Directions: Read each article, highlighting key information in support of the Big Bang Theory
and evidence against the Big Bang Theory. Be prepared to participate in a philosophical
chairs debate activity tomorrow on this topic.
The Big Bang
Evidence supporting Big Bang Theory
The night sky presents the viewer with a picture of a calm and unchanging Universe. So the 1929 discovery by Edwin Hubble that the
Universe is in fact expanding at enormous speed was revolutionary. Hubble noted that galaxies outside our own Milky Way were all
moving away from us, each at a speed proportional to its distance from us. He quickly realized what this meant that there must have
been an instant in time (now known to be about 14 billion years ago) when the entire Universe was contained in a single point in
space. The Universe must have been born in this single violent event, which came to be known as the "Big Bang."
Astronomers combine mathematical models with observations to develop workable theories of how the Universe came to be. The
mathematical underpinnings of the Big Bang theory include Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity along with standard theories
of fundamental particles. Today NASA spacecraft such as the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope continue
Edwin Hubble's work of measuring the expansion of the Universe. One of the goals has long been to decide whether the Universe will
expand forever, or whether it will someday stop, turn around, and collapse in a "Big Crunch?"
Background Radiation
According to the theories of physics, if we were to look at the Universe one second after the Big Bang, what we would see is a 10billion degree sea of neutrons, protons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons, and neutrinos. Then, as time went on, we would
see the Universe cool, the neutrons either decaying into protons and electrons or combining with protons to make deuterium (an
isotope of hydrogen). As it continued to cool, it would eventually reach the temperature where electrons combined with nuclei to form
neutral atoms. Before this "recombination" occurred, the Universe would have been opaque because the free electrons would have
caused light (photons) to scatter the way sunlight scatters from the water droplets in clouds. But when the free electrons were absorbed
to form neutral atoms, the Universe suddenly became transparent. Those same photons - the afterglow of the Big Bang known as
cosmic background radiation - can be observed today.
Missions Study Cosmic Background Radiation
NASA has launched two missions to study the cosmic background radiation, taking "baby pictures" of the Universe only 400,000
years after it was born. The first of these was the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE). In 1992, the COBE team announced that they
had mapped the primordial hot and cold spots in cosmic background radiation. These spots are related to the gravitational field in the
early Universe and form the seeds of the giant clusters of galaxies that stretch hundreds of millions of light years across the Universe.
This work earned NASA's Dr. John C. Mather and George F. Smoot of the University of California the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics.
The second mission to examine the cosmic background radiation was the Wilkinson Microware Anisotropy Probe (WMAP). With
greatly improved resolution compared to COBE, WMAP surveyed the entire sky, measuring temperature differences of the microwave
radiation that is nearly uniformly distributed across the Universe. The picture shows a map of the sky, with hot regions in red and
cooler regions in blue. By combining this evidence with theoretical models of the Universe, scientists have concluded that the
Universe is "flat," meaning that, on cosmological scales, the geometry of space satisfies the rules of Euclidean geometry (e.g., parallel
lines never meet, the ratio of circle circumference to diameter is pi, etc.).
A third mission, Planck, led by the European Space Agency with significant participation from NASA, was. launched in 2009. Planck
is making the most accurate maps of the microwave background radiation yet. With instruments sensitive to temperature variations of
a few millionths of a degree, and mapping the full sky over 9 wavelength bands, it measures the fluctuations of the temperature of the
CMB with an accuracy set by fundamental astrophysical limits.
The Universe's "baby picture".
WMAP's map of the temperature of the microwave background radiation shows tiny variations (of few microdegrees) in The 3K
background. Hot spots show as red, cold spots as dark blue.
Inflation
One problem that arose from the original COBE results, and that persists with the higher-resolution WMAP data, was that the
Universe was too homogeneous. How could pieces of the Universe that had never been in contact with each other have come to
equilibrium at the very same temperature? This and other cosmological problems could be solved, however, if there had been a very
short period immediately after the Big Bang where the Universe experienced an incredible burst of expansion called "inflation." For
this inflation to take place, the Universe at the time of the Big Bang must have been filled with an unstable form of energy whose
nature is not yet known. Whatever its nature, the inflationary model predicts that this primordial energy would have been unevenly
distributed in space due to a kind of quantum noise that arose when the Universe was extremely small. This pattern would have been
transferred to the matter of the Universe and would show up in the photons that began streaming away freely at the moment of
recombination. As a result, we would expect to see, and do see, this kind of pattern in the COBE and WMAP pictures of the Universe.
But all this leaves unanswered the question of what powered inflation. One difficulty in answering this question is that inflation was
over well before recombination, and so the opacity of the Universe before recombination is, in effect, a curtain drawn over those
interesting very early events. Fortunately, there is a way to observe the Universe that does not involve photons at all. Gravitational
waves, the only known form of information that can reach us undistorted from the instant of the Big Bang, can carry information that
we can get no other way. Two missions that are being considered by NASA, LISA and the Big Bang Observer, will look for the
gravitational waves from the epoch of inflation.
