THE BIG BANG MYTH

"Today you burn me, but in the future all men will believe as I believe".

Fourty two years into the future Isaac Newton was born. After a further forty two journeys of planet Earth around the sun Isaac Newton published the Universal Theory of Gravitation. In this he postulated that all bodies attract each other with a force which is proportional the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. From this Newton was able to give a complete account of the motion of heavenly bodies and terrestrial apples.

An obvious objection to Newton's theory of Gravitation is that if all bodies attract each other, how is it that all the matter in the universe has not gathered together in one place? Newton considered that this objection could be overcome if space was infinite. In a letter to Richard Bently written in 1692 he writes "..... if matter was evenly disposed throughout an infinite space it would never convene into one mass; but some of it would convene into one mass and some into another, so as to make an infinite number of great masses scattered at great distances from one another throughout all that infinite space."

Some hundred and thirty years later (1826) a serious difficulty with Newton's "infinite space" was raised by Heinrich Olbers. Olbers considered space divided up into spherical shells of equal thickness, each centered on the earth. The volume of each shell,and hence the number of stars it should contain, would increase with the square of its radius. The light from any one star should however decrease with the square of the radius. The two effects therefore cancel, and the amount of starlight received at the earth from each shell should be the same. If space is truly infinite there would of course be an infinite number of such shells, and we should expect to see an immense blaze of light spread all over the sky. This became known as Olbers' Paradox, and it was not resolved for another hundred years.

In the 1920's the American astronomer Edwin Hubble was conducting the first systematic investigation into our neighboring galaxies. Using a spectrometer to analyse the light emitted from galaxies, Hubble was able to identify various elements present on different galaxies. Hubble also noticed that the characteristic line spectra of the elements were shifted somewhat from those obtained in terrestrial measurements on the same elements. These shifts were found to be usually to the red end of the spectrum, and increased in magnitude with increasing distance from the emitting galaxy.

Whatever the interpretation of the observed 'red shifts', it should be noted that Hubble's observation leads to a satisfactory resolution of Olbers' Paradox. A shift to the red end of the spectrum corresponds to a decrease in the energy carried by the light. The successive shells as proposed in Olbers treatment would not therefore contribute equal amounts of energy, but rather each would contribute decreasing energy as the distance from the earth increased.

At the time when Hubble was studying galaxies, there was only one known phenomena which could explain the sort of shifts in the frequency which Hubble observed. This was the well understood 'Doppler Effect', which occurs with all wave phenomena when the source is travelling with a velocity relative to the observer. If the source is travelling away from the observer, measured frequencies will be decreased, i.e. shifted to the red end of the spectrum in just the way observed in Hubble's measurements. Assuming therefore that the measured shifts in frequency were due to the 'Doppler Effect',Hubble concluded that most of the galaxies were rushing away from us, and further that the speed of recession is directly proportional to the distance. (The distance to a galaxy was not easy to measure, but could be estimated from apparent brightness.)

If one accepts the velocity distribution of galaxies proposed by Hubble in 1929, then one is led inevitably to the "Big Bang". Projecting the position of the galaxies backwards in time, we find that all the galaxies appear to have set out from one point in space some 15 billion years ago. (Actually Hubble's data yielded a value of only about 1 billion years, an embarrassingly short time as some rocks in the earths crust are thought to be older than this, but revision of Hubble's distance measurements by later astronomers have led to the more acceptable value given here).

In 1994 the Big Bang theory is virtually dogma. Cosmologists work with particle physicists and mathematicians to develop theories of the evolution of the universe from the first instant of creation to the present day. The flavour of these exotic theories may be gleaned from the following extract from Riordan and Schramm's book -"The Shadows of Creation" 'At the very beginning of time, the hypothetical Theory of Everything breaks down into gravity and the GUT's force. This transition comes at about 10^-43 second, when the temperature is a truly blistering 10^55 degrees - corresponding to an average particle energy of 10^19 GeV. In other words, every particle has the kinetic energy of a Lear jet! Next come the GUT's phase transition at about 10^-34 second, and following that is the electroweak transition about 10^-12 second later. By this time the temperature has fallen to a mere 10^15 degrees, or a few billion electron volts per particle. Finally, at about 1 microsecond after creation, the hot plasma of quarks and gluons freezes into a sea of protons and neutrons that shortly thereafter enters the era of nucleosynthesis.'

The big bang theory is not of course man's first attempt at determining the age of the universe. In 1654 for example the Irish divine James Ussher determined that creation had occurred at 9 a.m. on Tuesday, 26th October, 4004 B.C. In my opinion contemporary estimates based on Big Bang theory are unlikely to prove any more durable than that proposed by the Rev. Ussher on the basis of biblical chronology.

