[sot]

* 02 July 2005 New Scientist
* Marcus Chown

  WHAT if the big bang never happened? Ask cosmologists this and
  they'll usually tell you it is a stupid question. The evidence,
  after all, is written in the heavens. Take the way galaxies are
  scattered across the sky, or witness the fading afterglow of the
  big bang fireball. Even the way the atoms in your body have come
  into being over the eons. They are all smoking guns that point
  to the existence 13.7 billion years ago of an ultra-hot,
  ultra-dense state known as the big bang.

  Or are they? A small band of researchers is starting to ask the
  question no one is supposed to ask. Last week the dissidents
  met to review the evidence at the first ever Crisis in Cosmology
  conference in Monção, Portugal. There they argued that
  cosmologists' most cherished theory of the universe fails to
  explain certain crucial observations. If they are right, the
  universe could be a lot weirder than anyone imagined. But before
  venturing that idea, say the dissidents, it is time for some
  serious investigation into the big bang's validity and its
  alternatives.

  “Look at the facts,” says Riccardo Scarpa of the European Southern
  Observatory in Santiago, Chile. “The basic big bang model fails to
  predict what we observe in the universe in three major ways.” The
  temperature of today's universe, the expansion of the cosmos, and
  even the presence of galaxies, have all had cosmologists scrambling
  for fixes. “Every time the basic big bang model has failed to
  predict what we see, the solution has been to bolt on something new
  – inflation, dark matter and dark energy,” Scarpa says.

  For Scarpa and his fellow dissidents, the tinkering has reached an
  unacceptable level. All for the sake of saving the notion that the
  universe flickered into being as a hot, dense state. “This isn't
  science,” says Eric Lerner who is president of Lawrenceville Plasma
  Physics in West Orange, New Jersey, and one of the conference
  organisers. “Big bang predictions are consistently wrong and are
  being fixed after the event.” So much so, that today's “standard
  model” of cosmology has become an ugly mishmash comprising the
  basic big bang theory, inflation and a generous helping of dark
  matter and dark energy.

  The fact that the conference went ahead at all is an important step
  forward, say its organisers. Last year they wrote an open letter
  warning that failure to fund research into big bang alternatives
  was suppressing free debate in the field of cosmology (New Scientist,
  22 May 2004, p 20).

  The trouble, says Lerner, who headed the list of more than 30
  signatories, is that cosmology is bankrolled by just a few sources,
  and the committees that control those purse strings are dominated by
  supporters of the big bang. Critics of the standard model of
  cosmology are not just uncomfortable about the way they feel it has
  been cobbled together. They also point to specific observations that
  they believe cast doubt on cosmology's standard model.

  “Dark matter is turning up in places where it shouldn't exist”

  Take the most distant galaxies ever spotted, for example. According
  to the accepted view, when we observe ultra-distant galaxies we
  should see them in their youth, full of stars not long spawned from
  gas clouds. This is because light from these faraway galaxies has
  taken billions of years to reach us, and so the galaxies must appear
  as they were shortly after the big bang. But there is a problem.
  “We don't see young galaxies,” says Lerner. “We see old ones.”

  He cites recent observations of high-red-shift galaxies from NASA's
  Spitzer space telescope. A galaxy's red shift is a measure of how
  much the universe has expanded since it emitted its light. As the
  light travels through an expanding universe, its wavelength gets
  stretched, as if the light wave were drawn on a piece of elastic.
  The increase in wavelength corresponds to a shift towards the red
  end of the spectrum.

  The Spitzer galaxies have red shifts that correspond to a time when
  the universe was between about 600 million and 1 billion years old.
  Galaxies this young should be full of newborn stars that emit blue
  light because they are so hot. The galaxies should not contain many
  older stars that are cool and red. “But they do,” says Lerner.

  Spitzer is the first telescope able to detect red stars in faraway
  galaxies because it is sensitive to infrared light. This means it
  can detect red light from stars in high-red-shift galaxies that has
  been pushed deep into the infrared during its journey to Earth.
  “It turns out these galaxies aren't young at all,” says Lerner.
  “They have pretty much the same range of stars as present-day
  galaxies.”

  And that is bad news for the big bang. Among the stars in today's
  galaxies are red giants that have taken billions of years to
  burn all their hydrogen and reach this bloated phase. So the
  Spitzer observations suggest that some of the stars in
  ultra-distant galaxies are older than the galaxies themselves,
  which plunges the standard model of cosmology into crisis.

