The Big Bang Never Happened

■ PREFACE TO THE VINTAGE EDITION ■ton Post. But in April 1992 another headline in the New YorkTimes reported "Astronomers Detect Proof of Big Bang—profoundinsight on how time began." What accounts for this suddenturnaround in the heavens? According to the reports, this decisiveproof of the Big Bang, this "scientific discovery of the century,of all time," this key evidence of the Creation and of theDeity, was the discovery of tiny ripples in the intensity of themicrowave background, a sort of universal radio hiss. Thus, if weare to believe the reports, the finding of tiny fluctuations in thebackground radiation overshadows in importance the discoveryof nuclear energy, DNA, antibiotics, the theory of relativity, andthe quantum theory of matter, among other more minor scientificideas.But reality is different from headlines. In fact, the overwhelmingmass of scientific evidence still contradicts the Big Bang, asthis book endeavors to show. As of this writing—May 1992—theBig Bang remains in just as deep trouble as ever, with even widerdivergence from observation than when the first edition of thisbook was completed in late 1990. The blizzard of press releasesthat accompanied the discovery of these fluctuations by the CosmologicalBackground Explorer (COBE) Satellite are not mereobjective statements of fact but a salvo in the developing cosmologicaldebate, a debate that is steadily growing and that hasprofound implications for science, and indeed for society.In the year and a half since this book was written, the evidenceagainst the Big Bang has grown stronger, and the COBE results,far from "proving" the theory, have not in any way resolved theproblems raised by other discoveries. The key problem, as I describein Chapter One, is that there are objects in the universe—huge conglomerations of galaxies—that are simply too big tohave formed in the time since the Big Bang, objects whose age isgreater than the age Big Bang cosmologists assign to the universeitself. These conglomerations stretch over a billion light-years ofspace and were first discovered in 1986. In January 1991, whilethe first edition of this book was at press, a team of astronomersled by Will Saunders of Oxford unveiled a survey of galaxies thatconfirmed beyond all doubt the existence of these conglomerations,termed supercluster complexes. The survey, based on datafrom the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS), showed howprevalent these large structures are. Since no version of the BigXVI