Here is an interesting article taken from the following site:
http://chalu.netfirms.com/bigquestionsabout.htm
I just want to make it quite clear at the outset, that this is not an endorsement on my part. I just think there may be some good food for thought here, that is worth considering in the overall discussion. That is all!
Rod P.
BIG QUESTIONS about the BIG BANG
When examined closely, the cosmologists' confident explanation of the origin and structure of the universe falls apart...
Look up at the night sky, full of stars and planets. Where did it all come from? These days most scientists will answer that question with some version of the big bang theory. In the beginning, you'll hear, all matter in the universe was concentrated into a single point at an extremely high temperature, and then it exploded with tremendous force. From an expanding superheated cloud of subatomic particles, atoms gradually formed, then stars, galaxies, planets, and finally life. This litany has now assumed the status of revealed truth. In accounts that deliberately evoke the atmosphere of Genesis, the tale of primal origins is elaborately presented in countless textbooks, paperback popularizations, slick science magazines, and television specials complete with computer-generated effects.
As an exciting, mindgrabbing story it certainly works. And because the big bang story does seem to be based on factual observation and the scientific method, it seems to many people more reasonable than religious accounts of creation. This big bang theory of cosmology is, however, only the latest in a series of attempts to explain the universe in a mechanistic way, a way that sees the world--and man--solely as the products of matter working according to materialistic laws.
Scientists traditionally reject supernatural explanations of the origin of the universe, especially ones involving a Supreme Person who creates it, saying that they would contradict their scientific method. In the mechanistic world view, God, if He exists at all, is reduced to the role of a petty servant who merely winds up the clock of the universe. Thereafter He has no choice but to allow everything to happen according to physical laws. This makes these laws, in effect, more powerful than God Himself. Or else God becomes simply a formless universal energy. There is definitely not much room for a personal God, a supreme designer and controller, in the universe described by the big bang theorists. Erwin Schrodinger, the Nobel-prize-winning Austrian theoretical physicist who discovered the basic equation of quantum mechanics, states in *Mind and Matter, "No personal god can form part of a world model that has only become accessible at the cost of removing everything personal from it."
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Thus we should not think that it is by their empirical findings that scientists have eliminated God from the universe or restricted His role in it. Rather from the very start their chosen method rules out God.
The scientists' attempt to understand the origin of the universe in purely physical terms is based on three assumptions: (1) that all phenomena can be completely explained by natutal laws expressed in the language of mathematics, (2) that these physical laws apply everywhere and at all times, and (3) that the fundamental natural laws are simple.
Many people take these assumptions for granted, but they have not been proven to be facts--nor is it possible to easily prove them. They are simply part of one strategy for approaching reality. Looking at the complex phenomena that confront any observer of the universe, scientists have decided to try a reductionistic approach. They say, "Let's try to reduce everything to measurements and try to explain them by simple, universal physical laws." But there is no logical reason for ruling out in advance alternative strategies for comprehending the universe, strategies that might involve laws and principles of irreducible complexity. Yet many scientists, confusing their strategy for trying to understand the universe with the actual nature of the universe, rule out a priori any such alternative approaches. They insist that the universe can be completely described by simple mathematical laws. "We hope to explain the entire universe in a single, simple formula that you can wear on your T-shirt,"
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says Leon Lederman, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
There are several reasons why the scientists feel compelled to adopt their strategy of simplification. If the underlying reality of the universe can be described by simple quantitative laws, then there is some chance that they can understand it (and manipulate it), even considering the limitations of the human mind. So they assume it can be so described and invent a myriad of theories to do this. But if the universe is infinitely complex, it would be very difficult for us to understand it with the limited powers of the human mind and senses. For example, suppose you were given a set of one million numbers and asked to describe their pattern with an equation. If the pattern were simple, you might be able to do it. But if the pattern were extremely complex, you might not even be able to guess what the equation would be. And of course the scientists' strategy will also be unsuccessful in coping with features of the universe that cannot be described in mathematical terms at all.
Thus it is not any wonder that the great majority of scientists cling so tenaciously to their present strategy to the exclusion of all other approaches. They could well be like the man who lost his car keys in his driveway and went to look for them by the streetlight, where the light was better.
However, the scientists' belief that the physical laws discovered in laboratory experiments on earth apply throughout all time and space is certainly open to question. For example, just because electrical fields are seen to behave a certain way in the laboratory does not insure that they also operate in the same way at vast distances and at times billions of years ago. Yet such assumptions are crucial to the scientists' attempts to explain such things as the origin of the universe and the nature of faraway objects such as quasars. After all, we can't really go back billions of years in time to the origin of the universe, and we have practically no firsthand evidence at all of anything beyond our own solar system.
