a

. “Observations only recently made possible by improvements in astronomical instrumentation have put theoretical models of the Universe [the big bang] under intense pressure. The standard ideas of the 1980s about the shape and history of the Universe have now been abandoned—and cosmologists are now taking seriously the possibility that the Universe is pervaded by some sort of vacuum energy, whose origin is not at all understood.” Peter Coles, “The End of the Old Model Universe,” Nature, Vol. 393, 25 June 1998, p. 741.

“Astronomy, rather cosmology, is in trouble. It is, for the most part, beside itself. It has departed from the scientific method and its principles, and drifted into the bizarre; it has raised imaginative invention to an art form; and has shown a ready willingness to surrender or ignore fundamental laws, such as the second law of thermodynamics and the maximum speed of light, all for the apparent rationale of saving the status quo. Perhaps no ‘science’ is receiving more self-criticism, chest-beating, and self-doubt; none other seems so lost and misdirected; trapped in debilitating dogma.” Roy C. Martin Jr., Astronomy on Trial: A Devastating and Complete Repudiation of the Big Bang Fiasco (New York: University Press of America, 1999), p. xv.

b

. Redshifts can be caused by other phenomena. [See Jayant V. Narlikar, “Noncosmological Redshifts,” Space Science Reviews, Vol. 50, August 1989, pp. 523–614.] However, large redshifts are probably the result of the Doppler effect.

c

. “... energy in recognizable forms (kinetic, potential, and internal) in an expanding, spatially unbounded, homogeneous universe is not conserved.” Edward R. Harrison, “Mining Energy in an Expanding Universe,” The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 446, 10 June 1955, p. 66.

d

. “The evidence is accumulating that redshift is a shaky measuring rod.” Margaret Burbidge (former director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), as quoted by Govert Schilling, “Radical Theory Takes a Test,” Science, Vol. 291, 26 January 2001, p. 579.

e

. Halton M. Arp, Quasars, Redshifts, and Controversies (Berkeley, California: Interstellar Media, 1987).

f

. Michael D. Lemonick, “Star Seeker,” Discover, November 2001, p. 44.

g

. William G. Tifft, “Properties of the Redshift,” The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 382, 1 December 1991, pp. 396–415.

h

. “The big bang made no quantitative prediction that the ‘background’ radiation would have a temperature of 3 degrees Kelvin (in fact its initial prediction [by George Gamow in 1946] was 30 degrees Kelvin); whereas Eddington in 1926 had already calculated that the ‘temperature of space’ produced by the radiation of starlight would be found to be 3 degrees Kelvin.” Tom Van Flandern, “Did the Universe Have a Beginning?” Meta Research Bulletin, Vol. 3, 15 September 1994, p. 33.

“Despite the widespread acceptance of the big bang theory as a working model for interpreting new findings, not a single important prediction of the theory has yet been confirmed, and substantial evidence has accumulated against it.”  Ibid., p. 25.

“History also shows that some BB [big bang] cosmologists’ ‘predictions’ of MBR [microwave background radiation] temperature have been ‘adjusted’ after-the-fact to agree with observed temperatures.” William C. Mitchell, “Big Bang Theory Under Fire,” Physics Essays, Vol. 10, June 1997, pp. 370–379.

“What’s more, the big bang theory can boast of no quantitative predictions that have subsequently been validated by observation.” Eric J. Lerner et al., “Bucking the Big Bang,” New Scientist, Vol. 182, 22 May 2004, p. 20. [This blistering article critiquing the big bang theory was originally signed by 33 scientists from 10 countries. Later 374 other scientists, engineers, and researchers endorsed the article. See www.cosmologystatement.org.]

i

. “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 Steidel, who is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.” Ron Cowen, “Light from the Early Universe,” Science News, Vol. 153, 7 February 1998, p. 92.

“In fact, studies we have done show that the distribution of matter is fractal, just like a tree or a cloud.” [Patterns that repeat on all scales are called fractal.] Francesco Sylos Labini, as quoted by Marcus Chown, “Fractured Universe,” New Scientist, Vol. 163, 21 August 1999, p. 23.

“If this dissenting view is correct [that the universe is fractal] and the Universe doesn’t become smoothed out on the very largest scales, the consequences for cosmology are profound. ‘We’re lost,’ says [Professor of Astrophysics, Peter] Coles. ‘The foundations of the big bang models would crumble away. We’d be left with no explanation for the big bang, or galaxy formation, or the distribution of galaxies in the Universe.’ ” Ibid.

j

. Margaret J. Geller and John P. Huchra, “Mapping the Universe,” Science, Vol. 246, 17 November 1989, pp. 897–903. [See also M. Mitchell Waldrop, “Astronomers Go Up Against the Great Wall,” Science, Vol. 246, 17 November 1989, p. 885.]

