news

more

The Big Bang Bust-Up

HowTheLightGetsIn debates the origin of the universe

4th October 2022
| Managing editor for the LSE's British Politics and Policy blog. He was previously the senior editor for the online magazine of the Institute of Art and Ideas.
1,945 words
Read time: approx. 10 mins

Earlier this summer, an article by Eric Lerner put the dominant theory about the origin of the universe into question. On October 1st, at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, Lerner took part in a live debate on “Cosmology and the Big Bust”, alongside theoretical physicist Julian Barbour and astrophysicist Claudia Maraston. Their exchanges shed light on the cracks of the theory concerning inflation, dark matter, and dark energy, as well as on the nature of scientific revolutions, and ultimately on why the Big Bang theory isn’t going anywhere any time soon.

 

In the beginning, there was chaos. At least that’s according to Hesiod’s Theogony, a poem about the creation of the cosmos thought to be articulated around the 8th century BC. Stories about the origin of the universe probably go further back than even that, but it’s safe to say that for at least three millennia humans have been positing hypotheses about how the world we see around us today came into existence. The Big Bang is the latest of these hypotheses, and while most physicists will be quick to protest that there is a huge difference between ancient myth and scientific theory, not everyone agrees.

  Deep Field James Webb min SUGGESTED READING The Big Bang didn't happen By Eric J. Lerner

There are those, like Sabine Hossenfelder, who think that physics will probably never be able to tell us how the universe came about and argue that we should think of the Big Bang theory as little more than another creation myth. And then there is Eric Lerner. The author of a recent article “The Big Bang Didn’t Happen” that went viral, Lerner articulated a challenge to the current scientific consensus in cosmology that caused quite a stir. On October 1st, at the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, Lerner took part in a debate with theoretical physicist Julian Barbour and astrophysicist Claudia Maraston, putting some challenges to the Big Bang theory to the test, in front of a live audience. Despite the explosiveness of the topic, the debate was civil, even if heated.

 

___

In Karl Popper’s terms, Lerner thinks the Big Bang theory has been falsified – it has made predictions, and observation has contradicted them – therefore, the theory needs to be rejected.

___

For Lerner, science is all about predictions, and according to him, the Big Bang theory has systematically failed to make accurate predictions. Instead, it has required constant adjustment and the postulating of auxiliary hypotheses like inflation – the theorised extremely rapid expansion of the universe in its very early moments – and mysterious (and yet unobserved) entities like dark matter and dark energy, in order to help the theory fit the increasingly recalcitrant observations. In Karl Popper’s terms, Lerner thinks the Big Bang theory has been falsified – it has made predictions, and observation has contradicted them – therefore, the theory needs to be rejected. The latest piece of evidence that Lerner believed contradicts the Big Bang Theory comes from the hauntingly beautiful images of the James Webb Telescope. What these images seem to show is that the most distant galaxies that we have now been able to witness are a lot smaller than we would expect to see under the Big Bang framework.

 

___

Maraston added that as an astrophysicist who studies the light spectrum of distant galaxies, she believes some data from the James Webb Telescope are not robust and were published prematurely.

___

Alexis Papazoglou
4th October 2022

Continue reading

Enjoy unlimited access to the world's leading thinkers.

Start by exploring our subscription options or joining our mailing list today.

Start Free Trial

Already a subscriber? Log in

Latest Releases

The psychology behind the culture wars

Therapy, psychedelics, and why the body keeps the score, with Bessel van der Kolk

The man who mistook reality for a fantasy

Join the conversation

Jun Xu 8 October 2022

I think the Big Bang theory is wrong. One of the proofs is the existence of blue-shifted galaxies. How is it possible that thousands of blue-shifted galaxies are approaching the Milky Way in the accelerated expansion of the universe?
Edwin Hubble's observations can be explained by Newton's first law: A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, unless it is subjected to a force.
Suppose all galaxies move at a constant speed in a straight line. Let us start with two galaxies. One is our Milky Way and the other is any other galaxy. The distance between them remains unchanged only if they move in the same direction and at the same speed. Otherwise, the distance increases or decreases over time.
If the distance increases, each galaxy will see the other move away with the redshift.
If the distance decreases, each galaxy will see the other get closer with the blueshift, but once a blue-shifted galaxy overtakes the Milky Way, it becomes red-shifted and moves away from us. Clearly, the more time passes, the more blue-shifted galaxies become red-shifted. After billions of years, only a small fraction of galaxies remains blue-shifted.

