It’s Past Time to Bury the Big Bang – Part I

As much as any other single item, we receive more questions or comments about the scientific time frame, geologic column and the expansion of the Universe (Big Bang Theory) than any other based on the book Scientific Fallacies & Other Myths, which is our fourth work in the series on the Book of Mormon. It’s part in the series is to show that scientific hypothesis, generally promoted as scientific facts, are not only in error, but that being in error, cast dispersion on the Biblical time frame and creation period of the Earth. Thus, in so doing, cause people to misunderstand many of the proofs of the Book of Mormon and, more importantly, of the location of the Land of Promise.

So in these next few posts, we will show the numerous reasons why the Big Bang is in error and it is way past time to put it to rest (or bury it, so to speak).

1) Observational data support a static universe better than an expanding universe, requiring no adjustable parameters. T. Van Flandern, in his Did the Universe have a Beginning?”and Dark Matter, Missing Planets and New Comets, shows that while the Big Bang can match each of the critical observations, it can do so only with adjustable parameters. One such adjustment is the cosmic deceleration parameter, which can be justified only through the use of mutually exclusive values to match different tests. Thus, without ad hoc theorizing, this point alone falsifies the Big Bang. Even if the discrepancy could be explained, Occam’s razor favors the model with fewer adjustable parameters, which is the static universe model.

2) The microwave “background” makes more sense as the limiting temperature of space heated by starlight than as the remnant of a fireball. “The temperature of space” is the title of chapter 13 of Sir Arthur Eddington calculated in 1926 the minimum temperature any body in space would cool to, given that it is immersed in the radiation of distant starlight. With no adjustable parameters, he obtained 3ºK (later refined to2.8ºK), essentially the same as the observed, so-called “background” temperature. A similar calculation, applies to the limiting temperature of intergalactic space because of the radiation of galaxy light, and therefore provides a simpler explanation for the microwave radiation, including its blackbody-shaped spectrum. At the same time, none of the predictions of the background temperature based on the Big Bang were close enough to qualify as successes, thus the Big Bang’s hypothetical “fireball” becomes indistinguishable from the natural minimum temperature of all cold matter in space, though none matched observations, and the theory offers no explanation for the kind of intensity variations with wavelength seen in radio galaxies.

3) Element abundance predictions using the Big Bang require too many adjustable parameters to make them work. The universal abundances of most elements were predicted correctly by Hoyle in the context of the original Steady State cosmological model. This worked for all elements heavier than lithium. The Big Bang co-opted those results and concentrated on predicting the abundances of the light elements. Each such prediction requires at least one adjustable parameter unique to that element prediction. Often, it’s a question of figuring out why the element was either created or destroyed or both to some degree following the Big Bang. When you take away these degrees of freedom, no genuine prediction remains.

4) The universe has too much large scale structure (interspersed “walls” and voids) to form in a time as short as 10-20 billion years. The average speed of galaxies through space is a well-measured quantity. At those speeds, galaxies would require roughly the age of the universe to assemble into the largest structures (superclusters and walls) we see in space and to clear all the voids between galaxy walls. But this assumes that the initial directions of motion are special, i.e., directed away from the centers of voids. To get around this problem, one must propose that galaxy speeds were initially much higher and have slowed due to some sort of “viscosity” of space. To form these structures by building up the needed motions through gravitational acceleration alone would take in excess of 100 billion years—a figure far too long for the times assigned to the Universe.

5) The ages of globular clusters appear older than the universe. The error bars on the Hubble age of the universe (122 Gyr) do not quite overlap the error bars on the oldest globular clusters (162 Gyr). Astronomers have studied this for the past decade, but resist the “observational error” explanation because that would almost certainly push the Hubble age older (as Sandage has been arguing for years), which creates several new problems for the Big Bang. In other words, the cure is worse than the illness for the theory. In fact, a new, relatively bias-free observational technique has gone the opposite way, lowering the Hubble age estimate to 10 Gyr, making the discrepancy worse again.

6) The local streaming motions of galaxies are too high for a finite universe that is supposed to be everywhere uniform. In the early 1990s, we learned that the average redshift for galaxies of a given brightness differs on opposite sides of the sky. The Big Bang interprets this as the existence of a puzzling group flow of galaxies relative to the microwave radiation on scales of at least 130 mpc—megaparsecs, or one million parsecs (the name parsec stands for "parallax of one second of arc," and one parsec is defined to be the distance from the Earth to a star that has a parallax of 1 arcsecond. The actual length of a parsec is approximately 3.262 light-years or 19,176,075,967,324.937 miles). Earlier, the existence of this flow led to the hypothesis of a "Great Attractor" pulling all these galaxies in its direction. But in newer studies, no backside infall was found on the other side of the hypothetical feature. Instead, there is streaming on both sides of us out to 60-70 mpc in a consistent direction relative to the microwave "background". The only Big Bang alternative to the apparent result of large-scale streaming of galaxies is that the microwave radiation is in motion relative to us. Either way, this result differs from the Big Bang.

7) The average luminosity of quasars must decrease with time in just the right way so that their average apparent brightness is the same at all redshifts, which is exceedingly unlikely. According to the Big Bang theory, a quasar at a redshift of 1 is roughly ten times as far away as one at a redshift of 0.1. If the two quasars were intrinsically similar, the high redshift one would be about 100 times fainter because of the inverse square law. But it is, on average, of comparable apparent brightness. This must be explained as quasars “evolving” their intrinsic properties so that they get smaller and fainter as the universe evolves. That way, the quasar at redshift 1 can be intrinsically 100 times brighter than the one at 0.1, explaining why they appear (on average) to be comparably bright. Quasars must evolve in this magical way to explain the observations using the Big Bang interpretation of the redshift of quasars as a measure of cosmological distance. However, the better explanation is the relation between apparent magnitude and distance for quasars, which is a simple, inverse-square law in alternative cosmologies. In H.C. Arp’s book Seeing Red, 1998, the great quantities of evidence that large quasar redshifts are a combination of a cosmological factor and an intrinsic factor are shown, with the latter dominant in most cases. Most large quasar redshifts therefore have little correlation with distance. According to the Astrophysics Journal 566, pp705-711, a grouping of 11 quasars close to NGC 1068, have nominal ejection patterns correlated with galaxy rotation, which provides further strong evidence that quasar redshifts are intrinsic.

(See the next post, “It’s Past Time to Bury the Big Bang – Part II,” for more of these reasons why the Big Bang is in error and it is way past time to put it to rest—or bury it, so more realistic time frames of earth’s existence can be understood in light of the Biblical dating system)