The "Big Bang"
I. Introduction
The "Big Bang" cosmological theory proposes that
the entire universe began at a definite moment in the distant past at which
time the universe was crammed into a point of infinite density. According
to the Big Bang cosmological model, the universe began in a sort of explosion
- starting out from infinite density and temperature - and then expanded,
thinned out, and cooled. The Big Bang model holds that at all times subsequent
to the universe's initial moment of creation, the universe has been controlled
by gravity only, and its mathematical description thus follows logically
from Einstein's theory of gravity.
The Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the
universe began to develop major problems throughout the 1970's and 1980's
as new astronomical observations became inconsistent with more and more
of its theoretical underpinnings: generally, the astronomical observations
simply did not square with a system controlled only by gravitational forces.
Such observations have resulted in the current "crisis in cosmology"
which begs for the Big Bang theory to be replaced with another cosmological
model.
II. The "Big Bang" Cosmological
Model
Rests on Four Observable Facts
A. The Outward Motion of Galaxies
This motion, discovered by Hubble in 1929, was
interpreted as evidence for the expansion and explosive beginning of the
universe. Two kinds of measurements were needed in Hubble's analysis, the
speed and distance of neighboring galaxies. Since the early 1900's it had
been thought that neighboring galaxies were speeding away from Earth as
determined by what is known as the "Doppler Shift," which is evidenced
by the "redshift" of light waves.
1. "Redshift of Waves" When a source of light is in motion,
its colors shift, analogously to the shift in pitch of a moving source
of sound. In light, the analogue of pitch is color. If a source of light
is moving closer, its colors are shifted up in frequency, toward the blue
end of the spectrum; if the source is moving away, its colors are shifted
down, toward the red. From the amount of shift, the speed of the moving
source of light can be inferred.
2. "Recession of Galaxies" Hubble discovered
that the colors of most nebula were shifted toward the red, indicating
that they were speeding away from us. This change in color of cosmic objects
is known as "redshift."
If galaxies were flying away from each other, they would
have been closer together in the past; thus it was felt that the universe
was more dense at earlier times. If this backward extrapolation were continued,
there would be some definite moment in the past when all matter in the universe
was crammed together in a state of almost infinite density. From the rate
of expansion, when this point in time occurred could be estimated: about
10 - 15 billion years ago. This concept of the beginning of the universe
came to be called the "Big Bang" model, according to which the
universe began in a sort of explosion, starting out from infinite density
and temperature, and then expanded, thinned out, and cooled. The Big Bang
model logically follows from Einstein's theory of gravity to provide a mathematical
description of the universe.
The Big Bang was not like an ordinary explosion in which
a localized region of flying debris spreads out into a surrounding region
of non-moving space, but instead it was to have occurred everywhere. Under
such a view there would be no surrounding space for the universe to move
into, because any such space would be part of the universe; the concept
of the individual particles in the universe flying away from one another
is like marks on the surface of a balloon all receding from one another
as the balloon is blown up.
B. Age of Earth Determined by
Radioactivity
There is a completely independent method for verifying the age of the Earth,
radioactive dating of uranium ore. The approximate match between the age
of the Earth as calculated in this manner, and the age of the universe according
to the Big Bang model as gauged by recession of galaxies, is good. Radioactive
dating of uranium ore suggests the age of the Earth to be 4 billion years
-- as opposed to a million years or 10 trillion years -- relatively very
close to the age of 10 - 15 billion years which the Big Bang model predicts
for the universe. C.
The Overall Chemical Makeup of the Universe
In addition to providing an explanation for the observed expansion and age
of the universe, the Big Bang model explains why the overall chemical makeup
of the universe is approximately 25% helium and 75% hydrogen, and attempts
to explain such chemical make-up in terms of atomic processes of the early
universe. According to the Big Bang model the universe was once so hot that
none of the chemical elements except for hydrogen and helium, the lightest
elements, could exist. All other elements consist of a fusion of two or
more particles, which could not hold together under the intense heat of
the very early universe as it expanded and cooled.
