Britain’s Guardian asks, thinking about the multiverse “Has physics gone too far?” Perhaps a better question would be, is New Atheist cosmology failing as physics? Because, make no mistake, an admitted motive for seeking alternatives to the Big Bang and the fine-tuning of our universe is getting rid of their theistic implications.
Worse, for some, the hateful Big Bang bangs on, oblivious of its critics. Cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin, resigned to the Big Bang’s reality, theorizes that it was “merely one of a series of big bangs creating an endless number of bubble universes.” Another scheme to get rid of the Big Bang as a singularity involves a rainbow universe where time has no beginning, a model that, as Scientific American tells us, “is not widely accepted.” No wonder because, as one critic put it, the scheme must get rid of the singularity within the Standard Model of physics. Similarly, another new cosmology accounts for the apparent acceleration of the universe — but only if there is no Big Bang: “This universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction.” It also has no cosmic microwave background, which our universe inconveniently does have.
Still others propose that the Big Bang was a “mirage from [a] collapsing higher-dimensional star,” a thesis with which the new Planck data apparently disagree. In general, experimental findings continue to support the Standard Model. As New Scientist’s editors put it in a 2012 editorial titled “The Genesis problem”: More
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