Two things many cosmologists would like to get rid of are the Big Bang and apparent fine-tuning of the universe. Telling a different story is difficult mainly due to lack of evidence for a different story but they can make do with discrepancies. But then maybe the years have made some of us cynical.
Big Bang
At Forbes: The “miracle” hope for finding the dark matter of the universe is dead
The WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive particles) model has just not worked out: We understand how the Standard Model particles behave. We have solid predictions for how they should interact through all of the fundamental forces, and experimental confirmation of those theories. We also have extraordinary constraints on how they’re permitted to interact in a beyond-the-Standard-Model […]
We actually don’t know the precise value of the Hubble Constant
Thank goodness we were never in any danger of running out of end-of-the-universe/world/world-as-we-know-it scenarios anyway.
Bill Nye’s “Christianity vs. the Big Universe” myth
“The big universe is a problem for Christianity” is a claim something like “They’re out there” (meaning ET). It has nothing to do with facts; it is pure social positioning (or posturing). As with the Cosmos’s series’s “artistic license to lie,” it is a way of indicating that their social position is so powerful that they can misrepresent people.
Rob Sheldon responds to cosmologist Sean Carroll’s 19 True Facts of Cosmology
Sean Carroll, an avowed atheist in the “scientism” camp of Bill Nye and Jerry Coyne, has made a list of apologia for the Big Bang (hereafter BB). You might wonder why there needs to be any apology at all if, as he himself says, “We have overwhelming evidence that it is true.”
Will the Large Hadron Collider doom particle physics?
They’ll find the money to continue. Consider: The Standard Model begins with the hated Big Bang. Nothing that supports string theory, eternal cosmic inflation, or a multiverse has been found. Don’t many people just have to keep looking and keep quiet about what they find that wasn’t what they hoped for?
Is cosmology “in crisis” over how to measure the universe?
We are told that the Standard Model just doesn’t work: Every night, astronomers post new ideas to arXiv, the open access publishing site. Cosmologists, in particular, use arXiv to engage in timely back-and-forths that formal journals don’t permit. “We’re just holding on for dear life, trying to keep up with what’s coming out,” says Scolnic. […]
Physicists: New approach to antimatter offers promising results
According to the Standard Model of our universe, beginning with the Big Bang, there is no difference between matter and antimatter (although they annihilate each other on contact). Why then do we see all matter, no antimatter? A group of physicists decided to test a new theory: From ScienceDaily: About ten picoseconds after the Big […]
Hubble’s Law name change urged, to recognize Big Bang pioneer, Fr. Georges Lemaitre
Belgian priest Lemaitre apparently got the idea, which “underpins modern cosmology,” two years before Edwin Hubble: The International Astronomical Union (IAU) recommends that the law now be known as the Hubble–Lemaître law. In the 1920s, the Belgian described in French how the expansion of the Universe would cause galaxies to move away from Earth at […]
The early universe was flat to a “suspicious” one part in a million
An “expert voice” astrophysicist explains that the Big Bang is now the “vanilla Big Bang,” which is unpopular because it doesn’t explain all observations: The Big Bang model is our most successful explanation for the history of the universe that we live in, and it’s ridiculously easy to encapsulate its core framework in a single, […]
Researchers: Bizarre Antartic particles might shatter modern physics
Recent cosmic ray activity in Antartica is provoking question and speculation: Physicists don’t know what it is exactly. But they do know it’s some sort of cosmic ray — a high-energy particle that’s blasted its way through space, into the Earth, and back out again. But the particles physicists know about — the collection of particles that […]
Researchers: Fewer galaxies have formed since the Big Bang than should have
They hope to be surer of that fact after a couple of years more data. From ScienceDaily: It all started with the measurements of the Planck satellite, which was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) to measure the cosmic background radiation. This radiation is, to some extent, an afterglow of the big bang. It […]
Is there a crisis inside the physics of time?
Did Carlo Rovelli, start a fashion for debunking time with The Order of Time? Here’s science writer Marcia Bartusiak, author of Dispatches from Planet 3, asking whether it is time to just get rid of time: You might say that quantum mechanics introduced a fuzziness into physics: You can pinpoint the precise position of a […]
Experiment to probe the weak points of the Standard Model of our universe
Better known as Big Bang cosmology, it is not very popular in some quarters: Developed in the 1960s and ’70s, the standard model has some sizable holes: It can’t explain dark matter — an ethereal substance so far detected only by its gravitational effects — or dark energy, a mysterious oomph that causes the cosmos […]
Must Christians believe in the Big Bang theory?
J. R. Miller offers a reasonable discussion of varieties of Biblical creationism: Maybe you have heard the accusation that biblical creationists are blinded by their ancient theology which forces them to reject the modern “scientific fact” of evolution. But what do people mean by this accusation? What is evolution? Is biblical creation a de facto […]