Calculations done by Hoyle and others in 1964 and refined
by Peebles in 1966, and Fowler and Hoyle in 1967, showed that nuclear fusion
in just a few minutes after the Big Bang should have converted approximately
25% of the mass of the universe to helium, the next lightest element after
hydrogen. It is believed that all heavier elements are manufactured in nuclear
reactions in the centers of stars; as a result of such reactions and subsequent
stellar explosions, other chemical elements, (O2 + C, etc.), make up only
a trace of the mass of the universe.
D. Cosmic Background Radiation
The other important experimental confirmation of
the Big Bang theory is the "cosmic background radiation", the
bath of radio waves from space, which first was predicted as a necessary
remnant of a hot, younger universe and then was actually discovered in 1965.
The cosmic background radiation was first predicted by
Gannow in 1948 and later independently predicted by Peebles, et al in 1965.
Both groups contended that when the universe a few seconds old, a special
kind of radiation would have been produced throughout space and then would
have traveled freely throughout space, appearing today with a wavelength
corresponding to radio waves and a temperature of about 3° K (above
absolute zero). According to such theory, when the temperature of the universe
dropped to 3,000°K, at about 300,000 years ago after Big Bang, protons
and electrons combined to form helium. At such time, all matter and radiation
went separate ways and in the 15 billion years of universe expansion since,
the radiation has cooled to 2.74°K.
In 1965 such background radiation was discovered by scientists
at Bell Laboratories, and then in 1989 the COBE satellite was launched and
confirmed that the spectrum of cosmic background radiation is very close
to what was predicted by the Big Bang model: the cosmic background radiation
was found to be a perfectly smooth 2.735°K in all directions of space
(isotropic), to a sensitivity of one part in 100,000.
Using the Big Bang model as a predicate, comprehensive
cosmological theories have developed of how the stars and galaxies were
formed; how galaxies have taken on different shapes; and how they have aged.
By the early 1990's the Big Bang model of the universe
had become well-developed and so well accepted that it in fact had become
part of the public consciousness.
At the beginning of the 1990's the Big Bang model was "alive
and well".
III. Trouble in Bang Land
The Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the
universe began to develop major problems throughout the 1970's and 1980's
as astronomical observations became inconsistent more and more of its theoretical
underpinnings. A.
Dark Attractors
During the 1970's as some astronomers mapped the velocities of wandering
galaxies, Rubin and Ford concentrated on galaxies' spiral arms, reasoning
that the way a galaxy was spinning would go a long way toward explaining
its structure and movement: they used spectroscopy to determine whether
light from the galaxies' arms moved toward the red or blue end of the spectrum.
Astronomers assumed that the largest concentration of a
galaxy's mass was tucked around its core; thus, a galaxy should behave like
a gigantic solar system. The great gravitational attraction of the galaxy's
central mass should keep the outer objects in place and set their velocity
according to Newton's inverse-square law; the close-in objects should speed
around the center while the more distant objects would rotate at a slower
pace. Since this is true of our solar system, it should be no different
for any galaxy. (Newton's law of gravitation in its most simple form, states
that the mutual attractive force between two bodies is proportional to the
product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them.)
Astronomers used redshift calculations to determine that
the outer stars in spiral galaxies moved as fast as those near the core;
they were astonished. Unless something unseen was holding the galaxies together,
Newton's inverse-square law would require that the outer stars and gases
should have twirled off into space; the existence of extra mass in the form
of some kind of matter was required. The second line of indirect evidence
is that galaxies in clusters swarm around one another at speeds which are
incomprehensible unless extra gravitational matter is holding the clusters
together.
Rubin and Ford analyzed over two hundred galaxies in the
late 1970's and early 1980's and found there was extra unknown matter in
virtually every galaxy they had examined which was at least ten times as
massive as the visible luminous stars and dust. Somehow, over 90 percent
of the matter in the universe had not been accounted for. This fact led
astronomers to propose the existence of unseen "dark gravitational
matter," composing 90% of all matter in the universe, in dark haloes
around galaxies.
