The Big Bang Never Happened

■ THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATE ■blackboards and computers of cosmologists. They are hypotheticalentities, predicted by theories that have no experimental verification.And what about the problem of the apparent age of the superclustercomplexes? "Perhaps matter moved faster in the past thanit does now," speculate cosmologists, "so large objects could bebuilt up quicker." So one unknown process accelerates matter tohigh speed, blowing it out of the voids, while another unknownprocess conveniently puts the brakes on, slowing the matterdown to the observed sedate speeds before the galaxies form.But enormous velocities would be needed to form the GreatWall and the supercluster complexes in the time since the BigBang—about 2,000 km/sec for the Great Wall, 3,000 km/sec forTully's complexes, and a speedy 5,000 km/sec to hollow out thevoids observed by the American-British-Hungarian team. If thismatter is now moving at only 500 km/sec the energy tied up in itsmotion had to be dissipated. Just as a car's brakes convert energyof motion into heat, which is radiated into the air, so the vastenergy of the primordial matter would have to be radiated away.Matter colliding at several thousand kilometers per second wouldradiate very intense X-rays. And there is indeed a universal X-raybackground, but the amount of energy in it is one hundred timesless than what would be released by braking the speeding matter.So, where is this energy?Theorists speculate that a third unknown process might convertthis high-energy X-ray radiation to some other sort of radiation.Astronomers have observed only one type of radiationintense enough to contain the enormous amount of energy whichwould result from the hypothetical "braking" of matter—thecosmic microwave background. This even bath of microwaves,radio waves each measuring about a millimeter long, comes fromevery part of the sky and is considered the key piece of evidencethat there was a Big Bang. According to conventional cosmology,the background is the dilute afterglow of the titanic explosionthat created the universe. It reflects the state of the universe onlya few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. If the largescalestructures were created after this time, the energy releasedin slowing the speeding matter would show up in the backgroundradiation.28