Sunday 14 May 2017

Stephen Hawking and Other Astronomers at Loggerheads Over Cosmic Inflation

This scenario is a source of naturalistic contention. Image courtesy of Yinweichen, Creative Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).




Joel Kontinen

The Big Bang model has several serious problems. It does not work without cosmic inflation that New Scientist recently called a totally bonkers idea.

No one knows what caused it or why it slowed at the time it did.

It is a naturalistic dogma that should not be contested.

However, recently physicists Anna Ijjas, Paul J. Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb published an article in Scientific American in which they examined “the latest measurements from the European Space Agency relating to cosmic microwave background (CMB)” and suggested that the data did not support the inflation theory.

An article in Newsweek points out some fatal flaws in the theory:

– No one has found primordial gravitational waves, or ripples in spacetime created by the Big Bang.
– Inflation requires the existence of “inflationary energy,” for which there is no direct evidence.

Ijjas and colleagues think that the idea of a “big bounce”, i.e. periods of expansion and contraction, fits the data better.

However, Stephen Hawking and 32 other astronomers replied with an angry letter, stating that they believe that the Big Bang and its concomitant cosmic inflation is the more credible explanation for the origin of the cosmos.

There are other serious problems with the Big Bang as well: the mystery of quantum fluctuation, missing dark matter and the likewise elusive dark energy and antimatter.

In addition, the earliest galaxies formed too quickly.

He [God] made the stars also,” Genesis tells us. That is by far the best explanation for the existence of the universe.

Source:

Osborne, Hannah. 2017. Big Bang or Big Bounce? Stephen Hawking and Others Pen Angry Letter About How the Universe Began. Newsweek (12 May).