As discomforting as it is to propose that 90%
of all matter in the universe is unseen, it is far less discomforting than
throwing out all of the known laws of physics.
B. The Horizon Problem
In 1969, only four years the microwave background radiation was discovered,
astronomers began wondering why the background radiation was so utterly
smooth. The problem was that the radiation was smooth across distances that
were too great to have allowed light to travel from a point on one side
of the universe to a point on the other side within the age of the universe
allowed by the Big Bang. Astrophysicists were able to look for the edge
of the universe at the very limits of observability, at what they called
the "horizon." If they looked at the horizon in one direction,
then looked the other way, they found that the background radiation poured
in at precisely the same temperature, 2.735 degrees Kelvin, from both directions.
The problem was that the regions of the universe could only have reached
the same temperature by having been in contact at one time.
If the universe had existed forever, there would have been
plenty of time for any two regions of the universe, no matter how far apart
today, to have exchanged heat and thus homogenized. But was not the case
in a universe that supposedly had evolved from a Big Bang in which the horizon
of the universe extended out only about 15 billion light-years in every
direction. Such background radiation from a distant edge of the universe
would have thus taken at least 15 billion years to reach Earth; the radiation
from the opposite horizon also had taken 15 billion years to get here. This
meant that the two regions of space had to be separated by at least 30 billion
light-years. But if the universe was only about 15 billion years old, the
question was how could these widely separated regions have ever been in
contact with one another in order to share the same temperature. There simply
was no way for a signal moving at the speed of light -- supposedly the maximum
velocity attainable according to Einstein's theories -- ever to have traveled
between the two points.
C. The Flatness Problem
As well as the universe's beginning, theorists faced another
big problem -- its fate. Generally, two kinds of universes predicated by
Einstein's theory: one that would go on expanding forever, and one that
would fall back on itself. In a universe which fell back on itself, there
would be enough matter for the gravitational force acting on it to bring
the outward expansion to a halt. How much matter was required for this to
occur was calculated with great accuracy: about 3 hydrogen atoms per cubic
yard of space (or 5 x 10-27 kilograms per cubic meter). Gravity acting on
matter of this density, the so-called "critical density," eventually
would cause a universe like this to begin falling back on itself; at last,
in pure collapse, the entire universe would revert to a single point of
nearly infinite density and heat.
There was a third possibility, too, that the universe was
neither open nor closed, but rather was balanced precariously between a
fate of grand contraction and infinite expansion. Astrophysicists assigned
the Greek letter omega (W) to represent the ratio between the actual cosmic
mass density as determined by observers and the critical density that would
allow gravity to pull the universe back down on itself. If this ratio were
equal to or less than 1, there would be too little actual mass density to
halt the expansion, which would then go on forever. If omega were greater
than 1, then the universe would be closed and the expansion would (or should
already have) come to a halt.
Using the example of an arrow shot by a bow and sent flying
into the air, omega was similar to the ratio of gravitational energy to
kinetic energy. If the archer were strong enough and shot the arrow skyward
with more than the critical speed represented by the ratio, the arrow would
escape Earth's gravity. If the arrow were shot at just the critical speed,
the arrow would forever travel in orbit with gravitational and kinetic energies
exactly balanced, their ratio equal to 1. An astronomer would call this
a "flat" trajectory.
Astoundingly, this seemed to be exactly the case with the
universe under the Big Bang scenario; observational astronomers were unable
to determine whether the curved space of the universe was open or closed.