John Travis, “Cosmic Structures Fill Southern Sky,” Science, Vol. 263, 25 March 1994, p. 1684.

Will Saunders et al., “The Density Field of the Local Universe,” Nature, Vol. 349, 3 January 1991, pp. 32–38.

“But this uniformity [in the cosmic microwave background radiation, 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’. ” Ivars Peterson, “Seeding the Universe,” Science News, Vol. 137, 24 March 1990, p. 184.

As described below, one of the largest structures in the universe, “The Great Wall,” was discovered in 1989. It consists of tens of thousands of galaxies lined up in a wall-like structure, stretching across half a billion light-years of space. It is so large that none of its edges have been found. An even larger structure, the Sloan Great Wall, was discovered in 2003 and is the largest structure known in the universe.

“The theorists know of no way such a monster [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.” M. Mitchell Waldrop, “The Large-Scale Structure of the Universe Gets Larger—Maybe,” Science, Vol. 238, 13 November 1987, p. 894.

“The map’s most eye-catching feature is the Sloan Great Wall of galaxies, a clustering of galaxies that stretches 1.37 billion light-years across the sky and is the largest cosmic structure ever found. Astronomers worried that such a humongous structure, 80 percent bigger than the famous Great Wall of galaxies first discerned in a sky survey 2 decades ago, might violate the accepted model of galaxy evolution.” Ron Cowen, “Cosmic Survey,” Science News, Vol. 164, 1 November 2003, p. 276.

James Glanz, “Precocious Structures Found,” Science, Vol. 272, 14 June 1996, p. 1590.

For many years, big bang theorists searched in vain with increasingly precise instruments for temperature concentrations in the nearly uniform CMB. Without concentrations, matter could never gravitationally contract around those concentrations to form galaxies and galaxy clusters. Finally, in 1992, with great fanfare, an announcement was made in the popular media that slight concentrations were discovered.  Major shortcomings were not mentioned:

The concentrations were only one part in 100,000—not much more than the errors in the instruments. Such slight concentrations could not be expected to initiate much clustering. As Margaret Geller stated, “Gravity can’t, over the age of the universe, amplify these irregularities enough [to form huge clusters of galaxies].” Travis, p. 1684.

“[The] data are notoriously noisy, and the purported effect looks remarkably like an instrumental glitch: it appears only in one small area of the sky and on an angular scale close to the limit of the satellite’s resolution.” George Musser, “Skewing the Cosmic Bell Curve,” Scientific American, Vol. 281, September 1999, p. 28.

Slight errors or omissions in the many data processing steps could easily account for the faint signal.

Reported variations in the CMB spanned areas of the sky that were 100 or 1,000 times too broad to produce galaxies.

“... mysterious discrepancies have arisen between [the inflationary big bang] theory and observations ... It looks like inflation is getting into a major jam.” Glen D. Starkman and Dominik J. Schwarz, “Is the Universe Out of Tune?” Scientific American, Vol. 293, August 2005, pp. 49, 55.

The slight temperature variations (0.00003°C) detected have a strong statistical connection with the solar system. [Ibid., pp. 52–55.] They probably have nothing to do with a big bang.

k

. “And no element abundance prediction of the big bang was successful without some ad hoc parameterization to ‘adjust’ predictions that otherwise would have been judged as failures.” Van Flandern, p. 33.

“It is commonly supposed that the so-called primordial abundances of D, 3He, and 4He and 7Li provide strong evidence for Big Bang cosmology. But a particular value for the baryon-to-photon ratio needs to be assumed ad hoc to obtain the required abundances.” H. C. Arp et al., “The Extragalactic Universe: An Alternative View,” Nature, Vol. 346, 30 August 1990, p. 811.

“The study of historical data shows that over the years predictions of the ratio of helium to hydrogen in a BB [big bang] universe have been repeatedly adjusted to agree with the latest available estimates of that ratio as observed in the real universe. The estimated ratio is dependent on a ratio of baryons to photons (the baryon number) that has also been arbitrarily adjusted to agree with the currently established helium to hydrogen ratio. These appear to have not been predictions, but merely adjustments of theory (‘retrodictions’) to accommodate current data.”  Mitchell, p. 7.

l

. Steidl, pp. 207–208.

D. W. Sciama, Modern Cosmology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 149–155.

m

. “Examining the faint light from an elderly Milky Way star, astronomers have detected a far greater abundance [a thousand times too much] of beryllium atoms than the standard Big Bang model predicts.” Ron Cowen, “Starlight Casts Doubt on Big Bang Details,” Science News, Vol. 140, 7 September 1991, p. 151.

