The Big Bust?

Modern physics has always told us that the universe began with a bang! The idea of the universe starting with a giant explosion explained the red and blue shift we see when we look at the stars in our night sky. That is we see that many objects in space are moving away from us at an extremely high speed which causes light to change frequencies, ie. Red Shifting.

The other thing that the Big Bang explains is the microwave background noise we measure when looking to the sky. Scientists have always said this is residue (or an echo) of the Big Bang.

The one giant glaring problem with the Big Bang theory is that we need to do some mathematical gymnastics to make it work. You are asking, what do I mean? Well, have you heard of Dark Matter or Dark Energy? These are both tricks of the trade that physicists have used to make the Big Bang model work, and depending on the model this Dark Matter is supposed to make up as much as 75% of the universe.

Its kind of funny when you think about it, that serious scientists rely on something they have no proof of to explain the universe. The only proof that Dark Matter exists is that it helps make the theory work. This sounds as bad as religious folks pointing to the bible as proof of god.

Physicist Wun-Yi Shu of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan has a theory which explains the universe without a Big Bang, which has no need for "Dark Matter/Dark Energy" to explain our observations.

Shu's theory is essentially that time and space are not independent entities, rather they can be converted back and forth between each other. With the speed of light being the conversion factor between the two. Couple to this, mass and length are interchangeable in a relationship in which the conversion factor depends on both the gravitational constant and the speed of light (neither of which need be constant).

According to Shu, as the Universe expands, mass and time are converted to length and space and vice versa as it contracts. This leads to the conclusion that the universe has no beginning or end, just alternating periods of expansion and contraction.

You can download his full paper here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.1750

From that page:

In the late 1990s, observations of Type Ia supernovae led to the astounding discovery that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. The explanation of this anomalous acceleration has been one of the great problems in physics since that discovery. In this article we propose cosmological models that can explain the cosmic acceleration without introducing a cosmological constant into the standard Einstein field equation, negating the necessity for the existence of dark energy. There are four distinguishing features of these models: 1) the speed of light and the gravitational "constant" are not constant, but vary with the evolution of the universe, 2) time has no beginning and no end, 3) the spatial section of the universe is a 3-sphere, and 4) the universe experiences phases of both acceleration and deceleration. One of these models is selected and tested against current cosmological observations of Type Ia supernovae, and is found to fit the redshift-luminosity distance data quite well.

I have always hated the notion of Dark Matter, anytime someone needs to pull a number out of the air to make their science work, I am very suspect. While Shu's theory may not be the last word on our model of the universe, I for one am thrilled that physicists are looking for new theories to explain the universe that don't rely on voodoo numbers to make them work.