The reason appeared to be that the universe was precisely poised between
the two states, its omega exactly equal to 1. Theoretical supporters of
the Big Bang believed that how the universe appears today -- in terms of
the number and distribution of the galaxies -- had been almost wholly determined
by minute features in the earliest instant of the universe. These conditions
were believed to have been set when the universe was at the early age of
10-43 second. There could have been almost no deviation in conditions in
the universe then to allow for the conditions we see today. For omega to
have remained so close to 1 -- that is, for the universe to be so incredibly
flat today -- the difference between the cosmic mass density and the critical
density must have been almost nonexistent in the earliest instants after
the Big Bang: at 1 second after the Big Bang, it was calculated, the universe
had to be fine-tuned to an accuracy of 1 part in 1015, or to within 1 trillionth
of 1 percent. (To help grasp the size of a number this large, if the universe
had been formed 15 billion years ago, it would have been in existence for
about 1015 seconds).
At 10-43 second, the universe would have had to have been
fine-tuned to within 1 part in 1059, a fraction so small as to be incomprehensible.
Had there been less matter by so much as one of these minuscule fractions,
matter would have expanded outward so quickly that gravity could never have
condensed the hydrogen and helium gases enough to form galaxies and stars;
with just a tiny fraction more matter, gravity would have been too strong,
and the expansion would have been halted long ago.
Since only enough mass had been detected throughout the
cosmos to bring omega up to 0.1 -- one-tenth the requirement amount -- huge
quantities of matter were still unaccounted for, meaning that almost the
entire inventory of the universe or 90%, is unseen, undetected and unknown.
D. Quasars - Cosmic Relics
In late 1980's a series of observations occurred
that added to cosmologists' concerns over the horizon and flatness problems;
they found new celestial objects which appeared to be at an enormous distance
from Earth and receding very fast. Unknown objects, they were so they were
called "quasi-stellar radio objects," or "quasars."
A quasar could be a hundred times brighter than the Milky Way but only about
the size of our solar system and were at the most distant radius of the
universe and moving away at 90% of the speed of light. It was initially
believed, that if the red shifts analyses were correct, quasars were formed
10 billion years ago.
The discovery of a quasar, "PC1158+4635" in 1989
further shocked astrophysicists since it was found to be 14 billion light-years
from Earth. A quasar so distant and so near the down of time should not
exist: PC1158+4635 left too little time in the current model of the universe's
evolution to get from the Big Bang to stellar structures such as galaxies.
Even more disturbing, some such quasars which have redshifts so large that
they appear to be on the edge of the universe have been found in the vicinity
of nearby galaxies with small redshifts. If, as expected, such quasars are
connected with the galaxy, then the two objects would be moving with vastly
different velocities: this would mean that their red shifts -- perhaps even
all redshifts -- result from a phenomenon other than rapid recession, as
now believed. E.
Inflation: The Universal Cure-All
During the late 1970's - early 1980's, the
subject of the extraordinary flatness of the universe, the unbelievable
balance of the cosmos between runaway expansion and utter gravitational
collapse, posed an incomprehensible problem. Then, in the late 1970's, Guth
proposed a solution: that the entire infant cosmos could have slipped into
an unstable state that physicists call a false vacuum and that this momentary
state could cause the universe to experience a rapid change called a phase
transition as it cooled in the instant after the Big Bang. (When water is
chilled very rapidly, it can remain liquid far below its freezing point
of 0 degrees Celsius; then it freezes all at once.) He proposed that as
the universe cooled, the instantaneous false vacuum created by supercooling
had driven the expansion: the universe would have done it all by itself;
there would be no outside force; no hand of God; no divine creative power
was necessary.
Guth calculated that inflation should have begun precisely
at 10-35 second following the Big Bang when the hyper-dense conditions of
the universe would have created the false vacuum condition at which time,
according to the field equations of general relativity, a kind of anti-gravitational
force would have pushed matter apart instead of drawing it together. Within
the infinitesimal span of 10-32 second, the anti-gravitational repulsion
would have made the universe expand in size by a factor of 1050 -- equivalent
to a grain of sand growing bigger than our universe in the same span of
time -- and then after such rapid expansion the universe then reverted to
the rate of expansion of the standard Big Bang model.
