The Big Pffft!

This submission is about Cosmology. Guys wait, don’t close this post!  Cosmology is not a course offered at the local beauty college; it is the study of the beginning of time and the physical nature of the universe.  Girls wait, don’t close this post! If you finish this article and can send me an e-mail containing the secret word of the day revealed at the end, I will send you a free bottle of nail polish.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble (preeminent American astronomer 1889-1953) was taking pictures of space with the 100 inch Hooker telescope located atop Mt. Wilson in Los Angeles’ San Gabriel mountains.  What he discovered was the most important contribution to science since Copernicus had delivered the heliocentric model of our solar system in the sixteenth century.  Which, in turn was the most important contribution to man’s thirst for knowledge since beer.

Prior to Hubble’s work, our galaxy (named in honor of the most heavenly candy bar ever, the Milky Way) was thought to be the entire universe, containing everything we see in the night sky. His observations led to the realization that the numerous blurry smudges known as nebulae, heretofore thought to be interstellar gas clouds residing within the Milky Way, were in fact galaxies external to our own.  His work essentially rewrote the book on the size of the universe; it was expanded by magnitudes inconceivable to human experience. I would use numbers to illustrate this, but I’m afraid I would wear out my zero key.

As amazing as this discovery seems, it was only the first evolution of what Hubble’s continuing revelations offered us.  Using a technique known as spectroscopy and applying the principles of Doppler Effect he found the galaxies he had been photographing were red-shifted. No, that does not mean they were dressed in their most gay finery in anticipation of the Nobel awards ceremony. It demonstrated they were travelling away from us.  It was as if our galaxy had farted and all the others were trying to escape the stench!  The same was true in every direction Hubble turned his telescope. This phenomenon led to a singular conclusion; the universe was expanding, and at an amazing rate!

Well, scientists’ natures being what they are, they immediately began analyzing this new data.  I apologize in advance for the complexity of this next statement, but it seems that if you work in the opposite direction of a body’s line of travel, you will find the point at which the journey began.  Application of this technique to the flight paths of the aforementioned galaxies seemed to demonstrate that they all came from the same place. This in turn led to what we have come to call the “Big Bang Theory” which replaced the then widely held Steady State model.  The steady state model holds that the universe is, has and always will be the same size.

The Big Bang Theory, if you believe CBS, is a highly rated sitcom about a group of quirky but loveable nerds living in Pasadena and their growing retinue of female romantic partners.  I find it delightful.  Is it more than coincidence that Pasadena is in the shadow of Edwin Hubble’s tor of triumph, Mt. Wilson? But I digress.

The Big Bang Theory that we’re discussing here actually received it’s moniker from British Astronomer and Steady State Universe advocate Fred Hoyle during a 1949 BBC radio interview in which he was attacking the idea of a universe that began with a single event. According to Hoyle (who, to my knowledge knows nothing of the rules of popular card games), he was using the term as a descriptive rather than a pejorative in trying to describe the theory he rejected.

Pejorative or not, the Big Bang Theory has become the popular model for the formation of the universe as we see it today.  The theory holds that the entire universe; all energy, space, mass and time, were created by the expansion of a singularity, an infinitesimally small and dense point in… well, there is the rub. If there was no space or time before the expansion began, just where was this alleged singularity?

Singularity is defined by Webster’s New World Dictionary as the condition or quality of being singular; a unique, distinct, or peculiar feature or thing.  It is nice to know that I enjoy the same characteristics as the progenitor of the universe.

The theory proposes that this singularity, for reasons totally unknown, began to expand rapidly in a great release of energy. And the result of that continuing expansion is all of the energy and matter we see today and the space and time in which they reside. There are some problems reconciling the theory with observations.  Perhaps the most important is the flat universe. No, this is not a pancake house. The distribution of matter in the observable universe (keep in mind, we cannot see all the way back to the beginning of time, yet) is flat.  What we know of energy release (like an explosion) is that the force, and all of the matter carried along with it, is generally distributed in a uniform manner in all directions from the point of the energy release unless some other force interferes.  So, if there were no other forces or structures to influence the pattern of universal distribution, why is the Universe not a big ball?

Well, the staunch defenders of the Big Bang Theory would have you believe that a phenomenon they call inflation is responsible. At 10^-36 (that’s a really small number) seconds after expansion began, the process sped up until 10^-33 seconds when it slowed to a much more reasonable rate. If you blinked, you missed it. It seems very convenient for the theory of inflation that all of this occurred beyond the limit of our powers of observation. It does, if you believe the proponents, explain away several glitches in the Big Bang measurements but there is no empirical evidence. It also asks us to believe that for those few very, very, very brief nano-moments, the Universe expanded at a rate greater even than the speed of light. Hmm!

So what these learned men of science are asking us to believe is that unobservable data that applies only to this singular event that is inconsistent with to our understanding of the natural world is plausible because it makes their model of the creation of the universe work!

I don’t mean to be the skeptic, but it kind of sounds like religious dogma to me.  What do you think? 

 

“Platypus”