  Fog-filled universe
  Not surprisingly, cosmologists have panned Lerner's theories. They
  put the discrepancy down to large uncertainties in estimating the
  ages of galaxies. But Lerner has a reply. He points to other
  distant objects that appear much older than they ought to be.
  “At high red shift, we also observe clusters and huge superclusters
  of galaxies,” he says, arguing that it would have taken far longer
  than a billion years for galaxies to clump together to form such
  giant structures.

  His solution to the puzzle is extreme. Rather than being caused
  by the expanding universe, he believes that the red shift is
  down to some other mechanism. But at this stage it is only a guess.
  “I admit I don't know what that mechanism might be,” Lerner says,
  “though I believe it is intrinsic to light.”

  To test his idea, he would like to see sensitive experiments on
  Earth capable of detecting minute changes in light. One
  possibility would be to modify the LIGO detector in Hanford,
  Washington state. LIGO is designed to detect gravitational waves,
  the warps in space-time created by events such as neutron star
  collisions. To do this it bounces perpendicular beams of laser
  light hundreds of times between mirrors 4 kilometres apart,
  looking for subtle shifts in the beams' lengths. With a few tweaks,
  Lerner believes that LIGO could be modified to measure any
  intrinsic red-shifting that light might undergo.

  If the experiment ever gets the go-ahead and Lerner is proved
  right, the implications would be immense, not least because the
  tapestry of cosmology as we know it would unravel. Without an
  expanding universe, there would be no need to invoke dark
  energy to account for the apparent acceleration of that expansion.
  Nor would there be any reason to suppose the big bang was the
  ultimate beginning. “I can prove that the universe wasn't born
  13.7 billion years ago,” says Lerner. “The big bang never happened.”

  However, Lerner's claims leave plenty of awkward questions. Among
  them is the matter of the cosmic microwave background. First
  detected in 1965, the vast majority of cosmologists believe that
  this faint, all-pervading soup of microwaves is the dying glow
  of the big bang, and proof of the ultimate beginning. According
  to big bang theory, the hot radiation that filled space after
  the birth of the universe has been trapped inside ever since
  because it has nowhere else to go. As the universe expanded over
  the past 13.7 billion years, the radiation has cooled to today's
  temperature of less than 3 kelvin above absolute zero.

  So if there was no big bang, where did the cosmic microwave
  background come from? Lerner believes that cosmologists have got
  the origin of the microwave glow all wrong. “If you wake up in a
  tent and everything around you is white, you don't conclude you've
  seen the start of the universe,” he says. “You conclude you're in
  fog.”

  Rather than coming from the big bang, Lerner believes that the
  cosmic background radiation is really starlight that has been
  absorbed and re-radiated. It is an old idea that was widely
  promoted by the late cosmologist and well-known big bang sceptic
  Fred Hoyle. He believed that starlight was absorbed by needle-like
  grains of iron ejected by supernovae and then radiated as
  microwaves. But Hoyle never found any evidence to back up his ideas
  and many cosmologists dismissed them.

  “Some of the stars in distant galaxies appear older than the
  universe itself”

[sot]

Lerner's idea is similar, though he thinks that threads of
  electrically charged gas called plasma are responsible, rather
  than iron whiskers. Jets of plasma are squirted into
  intergalactic space by highly energetic galaxies known as
  quasars, and Lerner believes that such plasma filaments
  continually fragmented until they filled the universe like fog.
  This fog then scattered the infrared light radiated by dust
  that had in turn absorbed starlight. By doing so, Lerner
  believes, the infrared radiation became uniform in all
  directions, just as the cosmic microwave background appears
  to be.

  All this is possible, he argues, because standard cosmology
  theory has overlooked processes involving plasmas. “All
  astronomers know that 99.99 per cent of matter in the
  universe is in the form of plasma, which is controlled by
  electromagnetic forces,” he says. “Yet all astronomers insist
  on believing that gravity is the only important force in the
  universe. It is like oceanographers ignoring hydrodynamics.”
  To make progress, Lerner is calling for theories that include
  plasma phenomena as well as gravity, and for more rigorous
  testing of theory against observations.

  Of course, Lerner's ideas are extremely controversial and few
  people are convinced, but that doesn't stop other researchers
  questioning the standard theory too. They have their own ideas
  about what is wrong with it. In Scarpa's case, the mysterious
  dark matter is at fault.

  Dark matter has become an essential ingredient in cosmology's
  standard model. That's because the big bang on its own fails
  to describe how galaxies could have congealed from the matter
  forged shortly after the birth of the universe. The problem
  is that gas and dust made from normal matter were spread too
  evenly for galaxies to clump together in just 13.7 billion years.
  Cosmologists fix this problem by adding to their brew a vast
  amount of invisible dark matter which provides the extra tug
  needed to speed up galaxy formation.

