Did Big Bang Happen?

Most recent answer: 10/22/2007

Q:
"THE BIG BANG NEVER HAPPENED" Yes, thats a title of a book I been trying to read for years. It complex and long. Written by ERIC J. LERNER, 1992, an independent researcher and writer, awarded the Award of Excellence from Aviation/space writers association. He basiclly says that everything in the universe is explained with elctric currents and plasma. Black holes don’t exist and other observed data can be explained with theories from Swedish Nobel Laureate Hannes Alfven; His Plasma Cosmology; Have you heard of this alternative cosmology? Can you validate this theory, any comment appreciated..Thanks mike.
- mike (age 16)
toms river high, new jersey
A:
It happens that I'm familiar with the book, because a student wrote a term paper on it for my class a few years ago. Although I don't remember the details, the book seemed to have many piece-by-piece attempts to fit data, rather than a coherent theory to fit the whole range of effects. I believe one of the book's key points involved the role of dust in affecting apparent brightnesses of distant galaxies, but that point has been thoroughly refuted by new data. In fact, there has been a flood of new data, especially on details of the cosmic microwave background but also on galaxy distributions, in the last 10 years confirming the inflationary Big Bang picture in amazing detail. Alfven’s cosmology is not really in the running any more. I recommend the last 5 years of Scientific American as a source for many excellent articles on recent developments in cosmology.

As for black holes, there is a large body of data on a wide variety of black holes. Black holes are a direct consequence of General Relativity, which has been confirmed to great accuracy in a variety of experiments. Although one can never know absolutely for sure that there could not be some other theory that could fit these data, that idea seems very far-fetched.

Mike W.

(published on 10/22/2007)