Inflation would solve the horizon problem: all the regions
of the universe that we observe today would have been in contact with one
another before inflation began at 10-35 second so that all the energy of
the universe would have been evenly distributed before the exponential inflation
of space itself.
More importantly, the inflation scenario would solve the
flatness problem by reducing it to a simple exercise in geometry: whatever
the curvature of space before inflation, it would have been flattened during
the rapid expansion like the surface of a balloon "flattens" as
it is inflated.
A major problem developed with inflation: inflation predicted
that the rapid expansion would have occurred in a number of separate spatial
bubbles which should be observable today. Bubbles were a major problem for
inflation because they are not observable.
Notwithstanding the bubble wall problem, the cosmology
world was galvanized by the novel concept of inflation since it solved such
difficult problems. One possible solution to the bubble problem was worked
out which predicted that the observable universe would occupy but one billion-trillionth
of a single bubble domain. This theory eliminated bubble walls as a major
worry: the walls would be so far beyond our observational reach of about
15 billion light-years that they could never possibly become visible.
The non-verifyiability of the inflation theory has been
a major flaw from its inception: throughout the history of science the best
theories have always made verifiable predictions, which could be tested
by experiment or observation. For example, Einstein's general relativity,
predicted a number of phenomena that were later observed and Quantum Theory,
envisioned numerous experiments at the subnuclear level that were then carried
out in accelerators. On the other hand inflation cannot be tested. Guth's
original theory of inflation made only one single prediction that could
be considered testable: astronomers should be able to discern the walls
of domains smaller than the observable universe which has turned out to
be false; no hint of domain walls has ever been observed.
Another major problem with inflation is that it required
that omega (W) equal 1 exactly and thus required the universe's mass to
be 10 times the amount we can account for. To solve this problem, theorists,
adopting inflation to cure observational problems with the Big Bang, proposed
that 90% of the mass of the universe was missing; they proposed a "missing
mass" to represent 90% of the universe. They called this missing mass
"cold dark matter," which also has never been observed. Moreover,
the cold dark matter was required by the theory to consist of non-baryonic
material, unlike any of the matter in the rest of the universe.
By the late 1980's the inflation theorists became to be
perplexed by the basic dilemma that the inflation which would have smoothed
out the inhomogeneities of the earlier universe would have left no fluctuations
in the density of space capable of producing the giant galactic structures
which were then becoming being observed. On the other hand, if inflation
had not occurred they could not explain the flat universe.
F. Big Attraction
The background radiation that had been discovered
in 1965 was considered the chief evidence for the Big Bang. In 1977 scientists
sent balloons aloft equipped with the most sophisticated measuring devices
that had yet been used to detect minute variations in this radiation. They
found surprised results: the radiation was shifted slightly toward the red
end of the spectrum on one side of the sky, and slightly toward the blue
end in the other direction.
As a consequence the conclusion was inescapable that the
Earth and the solar system were, in fact, moving rapidly in the direction
of the blueshifted background radiation.
The entire Milky Way had a peculiar motion not related
to the general expansion of the universe. Calculations undertaken soon afterward
showed that not only the Milky Way, but that the entire local group of about
thirty galaxies was moving in the same direction at about 700 kilometers
per second (about 2 percent of the speed of light) in the direction of Virgo;
these galaxies exhibited what became known as a "streaming motion."
Later astronomers found that our local group are being pulled not only toward
Virgo but toward an unseen, unknown mass, in a direction which lay nearly
perpendicular to the estimated position of Virgo.
In 1987 a group of seven astrophysicists analyzed the streaming
motions of some four hundred galaxies in our region of the universe and
made an announcement that shook the world astrophysics community: every
nearby galaxy, including those in clusters and gigantic superclusters, was
streaming at a rate of 600 to 700 kilometers per second toward a point in
the sky that lay some 300 million light-years beyond Hydra-Centaurus, some
70 million light-years away. The unknown object toward which all the galaxies
were streaming was named the "Great Attractor." The mass of this
monumentally Great Attractor was calculated to be as that of tens of billions
of galaxies. In 1989 astronomers announced that the Great Attractor appeared
to be two extremely dense superclusters of galaxies stretching 300 million
light-years across the universe beyond Hydra-Centaurus.
