(Summary of the book by Eric J. Lerner, 1991)
Our universe, they believe, began in a single instant as an infinitely dense and hot point-like ball of light, smaller than the tiniest atom. In one trillion-trillionth of a second it expanded a trillion-trillionfold, creating all the space, matter, and energy that now make up the galaxies and stars. Most of it is dark matter, exotic particles that can never be observed. Black holes suck in dying stars. It is threaded by cosmic strings, tears in the fabric of space itself. It is doomed to either collapse into a universal black hole or to expand and decay into the nothingness of an eternal night.
The only test of a scientific theory is how well it corresponds to the world we observe. No matter how well it is liked, if observation contradicts it, then it must be rejected. In the past four years [pre 1991] crucial observations have flatly contradicted the assumptions and predictions of the Big bang. Because the Big bang supposedly occurred only about 20 billion years ago [current figure is 13.7], nothing in the cosmos can be older that this. Yet in 1986 astronomers discovered a huge conglomeration of galaxies a billion light-years across. That must have taken a hundred billion years to form.
Other conflicts have emerged. These enormous ribbons of matter (confirmed in 1990) refute that the universe was, at its origin, perfectly smooth and homogeneous. Finnish and American astronomers, analyzing recent observations, have shown that the mysterious dark matter doesn't exist. By the end of the eighties, new contradictions were popping up every few months. Many by the most respected astronomers, yet most cosmologists either dismissed the observations as faulty, or have insisted that minor modifications to BB will fix it. This is not surprising because the BB has been their life's work.
But now an entirely different concept has developed based on the known fact that 99% of the matter in the universe is plasma – hot, electrically conducting gasses. Extrapolating from the behavior of such plasma in the laboratory, plasma cosmologists envision a universe crisscrossed by vast electrical currents and magnetic fields. Plasma cosmology works backward from the present universe and outward from the earth. It arrives in a universe without a big bang, without any beginning at all, a universe that has always existed, and will always evolve, with no limits of any sort.
One group of astronomers led by Dr. P.J.E. Peebles of Princeton, used a supercomputer to plot nearly a million galaxies. The result is a lacy filigree of interwoven threads, a pattern that was dubbed "the Cosmic Tapestry." These objects were discovered by Dr. Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii.
Margaret J. Geller and John P. Hucra of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics mapped all galaxies within about 600 million light-years of earth. In 1989 they announced the "Great Wall", a sheet of galaxies more than 200 million light-years across, and 700 million light-years long, but only 20 million light-years thick, and involves over 5,000 galaxies.
Still larger structures were discovered by an international team. They found galaxies clustered in thin bands, evenly spaced some 600 million light-years apart like the rungs of a titanic ladder. The entire pattern stretched over 7 billion light-years. They seemed to be moving only about 500 kilometers per second relative to each other. At that rate the pattern appears to have taken 150 billion years to form [over 10 times the current figure for the entire universe].
As these observations became harder to dispute, cosmologists began to introduce new concepts to bridge the gap. This has become increasingly common. The first idea is that the distribution of matter isn't clumpy, it only appears to be. There could be unseen matter between the clumps. This theory is entirely ad hoc. Astronomers can deduce fairly accurately how much matter is in such objects as the great wall by observing the velocities of galaxies around such objects. E. Shaya of Columbia University did that in 1989, assuming no dim matter. The result was the same as predicted by the BB theory, so if it is right, there can't be any matter left over to fill up the voids.
Dr. Jeremiah Ostriker of Princeton University and others proposed the idea of the 'cosmic string'- infinitely thin, infinitely dense objects, but stretching in length from one side of the observable universe to the other. They supposedly move at nearly the speed of light, and a meter of the stuff weighs about as much as the moon. Even cosmic strings could not overcome the time it takes to form supercluster complexes, and there is no evidence that they exist. As Dr. Tully puts it "It's disturbing to see that there is a new theory every time there's a new observation."
What about the problem of the apparent age of supercluster complexes? Cosmologists speculate "Perhaps matter moved faster in the past than it does now." This would take one unknown process to accelerate matter to high speed, and another unknown process to put the brakes on. Theorists speculate that a third unknown process would radiate away the braking energy. This would show up in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as a predicted bump in the black-body curve (1% for the great wall, 2% for Tully's, and 5% for one discovered by Koo and colleagues). The COBE satellite data had 0.1% accuracy, and it showed no bump whatsoever.
