photo credit: NASA. A new model of the universe suggests that spacetime recedes infinitely into the distance, rather than starting from a single event.
Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with.
The term Big Bang was created by astrophysicist Fred Hoyle as a way to mock the theory. Hoyle thought of the universe as like an endlessly flowing river, saying “Things are they way they are, because they were the way they were.” However, the weight of evidence—particularly the discovery of the cosmic background radiation—led the scientific community to overwhelmingly favor the idea that the universe came into being from a single, infinitely dense point.
Nevertheless, the problem of what, if anything, came before the Big Bang has continued to trouble many scientists, along with questions about how it actually occurred.
“The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there,” says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt. In collaboration with Professor Saurya Das of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, Ali has created a series of equations that describe a universe much like Hoyle’s; one without a beginning or end. Part of their work has been published in Physics Letters B, while a follow-up paper by Das and Rajat Bhaduri of Manchester University, Canada, is awaiting publication.