The Big Bang Never Happened

THE COSMOLOGICAL DEBATEbased on measuring galaxies' distance from us, and the speed atwhich galaxies appear to be receding from one another. If galaxiesreceding at half the speed of light appear to be about five orten billion light-years away now, cosmologists reason, they wereall much closer ten or twenty billion years ago. So to move theBig Bang back hundreds of billions of years, cosmologists musthypothesize a bizarre two-step expansion: an initial explosion toget things going, a pause of a few hundred billion years to allowtime for large objects to form, and a resumed explosion to getthings going again, so that they only appear to have startedtwenty billion years ago.Here the questions multiply like rabbits. But the underlyingproblem is basic to science. A theory is tested by comparing predictionsderived from it with observations. If a theorist merelyintroduces some new and arbitrary modification in his theory tofit the new observations, like the epicycles of Ptolemy's cosmos,scientific method is abandoned.Yet Big Bang theory is supported in great part by arbitrary,hypothetical entities, such as cosmic strings. As Tully puts it,"It's disturbing to see that there is a new theory every timethere's a new observation."Despite the many new hypotheses, there remains no way tobegin with the perfect universe of the Big Bang and arrive at thecomplex, structured universe of today in twenty billion years. Asone COBE scientist, George Smoot of the University of Californiaat Berkeley, put it, "Using the forces we now know, you can'tmake the universe we know now."THE DARK MATTER THAT WASN'T THEREThe problem of large-scale structure is itself a serious challengeto the Big Bang, but it is not the only one: a closely relatedproblem is the evidence that dark matter does not exist.Dark matter is perhaps the strangest feature of conventionalcosmology. According to most cosmologists nearly 99 percent ofthe universe is unobservable—dark, emitting no radiation at all.The universe we do see—stars, galaxies, and all—is only 1 or 2percent of the total. The rest is some strange and unknown formof matter, particles necessitated by theory but never observed.32