  The same gravitational top-up helps to explain the rapid motion
  of outlying stars in galaxies. Astronomers have measured stars
  orbiting their galactic centres so fast that they ought to fly
  off into intergalactic space. But dark matter's extra gravity
  would explain how the galaxies hold onto their speeding stars.
  Similarly, dark matter is needed to explain how clusters of
  galaxies can hold on to galaxies that are orbiting the cluster's
  centre so fast they ought to be flung away.

  But dark matter may not be the cure-all it seems, warns Scarpa.
  What worries him are inconsistencies with the theory. “If you
  believe in dark matter, you discover there is too much of it,”
  he says. In particular, his observations point to dark matter
  in places cosmologists say it shouldn't exist. One place no one
  expects to see it is in globular clusters, tight knots of stars
  that orbit the Milky Way and many other galaxies. Unlike normal
  matter, the dark stuff is completely incapable of emitting light
  or any other form of electromagnetic radiation. This means a
  cloud of the stuff cannot radiate away its internal heat, a
  process vital for gravitational contraction, so dark matter
  cannot easily clump together at scales as small as those of
  globular clusters.

  Scarpa's observations tell a different story, however. He and his
  colleagues have found evidence that the stars in globular clusters
  are moving faster than the gravity of visible matter can explain,
  just as they do in larger galaxies. They have studied three globular
  clusters, including the Milky Way's biggest, Omega Centauri, which
  contains about a million stars. In all three, they find the same
  wayward behaviour. So if isn't dark matter, what is going on?

  Scarpa's team believes the answer might be a breakdown of Newton's
  law of gravity, which says an object's gravitational tug is
  inversely proportional to the square of your distance from it.
  Their observations of globular clusters suggest that Newton's
  inverse square law holds true only above some critical acceleration.
  Below this threshold strength, gravity appears to dissipate more
  slowly than Newton predicts.

  Exactly the same effect has been spotted in spiral galaxies and
  galaxy-rich clusters. It was identified more than 20 years ago by
  Mordehai Milgrom at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, who
  proposed a theory known as modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) to
  explain it. Scarpa points out that the critical acceleration of
  10-10 metres per second per second that was identified for
  galaxies appears to hold for globular clusters too. And his work
  has led him to the same conclusion as Milgrom: “There is no need
  for dark matter in the universe,” says Scarpa.

  It is a bold claim to make. And not surprisingly, MOND has had
  plenty of critics over the years. One of cosmologists' biggest
  gripes is that MOND is not compatible with Einstein's theory of
  relativity, so it is not valid for objects travelling close to
  the speed of light or in very strong gravitational fields.
  In practice, this means MOND has been powerless to make
  predictions about pulsars, black holes and, most importantly,
  the big bang. But this has now been fixed by Jacob Bekenstein
  at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.

  Bekenstein's relativistic version of the theory already appears
  to be bearing fruit. In May a team led by Constantinos Skordis
  of the University of Oxford showed that relativistic MOND can
  make cosmological predictions. The researchers have reproduced
  both the observed properties of the cosmic microwave background
  and the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe
  (www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0505519).

  Gravity in crisis

  Scarpa believes that MOND is a crucial body blow for the big
  bang. “It means that the law of gravity from which we derive
  the big bang is wrong,” he says. He insists that cosmologists
  are interpreting astronomical observations using the wrong
  framework. And he urges them to go back to the drawing board
  and derive a cosmological model based on MOND.

  For now, his plea seems to be falling mostly on deaf ears. Yet
  there is more evidence that there could be something wrong with
  the standard model of cosmology. And it is evidence that many
  cosmologists are finding harder to dismiss because it comes from
  the jewel in the crown of cosmology instruments, the Wilkinson
  Microwave Anisotropy Probe. “It could be telling us something
  fundamental about our universe, maybe even that the simplest big
  bang model is wrong,” says João Magueijo of Imperial College London.

  Since its launch in 2001, WMAP has been quietly taking the
  temperature of the universe from its vantage point 1.5 million
  kilometres out in space. The probe measures the way the temperature
  of the cosmic microwave background varies across the sky.
  Cosmologists believe that the tiny variations from one place to
  another are an imprint of the state of the universe about 300,000
  years after the big bang, when matter began to clump together under
  gravity. Hotter patches correspond to denser regions, and cooler
  patches reflect less dense areas. These density variations began
  life as quantum fluctuations in the vacuum in the first split second
  of the universe's existence, and were subsequently amplified by a
  brief period of phenomenally fast expansion called inflation.

