004 BC or so, at what approximate speed was light traveling back at the Biblical Beginning, and at what rate has it been slowing each year since then?
Hard to say, since they use 3.0 for pi, don’t they? I’d say they play pretty fast and loose with math when it suits them.