Mike Pollock 7 October 2022

The Big Bang theory isn't going anywhere?

That means dark energy and dark matter aren't going anywhere.

That means scientists will continue to search for fusion to no avail.

That means quantum gravity has no chance of being solved.

That means the cosmological constant will always be unresolved.

That means none of the physics mysteries that have lasted for decades will be solved.

Nothing can be solved with a theory that creates the universe 13.8 billion years ago. All the assumptions of the Lambda-CDM model are completely wrong. Even assuming fusion will work is based on the early part of the Lambda-CDM model because hydrogen was all that existed. Quantum gravity will never be understood because the Lambda-CDM model creates stars from gas and dust. All of these problems are facts that will never be resolved yet the people that call out the Big Bang Bang theory like Lerner are immediately frowned upon. It is as if the scientific method has been completely wiped out..

What kind of science is the Big Bang theory? It never explains any observations. Never. Everything negative about the theory is readily dismissed. It is currently an utter fact even though to say it has failed miserably is the most underrated statement possible. The scientific community believes that continuing on with the "cosmic egg" theory will eventually show success. Unfortunately, it never will but nobody is willing to destroy everything in their astrophysics education and start all over. Unfortunately, that is what paradigm shifts are for and some have have taken centuries to be realized because of the same attitude that is shown towards the Big Bang theory.

Edwin Hubble discovered the galaxies expanding, not the universe. All the answers to everything are based on that one assumption. The "Big Bang" was merely two objects colliding creating a particle collider in space. The galaxies are simply shrapnel from the event. That is the way the laws describe what happened 13.8 billion years ago.

Joe Bakhos 6 October 2022

Thank you for this article. I have my own views, but I am very happy to see at least a few researchers challenging GR-LCDM. My own hypothesis was submitted in March of this year, BEFORE the recent Webb results. It is Cyclic Gravity and Cosmology (CGC). CGC posits an eternal universe forever alternating gently between eras of expansion and contraction, but this motion is in Euclidean space; i.e. space does not stretch. CGC explains the effects that GR-LCDM explains with dark matter and dark energy, but CGC's explanation does not employ either of these two crutches. Rather, CGC adapts GR, and shows that these effects are simply the operation of gravity.

In CGC, there is no big bang, no inflation, no dark matter, no dark energy, no stretching space, no singularities. It is currently under submission to another journal. A preprint may be downloaded at vixra. Author is Joseph Bakhos. Title is Chasing Oumuamua: An apology for a cyclic gravity and cosmology, consistent with an adaptation of general relativity.

Bud Rapanault 5 October 2022

"Everyone would be keen to abandon the theory if there’s a better alternative, nobody’s married to the Big Bang theory.”

That is a typically disingenuous remark from a member of the cosmology establishment. There is no serious support or funding for research into non-expanding models of the Cosmos within the scientific community. If an alternative to the standard model is not being sought within the cosmological community where is it supposed to come from, divine revelation?

"What eventually led to the shift to the Copernican model was not new observations, but a collective disillusionment with Ptolemy’s model and the promise that the new theory could overcome some of its problems."

That is lousy history. The heliocentric model replaced geocentrism once Kepler, using Tycho Brahe's extensive data set, developed his laws of planetary motion. Copernicus's original heliocentric model retained circular orbits which made it a predictive failure.

Mike W 5 October 2022

Lerner’s objection that the apparent size of early galaxies is too small is answered by the diagram at the top of the article. Galaxies weren’t formed until after inflation, when the size of the Universe was only slightly smaller, proportionally, than it is now. That’s why the apparent size of early galaxies is similar to what it would be in a steady-state universe.

Caleigh Fisher 5 October 2022

Neutron decay cosmology is the physical process, path of least action solution to black hole paradoxes, dark energy, dark matter and critical density maintenance.
Neutrons/mass which eventually contacts event horizons becomes the vacuum energy for one single Planck second then re-emerges from lowest density points of space, deep voids, where it decays, as Neutrons do, into atomic hydrogen.
This decay process, from near point particle to one cubic meter, is a volume increase of 10^45. This is Lambda, the expansion to compensate for gravity, dark energy.
The decay product, amorphous atomic hydrogen, initially doesn't have a stable orbital electron so can't emit or absorb photons. Dark matter.
In time the hydrogen stabilizes and scintillates and follows usual evolution pathway until in the far distant future, 13.8 billion light years or so, it is again at the edge of event horizon.
Neutron decay cosmology