Gerard Gilmore et al., “First Detection of Beryllium in a Very Metal Poor Star: A Test of the Standard Big Bang Model,” The Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 378, 1 September 1991, pp. 17–21.

Ron Cowen, “Cosmic Chemistry: Closing the Gap in the Origin of the Elements,” Science News, Vol. 150, 2 November 1996, pp. 286–287.

n

. “One might expect Population III stars [stars with only hydrogen and helium and no heavier elements] to have the same sort of distribution of masses as stars forming today, in which case some should be small enough (smaller than 0.8 the mass of the Sun) still to be burning their nuclear fuel. The problem is that, despite extensive searches, nobody has ever found a zero-metallicity star.”  Bernard Carr, “Where Is Population III?” Nature, Vol. 326, 30 April 1987, p. 829.

“Are there any stars older than Population II [i.e., Population III stars]? There should be, if our ideas about the early history of the universe [i.e., the big bang theory] are correct. ... There is no statistically significant evidence for Population III objects [stars].”  Leif J. Robinson, “Where Is Population III?” Sky and Telescope, July 1982, p. 20.

“Astronomers have never seen a pure Population III star, despite years of combing our Milky Way galaxy.” Robert Irion, “The Quest for Population III,” Science, Vol. 295, 4 January 2002, p. 66.

Supposedly, Population II stars, stars having slight amounts of some heavy elements, evolved after Population III stars. Predicted characteristics of Population II stars have never been observed.

Spectral studies of ancient [Population II] stars in the Milky Way haven’t turned up anything so distinctive [as the chemical elements that should be present], [Timothy] Beers notes, but the search continues.   Ibid., p. 67.

o

. “There shouldn’t be galaxies out there at all, and even if there are galaxies, they shouldn’t be grouped together the way they are.” James Trefil, The Dark Side of the Universe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988), p. 3.

Geoffrey R. Burbidge, “Was There Really a Big Bang?” Nature, Vol. 233, 3 September 1971, pp. 36–40.

Ben Patrusky, “Why Is the Cosmos ‘Lumpy’?” Science 81, June 1981, p. 96.

Stephen A. Gregory and Laird A. Thompson, “Superclusters and Voids in the Distribution of Galaxies,” Scientific American, Vol. 246, March 1982, pp. 106–114.

p

. “Galaxy rotation and how it got started is one of the great mysteries of astrophysics. In a Big Bang universe, linear motions are easy to explain: They result from the bang. But what started the rotary motions?” William R. Corliss, Stars, Galaxies, Cosmos: A Catalog of Astronomical Anomalies (Glen Arm, Maryland: The Sourcebook Project, 1987), p. 177.

q

. “One of the great challenges for modern cosmology is to determine how the initial power spectrum evolved into the spectrum observed today. ... the universe is much clumpier on those scales [600–900 million light-years] than current theories can explain.” Stephen D. Landy, “Mapping the Universe,” Scientific American, Vol. 280, June 1999, p. 44.

r

. Alan Dressler, “The Large-Scale Streaming of Galaxies,” Scientific American, Vol. 257, September 1987, pp. 46–54.

s

. “It is a fundamental rule of modern physics [namely, the big bang theory] that for every type of particle in nature there is a corresponding ‘antiparticle’.” Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Bantam Books, Inc., 1977), p. 76.

“If the universe began in the big bang as a huge burst of energy, it should have evolved into equal parts matter and antimatter. But instead the stars and nebulae are made of protons, neutrons and electrons and not their antiparticles (their antimatter equivalents).” Kane, pp. 73–74.

“But to balance the cosmic energy books—and to avoid violating the most fundamental laws of physics—matter and antimatter should have been created [in a big bang] in exactly equal amounts. And then they should have promptly wiped each other out. Yet here we are.”  Tim Folger, “Antimatter,” Discover, August 2004, p. 68.

t

. “Within our galaxy, we can be confident that there are no stars of antimatter; otherwise, the pervasive interstellar medium would instigate annihilation and ensuing gamma-ray emission at a rate far in excess of that observed. ... One difficulty with the idea of antigalaxies lies in maintaining their separation from galaxies. Empty space may now separate them, but in the early universe, these regions must have been in relatively close contact. Annihilation seems difficult to avoid, particularly because we now know that many regions of intergalactic space are occupied by a tenuous gas. Interaction with the gas would make annihilation inevitable in antimatter regions, with the consequent emission of observable gamma radiation.”  Joseph Silk, The Big Bang (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980), p. 115.

