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Science Frontiers ONLINE No. 66: Nov-Dec 1989 |
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Down With The Big Bang
We might have concocted the above title, but we didn't! Rather, J. Maddox, the Editor of Nature, raised that red flag. To make things even worse, he subtitled his editorial:
"Apart from being philosophically unacceptable, the Big Bang is an oversimple view of how the Universe began, and it is unlikely to survive the decade ahead."
His philosophical objcections to the Big Bang are powerful:
"For one thing, the implication is that there was an instant at which time literally began and, so, by extension, an instant before which there was no time. That in turn implies that even if the origin of the Universe may be successfully supposed to lie in the Big Bang, the origin of the Big Bang itself is not susceptible to discussion."
The Big Bang, Maddox says, is no more scientific than Biblical creation!
The scientific objections involve space, time, the curvature of space. The Big Bang further fails at explaining quasars and the hidden mass of the Universe. Maddox doubts that the Big Bang will survive the new data to be provided by the Hubble telescope.
(Maddox, John; "Down with the Big Bang," Nature, 340: 425, 1989.)