Even some prominent scientists recognize the risks involved in extrapolating conclusions about the universe as a whole from our limited knowledge. In 1980, Kenneth E. Boulding, in his presidential address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said: "Cosmology ... is likely to be very insecure, simply because it studies a very large universe with a very small and biased sample. We have only been looking at it carefully for a very small fraction of its total time span, and we know intimately an even smaller fraction of its total space."
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But not only are the cosmologists' conclusions insecure--it also seems that their whole attempt to make a simple mathematical model of the universe consistent with its observable features is fraught with fundamental difficulties, which we will now describe.
The Dreaded Singularity
One of the greatest problems faced by the big bang theorists is that although they are attempting to explain the "origin of the universe," the origin they propose is mathematically indescribable. According to the standard big bang theories, the initial condition of the universe was a point of infinitesimal circumference and infinite density and temperature. An initial condition such as this is beyond mathematical description. Nothing can be said about it. All calculations go haywire. It's like trying to divide a number by 0--what do you get? 1? ... 5? ... 5 trillion? ... ??? It's impossible to say. Technically, such a phenomenon is called a "singularity."
Sir Bernard Lovell, professor of radio astronomy at the University of Manchester, wrote of singularities, "In the approach to a physical description of the beginning of time, we reach a barrier at this point. The problem as to whether or not this really is a fundamental barrier to a scientific description of the initial state of the universe, and the associated conceptual difficulties in the consideration of a single entity at the beginning of time, are questions of outstanding importance in modern thought."
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As of yet, the barrier has not been surmounted by even the greatest exponents of the big bang theory. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg laments, "Unfortunately, I cannot start the film [his colorful description of the big bang] at zero time and infinite temperature."
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So we find that the big bang theory does not describe the origin of the universe at all, because the initial singularity is by definition indescribable.
Quite literally, therefore, the big bang theory is in trouble right from the very start. While the difficulty about the initial singularity is ignored or glossed over in popular accounts of the big bang, it is recognized as a major stumbling block in the more technical accounts by scientists attempting to deal with its actual mathematical implications. Stephen Hawking, Lucian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, and G.F.R. Ellis, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cape Town, in their authoritative book The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time point out, "It seems to be a good principle that the prediction of a singularity by a physical theory indicates that the theory has broken down."6 They add, "The results we have obtained support the idea that the universe began a finite time ago. However the actual point of creation, the singularity, is outside the scope of presently known laws of physics."
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Any explanation of the origin of the universe that begins with something physically indescribable is certainly open to question. And then there is a further difficulty. Where did the singularity come from? Here the scientists face the same difficulty as the religionists they taunt with the question, "Where did God come from?" And just as the religionist responds with the answer that God is the causeless cause of all causes, the scientists are now faced with the prospect of declaring a mathematically indescribable point of infinite density and infinitesimal size, existing before all conceptions of time and space, as the causeless cause of all causes. At this point, the hapless scientist stands convicted of the same unforgivable intellectual crime that he has always accused the saints and mystics of committing--making physically unverifiable supernatural claims. If he is to know anything at all about the origin of the universe, it would seem he would now have to consider the possibility of accepting methods of inquiry and experiment transcending the physical.
Attempted Solutions
Unwilling to face this distasteful prospect, theorists have proposed a multitude of variations on the big bang theory in an effort to sidestep the singularity problem. One approach has been to postulate that the universe did not begin with a perfect singularity. Sir Bernard Lovell states that the singularity in the big bang universe "has often been regarded as a mathematical difficulty arising from the assumption that the universe is uniform."
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The standard models for the big bang universe have perfect mathematical symmetry, and some physicists thought this was the cause of a singularity when they worked out the mathematical answers to the equations for the big bang's initial state at time zero. As a correction, some theorists introduced into their models irregularities similar to those of the observed universe. This, it was hoped, would give the initial state enough irregularity to prevent everything from being reduced to a single point. But this hope was dashed by Hawking and Ellis, who state that according to their calculations a big bang model with irregularities in the distribution of matter on the observed scale must still have a singularity in the beginning.
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The Question of Origins
The problem of the singularity is simply part of the larger problem of understanding the origin of the initial condition of the universe, whatever it may have happened to be. If a model of universal origins involves a singularity, that certainly creates severe theoretical difficulties. But even if the singularity can somehow be avoided, we are still confronted with the question of where the universe came from. Hoping to sidestep the whole issue of origins, some scientists have proposed the so-called "infinitely rebounding universe," a universe that expands, contracts to a singularity, and then again expands and contracts continually through the course of unlimited time. There is no beginning and no end, only an endless cycle. This resolves the problem of the origin of the universe by proposing that there is no origin and that the material universe has always existed.
