This is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood
(7th Edition) by Dr. Walt Brown. The online version of the book is designed to be read online.
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Smoothness of the CMB
The CMB is remarkably smooth, so smooth that for 25 years after its discovery, no variations could be detected. Increasingly precise instruments were designed and launched into space to look for variations in the CMB’s intensity, because the big bang theory said they had to be there. Without billions of large concentrations of matter (from which most CMB radiated), other matter could not gravitationally contract around those concentrations to form the untold billions of galaxies. If galaxies did not form, we would not be here!
Finally, after 25 years of searching, variations amounting to only one part in 100,000 were found. However, experts recognized that such weak concentrations, even after hundreds of billions of years, could not have pulled in enough matter to form galaxies.
But this uniformity [in the CMB] is difficult to reconcile with the obvious clumping of matter into galaxies, clusters of galaxies and even larger features extending across vast regions of the universe, such as “walls” and “bubbles.” 3
Why was [the CMB in] the early universe asymmetric by such a small amount? This is one of the outstanding puzzles of the Big Bang theory.4
The theorists know of no way such a monster [a massive accumulation of galaxies, called the Great Wall] could have condensed in the time available since the Big Bang, especially considering that the 2.7 K background radiation reveals a universe that was very homogeneous in the beginning.5
Gravity can’t, over the age of the universe, amplify these [tiny] irregularities enough [to form huge clusters of galaxies].6
Furthermore, the Hubble Space Telescope has photographed the extreme edges of the visible universe. Most experts expected to see diffuse matter slowly gravitating together to form galaxies. This is what one would expect if the extremely smooth CMB was left over from the big bang. Instead, galaxies were already “bunched together”—having formed very early in the history of the universe.
... tremendously distant galaxies are just as clustered as today and are arranged in the same filamentary, bubbly structures that nearby galaxies are.7
In each of the five patches of sky surveyed by the team, the distant galaxies bunch together instead of being distributed randomly in space. “The work is ongoing, but what we’re able to say now is that galaxies we are seeing at great distances are as strongly clustered in the early universe as they are today,” says [Charles C.] Steidel, who is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.8