Dark Energy
During the years following Hubble and COBE, the picture of the Big Bang gradually became clearer. But in 1996, observations of
very distant supernovae required a dramatic change in the picture. It had always been assumed that the matter of the Universe would
slow its rate of expansion. Mass creates gravity, gravity creates pull; the pulling must slow the expansion. But supernovae
observations showed that the expansion of the Universe, rather than slowing, is accelerating. Something, not like matter and not like
ordinary energy, is pushing the galaxies apart. This "stuff" has been dubbed dark energy, but to give it a name is not to understand it.
Whether dark energy is a type of dynamical fluid, heretofore unknown to physics, or whether it is a property of the vacuum of empty
space, or whether it is some modification to general relativity is not yet known.
References:
Netting, Ruth. “The Big Bang.” NASA Astrophysics. [Internet] Found at http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/focus-areas/whatpowered-the-big-bang/ Updated March 2013.
The Big Bang Theory Collapses
By Duane Gish, Ph.D.
"Down with the Big Bang;" "The Big Bang Theory Goes Kerplooey;" "The Big Bang Theory Explodes;" "Sorry, Big Bang Theory is a
Dud;" "Map Challenges Theory of Universe;" "Astronomers' New Data Jolt Vital Part of Big Bang Theory;" "Quasar Clumps Dim
Cosmological Theory." These have been titles of a few of the articles found in newspapers and science journals in the last two or three
years, as the Big Bang theory has received one body blow after another. And why not? We know that the universe did not begin with a
big bang -- it will end with a big bang, for "but the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall
pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be
burned up" (II Peter 3:10). Cosmologists have thus miserably failed as to the time, nature, and cause of the Big Bang.
The Big Bang theory concerning the origin of the universe was spawned about 50 years ago, and soon became the dogma of the
evolutionary establishment. It has had many dissenters, however, including the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, the Nobel laureate
Hannes Alfven, and astronomers Geoffrey Burbidge and Halton Arp. According to the Big Bang theory, some 10 to 20 billion years
ago, all of the matter and energy of the universe was compressed into a cosmic egg, or plasma ball, consisting of sub-atomic particles
and radiation. Nobody knows where the cosmic egg came from, or how it got there -- it was just there. For some equally inexplicable
reason, the cosmic egg exploded. As the matter and radiation expanded, so the theory says, it cooled sufficiently for elements to form,
as protons and electrons combined to form hydrogen of atomic weight one, and neutrons were subsequently captured to form helium
of atomic weight four. Most of the gas that formed consisted of hydrogen. These gases, it is then supposed, expanded radially in all
directions throughout the universe until they were so highly dispersed that an extremely low vacuum and temperature existed. No
oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, sulfur, copper, iron, nickel, uranium, or other elements existed. The universe consisted
essentially of hydrogen gas. Then somehow, we are told; the molecules of gas that were racing out at an enormous speed in a radial
direction began to collapse in on themselves in local areas by gravitational attraction. The molecules within a space of about six
trillion miles diameter collapsed to form each star, a hundred billion stars somehow collected to form each of the estimated 100 billion
galaxies in the universe, and our own solar system formed about five billion years or so ago from a cloud of dust and gas made up of
the exploded remnants of previously existing stars. No satisfactory theory exists to explain any of these events, but cosmologists
remained firm in their conviction that all of these marvelous events would eventually yield to credible explanations. But now a cruel
fate has befallen the grandest theory of all -- the Big Bang theory.
Based on the Big Bang theory, cosmologists predicted that the distribution of matter throughout the universe would be homogeneous.
Thus, based upon the so-called Cosmological Principle, it was postulated that the distribution of galaxies in the universe would be
essentially uniform. No matter in which direction one looked, if one looked far enough, one would see the same number of galaxies.
There would be no large-scale clusters of galaxies or great voids in space. Recent research, however, has revealed massive super
clusters of galaxies and vast voids in space. We exist in a very "clumpy" universe.
The present crisis in Big Bang cosmologies began in 1986, when R. Brent Tully, of the University of Hawaii, showed that there were
ribbons of super clusters of galaxies 300 million light-years long and 100 million light-years thick, stretching out about a billion lightyears, and separated by voids about 300 million light-years across. [1] These structures are much too big for the Big Bang theory to
produce. At the speeds at which galaxies are supposed to be moving, it would require 80 billion years to create such a huge complex,
but the age of the universe is supposed to be somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years.