But there are some serious problems with this model. First of all, no one has ever proposed a satisfactory mechanism for the bouncing. Futhermore, in The First Three Minutes physicist Steven Weinberg points out that with each successive bounce progressive changes must take place in the universe. This indicates that at some point there must be a beginning and not a regress extending over an infinite period of time.
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And thus again you confront the question of origins.
Another creative attempt to escape the necessity of dealing with the question of origins is the time-reverse rebounding universe model proposed by English astrophysicist Paul Davies. The universe would expand with time flowing forward and then collapse to a singularity. During the rebound, time flows backward as the universe expands and collapses again into a singularity, the same singularity from which it began its previous forward cycle. In this model, the past becomes the future, and the future becomes the past, thus making the statement "in the beginning" meaningless. This scenario gives one small indication of the many imaginative schemes the cosmologists have been forced to resort to in order to explain the origin of the universe.
The Inflationary Universe
Quite apart from the question of where the initial condition of the universe comes from, there are other problems troubling modern cosmologists. In order for the standard big bang theory to predict the distribution of matter we observe within the universe, the initial state has to be fine tuned to an incredible degree. The question then arises, how did the initial state get that way? Physicist Alan H. Guth of M.I.T. has proposed a version of the big bang model that automatically produces the required fine tunings, doing away with the necessity for artificially introducing them into the equations. Called the inflationary model, it assumes that within a rapidly expanding, superheated region of the universe a tiny section cools off and then begins to expand much more violently, just as supercooled water rapidly expands when it freezes. It is this phase of rapid expansion that resolves some of the difficulties inherent in the standard big bang theories.
But Guth's version has difficulties of its own. Guth has been forced to fine tune his own equations in order to get them to yield his inflationary universe. Thus he is confronted with the same difficulty his model was supposed to overcome. He had hoped to explain the fine tuning required in the big bang universe, but he requires unexplained tuning of his own. Guth and his collaborator Paul J. Steinhardt admit that in their model "calculations yield reasonable predictions only if the parameters are assigned values in a narrow range. Most theorists (including both of us) regard such fine tuning as implausible."
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They go on to express a hope that in the future mathematical theories will be developed that will enable them to give a plausible expression of their model.
This dependence on as yet unrealized future developments highlights another difficulty with Guth's model. The grand unified theories (GUTs) upon which the inflationary universe is based are completely hypothetical and "have little support from controlled experiments because most of their implications are impossible to measure in the laboratory."
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(The grand unified theories are very speculative attempts to tie together some of the basic forces of the universe.)
Another problem with Guth's theory is that it does not even attempt to explain the origin of the superheated expanding condition necessary for his inflation to take place. He has toyed with three hypothetical origins. The first is the standard big bang--according to Guth the inflationary episode would take place within the very early stages of it. This model, however, leaves us with the knotty singularity problem already discussed. The second option is to assume an initial condition of random chaos, in which some regions would be hot, others cold, some expanding, some contracting. The inflation would begin in an area that was superheated and expanding. But Guth admits there is no explanation for the origin of the imagined primordial random chaos.
The third alternative, favored by Guth himself, is that the superheated expanding region emerges quantum-mechanically from nothing. In an article that appeared in 1984 in Scientific American, Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt state, "The inflationary model of the universe provides a possible mechanism by which the observed universe could have evolved from an infinitesimal region. It is then tempting to go one step further and speculate that *the entire universe evolvedfrom literally nothing."
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As attractive as this idea may seem to scientists who balk at any suggestion of a supreme intelligence that designed the universe, it doesn't hold up under close examination. The literal "nothing" Guth is speaking of is a hypothetical quantum-mechanical vacuum state occurring in a still-to-be-formulated ultimate grand unified theory combining the equations of both quantum mechanics and general relativity. In other words, this vacuum state cannot now be described, even theoretically.
However, physicists have already come up with a description of a simpler kind of quantum-mechanical vacuum state, which can be visualized as containing a sea of "virtual particles," atomic fragments that almost but not quite exist. From time to time some of these subatomic particles pop out of the vacuum into material reality.
Such occurrences are called vacuum fluctuations. The fluctuations cannot be directly observed, but theories based upon them have been corroborated by laboratory experiments. What theoretically occurs is that a particle and antiparticle appear without cause from the vacuum and almost instantaneously negate each other and disappear. Guth and his colleagues postulate that instead of just a tiny particle, the entire universe popped out of the vacuum. And instead of instantaneously disappearing, our universe has somehow persisted for billions of years. The singularity problem is avoided by having the universe pop into being a little bit beyond the stage of singularity.
