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The Big Bang's Last Great Prediction

Posted by samzenpus on from the in-the-beginning dept.

StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "Even with the add-ons of dark matter, dark energy and inflation, the Big Bang still thrives as the most successful scientific model of the Universe ever constructed. It not only accounting for phenomena like the abundance of the light elements, the cosmic microwave background, and the Universe's large-scale structure, but it's led to observable predictions about their details that have since been verified. But there's one thing the Big Bang has generically predicted that we haven't been able to test: a cosmic background of low-energy, relic neutrinos."

1 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Theory as it stands is wrong by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 0, Troll

    Depending on who you talk to, evidence either contradicts or makes the Big Bang incomplete.

    Wikipedia Big Bang mentions these 3 problems:

    * the horizon problem,
    * the flatness problem,
    * and the magnetic monopole problem.

    The typical kludge is "Cosmic Inflation", but that hack creates even more problems. (" inflation is the expansion of space in the early universe at a rate much faster than the speed of light temporarily.") Paul J. Steinhardt, one of the founding fathers of inflationary cosmology, has recently become one of its sharpest critics.

    There are numerous other problems with the Big Bang:

    The first law of thermodynamics says Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only change form, yet "magically" the Big Bang appeared out of nothing ?!?!?
    * The Big Bang attempts to explain "How", but it still doesn't explain why it happened in the first place?

    I've included the top 11 of the full list of 30 Problems of the Big Bang:

    * Static universe models fit observational data better than expanding universe models.
    * The microwave "background" makes more sense as the limiting temperature of space heated by starlight than as the remnant of a fireball
    * Element abundance predictions using the Big Bang require too many adjustable parameters to make them work.
    * 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 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.
    * The ages of globular clusters appear older than the universe.
    * The local streaming motions of galaxies are too high for a finite universe that is supposed to be everywhere uniform.
    * Invisible dark matter of an unknown but non-baryonic nature must be the dominant ingredient of the entire universe.
    * The most distant galaxies in the Hubble Deep Field show insufficient evidence of evolution, with some of them having higher redshifts (z = 6-7) than the highest-redshift quasars.
    * If the open universe we see today is extrapolated back near the beginning, the ratio of the actual density of matter in the universe to the critical density must differ from unity by just a part in 1059. Any larger deviation would result in a universe already collapsed on itself or already dissipated.
    * Under Big Bang premises, the Fine Structure Constant must vary with time. WHOOPS! Feynamn, founder of QED, once wrote:

    There is a most profound and beautiful question associated with the observed coupling constant, e - the amplitude for a real electron to emit or absorb a real photon. It is a simple number that has been experimentally determined to be close to 0.08542455. (My physicist friends won't recognize this number, because they like to remember it as the inverse of its square: about 137.03597 with about an uncertainty of about 2 in the last decimal place. It has been a mystery ever since it was discovered more than fifty years ago, and all good theoretical physicists put this number up on their wall and worry about it.) Immediately you would like to know where this number for a coupling comes from: is it related to pi or perhaps to the base of natural logarithms? Nobody knows. It's one of the greatest damn mysteries of physics: a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man. You might say the "hand of God" wrote that number, and "we don't know how He pushed his pencil." We know what kind of a dance to do experimentally to measure this number very accurately, but we don't know what kind of dance to do on the computer to make this number co