In November of 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announced the results
of their research. Their map of the sky revealed what they termed the "Great Wall" -- a huge sheet of galaxies 200 million light years
across and 700 million light years long. [2] A team of American, British, and Hungarian astronomers, it is reported, discovered even
larger structures. [3] They found galaxies clustered into thin bands spaced about 600 million light years apart. The pattern of these
clusters stretched across about one-fourth of the diameter of the universe, or about seven billion light years. This huge shell and void
pattern would have required nearly 150 billion years to form, based on their speed of movement, if produced by the standard Big Bang
cosmology.
Even more recently (January 3, 1991), Will Saunders and nine fellow astronomers published the results of their all-sky redshift survey
of galaxies detected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite. This survey revealed the existence of a far-greater number of massive
super clusters of galaxies than can be accounted for by Big Bang cosmologies. [4]
In an attempt to salvage the Big Bang theory, cosmologists have invented hypotheses to explain the failures of their hypotheses. One
of these is the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory. According to this theory, 90-99% of the matter in the universe cannot be detected. If
CDM existed, it would supply sufficient gravitational pull to create large clusters of galaxies. The structures discovered during the
past few years, however, are so massive that even if CDM did exist, it could not account for their formation. Saunders and co-workers
thus state that the CDM model can be ruled out to at least the 97% confidence level. In the same issue of Nature, in which is found the
article by Saunders, et al, there appears an article by David Lindley in the "News and Views" section (p. 14) entitled "Cold Dark
Matter Makes an Exit." Caltech cosmologist S. George Djorgovski, taking into account the astronomical observations that contradict
the CDM theory, states that the demise of the notion of the existence of cold dark matter is inevitable. [5]
Also very recently, the U.S.-European Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT), detecting x-ray emissions, discovered evidence of giant super
clusters of quasars on the edge of the universe, supposedly eight to 12 billion light years from the earth. [6] Physicist Paul Steinhardt,
of the University of Pennsylvania, states, "This may be the start of the death knell of the cold-dark-matter theory. " Even if this
hypothetical matter existed, it still could not explain the existence of these giant clusters of quasars.
If all of this weren't bad enough news for Big Bang cosmologists, results from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) should really
make them wish they had gone into some other field. Based on the Big Bang theory, it was predicted that there should exist a
background radiation equivalent to a few degrees Kelvin. Sure enough, in 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, radio engineers at
Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey, discovered a microwave background radiation of 2.7° K. Evolutionary cosmologists were
absolutely delighted. This discovery was considered proof of the Big Bang, and Penzias and Wilson were duly awarded Nobel Prizes.
It now appears, however, that the background radiation may turn out to be additional evidence against the Big Bang theory, rather than
its proof.
Since the Big Bang theory predicted a homogeneous universe with matter evenly distributed throughout the universe (which it most
certainly is not, as described above), evolutionary cosmologists expected that the background radiation would be perfectly smooth.
That is, no matter in which direction one looked, the background radiation would be the same. Just as predicted, the background
radiation was perfectly smooth. Theorists were delighted, smug in the assurance that this background radiation was the leftover
whimper of the Big Bang. Now, however, it turns out that the universe is not homogeneous, but is extremely lumpy, with massive
super clusters of galaxies and great voids in space. Thus, if the background radiation is left over from the Big Bang, it should not be
smooth, but should be more intense in certain directions than in others, indicating in homogeneities at the very start of the universe,
immediately following the initial moments of the Big Bang. Astronomers thus began to search for differences in the background
radiations. All measurements showed it to be perfectly smooth. Thus COBE was launched to an orbit 559 miles above the earth,
carrying sensitive instruments to measure the background radiation. Alas, preliminary data from COBE announced in January, show
absolutely no evidence of inhomogeneity in the background radiation. It is perfectly smooth. [7]
"No energetic processes, even unknown ones, could have occurred that were vigorous enough to either create the large-scale structures
astronomers have observed or stop their headlong motion once created. There is simply no way to form these structures in the 20
billion years since the Big Bang."[8]
Of course, the demise of the Big Bang theory will not discourage evolutionary theorists from proposing other theories. In fact, theories
based on plasma processes and a revised steady-state theory have already been advanced to replace Big Bang cosmologies."[9], [10],
[11]
-- References -1. R. B. Tully, Astrophysics Journal 303:25-38 (1986).
2. M. J. Geller and J. P. Huchra, Science 246:897-903 (1990).
3. E. G. Lerner, Aerospace America, March 1990, pp. 38-43.
4. Will Saunders, et al, Nature 349:32-38 (1991).
5. T. H. Maugh, II, Los Angeles Times, San Diego Edition, January 5, 1991, p. A29.
6. R. Cowen, Science News 139:52 (1991).
7. Reference 3, p. 41.
8. Reference 3, p. 42.
9. Reference 3, p. 43.
10. A. L. Peratt, The Sciences, January/February 1990, p. 24.
11. H. C. Arp, G. Burbidge, F. Hoyle, J. V. Narlikar, and N. C. Wickramasinghe, Nature 346:807-812 (199