G. Then, The "Great Wall"
Until the 1980's, without the advanced computer
technology then available to astronomers, astronomers were unable to undertake
a meaningful survey of the universe using Hubble's concept of red shift.
Until then, no one had the slightest idea what the actual structure of the
universe might be.
In the mid-1980's Huchra and Geller of Harvard and Smithsonian
Observatory built a red-shift map of the sky; instead of the uniform distribution
of galaxies that they expected, astronomers begin finding great clusters
of galaxies, superclusters and, eventually, the immense superclusters. Their
study revealed that the universe consisted of a pattern of galactic structures
that utterly defied existing theory, including one unusually large cosmic
construction at least 500 million light-years long and 15 million light-years
thick. Not able to tell its exact size because it ran off the edge of their
survey, they named it the "Great Wall," and further speculated
that it could be made up of walls of still larger galactic bubbles.
In between these gigantic new structures they surprisingly
found great stretches of empty space nearly devoid of any matter at all.
One of these voids was an estimated 300 million light-years across, far
too immense a span of emptiness to be accommodated by existing ideas about
how the universe had evolved; according to these standard theories, based
on the Big Bang model the cosmic density should have been as quite smooth.
Big Bang theorists were stunned since the Great Wall was
far too large and too massive to have formed by only the mutual gravitational
attraction of its member galaxies, as should have been the case under the
Big Bang scenario. Worse, indications that the Great Wall might be just
a part of one of a series of gigantic galactic sheets lined up one after
the other in a honeycomb structure with voids of 400 million light-years
in between have been recently confirmed: an extension of the Great Wall
has been found in the Southern Hemisphere, the "Southern Wall."
The gigantic structure as now mapped consists of over 11,000 galaxies stretching
over what is believed to be a billion light-years.
H. Biggest Bang Problems
In 1994 the newly-repaired Hubble Space Telescope (the
"HST") took a new look at the rate of the expansion of the universe
in a renewed effort to determine its age. The repaired HST spied cephoid
"standard candles" in the M100 galaxy in the Virgo cluster and,
based on the expansion rate, determined the Cephoids to be 56 million light
years from Earth, rather than several times further. Such observations necessitated
the age of the universe to be 8-12 billion years old, based on the consequential
expansion rate, rather than the 16-20 billion previously believed.
The huge problem for advocates of the Big Bang theory is
that certain objects in the universe, particularly certain quasars which
are reliably dated at 16 billion years old, appear to be older than the
universe itself!
Such realizations have led to the current crisis in cosmology.
The new findings that the universe is younger than objects in it has began
to permeate the public consciousness.
IV. The Current Crisis in Cosmology
In 1962 Thomas Kuhn revolutionized our concepts concerning
the history of science: in his classic work The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions Kuhn hit on the word "paradigm" to describe the world
view of any specific scientific community. Kuhn proposed that science did
not move forward by refining old views but rather by changing basic concepts;
he described an old paradigm-anomaly-crisis-revolution-acceptance-new paradigm
cycle. By the mid-1990's, it appears that cosmology is ready for just such
a paradigm shift.
The current crisis in cosmology generally is that the Big
Bang model does not allow enough time to get the universe from its early
state to one we are seeing now. The question is: how did the universe get
to be as lumpy as it is given the COBE results, which would indicate that
the universe would be smooth and homogenous from a Big Bang beginning.
In an atmosphere reminiscent of the last days of dying
Aristotelian or Ptolemaic cosmology, Big Bang theorists would have us now
believe that our universe is filled with an utterly smooth background radiation
in a volume of space which is filled with galactic structures too large
to possibly exist, which may themselves have sprung from quasars too old
for the age of a cosmos in which at least 90 - 99% of all matter was supposed
to be there and had never been seen. Such problems beg the proposition of
a new cosmological model.