  Because the quantum fluctuations popped up at random, the hot and
  cold spots we see in one part of the sky should look much like
  those in any other part. And because the cosmic background
  radiation is a feature of the universe as a whole rather than any
  single object in it, none of the hot or cold regions should be
  aligned with structures in our corner of the cosmos. Yet this is
  exactly what some researchers are claiming from the WMAP results.

  Earlier this year, Magueijo and his Imperial College colleague
  Kate Land reported that they had found a bizarre alignment in the
  cosmic microwave background. At first glance, the pattern of hot
  and cold spots appeared random, as expected. But when they looked
  more closely, they found something unexpected. It is as if you were
  listening to an anarchic orchestra playing some random cacophony,
  and yet when you picked out the violins, trombones and clarinets
  separately, you discovered that they are playing the same tune.

  Like an orchestral movement, the WMAP results can be analysed as
  a blend of patterns of different spatial frequencies.
  When Magueijo and Land looked at the hot and cold spots this way,
  they noticed a striking similarity between the individual
  patterns. Rather than being spattered randomly across the sky,
  the spots in each pattern seemed to line up along the same
  direction. With a good eye for a newspaper headline, Magueijo
  dubbed this alignment the axis of evil. “If it is true, this is
  an astonishing discovery,” he says.

  “Without an expanding universe, the big bang was not the ultimate
  beginning”

  That's because the result flies in the face of big bang theory,
  which rules out any such special or preferred direction. So could
  the weird effect be down to something more mundane, such as a
  problem with the WMAP satellite? Charles Bennett, who leads the
  WMAP mission at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt,
  Maryland, discounts that possibility. “I have no reason to think
  that any anomaly is an artefact of the instrument,” he says.

  Another suggestion is that heat given off by the Milky Way's
  dusty disk has not been properly subtracted from the WMAP signals
  and mimics the axis of evil. “Certainly there are some sloppy
  papers where insufficient attention has been paid to the signals
  from the Milky Way,” warns Bennett. Others point out that the
  conclusions are based on only one year's worth of WMAP signals.
  And researchers are eagerly awaiting the next batch, rumoured to
  be released in September.

  Yet Magueijo and Land are convinced that the alignment in the
  patterns does exist. “The big question is: what could have caused
  it,” asks Magueijo. One possibility, he says, is that the universe
  is shaped like a slab, with space extending to infinity in two
  dimensions but spanning only about 20 billion light years in the
  third dimension. Or the universe might be shaped like a bagel.
  Another way to create a preferred direction would be to have a
  rotating universe, because this singles out the axis of rotation
  as different from all other directions.

  Bennett admits he is excited by the possibility that WMAP has
  stumbled on something so important and fundamental about the
  universe. His hunch, though, is that the alignment is a fluke.
  “However, it's always possible the universe is trying to tell
  us something,” he says.

  Clearly, such a universe would flout a fundamental assumption of
  all big bang models: that the universe is the same in all places
  and in all directions. “People made these assumptions because,
  without them, it was impossible to simplify Einstein's equations
  enough to solve them for the universe,” says Magueijo. And if those
  assumptions are wrong, it could be curtains for the standard model
  of cosmology.

  That may not be a bad thing, according to Magueijo. “The standard
  model is ugly and embarrassing,” he says. “I hope it will soon
  come to breaking point.” But whatever replaced it would of course
  have to predict all the things the standard model predicts. “This
  would be very hard indeed,” concedes Magueijo.

  Meanwhile the axis of evil is peculiar enough that Bennett and his
  colleague Gary Hinsha have obtained money from NASA to carry out
  a five-year exhaustive examination of the WMAP signals. That should
  exclude the possibilities of the instrumental error and contamination
  once and for all. “The alignment is probably just a fluke but I
  really feel compelled to investigate it,” he says. “Who knows what
  we will find.”

  Lerner and his fellow sceptics are in little doubt: “What we may
  find is a universe that is very different than the increasingly
  bizarre one of the big bang theory.”

[thefixer]

Julian Barbour's “End of Time” also contains a strong critique of the Big Bang. Barbour believes that time itself does not exist outside of our brains. Hence, the universe was never created; what we perceive as time is the relationship of Nows related in an unimaginably vast “relative configuration space.” It is a very difficult read but makes sense to me.

[Robyo]

thanx for the info Igor. will take a bit to digest it all..

I never heard of Julian Barbour, but he sounds sensible. Our concept of time is dependant on our own material perception and the effects of time on our surroundings.
Seems like even if the “big bang” ever was, there's prolly been an infinite amount of them as well…

Under the sun, is the evolution of consciousness the only thing that is ever truly new?
Must be why new music is so appealing  ;D

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