A growing number of cosmologists are becoming increasingly dissatisfied (or is that frustrated?) with the Big Bang Theory. One such person is David F. Crawford who recently posited a static theory of the universe which he claims better explains the properties of the cosmos than the Big Bang and avoids the nagging problems of dark matter and dark energy.From Technology Review:
The idea that the universe began in an event called the Big Bang some 13 billion years ago has a special place in science and in our society. We like the idea of a beginning.Continue reading.
And the evidence is persuasive. Distant galaxies all appear to be moving away from us at great speed, which is exactly what you'd expect if they were created in a Big Bang type event many billions of years ago. Such an event might also have left an echo, exactly like the one we can see as the cosmic microwave background radiation.
The Big Bang seems so elegant an explanation that we're prepared to overlook the one or two anomalies that don't quite fit, like the fact that distant galaxies aren't travelling fast enough to have moved so far since the Big Bang, a problem that inflation was invented to explain. Then there are the problems of dark matter and dark energy, which still defy explanation.
So a legitimate question, albeit an uncomfortable one, is whether there is an alternative hypothesis that also explains the observations. We looked at one here and today, David Crawford at the University of Sydney in Australia gives us another. He says all this can be explained just as well by a static universe in which spacetime is curved. He says this explains most of the major characteristics of our universe without the need for dark matter or dark energy. Neither is there any need for inflation in a static universe.