CONCLUSION? THE BIG BANG NEVER HAPPENED!
NEEDED? SOME OTHER COSMOLOGICAL MODEL (See pages 651-655
in The Urantia Book)
Stellar recession began 8 billion years ago (local systems).
Objects exist which appear to be "outside" of the universe.
If cosmological model is controlled only by gravity, over 90% of
the mass of the universe is unaccounted for.
Spherical matter ("dark islands of space") comprises Dark
Gravitational Matter.
Large-scale features of the universe ("outer space levels")
represented by the Great Wall and the Southern Wall.
Large-scale recession (red-shift) consists of "space respiration".
Galactic streaming demonstrates super-universe rotation.
V. The Respiratory Universe Model
The problems of the Big Bang model can be solved, as well
as its characteristics explained, by the "Respiratory Universe"
model in which seven super-universes circle the central universe in a counter-clockwise
rotation; the first of the four outer space layers rotates around the central
universe in a clockwise direction; the expansion-contraction cycle of the
universe ("respiration") which takes approximately 2 billion years;
and in which the various spheres of space consist of stars, dark islands
of space, minor space bodies (such as comets, meteors, etc.), planets, and
architectural spheres. Such a model is presented in The Urantia Book.
A. Horizon and Flatness Problems
The Respiratory Universe model would easily explain
the horizon problem, since the universe, having practically existed for
infinity, would have plenty of time to exchange heat and energy. The microwave
background energy, or radiation, would appear to be practically the same
everywhere.
Such a model, which would exhibit slow controlled epochs
of fine-tuned expansion and contraction, would appear to be neither "open,"
flying apart, or "closed," heading toward the Big Crunch, but
rather to be "flat". Critical mass, or omega, would not be a factor
since forces other than gravity would come into play. The existence of these
forces have been suggested by physicists such as the Swedish Nobel laureate
Hannes Alfven, who contends that the universe is continually energizing
itself by means of electromagnetic currents; Alfven contends such currents
are as important to universe development as gravity. Alfven believes that
magnetic fields and currents can concentrate matter and energy far faster
and more effectively than can gravity. Also, theories by even Big Bang supporters
such as Hawking, have been proposed stating that energy may continually
be recycled in the universe by the explosion of black holes after gravity
has completed its work of matter condensation. If this is the case, the
energy-mass-energy conversion cycle could repeat itself endlessly allowing
plenty of time for heat in the universe to equalize and requiring no "critical
mass." B. The
Large Scale Structure of the Universe
"The Great and Southern Walls" The increasingly
comprehensive maps which show enormous structures consisting of galaxies
located along the bubble-like surface of enormous "voids" are
also explained by the Respiratory Universe model. The model contains four
huge outer space levels which encircle the superuniverse clusters. Thus,
the first outer space level could be what is now described as the "Great
Wall - Southern Wall" complex. C.
Streaming Motions of Galaxies: "The Great Attractor"
In the Respiratory Universe model consisting of seven superuniverse
galaxies moving in a counter-clockwise direction around a universal center,
an individual superuniverse cluster of galaxies would exhibit an overall
"streaming motion" associated with such a counter-clockwise rotational
track. In addition, one's home galaxy would exhibit angular rotation associated
with the rotation of the super-universe around its system axis.
The Respiratory Universe model which combines counter-clockwise
and angular rotation would therefore explain the streaming motions which
we actually observe toward what we now call the Great Attractor.
D. "Dark Islands of Space":
Dark Gravitational Matter
The "dark gravitational matter" comprising 90% of all matter in
the universe is the matter which is required to be present from the laws
of physics, but which is not visible. In an effort to explain its identity,
astronomers have proposed that such matter consist of "dark haloes"
of exotic kinds of particles.
