The Big Bang Never Happened

THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATE■took on the characteristics of myth—absolute, exact knowledgeabout events in the distant past but an increasingly hazy understandingof how they led to the cosmos we now see, and anincreasing rejection of observation.In a decade the field of cosmology was transformed from asmall group of squabbling theorists trying to develop theoriesthat would match observation, to a huge phalanx of hundreds ofresearchers, virtually all united in their basic assumptions,mainly preoccupied with the mathematical nuances of the underlyingtheory.This tremendous expansion of theoretical cosmology was encouragedby powerful economic incentives, for both the researchersand their institutions. In no other field of science,excluding mathematics itself, could research be accomplished asinexpensively as in cosmology. The seventies saw a rapid contractionin the research money available for physical sciences,especially in the U.S., with the end of the defense spendingboom of the Vietnam War and of the Apollo Project. In most fieldsof science, advance was based on experimentation which requiredexpensive equipment and an arduous search for money tobuild it. In these fields theoreticians were a minority in need ofexperimenters' data to inspire or to test a new theory. In astrophysicstoo theoreticians relied on extensive data from nuclearscientists and their accelerators, or on observers' giant radio andoptical telescopes—or on even more expensive satellites. By contrast,theoretical cosmologists seemingly need no data at all. Afew, especially in the later seventies, started using computers forsimulations; but most of their time-consuming calculationsneeded nothing more than paper and pencil. Cosmology was scientificresearch on the cheap!The tremendous growth of the theoretical side inevitablybiased the entire field against observation, which became secondaryto the "real" work of manipulating equations. Cosmologistscame to look down on the observing astronomer who spentlong nights at the telescope but could not fathom (or did not careto fathom) the complexities of a Bianchi universe.At the same time, the social investment in Big Bang theorygreatly increased. For an experimental scientist, the bulk of theworking scientific world, the discrediting of a theory can redirect154