Parts of the current standard model of the origin of our Universe (the Big Bang event) violate nearly every principle of physics there is – from causality to the conservation laws. There’s got to be a better answer. Fortunately there are cosmological alternatives (not detailed here) including perhaps my own variation on the theme (which is detailed here). Supernovae gave me a possible clue to a cyclic Multiverse.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
POINT AND COUNTERPOINT: Now your standard run-of-the-mill, everyday professor of cosmology at your local leading university will tell you if you show her this scenario that it is all total nonsense and I should be consigned to the pseudoscientific rubbish bin. The Big Bang event was a one-off; it was unique; a one-of-a-kind; a fluke; just one of those interesting things that happen for no apparent reason at all. The Big Bang event created time and space, therefore time and space cannot be infinite.
But – and you’ll read that non-observation (since there was no one around including any lady cosmologists to observe at the Big Bang’s ground zero) in any standard book on the subject – it’s nonsense, a scientific fabrication if you really stop and think about it. You cannot create something, anything, without having the space already available to create it into. That applies to the creation of our Universe as much as it applies to creating widgets in a factory! To claim otherwise is to suggest all of ultimate creation was kick-started in no space at all! How absurd is that! Consider the reverse: how can you cram everything into nothing?
Now if the Big Bang event did not, could not, create space way back then, then space is not undergoing continuous creation today contrary to the standard spiel. Translated, space is not expanding into some non-space region of non-existence. Expanding space either means that space is getting thinner and thinner (less dense) like an expanding balloon skin stretching (and that’s nonsense – how can space decrease in density?), or new space is being created out of nothing to fill the void as space expands. You can’t create something out of pure nothing; not then (at the Big Bang); not now. That’s a violation of all the basic conservation laws that are the bedrock of physics.
So, the obvious alternative is that what’s expanding is the stuff vomited out by the Big Bang event into pre-existing space and the vomit just keeps thinning out as it expands throughout an ever wider volume of that pre-existing space. Now fortunately for me, and unfortunately for those cosmology professors, there’s no actual observational test or experiment that can be done to distinguish between the two possibilities and settle the matter. If there were such observational evidence that proved that space itself was expanding (and thus being continuously created even as I type this) that evidence would be given in the textbooks. But it’s not there. All you get is just the standard scenario: “the Big Bang created space; space is expanding and therefore space is still being created today”. The unwritten sentence is “just take my word for it” because I can’t back it up with any evidence, far less proof. The only evidence is that something is expanding. That something could equally be Big Bang stuff spewing out into pre-existing space like an exploding firecracker will spew its contents outward bound and ever expanding.
It’s the unanswered question that remains in fact unasked in the standard textbooks – what exactly is our Universe’s expanding space expanding into? What is our expanding space shoving out of the way as it expands, ever expands? It can’t be pre-existing space according to the standard model since the Big Bang event created all of space; the entirety of space in the beginning 13.7 billion years ago. Perhaps space is pushing into a theoretical higher dimension (whatever that really means), but that would be an ad hoc pull of the rabbit out of the proverbial hat where nobody advocating that could provide any evidence that either the rabbit or the hat exists at all. Besides, all those extra dimensions predicted by the purely mathematical and hypothetical string theory (if string theory is to work) are compactified; curled up into super-ultra microscopic foetal positions; they are tiny. They aren’t the sort of higher dimension you can expand a universe of space into. So it’s back to the drawing board for our standard lady (and gentlemen) cosmologists.
The other bit, the creation of time, is equally absurd. The Big Bang was an event. It was an effect. If causality has any meaning at all, and it’s one of the foundations upon which all of science rests on, then an effect has a cause. Causes must precede effects when cause and effect are intimately related (there are of course lots of causes and lots of effects that have no connection). Therefore, whatever caused the Big Bang event (or effect), must of necessity have happened before (preceded) the Big Bang event. Therefore, there must have been an already existing time prior to the Big Bang event and therefore the Big Bang event did not, could not, create time. Since there was a before the Big Bang, since cause always precedes effect, then again time could not have been created – time has always been, is, and always will be.
Fortunately for me, and unfortunately for those professors of cosmology ramming down the standard ‘creation of time and space’ scenario to their students, all equations (that which usually substitutes for lack of ways and means to do actual observations) that try to describe the Big Bang event; ground zero when space allegedly equals zero and time allegedly also equals zero, totally break down. So the standard ‘create time and space’ model is pure extrapolation (running the film backwards from today’s data) and ultimately a best guess. So while I’ve no doubt the Big Bang scenario is correct in the broad-brush generalities, there is a lot of observational evidence that something really big happened 13.7 billion years ago that kick-started our Universe off on its evolutional path, when it comes to some of the nitty-gritty details, like that ‘create time and space’ detail, well I just think that is plain wrong – pure and simple.
So why is that ‘Big Bang created time and space’ the only accepted scenario? It is beyond me, except it probably has a lot to do, not with science, but the sociology and the office politics of science – peer pressure. Science, like the church and other formal institutions does not approve of mavericks that go against the grain. So if you want a Ph D., a job, research funding, a career with promotions, publications, etc. you don’t rock the boat. Science, and that includes cosmology, for all its self-correcting ways and means and methods and ideals is still, ultimately, a human endeavour. As such, you tow the party line; go with the flow; parrot to your students what your professors parroted to you.
Now there are a few bold cosmologists who do acknowledge that the Big Bang event still has some kinks to be ironed out and that there was a “before the Big Bang”. That’s not to say they would endorse my scenario. They probably wouldn’t in a pink fit!
Heading back on track, even if my supernovae analogy is wrong, there still had to have been an existence both of time and space prior to the creation of our Universe via the Big Bang event, and that alone suggests that all things are still cyclic or re-cyclic in the cosmos.
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