There are two basic shortcomings in this scenario. First, it involves a truly impressive speculative leap from our limited experience with subatomic particles in the laboratory to the universe as a whole. Stephen Hawking and G.F.R. Ellis sagely warn their colleagues who would without hesitation hurl themselves headlong into such wild speculation, "There is of course a large extrapolation in the assumption that the physical laws one determines in the laboratory should apply to other points of space-time where conditions may be different."
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Second, it is actually misleading to speak of the quantum-mechanical vacuum as "literally nothing." To describe a quantum-mechanical vacuum, even the relatively simple one of currently existing theory, requires chapters upon chapters of highly abstract mathematics. Such an entity is certainly "something," and this raises the interesting question of where such a complicated "vacuum" might come from.
At this point let us return to the original problem Guth was trying to solve with his inflationary model: trying to eliminate the need. for fine tuning the initial conditions in order to obtain the observed universe. As we have seen, he hasn't succeeded. But another problem is this: does any version of the big bang theory, including Guth's, really predict the observed universe? What Guth says he finally gets out of his complicated initial state is a universe about 4 inches across, filled with nothing more than a uniform superdense, superheated gas. This will expand and cool, but there is no reason to suppose that it will ever become more than a cloud of uniformly distributed gas. In fact, this is all that any of the big bang theories leave you with. So if Guth's present theory requires implausible tinkering simply to yield a universe consisting of uniformly distributed gas, then we can just imagine what would be necessary to get it to yield the universe as we know it today. In a good scientific explanation many complex phenomena can be deduced from a simple theoretical scheme, but in Guth's inflationary universe--and indeed in the standard big bang theories--we have just the opposite: from a very complex tangle of equations, we just get an expanding uniform ball of gas. Despite this, science magazines run articles about. the inflationary model, complete with pages of hightech illustrations, that give the impression Guth has finally achieved the ultimate goal--explaining the origin of the universe. Not quite, it seems. Perhaps they should run regular columns in the science magazines featuring the universal origin theories of the month.
We can just imagine the complexity of the initial conditions necessary to produce the universe as we know it, with all its varied structures and organisms. In our own universe, these conditions seem to have been arranged far too precisely to be explained simply by physical laws. Thus one could conceivably argue in favor of a designer. At this point some noted theorists, unable even to consider such an idea, take shelter of what they call "the anthropic principle."
They propose that the quantum-mechanical vacuum is producing universes by the millions. The great majority are not constituted so as to produce life. These universes therefore do not contain observers who could study their conditions. However, other universes, including our own, are constituted so as to have produced observers, and it is therefore not surprising that these observers would discover that their universe possesses some rather startlingly precise conditions to allow for the existence of life. According to this line of reasoning, the observers should not expect to find anything other than such improbably complex conditions. In effect, supporters of the anthropic principle take the very existence of human beings as the explanation of why the universe is so constituted as to have produced human beings. But this logical sleight of hand isn't an explanation of anything.
Another form of verbal jugglery is to say straight out, as many scientists do, that the universe has occurred by causeless chance. But it must be pointed out that this also is not at all an explanation. To say that something happens once by chance is in essence no different than simply saying "it happened"' or "there it is." And these statements do not qualify as scientific explanations. In the end you wind up knowing no more than you did before. In other words, by invoking either chance or the anthropic principle the scientists have not actually explained anything about the origin of the universe.
At this point, the theorists could perhaps forgive us for suggesting that their chosen methods might not be quite adequate for the task at hand. Indeed it appears, in addition to the problems we have already discussed, that general relativity and quantum mechanics, the two intellectual tools with which the cosmologists are attempting to define the development of the universe, contain certain flaws. It is true that these theories have been very successful in describing certain physical phenomena, but this does not prove they are perfect in all respects.
General relativity describes curved space-time and is an integral part of every current theory of universal origins, including the big bang theory and Guth's inflationary model. If general relativity is in need of revision in any way, then any universal theories based on it will also need to be revised.
One major difficulty with general relativity and Einstein's earlier theory of special relativity is that they rule out time as we commonly understand it. In Newtonian physics, time is treated as a variable separate from space. In this way, it is possible to chart the path of an object moving in space and time in the following way. At a particular point in time, the object is located at a particular point in space. As time varies, the position of the object in space varies.