Looking out from planet Earth we are privileged not just with a view of the immensity of space, but also with the immensity of time. Due to the finite velocity of light, we know that as we look further out in space so we are looking further back in time. A telescope is therefore a sort of time machine with which we can view the history of the universe. If the universe is evolving as proposed in Big Bang theory, then the evidence for it should be directly observable in our telescopes. For example if the density of the universe is decreasing with time, then we should expect to see density increase as we look further out into space. Similarly, as the universe is fueled by Hydrogen, we might expect to see the proportion of Hydrogen in the cosmos appear to increase as we look out from the earth. Nowhere have I read that either of these trends is actually found. On the contrary, most astronomers comment on the uniformity of the observed cosmos.

The detection of the 2.73 K background radiation is often claimed as a success for the Big Bang theory, but if this radiation comes from the edge of the observable universe, 15 billion light years away, then it must have set out from there 15 billion years ago. In other words the radius of the universe was 15 billion light years at the very time that the universe was supposed to be compressed to a singularity.

On the subject of the background radiation Riordan and Schramm write the following:-

'It was the detection of this radiation in 1964 that set the stage for modern Big Bang cosmology.... When the Universe was still a hot plasma at the 100,000 year mark, its temperature was roughly the same as the surface of the Sun today. As a single continuous body at this one temperature, it radiated profusely in the same range of optical wavelengths. Just before escaping from matter, this radiation was predominantly composed of visible and shorter wavelength ultraviolet light. After breaking free, however, the radiation could not leave the Universe, which contains everything that exists. The remnants of this radiation therefore must still be around today.'

It is not obvious why Big Bang cosmology should attribute the background radiation to an original temperature only a few thousand degrees, rather than the 'blistering 10^55 degrees' mentioned earlier. However if the background radiation actually does come from very distant stars then the connection with a temperature 'roughly the same as the surface of the Sun', would be readily understandable. It seems to me therefore, that the background radiation is more naturally explained as the remnant of Olbers' radiation, rather than as a remnant of the Big Bang.

Yet another difficulty for advocates of the Big Bang comes from our ability to measure our velocity relative to the background radiation. Measurements of the "dipole variation" made in 1991 indicate that the Milky Way is moving through the background radiation with a velocity of 600 kilometers per second. Although this may appear a large velocity, it is negligible compared to the speed of light(i.e.300,000 kilometers per second).

If the measured red shifts are due to the Doppler Effect ,then most galaxies have velocities which are an appreciable fraction of the speed of light relative to us. If the background radiation is uniform, then the galaxies must also have high velocities through the background radiation. Thus our own galaxy would be in a privileged position i.e. almost stationary at the center of the Universe. Such a proposition, while not impossible, is highly improbable and has been rejected by all serious cosmologists since the ill fated Giordano Bruno.

If the systematic red shifts first announced by Hubble in 1929 are not due to the Doppler Effect then they must be caused by some other phenomenon. In 1960 Pound and Rebka performed experiments which demonstrated that the measured frequency of electromagnetic radiation decreases as the detector is moved up through a gravitational field. The similarity of gravitational frequency shifts and Doppler shifts is nicely illustrated in these experiments, because their experiments involved compensating the gravitation shift with an exactly equivalent Doppler shift, produced by moving the emitter relative to the receiver. These experiments confirmed Einstein's prediction that the fractional change in frequency is equal to the change in gravitational potential divided by the square of the velocity of light.

The gravitational potential at the center of a sphere of radius R and density d is equal to -2PiGdR^2 ,where G is Newton's Gravitational Constant ( = 6.67 * 10^-11 mks units). (The gravitation potential is obtained by integrating the work done in taking unit mass from the center of the sphere to infinity.) Now the radius of the Universe is about 15 billion light years ( = 1.5 * 10^26 m) and the density is about 10^-26 kilograms per cubic meter. Substituting these values in the expression for the gravitational potential we find that the gravitational potential at the center of our Universe is almost exactly equal to the square of the velocity of light ( = 9 * 10^16 m^2/s^2). Therefore the fraction change in frequency which could be induced by the gravitational effects of our universe is almost exactly equal to unity.

In order to use gravitational red shifts to explain the Hubble red shifts it is necessary to assume that every galaxy emmits light as if it were at the center of the universe. On this assumption the gravitational frequency shifts would always be to the red end, and the maximum red shift (for a sphere of the size and density of our universe) would be exactly 100% as observed.

I would assume that the 15 billion light year figure for the radius of the universe is in fact only a limit on the observable universe, and there is no reason to assume that space is not infinite, as proposed by Newton in 1692.

Keith Stein