The Big Bang Never Happened

■ THE PLASMA UNIVERSE ■a universe that contracts to a certain size, then smoothly turnsaround to expand again. It has no origin in time. What pushes thecosmos apart is the cosmological force discussed in Chapter Four—a universal repulsive force that resembles centrifugal force butoperates in all directions equally.This relativistic solution will work for a universe with as littlematter as ours appears to have, yet the cosmos would be "closed"in space—finite because of the curvature generated by energyin the repulsive field. Since the cosmological constant—thestrength of the cosmological force—can be adjusted in thismodel, the minimum state of contraction can be quite big—abillion light-years across, for example, so that large-scale structureswhich would have taken hundreds of billions of years toform might survive the minimum point of contraction.This is what Alfven has termed a "Tycho Brahe solution." Justas Brahe combined the heliocentric and geocentric theories, thisone hangs on to a general relativist universe, reconciling it witha plasma universe of infinite duration. It isn't easily contradictedby observation, but neither can it be confirmed. The universe isexpanding, in this view, because of a universal expansionaryforce—not much improvement over Aristotle's explanation forthe moon's phases: Because the moon tends to have phases!Another approach to the Hubble relationship denies that itrepresents a true expansion of the universe, a process in whichthe universe has become increasingly diffuse. The redshifts arereal, but they do not signify what astronomers have thought. Forexample, light may lose energy as it travels through space, shiftingit to the red. Or perhaps all objects, all space expands continuously,a certain tiny percentage a year. Distant objects areredshifted, yet no real expansion takes place, since the density ofeverything remains the same.Many such theories have been elaborated over the past years,and all have problems. (A summary discussion of these theoriescan be found in the Appendix.) The question of the Hubble relationremains unanswered, and other fundamental questionsabout the cosmos must also remain unanswered until an adequatetheory is found. Far more theoretical and observationalwork is needed.But we are not stuck with the Big Bang by default. It is one279