Such matter is better explained by compact "black
hole-like" objects; especially since the laws of physics would suggest
that dispersed halo particulate should contract and condense to form sphercal
bodies as a result of gravitational forces. Detailed studies of nearby galaxies
have been made to verify the existence of and locate such compact objects.
Recently some confirmation of the existence of dark gravitational
matter in the form of compact spheres, which astronomers call MACHOs ("Massive
Compact Halo Objects") has been reported; they have noticed a star
slowly brightening and then fading again. Astronomers have proposed that
this event, which occured in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a companion galaxy
to ours, could be "microlensing" the gravitational focusing of
a star's light by a large compact invisible object as that mass moved between
us and the distant star. This microlensing event, discovered by Griest of
University of California, San Diego, is the first direct evidence of dark
matter.
The Respiratory Universe model proposes that "Dark
Islands of Space," or MACHOs, cause the rotational veolocities of galaxies.
MACHOs consequently represent 10% of the "missing mass" of the
universe which is the mass known to be present due to rotational velocities
of galaxies, but which represent objects which are not conventionally visible.
E. Redshift
What has been perhaps the most troubling aspect
of the Respiratory Universe model is the abundance of redshift in the cosmos.
The Respiratory model predicts that much of the redshift is not actually
real, but rather occurs because of the rotational direction of the first
outer space level with reference to our superuniverse domain. Now that the
Great Wall has been discovered, detailed study of it will no doubt display
a preferential streaming direction due to such rotational direction.
VI. Conclusion
Today, in a trend reminiscent of the methods of Ptolemaic
astronomers until Copernicus came to the rescue, cosmologists are ignoring
facts that fail to fit the Big Bang model. When the theoretical model first
appeared, it was a reasonable and seemingly scientific explanation for a
relatively small amount of astronomical data taken earlier in the century:
it was consistent with the Hubble redshift of galaxies and large-scale expansion;
it seemed to explain the observed abundances of light elements such as helium
and hydrogen which had not been created in the fusion furnaces of existing
stars, but created in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. In what probably
was its finest hour, the Big Bang model predicted the microwave background
radiation at about the temperature that was consistent with a creation explosion
out of a formless nothingness 15 billion years or so ago.
However, the troubling observational and theoretical problems
of the 1970's and 1980's increasingly have challenged the Big Bang model.
The Big Bang model also began having more and more difficulty reconciling
the latest observational details found by astronomers with the fundamental
assumption that on the galactic and cosmic scales gravity was the sole player.
In other words, the theory failed to explain convincingly how matter had
become organized in clusters of galaxies and superclusters in the time period
allotted since the Big Bang.
Also for the universe to be structured in a manner consistent
with current observations, more than 90 percent of its matter would have
to be in the form of some unknown, unseen, but unbelievable massive dark
matter which would not only have to be present in such a huge quantity that
it would account gravitationally for the size and behavior of the new clusters
and superclusters, but it also would have to be of such a bizarre quality
that it could not possibly be detected by even the most sophisticated technology.
For instance, gravity working alone would have taken something like 100
billion years to create the supercluster two and a half billion light-years
across that was recently discovered by American and German observers. This
was a time scale at least five times longer than permitted by even the most
generous of the Big Bang models.
To salvage the Big Bang, theorists have brought in a number
of ad hoc assumptions such as inflation, to supposedly cause the universe
to expand exponentially, but which suffers from the same malady as the Big
Bang, an inability to make predictions that can be tested.
Today the long odds are that the Big Bang never happened.
Perhaps the Big Bang was just a "big spash," a stellar disgorgement
in our little neighborhood of the universe that was neither the beginning
of time nor the creation of the cosmos.
How long will the Big Bang theory survive? Whether the
Big Bang goes down in five years or twenty-give years, it appears inevitable
that it soon will be overwhelmed by more and more uncompromising new observations
and experimentation. In the next millennium scientists and other people
looking back likely will regard it much the way we look back on the cosmology
of Aristotle, a quaint theory that people believed in for a while.
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