Sky & Telescope February 1992 [antikvár]

FOCAL POINTThe Cosmologists' New ClothesFrom Nature to Sky Telescope, the science journals of the past year have been filled with earnest defenses of the Big Bang. Reports of its death are exaggerated, we're told mere details are out of place and will soon be straightened out. According to David Schramm, there's no more doubt that the Big Bang happened than that the Earth is round.If the Big Bang needs no defense, why is it continually defended? The reason is that the theory itself is threatened by an avalanche of contrary observations. Like the emperor's new clothes, the Big Bang is a widely held idea without observational support. The theory can be made to fit observations only by adding layers of epicycles far thicker than those that encrusted Ptolemy's cosmology. Today the epicycles are called "new physics" ad hoc hypotheses like inflation and dark matter that bridge the yawning gap between theory and fact.The Big Bang predicts that the universe is homogeneous on the largest scales. Yet astronomers have discovered ever larger inhomogeneities, including vast conglomerations of galaxies stretching across billions of light-years. These structures are simply too big to have formed since the (alleged) Big Bang. Given the known velocities of galaxies today, it's easy to calculate that it would have taken at least 60 billion years by any process to form these structures in blatant contradiction to a theory that says the universe is at most one-third that old!Even such epicycles as the cosmological constant can't make the Big Bang universe anywhere near old enough. Nor does it help to assume that the seeds of today's large structures formed in the initial Big Bang, because they would distort the smoothness of the cosmic background radiation and the shape of its spectrum far more than the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite's recent data allow.Schramm and others cite this isotropic, blackbody radiation as the greatest confirmation of the Big Bang. Yet the original form of the theory does not even predict it. In a Big Bang regions of the sky more than a few degrees apart would not have had time to reach thermal equilibrium with each other, so a lumpy background would be expected.Only with the ad hoc hypothesis ofinflation (another epicycle) are perfect isotropy and an ideal blackbody predicted. But inflation in turn demands that the density of matter in the universe is 50 to 100 times larger than observed, a serious contradiction with observations answered only by yet another epicycle: "dark matter." There is no direct observational evidence for that mythical substance. Indeed, if the large-scale structures we see had the density dark-matter theories predict, they would send galaxies flying around at speeds 10 times higher than observed.Further evidence cited for the Big Bang is the abundance of helium, deuterium, and lithium in the cosmos. Last April this defense also fell when George Fuller and his colleagues showed that there is less helium in the cosmos than the Big Bang calls for. This result throws the theory's estimate of deuterium and lithium off by as much as a factor of 10. Thus not one quantitative prediction of the Big Bang now accords with observation.Since existing epicycles, or new physics, cannot yet produce agreement with what we see, Schramm and others keep busy with still newer physics such as "textures" and cosmic strings. To continue to patch up the Big Bang with such unsupportedspeculation is to abandon the empirical scientific method for that of medieval scholastics.Fortunately there is an alternative. For 20 years a growing band of scientists, led by physics nobelist Hannes Alfven, have argued that the Big Bang never happened, that the universe has always existed, and that it is always changing and evolving without beginning or end. This approach assumes we can learn about the cosmos by using the same empirical method that works so well in the rest of science extrapolating from the known laws observed in the laboratory, not inventing new laws as we like.The universe thus described is filled with plasma and shaped by electricity and magnetism as much as by gravitation. Plasma becomes inhomogeneous naturally, forming the vast filaments of galaxies we now see. The plasma process can also explain the origins of galaxies {see the article on page 136]. Extensions of these theories specify that young galaxies are dominated by stars up to 10 times as massive as the Sun. These stars produced the observed cosmic helium by thermonuclear reactions and the deuterium and lithium by collisions of cosmic rays with the surrounding plasma. Neither new physics, epicycles, tooth fairies, nor the Big Bang are required.The energy from these stars, scattered by galactic and intergalactic dust, accounts for the cosmic background radiation. This radiation is, in turn, smoothed and thermalized to the observed spectrum by a dense thicket of magnetically confined filaments floating between the galaxies. Such an absorbing and emitting medium would tend to make galaxies dimmer in the radio as they get farther away, an effect confirmed by abundant statistical evidence that compares galaxies' radio and infrared radiation.There are also plasma explanations for the Hubble relation, all as compelling as or more so than the Big Bang's. While many are reluctant to say it, it is becoming obvious that the Big Bang, like the emperor's new clothes, never existed.ERIC J. LERNERA physicist at Lawrence Plasma Physics in Lawrenceville. New Jersey. Eric J. Lerner authored The Big Bang Never Happened (reviewed in last November's issue, page 492).Focal Point invites contributions from readers who wish to comment on contemporary issues in astronomy and space science.124 Sky & Telescope, February, 1992