But in Einstein's theory of relativity, this conception evaporates. Instead, time and space are wedded together in a fourdimensional space-time continuum. It is no longer possible to describe an object as occupying a particular point in space at a particular point in time. A relativistic description of an object will show its spatial and temporal existence in its entirety, merged from beginning to end, wherever it is happening. For instance, a human being would be depicted as the entire progression from embryo to corpse. Such constructs are labeled "space-time worms." And physics does not permit the space-time worm to say, "Now I am an adult and I used to be a child." There is no passage of time; the whole sequence exists as one unit. If we are space-time worms, we are just configurations of matter, not personalities with consciousness. Defining human beings in that way invalidates our individual perception of past, present, and future, and thus leads to the conclusion that such perceptions are unreal.
In a letter to Michael Besso, Einstein wrote, "You have to accept the idea that subjective time with its emphasis on the now has no objective meaning.
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When Besso died, Einstein tried to console his widow by writing, "Michael has preceded me a little in leaving this strange world. This is not important. For us who are convinced physicists, the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion, however persistent."
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This is in effect a denial of consciousness, which entails the reality of the present experienced moment. We experience our present form as real, whereas our infant form exists only in memory. As conscious beings we can definitely experience that we do occupy a particular bodily form at a particular point in time. Despite the fact that relativity theory converts a series of events into a single unified spatio-temporal entity, we actually experience in sequence different points in time. What all this means is that every theory of universal origins built around relativity theory fails to explain our conscious experience of time, thus making these theories, as they stand, incomplete and unacceptable.
Quantum Physics and Reality
All of the current cosmological theories also depend upon quantum mechanics, which defines the activity of atomic and subatomic particles. Quantum physics differs in fundamental ways from classical Newtonian physics. Classical physics concerns itself with the behavior of solid matter, but quantum physics is concerned only with mathematical expressions of observations and measurements. Solid material reality evaporates. Nobel-laureate physicist Werner Heisenberg declared, "It turns out that we can no longer talk of the behavior of the particle apart from the process of observation. In consequence, we are finally led to believe that the laws of nature which we formulate mathematically in quantum theory no longer deal with the particles themselves but with our knowledge of elementary particles."
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In addition to the experimental apparatus, the observer had to be brought into the analysis as an explicit element distinct from the apparatus.
But there are fundamental problems in applying quantum mechanics to the universe. By definition, the universe includes all observers, so you cannot have an outside observer of a universal physical system. In an attempt to formulate a version of quantum mechanics that does not require an outside observer, eminent physicists such as John Wheeler have proposed that the universe continuously splits into innumerable copies. Each parallel universe contains observers to see that particular set of quantum alternatives, and according to this theory all of these universes are real.
Reacting to this, Bryce D. Witt, writing in Physics Today, states, "I still recall the shock I experienced on first encountering the multiworld concept. The idea of 10 to the 100th plus slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies, which ultimately become unrecognizable, is not easy to reconcile with common sense. Here is schizophrenia with a vengeance."
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If scientists want a big bang theory of the origin of the universe that can be consistent with quantum mechanics, this is one of the bizarre hypotheses they are forced to come up with.
But even more problems lie ahead on the path of materialistic reduction that most scientists are treading. It's bad enough that both general relativity and quantum mechanics lead to bizarre and unrealistic consequences when applied to cosmological questions. But these difficulties are compounded to an exasperating degree by the fact that scientists' hopes to properly describe the universe and its beginning depend upon combining both theories. The proposed result would be a Grand Unified Theory (GUT) capable of describing all the forces at work in the universe by a single comprehensive mathematical expresssion. General relativity is required to explain the basic structure of space-time. Quantum mechanics is needed in order to explain the behavior of subatomic particles. Unfortunately these two theories apparently contradict each other.
The first step toward this mathematical integration is quantum field theory, which attempts to describe the behavior of electrons by a combination of quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of special relativity. This theory has scored some remarkable successes. Yet P.A.M. Dirac, the Nobel-prize-winning English physicist
who invented the theory, confessed, "It seems to be quite impossible to put the theory on a sound mathematical basis."
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The second and much more difficult step would be to combine general relativity with quantum mechanics, and no one has the faintest idea how to do this. No less an authority than Nobel-laureate physicist Steven Weinberg admits that it may take a century or two to get the mathematics together.20 The cosmologists say they need the GUT to describe the origin of the universe, and they don't have it yet. So that can only mean their big bang and inflationary models are without solid foundation.
Since the days of Newton and Galileo, the program of physical science has been to express everything in mathematical terms. Furthermore the mathematical description must be confirmed by observation and controlled experiments. We have shown that the big bang theories fail to conform to these requirements. Simplicity has also been stressed as a requirement of physical theories, and the big bang theories also fail in that respect, for they are becoming, as we have seen, progressively more outlandishly contorted with each new formulation. They are just what Galileo and Newton would have disliked--storytelling to fill in the gaps of knowledge.
