Big Bang Theory: Exquisite & Fatally Incomplete
The Big Bang is an attractive story. It gives the entirety of existence a clear birth and nods toward some kind of death. In doing so, the theory instantly humanizes the cosmos by providing a narrative we can each relate to practically. Indeed, such a finite conception of the cosmos seems to be a perspective that we as humans have required since time immemorial.
Almost every single ancient tradition, from Mesoamerica to Sumeria, boasts an origin story for the universe: a momentous occasion when materials appeared and were set in motion once and for all.
This makes sense on an intuitive level. Afterall, everything we experience comes to us as a story. Each and every trial, tragedy, hope, and desire, occurs as an intricate tapestry of narrative. Handling our experiences as stories allows us to triage daunting affairs with dignity and understanding. And understanding appears to be the key to combating the chaos that pervades in its absence.
The problem with the Big Bang is not quantitative. The math is solid.
The theory does a remarkable job of tying the wider net of accumulated data together and extrapolating all of this motion to an origin point. The problem with the theory is that it is physically unimaginable. The critical frame in the movie of the Big Bang is missing. No amount nor caliber of mathematic acrobatics can save the theory from this fatal flaw.
Here’s the thing with math: math is an amazingly powerful tool BUT like a chainsaw, math is quite dangerous if the user is in anyway misguided. Using math, we can faithfully articulate dynamics and often even extrapolate those motions into the future. This tool has given humans the ability to make astoundingly accurate predictions of cyclic celestial behaviors. Ancient priests indeed made mathematical models of eclipses and used their predictions to astonish their patrons for milenia.
Many people don’t realize that the Big Bang theory was also developed and popularized by a mathematician-priest. In fact, the theory required assumption of a creation before even attempting to explain the apparent recession of distant galaxies. This is the sort of assumption one might expect from a priest, but hardly from an objective scientist pursuing physical cause for phenomena. An objective investigator must explain physical events starting with the physical actors: the relevant objects involved. No amount of quantitative logic can spare a scientist from this step in the construction of an explanation. And this theory is supposed to explain the appearance of red-shifted, presumably receding, distant galaxies.
What’s important to understand is that math can be mishandled by the best of us if our prior assumptions are problematic. Garbage-in, garbage-out, as they say in computing. Let’s check out a simplified example:
Say you’re an alien scientist studying car crashes on Earth. Afterall, car crashes kill a lot of people each year. You want to know what causes these tragedies, and a pile of data is amassing on your desk back in Antares showing that police cars are always present at the scene of these accidents (your temporal resolution isn’t high enough to perceive that they arrive just after the accident). You extrapolate the presence of the police cars backward in time mathematically and write a report indicating that you’ve proved that the police cause collisions by materializing in dense traffic.
The problem with your theory of car crashes is not the math. The problem is not that instantaneous appearance of static police cars in high-speed traffic would cause wrecks. The problem with your theory is that cars cannot materialize out of nowhere! Why? Because there is no conceivable mechanism for how nothing can turn into something.
I have a good rule of thumb when it comes to physical theories. If it can’t be illustrated in a movie, schematically, in slow-motion, so that every detail of the mechanism is available to the viewer/reader, then the theory is at best unfinished and presently impossible. Missing frames are the biggest tip-off to these sort of fractures in a theory.
When it comes to the Big Bang, we are missing the critical frame of this movie: the frame where nothing turns into something.
No matter how much data we have amassed indicating that the galaxies are moving apart, we will never be able to rationalize that something came from nothing to cause this appearance. If we want to propose that as an explanation, we need to illustrate it unambiguously. Recall that spontaneous generation was the prevailing theory for the appearance of life on Earth for millennia prior to germ theory.
Perhaps you don’t believe me; you think the mathematicians aren’t actually suggesting something came from nothing. Make no mistake, this is exactly what is being proposed. In Stephen Hawking’s own words “…the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.”
With all respect to the venerable Dr. Hawking, if the universe is going to create itself, it will have to start with some building materials and a hefty supply of driving motion. And it is the duty of scientists to propose the structures of those materials and the motions that provide for what is apparent if this is going to be their standby theory. In the meantime, we ought to seek explanations for the appearance of the night skies that can be rationalized without censored frames in those explanations.
And in the absence of uninterrupted mechanism, we can only assume that the universe has always been here. No matter how unattractive a notion this may be; no matter how deeply it conflicts with our sense of worldly orientation, it must remain our starting-place until we can illustrate the alternative. Not mathematically but visually. Science must explain not confuse. After all 1+1= A number. 4+4= A number. A number= A number. But 1+1 DOES NOT EQUAL 4+4.
A tool like math, or a chainsaw, is only as powerful as its operator’s hand.
Note, 6/20/2020:
Several of my readers have pointed out that the Big Bang Theory does not officially claim that something comes from nothing. This is an interesting position and I am making some effort to follow up on the notion. What I can say is that more than a few prominent physicists do, indeed, insist that the Universe came from nothing and that the creators of BBT certainly use words like “origin” and “originally",” etc., which scientifically may be considered synonymous with “beginning”. My sense is that BBT as origin of existence is becoming increasingly less attractive for researchers but has a prominent role in its inception. I will update you when I have a wider view on the subject. It is perhaps worth its own post at a later date.
