Bad News for the Big Bang: Secular Scientists Claim Universe Shouldn’t Exist

[Mark]

Bad News for the Big Bang: Secular Scientists Claim Universe Shouldn’t Exist

 

Nearly two years after the highly-publicized discovery of the elusive ‘God Particle,’ scientists have determined that the current Big Bang model cannot account for the existence of the universe.

As previously reported, scientists in Europe announced in 2012 that they had detected the Higgs boson, then confirmed their findings last year.  The Higgs boson, also known as “the God particle,” was widely heralded as a key to understanding the origins of the universe.

However, in a major setback to the secular Big Bang theory, scientists with King’s College in London announced this month that Higgs boson physics cannot account for the universe’s existence. The scientists came to this conclusion after modeling the hypothetical conditions of the universe immediately after the Big Bang.

“During the early universe, we expected cosmic inflation—this is a rapid expansion of the universe right after the Big Bang,” Robert Hogan, a physicist with King’s College, told LiveScience. “This expansion causes lots of stuff to shake around.”

However, Hogan added, the “shaking around” caused by the Big Bang would have brought catastrophic consequences to the early universe.

“If we shake it too much, we could go into this new energy space, which could cause the universe to collapse,” he said.

Incorporating “the God particle” into the Big Bang model only made matters worse.

“What [the scientists] found was bad news for, well, everything,” LiveScience reports. “The newborn universe should have experienced an intense jittering in the energy field, known as quantum fluctuation. Those jitters, in turn, could have disrupted the Higgs field, in essence rolling the entire system into a much lower energy state that would make the collapse of the universe inevitable.”

Hogan plans to share his findings today at the Royal Astronomical Society meeting in Portsmouth, England. Meanwhile, some suggest that these findings are evidence that the Big Bang theory is a flawed model which cannot account for the origin of the universe.

“Of course another possibility is a creative designer,” one online commenter succinctly noted.

Dr. Danny Faulkner, an astronomer with Answers in Genesis, says the Big Bang theory has repeatedly conflicted with observational evidence.

“When we hear the term big bang theory, many people assume it was conceived in its present form and has remained unassailed ever since,” Faulker wrote in a recent article.

“In reality,” he continued, “it is a very pliable model. Several assumed variables in the equations have been changed to make the numbers match new findings. Today’s big bang model little resembles the one your grandfather learned, and it is likely to continue morphing. Are these improvements, or just rescuing devices?”

Likewise, Drs. Jake Hebert and Jason Lisle with the Institute for Creation Research propose that a belief in God—not the Big Bang theory—is ultimately foundational for understanding the universe’s existence.

“If God chooses to use a Higgs field to set the masses of all particles, He can certainly do so,” they wrote in an online article. “The fact that such physics is possible or even meaningful would only make sense in a created universe that is controlled by the mind of God anyway. The study of how God upholds the universe today is the very essence of science.”

http://christiannews.net/2014/06/24/bad-news-for-the-big-bang-secular-scientists-claim-universe-shouldnt-exist/

[Mark]

The Big Bang’s Big Problem Bedevils Researchers

 If the Big Bang theory is correct, our universe should not exist, according to research published last month by physicists at King’s College in London. The shocking discovery implies the universe should have collapsed less than a second after it exploded into existence.
 
Christians are divided on whether or not the Big Bang theory fits with the biblical description of creation. But the theory has been an enormous concession for many secular scientists. For years they clung to belief in a universe that was steady and that had existed indefinitely. But recent advances in physics have forced most scientists to admit that the universe had a beginning and that it has been expanding ever since by a process dubbed cosmic inflation.
 
For Christians, the universe having a beginning point is no new discovery. These scientists were upstaged more than 2,500 years ago by Job, Moses, David, and other Bible authors, said Hugh Ross, astrophysicist and founder of the Reasons to Believe ministry. The Bible confirms explicitly and repeatedly the two most fundamental properties of the Big Bang theory: There was a definite, finite beginning and the universe is undergoing continual expansion. For example, said Ross, in Isaiah 42:5 both properties were declared: “This is what the Lord says—He who created the heavens and stretched them out.”
 
The researchers of the current study combined data from observations made possible by the BICEP2 telescope with new information developed from the discovery of the Higgs Boson, a particle thought to be responsible for the mass of everything that exists. The scientists said the universe lies in a valley of the Higgs Field, an energy field that exists throughout the universe. It contains the Higgs Boson particle and sets the limits on its behavior. The universe is prevented from entering an even deeper valley by a large energy barrier that can be thought of as a giant hill separating the two valleys. But, according to the Big Bang theory, the researchers say cosmic inflation would have kicked the universe over the hill and into the deeper valley where it would have collapsed in less than a second.
 
Bewildered secular scientists are scratching their heads at the new findings. “We have to extend our theories to explain why this didn’t happen,” said Robert Hogan, a doctoral student at King’s College who led the study, in the Royal Astronomical Society. The researchers conclude there must be some process yet undiscovered.
 
Someday the scientists seeking explanations of why there was no big collapse immediately after the universe came into existence may well have to contend with the concept of a creator.
 
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream,” said Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a self-proclaimed agnostic. “He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”

http://www.christianheadlines.com/news/the-big-bang-s-big-problem-bedevils-researchers.html

[Mark]

Astronomers Find a Dusty Galaxy That Shouldn't Exist

 

A object from the very early universe is bafflingly rich with dust that theory says shouldn't have formed yet.

Astronomers have spotted a surprisingly dusty little galaxy within the cluster Abell 1689, shown here in an image by the Hubble telescope.

Peering back in time to find the very earliest objects in the universe, an international team of astronomers has discovered a galaxy that shouldn't be there at all.

The problem, the scientists report Monday in Nature, is that while the tiny galaxy dates from just 700 million years or so after the big bang, it's far more dusty than something this young and small has any right to be.

It's surprising, says Daniel Marrone, a University of Arizona expert on galaxy formation who wasn't involved in the research, because although dust is essential for the formation of planets and other solid material, the cosmos started out with no dust at all. In the aftermath of the big bang, the universe consisted only of hydrogen and helium gas (along with dark matter, but that's invisible).

The dusty galaxy is just one of the recent surprises astronomers have found. "Last week," says Marrone, "we learned of an incredibly massive black hole in the early universe. Now we have this average galaxy with significant amounts of dust. We've had this cartoon picture of the early universe, but it's clear that we really don't know what's going on."

What Astronomers Think They Know

The gas in the post-big bang universe condensed to form the first stars, which forged heavier elements, including carbon, silicon, and oxygen, then died and released those elements into space. It was from these that the first particles of dust formed.

Those first stars had already lived and died by the time this newly discovered galaxy, known as A1689-zD1, was up and running, so the universe was hardly dust free at that point. But most of the dust should have been in large, bright galaxies that formed lots of stars. A1689-zD1 is relatively small and dim—no bigger than the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy that orbits the Milky Way.

Few early galaxies have been spotted, because even the brightest among them is far away and thus relatively dim. To get around that problem, astronomers use the magnifying effect of gravity. Einstein's general theory of relativity says the gravity from an object closer to Earth can warp light rays from a more distant one. (Einstein thought we'd never actually observe this so-called gravitational lensing, but he was dead wrong about that.)

In this case, the Nature paper's lead author, Darach Watson, of the deliciously named Dark Cosmology Centre at the University of Copenhagen, used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile's Atacama Desert to look at a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 1689. The cluster's gravity magnified A1689-zD1 by a factor of nine, says Watson, which allowed him and several colleagues to gauge its distance from Earth and thus how long ago its light began traveling in our direction.

The VLT can see starlight but not dust, so Watson called on a colleague who was using the dust-sensitive ALMA radio telescope (see "Cosmic Dawn" in National Geographic magazine). "She had a look," says Watson, "and bingo!"

Like Marrone, Watson was taken aback by how dusty A1689-zD1 turned out to be. In bigger galaxies with more massive, short-lived stars, dust can pile up quickly since giant stars explode violently as supernovae after just a few million years. In smaller galaxies, most of the dust should emerge from the more gentle deaths of smaller stars that live for billions of years. So maybe A1689-zD1's dust comes from supernovae after all, says Watson. "But they'd have to produce the maximum possible dust," he says, to account for what ALMA sees, "and the dust can't be destroyed."

The only way to find out for sure is to uncover more galaxies like A1689-zD1. Unfortunately, they're extremely difficult to find—and the one other example astronomers have is almost entirely dust free, so it's impossible to say which type is more common. "We don't have any other candidates at this point," says Watson.

With ALMA, completed two years ago, and a new generation of giant optical telescopes now under construction, however, they're likely to find more of these galaxies before long. (See "Cosmic Vision: Telescopes.") The very early universe doesn't make a lot of sense at the moment—but that's almost certainly going to change.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/03/150302-black-hole-blast-biggest-science-galaxies-space/