The big bang theories would therefore appear to be something less than actual scientific explanations of the origin of the universe. Nevertheless, in popular magazines and television specials, as well as in the classroom, scientists deliberately give the public the impression that they have already succeeded in demonstrating exactly how the universe originated simply by physical laws. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What About Galaxies?
We have seen that the cosmologists' attempt to comprehend the universe within the narrow bounds of their narrow materialistic conceptions has failed to explain its origins. Moreover, we have seen that their theories do not even account for what they say is present in the universe now.
For instance, the big bang theory does not account for the existence of galaxies. Imagine a scientist of great genius who had knowledge of the current cosmological theories but no knowledge of observational astronomy. Would he be able to predict that galaxies would form? The answer is no. A universe made up of a uniformly distributed cloud of gas is the only result consistent with the standard formulations of the theory. This cloud would have a density of perhaps one atom per several cubic feet, making it little better than a perfect vacuum. To get anything else requires special modifications of the initial conditions of the universe, and scientists find such modifications difficult to justify. Traditionally, a scientific theory is considered acceptable if starting from the initial framework you can straightforwardly predict things. A theory that has to be monkeyed around with to a considerable degree to obtain valid predictions is of questionable value.
As Steven Weinberg says in The First Three Minutes, "The theory of the formation of galaxies is one of the great outstanding problems in astrophysics, a problem that today seems far from solution."
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Then without skipping a beat he says, "But that is another story." But no, wait a minute--that is exactly the story! If the big bang theory can't explain the initial cause of the universe or major features of the universe such as galaxies, then what does it explain? Not very much, it would seem.
Missing Mass
The big bang theory is supposed to explain the universe, but a major problem is that many features of the universe are not understood clearly enough to be the subject of such explanation. One big mystery is the problem of missing mass. Physicist David Schramm of the University of Chicago explains, "From all the light being emitted by the Milky Way, we can estimate that our galaxy contains the mass of about one hundred billion suns. But once we take this same object [the Milky Way] and see how it interacts with another galaxy, such as our neighbor Andromeda, we find that our galaxy is gravitating toward Andromeda as though it had a mass almost ten times as great."
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It thus appears that over 90% of the mass of the universe is missing. Ghostly subatomic particles called neutrinos have been put forward as the solution. Originally, however, the invisible neutrino was assigned no mass by physicists, but now it has suddenly been assigned mass sufficient to account for the missing matter in the universe as a whole. How convenient.
So even when we leave aside the questions of primal origins and get down to the picture of the universe as it is today, there are still many unanswered questions. The scientists will assert to the public with an air of absolute conviction that they know the universe extends x millions of light years and that it has existed for a total of y billion years. They say that they have identified all the major bodies in the universe for what they are--distant stars, galaxies, nebulae, quasars, and so forth. Yet even the local Milky Way galaxy is not clearly understood.
For example, in Scientific American noted astronomer Bart J. Bok wrote, "I remember the mid 1970s as a time when I and my fellow [Milky Way] watchers were notably self-assured ... we did not suspect it would soon be necessary to revise the radius of the Milky Way upward by a factor of three or more and to increase its mass by as much as a factor of 10."
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If such basic measurements recently had to be drastically revised after so many decades of observation, then what might the future hold? Will there be even more drastic revisions?
Even when we get down to our own solar system, we find there are fundamental problems. The traditional account for the origin of planets--that they have condensed from clouds of cosmic dust and gas--is on very shaky ground because the equations for the interactions of the gas clouds have never been satisfactorily solved. William McRae, professor of astronomy at England's Sussex University and past president of the Royal Astronomical Society, states, "The problem of the origin of the solar system is perhaps the most notable of all unsolved problems in astronomy."
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It should be clear at this point to any impartial onlooker that the strategy of materialistic reduction followed by cosmologists has not allowed them to arrive at firm conclusions about the origin and nature of the universe, despite their public posturing. There is certainly no compelling reason for anyone to insist that the ultimate answers to cosmological questions must be contained in simple mathematically expressed physical laws. Indeed, the quantitative method has proved inadequate for explaining many phenomena very close at hand, what to speak of explaining the vast universe. Therefore it is certainly too early to exclude alternative approaches, approaches that may involve nonphysical explanations--explanations involving principles that go beyond the known laws of physics.
A Different Picture of Reality
There may in fact be nonphysical causes at work in the history of the universe, and there may even be nonphysical regions of the cosmos as well. Physicist David Bohm admits, "The possibility is always open that there may exist an unlimited variety of additional properties, qualities, entities, systems, levels, etc., to which apply correspondingly new kinds of laws of nature."