Galaxy formation has long been a problem for cosmologists. BB theory assumes they grew by gravitational attraction from primordial fluctuations in the early universe. As early as 1967, Peebles and Joseph Silk concluded that they would show up as temperature fluctuations ('anisotropies') in the CMB. By 1970 they had calculated that this should be 5 or 6 parts per thousand (ppt), but in 1973 observers showed it to be no more than 1 ppt. Throughout the seventies, observers continually lowered the limits of the anisotropy, and theorists modified their theories to make new predictions below those limits. By 1979 it had become clear that that game could not continue, since there was no anisotropy at even 1 part in 10,000.
Theorists realized that there was just too little matter in the universe. Cosmologists decided to represent the density of the universe as a ratio to the density that would stop the expansion, and they called it W. To stop the expansion W had to equal 1. It appeared that it was only about .01 or .02, far too little to magnify the fluctuations fast enough to form galaxies. This is where dark matter came in. Theorists assumed it to be 1 or the whole BB theory would collapse. The BB theory also predicted the abundance of helium and certain rare isotopes, which depend on the density of the universe. There couldn't be any more ordinary matter, or there would be too much helium, so the 'extra' matter had to be exotic [but it would still have to have gravity].
[For brevity I have skipped "Searching for Dark Matter"]
The alternative to the BB is plasma cosmology. Its pioneer is Hannes Alfvẻn (1908-1995), a Swedish Nobel laureate. The plasma universe is formed and controlled by electricity and magnetism as well as gravity. As a boy Alfvẻn was fascinated by the northern lights. The Norwegian physicist Kristian Birkland had explained that the aurora was the effect of electrical currents flowing through plasma above the earth. In his own experiments in nuclear physics labs, Alfvẻn saw tiny electromagnetic vortices that snake through plasma. The vortices are produced by a phenomenon called "pinch effect." A straight thread of electrical current produces a cylindrical magnetic field, which attracts other currents flowing in the same direction. The tiny current threads tend to "pinch" together, drawing the plasma with them. The converging threads twine into a rope and become plasma whirlwinds.
Over a period of decades, Alfvẻn and colleagues applied laboratory study of plasma to cosmic mysteries. They were met with fierce opposition or indifference. In the seventies, the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft detected currents and filaments around Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. [I read last week in another book that the planet Io is connected to Jupiter by a 'flux loop', which carries a current of 5 million amps, and causes an intense aurora on Jupiter.] Filamentary structure is evident in the Orion nebula. In 1977 Alfvẻn applied his concepts to galaxy formation. In his theory, a galaxy, spinning in the magnetic fields of intergalactic space, generates electricity. The huge electrical current flows in great filamentary spirals toward the center of the galaxy, where it turns and flows out along the spin axis. This galactic current then short-circuits, driving a lot of energy into the galactic core. Powerful electrical fields accelerate intense jets of electrons and ions out along the axis.
A few astrophysicists took Alfvẻn seriously. In 1979 Tony Peratt, a plasma physicist, began to see things in the lab that seemed to confirm Alfvẻn's theory. Working at San Diego's Maxwell Laboratory he saw currents in plasma develop vortex filaments, which twisted up into what looked like tiny spiral galaxies. Peratt used a recently developed program to simulate the action of plasma on a galactic scale. He simulated two filaments of current, each 100,000 light-years in thickness, and brought them together. The results were dramatic. The two filaments merged, generating the graceful forms of spiral galaxies. [A picture is shown of 24 'steps' in the process of formation. In about the middle they look like barred galaxies, and at the end like spiral galaxies.]
In 1989 a team of Italian and Canadian radio astronomers detected a filament of radio emission stretched along a supercluster, coming from the region between two clusters of galaxies. This was indirect evidence of a river of electricity flowing through the empty space. The estimated size of the current was 5-10 million trillion amperes, the same as that predicted by Peratt's model. The prediction of filaments at the supergalactic scale was confirmed by observation.
[He goes on to account for the 3 observed phenomena that the BB claims as evidence. All this is from chapter one. In the rest of the first half of the book he talks about the history the cosmological debate from ancient Greece until now. The history of the BB theories was enlightening. In the second half he goes into more detail and explains galaxy formation and quasars without any dark matter or black holes. In the 'third half' he talks about the implications of an infinite universe on things like politics, the economy, and religion.]
2
Book Review: The Big Bang Never Happened
Re: The Big Bang Never Happened – a book report
Good Answers:
"Almost" Good Answers: