Oscillating Universe Theory

[sandy_mcd]

Science collides with a Big Bang
An argument is raging between physicists on how the universe began, writes Jonathan Leake
August 21, 2006
IT was the monkey picture that did it. Neil Turok, professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Britain's Cambridge University, had just expounded to a conference of fellow physicists his revolutionary theory of how the universe began.

When Alan Guth, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the US's leading research universities, took the podium, he pulled no punches.

The conference, organised by the US's National Academy of Sciences, froze in embarrassment as Guth attacked Turok and his theories - and called up a slide of a monkey to illustrate his comments.

"I was shocked," Turok said. "I had been putting forward a new idea about what happened before the Big Bang and the events that led to the creation of our universe. Depicting me as a monkey was his way of saying I was wrong."

That event was just one salvo in what has become one of science's fiercest debates: how to explain the origins of the universe. What Turok had done in his lecture and accompanying papers was to challenge an idea that has held physicists in thrall for more than four decades: that time, space and everything else all appeared out of nothing and began with one Big Bang.

Instead, Turok says the Big Bang was not a unique event at all. In fact, it was likely to have been one of many, perhaps millions of, Big Bangs.

A small but growing band of other researchers, including Paul Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein professor of science at Princeton University, in New Jersey, support the idea.

If Turok and his supporters are right, the implications are daunting. The life's work of many scientists, and thousands of research papers, would be redundant. No wonder they are fighting back. It would also mean that time, matter and energy have always existed - and always will.

It was Albert Einstein who put science on the trail of the Big Bang when his theory of relativity made it clear that the universe could expand or contract.

Einstein never worked out which it was doing, but 14 years later the American astronomer Edwin Hubble made the historic discovery that, wherever one looked in space, galaxies were racing away from each other.

The clear implication was that if things are flying apart now they must once have been much closer together - and that perhaps they all began at one single, tiny point.

From this combination of theory and observation grew the idea of the Big Bang which, in its current form, suggests that the universe exploded into existence 13.7 billion years ago.

The Big Bang theory has a lot going for it. It fits with the observed expansion of the universe, the age of the oldest stars and the ratio of light and heavy elements found around the universe.

The idea has gathered support outside science, too, partly because it suits the creation myths of many religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Pope Pius XII, then head of the Catholic Church, even began preaching Big Bang theology in the 1950s, although he urged researchers not to probe the Big Bang itself, suggesting that the moment of creation was "the work of God".

Pius was prescient. He had put his finger on the very problems that are still troubling many cosmologists today. The universe may have begun with a Big Bang - but where did that come from? What caused it? And was it unique?

In the 1970s, Guth was one of those who realised that the Big Bang theory failed to explain how a hot chaotic fireball could become the cool universe with stable clusters of galaxies we see today.

Rather than challenge the idea that time and space began with the Big Bang, he suggested the new universe had suddenly expanded trillions of times in a millionth of a second. That idea, called inflation, did such a good mathematical job of explaining the shape of the universe that it was adopted far and wide.

Guth himself has built his career on it. Recently, however, it has become clear that the theory has major flaws. There is, for example, no widely accepted way for physics to explain how such "inflation" could have happened.

It also fails to deal with the 1990s discovery of "dark energy", the energy field that fills all space and which is now thought to be the cause of the universe's expansion.

For Turok and others, such failings have become too much to live with. "The supporters of inflation have become too evangelical. They have no idea why inflation happened but they still believe in it," he declares.

Under his and Steinhardt's theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of history but simply an event within it, caused by the collision of our universe with another one existing in another dimension.

Turok and Steinhardt suggest that such events may happen every trillion years in a kind of cycle. If they are right, then time has always existed and so has the universe. What's more, they always will exist, and so there is no need for inflation or for a creation event - or perhaps even a creator. Pope Pius would be furious. Many of Turok's fellow physicists already are.

To those outside physics, Turok's and Steinhardt's ideas may sound radical, but some cosmologists have long recognised that they offer solutions to many of the problems thrown up by the standard Big Bang theory.

Among them is Professor Stephen Hawking, a close colleague of Turok's in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University.

Hawking has suggested that space could have up to 11 dimensions; that our universe could exist inside a "higher dimensional space" that contains one or more other universes; and he has proposed the existence of "shadow worlds" whose presence might only be revealed by tiny fluctuations in our universe's gravitational background.

These ideas are the basis of the new theory. This week, Hawking will give a keynote speech on the subject at an international conference in Cambridge he has co-organised with Turok.

Others remain sceptical, if not scathing. Andrei Linde, professor of physics at Stanford University, in California, is a longstanding opponent. Linde said: "Turok and Steinhardt's model has many problems and the authors made quite a number of errors, which is why it is not very popular among cosmologists."

The academic world is often thought to be one of reasoned debate rather than vitriol. What is driving the heated emotions? Peter Woit, an advanced maths lecturer at Columbia University, in New York, believes he has an explanation for the present fury: the physicists are simply getting bored.

The Sunday Times

[Jet]

The First and Second Law of Thermodynamics are both false. The proof is in the Big Bang. From nothingness springs forward a big, big universe. And before the Big Bang there must surely have been another universe in and during which God decided to create the Big Bang and us.

[BGoodForGoodSake]

The First and Second Law of Thermodynamics are both false. The proof is in the Big Bang. From nothingness springs forward a big, big universe. And before the Big Bang there must surely have been another universe in and during which God decided to create the Big Bang and us.

These are scientific theories.

You cannot use another theory to disprove a theory, both are based on consistent observations.

What you must do is find a dissonant observation which will contradict a theory.

[Oriental]

Hey,

I'm trying to debate an athiest and show him that God can exist. However he has used the oscillating universe theory which says that the universe expands and then due to gravity contracts and when it does that it reverses time so when it gets back to the central point all the energy will be present and the universe will expand again ad infinitum.

I haven't read Hawking's masterpiece but am curious about the "reversal of time" when universe contracts. Does it mean if the gravitational force outweighs the electromagnetic force, and the universe starts to contract, the time moves in reverse direction? In other words, does it mean that by meantime, things go from future back to the beginning and there is no "beginning"?

It is imaginery scanerios beyond all sketches of reasoning indeed.