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Thus it is quite possible that as our understanding of natural laws continues to evolve, a picture of reality quite different from the one most people now accept may emerge.
As we have already seen, with infinitely rebounding and infinitely splitting universes, some of the models and concepts proposed by the cosmologists already challenge our commonsense conception of things. Do not think that these strange ideas are out of the mainstream of scientific thought. All the notions we have considered so far are actually the most staid and respectable speculations.
Let us now look at some even more outlandish ideas currently running loose in the world of modern cosmology. Scientist John Gribbin, author of White Holes, a book summarizing these topics, admiringly calls them "the latest series of imaginative leaps made by the creative thinkers today we call scientists--rather than prophets, seers, or oracles."
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One is the white hole--a quasar that pours out galaxies in a cosmic gusher. Gribbin says, "Could the white holes actually fragment themselves so that galaxies would reproduce themselves like amoebas, by parthenogenesis? That sounds so unlikely in terms of our everyday experience of the behavior of matter that it's worth looking at the standard theories of galaxy formation to show just how hopeless they are as explanations of the real Universe. Fissioning white holes might seem like a solution of last resort, but when no other theory provides any kind of satisfactory solution, that solution is surely the one we must accept."
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Another idea seriously entertained by cosmologists is space-time tunnels or "cosmic wormholes." First seriously discussed in 1962 by physicist John Wheeler in his book Geometrodynamics, the idea has entered into popular consciousness through fantasy movies such as the Star Wars series, where starships hurtle through hyperspace, thus making intergalactic journeys that would normally take millions of years at the speed of light. Some versions of the wormholes see them as entrances to the past and future, or even to other universes.
In the early part of this century, Einstein posited a fourth dimension; now, as the implications of his gravitational field equations are being more fully explored, extra dimensions are being added. Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist, writes, "In addition to the three space dimensions and the one time dimension we perceive in daily life, there are seven extra space dimensions that have hitherto gone unnoticed."
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The point of these descriptions is to show that even the material scientists are being compelled to put forward explanations of the universe that stretch the mind to an incredible degree. But must we stretch our minds' only in the directions pointed out by material science? Perhaps minds can be stretched in even other directions. If we can contemplate higher material dimensions, then why not dimensions of an entirely different sort? There is a definite need for new categories of ideas, ideas that will undoubtedly challenge the currently held reductionistic scientific strategy for understanding the universe . That strategy includes the idea that the universe is ultimately simple and can be exhaustively described in terms of quantitative laws.
But suppose this is not so. It certainly appears that the universe is unlimitedly complex and has aspects that may not be approached by quantitative methods. If so, what strategy can be used to gain knowledge about it? The many complex and orderly features of the universe suggest that its cause is an intelligent designer. This idea brings to mind the following possible strategy. If the underlying cause of the universe is a supreme intelligent being, then there is hope that we can understand the ultimate nature of reality by obtaining information from this being. That there is such a being is certainly a bold proposition, but no more so than the proposal that everything can be explained by simple, mathematically expressed physical laws. And just as in the case of the quantitative strategy, the value of this alternative strategy can only be judged by how successfully it can be applied. It would be unfair to reject it without seeing how well it can be used to gain practical knowledge about reality.
To many the idea of a supreme intelligence will bring to mind the world view of Christian fundamentalism, to which people will have varying reactions. But alternatives to the current theories of cosmologists are not limited to the fundamentalist Christian interpretation of Genesis. Just as there are many possible materialistic explanations of the origin of the universe, there are many possible explanations involving a personal creator.
For those seeking to broaden their intellectual options, one very rich source of ideas for understanding the cosmos and our place in it is the Vedic knowledge of ancient India. The Vedas include an extremely sophisticated cosmology. Some of the concepts will be radically different from those now being propagated; others will be surprisingly complementary with current scientific findings. For example, Carl Sagan, while in India filming a segment for his Cosmos television series, said, "The most sophisticated ancient cosmological ideas come from India. Hinduism [based on the Vedas] is the only religion in which time scales correspond to scientific cosmology." He noted that the sages of ancient India held that the universe undergoes progressive cycles of creation and destruction over time scales lasting billions of years.
As in modern science, a basic unit of matter is the atom (in Sanskrit, the aëu), but the Vedas also include particles of consciousness called jivatmas as well as an integrated superior conscious principle called the paramatma (Supersoul). The Supreme Being, seen as the source of a variety of physical and universal energies, is described as a personality simultaneously omnipresent and localized, in whom the universe exists and who exists within every atom of the universe. As we shall see throughout this magazine, such ideas may give a more complete and coherent understanding of the origin and nature of the universe. Consciousness in particular is a fundamental aspect of reality that cannot be ignored in theories that attempt to comprehensively explain the cosmos.
