18 Mar 2004 @ 11:31, by Raymond Powers
Big bang revised again?
By David Clark
"Cosmologists Paul Steinhardt and Niel Turok... theorize that the cosmos was never compacted into a single point and did not spring forth in a violent instant. Instead, the universe as we know it is a small cross section of a much grander universe whose true magnitude is hidden in dimensions we cannot perceive. What we think of as the Big Bang, they contend, was the result of a collision between our three-dimensional world and another three-dimensional world less than the width of a proton away from ours — right next to us, and yet displaced in a way that renders it invisible. Moreover, they say the Big Bang is just the latest in a cycle of cosmic collisions stretching infinitely into the past and into the future. Each collision creates the universe anew. The 13.7 -billion-year history of our cosmos is just a moment in this endless expanse of time." Wow.
While it is exciting to elaborate on the big bang, it is wrong to pretend that a theory so fluid has sufficient authority to govern unrelated fields such as biology. In other words, the big bang theory does not prove that life can originate from nonlife by natural means. Real evidence is needed.
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Before the Big Bang
Maverick cosmologists contend that what we think of as the moment of creation was simply part of an infinite cycle of titanic collisions between our universe and a parallel world By Michael D. Lemonick Illustrations by Moonrunner Design DISCOVER Vol. 25 No. 02 | February 2004 | Astronomy & Physics
The Catholic Church, which put Galileo under house arrest for daring to say that Earth orbits the sun, isn’t known for easily accepting new scientific ideas. So it came as a surprise when Pope Pius XII declared his approval in 1951 of a brand new cosmological theory—the Big Bang. What entranced the pope was the very thing that initially made scientists wary: The theory says the universe had a beginning, and that both time and space leaped out of nothingness. It seemed to confirm the first few sentences of Genesis.
Eventually, astrophysicists followed the pope’s lead, as evidence for the Big Bang became too powerful to ignore. They accepted the notion that the entire observable universe—100 billion galaxies, each stuffed with 100 billion stars, stretching out more than 10 billion light-years in all directions—was once squashed into a space far smaller than a single electron. They bought the idea that the cosmos burst into existence precisely 13.7 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. But even now, many astrophysicists are still uncomfortable with the implication that the Big Bang marked the beginning of time itself. And the theory has yet to yield a satisfactory answer to a key question: What made the Big Bang go bang?
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