“Also, as far as we know, there is no appreciable amount of antimatter in the universe.” Weinberg, p. 88.

u

. One might also ask where the “cosmic egg” came from if there was a big bang. Of course, the question is unanswerable. Pushing any origin explanation back far enough raises similar questions—all scientifically untestable. Thus, the question of ultimate origins is not a purely scientific matter. What science can do is test possible explanations once the starting assumptions are given. For example, if a tiny “cosmic egg” (having all the mass in the universe) existed, it should not explode, based on present understanding. Claiming that some strange, new phenomenon caused an explosion (or inflation) is philosophical speculation. While such speculation may or may not be correct, it is not science. [See “How Can the Study of Creation Be Scientific?” on page 326.]

v

. “Three years ago, observations of distant, exploding stars blew to smithereens some of astronomers’ most cherished ideas about the universe [the big bang theory]. To piece together an updated theory, they’re now thinking dark thoughts about what sort of mystery force may be contorting the cosmos.

     “According to the standard view of cosmology, the once infinitesimal universe has ballooned in volume ever since its fiery birth in the Big Bang, but the mutual gravitational tug of all the matter in the cosmos has gradually slowed that expansion.

     “In 1998, however, scientists reported that a group of distant supernovas were dimmer, and therefore farther from Earth, than the standard theory indicated. It was as if, in the billion or so years it took for the light from these exploded stars to arrive at Earth, the space between the stars and our planet had stretched out more than expected. That would mean that cosmic expansion has somehow sped up, not slowed down. Recent evidence has only firmed up that bizarre result.” Ron Cowen, “A Dark Force in the Universe,” Science News, Vol. 159, 7 April 2001, p. 218.

“Not only don’t we see the universe slowing down; we see it speeding up.” Adam Riess, as quoted by James Glanz, “Astronomers See a Cosmic Antigravity Force at Work,” Science, Vol. 279, 27 February 1998, p. 1298.

“In one of the great results of twentieth century science, NSF-funded astronomers have shown both that the universe does not contain enough matter in the universe to slow the expansion, and that the rate of expansion actually increases with distance. Why? Nobody knows yet.” National Science Foundation Advertisement, “Astronomy: Fifty Years of Astronomical Excellence,” Discover, September 2000, p. 7.

“The expansion of the universe was long believed to be slowing down because of the mutual gravitational attraction of all the matter in the universe. We now know that the expansion is accelerating and that whatever caused the acceleration (dubbed “dark energy”) cannot be Standard Model physics.” Gordon Kane, “The Dawn of Physics Beyond the Standard Model,” Scientific American, Vol. 288, June 2003, p. 73.

w

. “... dark matter has not been detected in the laboratory, and there is no convincing theoretical explanation of dark energy.”  Carlton Baugh, “Universal Building Blocks,” Nature, Vol. 421, 20 February 2003, p. 792.

“We know little about that sea. The terms we use to describe its components, ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy,’ serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance.”  David B. Cline, “The Search for Dark Matter,” Scientific American, Vol. 288, March 2003, p. 52.

x

. Wayne Hu and Martin White, “The Cosmic Symphony,” Scientific American, Vol. 290, February 2004, p. 50.

y

. “Big Bang Gone Quiet,” Nature, Vol. 372, 24 November 1994, p. 304.

Michael J. Pierce et al., “The Hubble Constant and Virgo Cluster Distance from Observations of Cepheid Variables,” Nature, Vol. 371, 29 September 1994, pp. 385–389.

Wendy L. Freedman et al., “Distance to the Virgo Cluster Galaxy M100 from Hubble Space Telescope Observations of Cepheids,” Nature, Vol. 371, 27 October 1994, pp. 757–762.

N. R. Tanvir et al., “Determination of the Hubble Constant from Observations of Cepheid Variables in the Galaxy M96,” Nature, Vol. 377, 7 September 1995, pp. 27–31.

Robert C. Kennicutt Jr., “An Old Galaxy in a Young Universe,” Nature, Vol. 381, 13 June 1996, pp. 555–556.

James Dunlop, “A 3.5-Gyr-Old Galaxy at Redshift 1.55,” Nature, Vol. 381, 13 June 1996, pp. 581–584.

“It’s clear to most people that you can’t be older than your mother. Astronomers understand this, too, which is why they’re so uncomfortable these days. The oldest stars in globular clusters seem to date back 15 billion years. The universe appears to be only 9 billion to 12 billion years old. At least one of those conclusions is wrong.” William J. Cook, “How Old Is the Universe?” U.S. News & World Report, 18–25 August 1997, p. 34.

z

. “I have little hesitation in saying that a sickly pall now hangs over the big-bang theory. When a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that the theory rarely recovers.” Fred Hoyle, “The Big Bang Under Attack,” Science Digest, May 1984, p. 84.