At a time when scientists are proposing such things as multiply-splitting universes, cosmic wormholes for traveling from one space-time region to another, universes in which time reverses, an eleventh dimension of space-time, etc., the ancient transcendental conceptions found in the Vedas should not be dismissed without due consideration. The big bang and inflationary models, which rest on the shakiest of mathematical and theoretical foundations, have certainly failed to provide adequate answers to fundamental questions about the the universe and the galaxies and planets and life forms we find within it today. Perhaps a superconsciousness, a supremely intelligent designer--and not a set of impersonal mathematical equations--is the ultimate explanation for the universe that now seems so inexplicable.
REFERENCES
1. Erwin Schrodinger, What Is Life? and Mind and Matter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 68.
2. Richard Wolkomir, "Quark City," Omni, (February 198,4), p. 41.
3. Kenneth E. Boulding, "Science: Our Common Heritage, Science, Vol. 207 (February 22, 1980), p. 834.
4. Sir Bernard Lovell, "The Universe," The Random House Encyclopedia (New York: Random House, Inc., 1977), p.37.
5. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes (New York: Bantam, 1977), p. 94.
6. S. W. Hawking and G. F. R. Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 362--63.
7. S.W. Hawking and G. F. R. Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, p. 364.
8. Sir Bernard Lovell, "The Universe" The Random House Encyclopedia, p. 37.
9. S. W. Hawking and G. F. R. Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, p. 360.
10. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, p. 143
11. Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, "The Inflationary Universe," Scientific American, (May 1984), p. 127.
12. Mitchell Waldrop, "Before the Beginning," Science 84 (January/February 1984), p. 51.
13. Alan H. Guth and Paul J. Steinhardt, "The Inflationary Universe," Scientific American, p. 128.
14. S. W. Hawking and G. F. R. Ellis, The Large Scale Structure of Space-time, p. 1.
15. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1980), p. 20.
16. Ilya Prigogine, From Being to Becoming, p. 20.
17. Werner Heisenberg, "The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics," Daedalus, Vol. 87, No. 3 (1958), pp. 95--108.
18. Bryce D. Witt, "Quantum Mechanics and Reality," Physics Today (September 1970), p. 33.
19. P. A. M. Dirac, "The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature," Scientific American (May 1963), pp. 45--53.
20. David Hunter, "The Grand Unification of Physics" Softalk (March 1984), p. 91.
21. Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes, p. 68.
22. Marcia Bartusiak, "Missing: 97 % of the Universe," Science Digest (December 1983), p. 53.
23. Bart J. Bok, "The Milky Way Galaxy," Scientific American (March 1981), p. 94.
24. William McRae, "The Origin of Earth, Moon, and Planets," in The Encyclopedia of Ignorance, ed. Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith (New York: Pergamon Press, Ltd., 1977), p. 48.
25. David Bohm, Causality and Chance in Modern Physics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, Ltd., 1957) p. 133.
26. John Gribbin, White Holes (New York: Delacorte Press. 1977), p. 9.
27. John Gribbin, White Holes, p. 107.
28. Paul Davies, "The Eleventh Dimension," Science Digest (January 1984), p. 72.
Courtesy Origins Magazine
(b)
The diagram above is an attempt to plot the positions of the galaxies we can see from Earth that are located in a ninety degree field of view centered on the Virgo Galaxy Cluster. The distance of each galaxy that was used to make this plot is computed by presuming that its actual distance is proportional to its redshift value - as modern astronomers do. As a result, the Virgo cluster itself takes on the shape of two long fingers pointed directly at Earth. These have become known as "The Fingers of God". (Shown here in red.) Long cosmic sized fingers pointed directly at Earth! This result is false on its face. It is independent proof that the "redshift equals distance" assumption is nonsense. Again - Copernicus discovered many years ago that the Earth was not the center of anything! A galaxy cluster should have a more symmetrical shape than this. Arp demonstrates that the Virgo cluster is much more compact than it appears in this diagram. The high redshift galaxies in the upper regions of the diagram are not far away - they are just very young! And much closer to us than this diagram would indicate. How astrophysicists can continue to look at this diagram and not see that something is very wrong with their theory is evidence of how disconnected from reality they have become. It is ironic to remember that Galileo got into trouble with the Church by defending the work of Copernicus. Copernicus' voice is coming down to us today through the ages - "If you think that all the galaxies in the Virgo Cluster are in a couple of straight lines that point directly at Earth, you are wrong!" Arp is, indeed, today's Galileo. 
