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Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 28: Jul-Aug 1983 |
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The better, bigger big bang
Astronomers are ever more discomfitted by the Big Bang hypothesis for the creation of the universe. The reasons are several:
- The observed universe is extremely homogeneous, even though theory says that distant parts of the universe could never have been causally connected;
- No satisfactory explanation exists for the density fluctuations that had to occur for galaxies to be formed; and
- The universe seems to be flat, not curved, and the Big Bang does not explain why.
Paul Steinhardt and Andreas Al-brecht, at the University of Pennsylvania, have developed a radically different Big Bang -- a two-stage one, with hot and super-cooled states. The three objections listed above are neatly disposed of in the new version, but at the cost of a radically new view of the cosmos. The "new" universe is about 10100 times as big as the 12 billion light years assigned to the cozy universe we used to know -- and it is presumably correspondingly older.
This means that the portion of the cosmos we see is only a negligible fraction of the whole -- a fraction that just happens to be homogeneous. Somewhere, way out beyond the farthest quasar, things could be -- well -- different!
(Anonymous; "A Bigger, Better Big Bang," Astronomy, 11:62, February 1983.)
Reference. Our Catalog volume Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos brims with challenges to the Big Bang. For details on this book, visit: here.