What makes the Big Bang theory so successful? How were alternatives ruled out? What are the electric universe and steady state theories? Do any other options remain, like conformal cyclic cosmology? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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EPISODE TRANSCRIPTION (AUTO-GENERATED)

I think that the big bang theory is pretty awesome. No, no, I'm not talking about the long running sitcom I. I actually didn't watch too much of it. And what I did watch, I thought was, um, OK, I guess. But anyway, I mean the actual theory of the universe, its histories, its origins, the cosmological big bang theory in the Big Bang theory is the theory. The MVP, the gold medalist, the reigning champion, the sole surviving explanation for how our universe works on the biggest spatial scales and the longest temporal scales. It's it's it. And the Big Bang theory didn't just come about because a bunch of scientists were bored 100 years ago and wanted to make a nice sounding theory. You know, science is argumentative. Science is debated. Science is contentious. Sometimes science is even dirty. Theories advance to the front and become successful not by making great sweeps of insight but by simply surviving at any one time.

There are multiple theories, and and this doesn't just apply to cosmology and the Big Bang theory, any field of science at any point of time. Whenever there is some sort of mystery, there are multiple theories out there, and all of the theories are interesting and creative and feature leaps of reason and insight and imagination and our power, and are trying to explain something really funky going on in our universe. Whether it is the, you know, the the largest observations in cosmology that we can possibly make or something you might see under the microscope. There are always multiple theories. There are more theories than there are scientists, because if you leave a theorist alone for long enough, they will generate more than one idea. I guarantee it. And so there are all these theories swimming out there, and and they what they face is the evidence.

And usually what happens is that there is some new observation that we don't know how to explain, and then we come up with a bunch of theories to try to explain it. We do our best to ground these theories based on what we already know and then push past it a little bit to encompass the new knowledge. The new observation and at first multiple ideas can explain the same observations. Some might have a stronger case than others. Some might be more well grounded than others. Some might be more speculative than others. But I, I in the end, they're all there to explain the new observations. And then we go out and we make more observations and we do more tests and we slowly winnow away the theories that don't work. And the theories that don't work are usually pretty good theories. They're elegant. They're interesting. They're fascinating. Uh, they just they just didn't work out. And then hopefully after enough time, one theory remains that is able to explain all the observations.

This is the case, like I said, with every single scientific theory out there. And so, of course, it's the case with the Big Bang theory, the current cosmological paradigm, which we call Lambda CD M. Uh, this this is a a cathedral built with the human intellect, and it's built on top of the graveyard of other failed theories that explain or attempted to explain the observations that we see at the very largest scale. So, just for fun today, let's discuss some theories of the universe that didn't quite make the cut. Uh, we'll start with the eternal universe. Uh, this This is a long running idea where you just assume that the universe is the way the universe is that you look out and you see a bunch of stars and Galaxies or whatever and and actually, when we had this theory, we didn't know about other Galaxies. But the UN did. It didn't matter. You see a bunch of stars and Galaxies and whatever, and you just assume that this is just it, that you look in any random direction and you'll see pretty much the same stuff.

And if we were looking today or 1000 years ago or a billion years in the future, it's pretty much the same. This is what we call the eternal universe. It was the prevailing model for how the universe worked, uh, up until the early 20th century, and and this even works, if you want to Sprinkle in a little bit of of religion here, a little bit of divine creation and OK, there was some starting point. There was a There was a moment where let there be light. But then after that, the universe was just the universe that you you know, if you look back at and you read religious texts and and even philosophical text over thousands of years. There may be some creation point, but then, after that, the universe is pretty much the same there. You know, there might be ages or some some long forgotten, long, distant time when things were a little bit different, like different people were in charge. Or maybe things were better. But the physics stayed the same. And this even works in in mythologies or beliefs or philosophies that are sick.

Like where, uh, the the world. Constantly, the universe constantly changes itself, But the whole structure of it changing itself is itself a form of eternal universe. Will come back to this, and that's no, that's not a pot. And we're actually gonna come back to this topic later. Um, but that's still like there's some sort of universal set of laws that got drive the turning of, uh, the Great Wheel of time. And that's still a form of eternal universe. This this is just the way it is, folks. It's not a bad idea, you know, we had to modify it over the past few 100 years, as we got more and more observations, we discovered that planets move. Uh, In fact, the earth moves that it's not just sitting here staying all still like that. That was a bit of a of a revolution. Uh, then we realized that stars move. We realize that stars can blow up and stars can go away, and and so there's definitely a lot going on in the heavens. But, uh, we still maintained this eternal universe idea at the very largest scales.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Stars blow up planets crash into each other or whatever, but at the biggest scales, the universe is simply the universe. This idea of the eternal universe was so prevalent and so common that when Einstein developed his theory of general relativity and he applied it to the universe because why not the generic default equations of relativity said, Hey, Einstein, uh, the universe is changing and evolving with time, and he's like, nine. No, no, no, no. Uh so he added, in a constant to make the universe be static, make it be eternal. Um, he also called that his greatest blunder, uh, it it's comforting. It's simple. It feels good. You're just like, you know what universe You're OK and and there are parts of you I don't like, but I can't change it. And I can just move on with my life. And so it's also wrong And the big observation, you know, 100 20 years ago, it was not a bad idea because all observations indicated that the universe was static and eternal and unchanging.

And then Edwin Hubble discovered the expansion of the universe. He discovered that Galaxies are receding away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they received away from us. That's a dynamic, changing, evolving universe. The Galaxies aren't just moving around randomly. That would have been one thing and be like, OK, the universe is still eternal. We just have these things called Galaxies and they move around a bit just like stars and planets. No, the no. The entire universe is dynamic, the entire universe is evolving. And there was this observation that kicked off the Big Bang revolution because it was obvious that the eternal universe was was wrong. The universe is not eternal. The universe changes with time. But that leads me into my second failed theory today, which is the steady state theory. Uh, you know, big bang theory was an early explanation for the expansion of the universe. Why do we see Galaxies receding away from us? Because the universe is getting bigger. It's literally getting larger. It's There's literally more volume, more space in the universe today than there was yesterday.

So if it's dynamic, it means in the past it was smaller. The Big Bang theory. The mathematics of it incorporates something called the cosmological principle, which is saying, You know, roughly throughout the universe, everything is the same. You know, if I look at a random patch, that's big enough and I see a bunch of Galaxies in a particular arrangement and I look at another patch that's big enough somewhere over here, uh, you know, the arrangement will be different, but all the statistics will be the same. The same number small Galaxies, same number, medium Galaxies, same average distance between Galaxies, et cetera, et cetera. So the Big Bang theory, our our current model of the universe incorporates this cosmological principle where the universe is roughly the same throughout space. Well, steady state theory. 11 ups that and says, Hey, what if the universe was roughly the same through space and through time. Hm? OK, How is that? Not literally the eternal universe that we just disproved of the expansion of the universe, the way steady state theory works.

And this is, uh, credited to astronomer Fred Hoyle. He said OK, in big Bang theory, the universe used to be smaller, and now it's bigger in steady state model. Yes, Galaxies are always receding away from each other, but there is new material being generated to replace it, so it looks like it's expanding. But really, it's been expanding forever, and there's been more and more stuff created or generated to maintain an average density. So in big bang theory, the density of the universe is slowly going down. All the same matter is getting more and more diluted in steady state theory. The density stays constant because there's always new generation of matter as we go along. And, yeah, it's expanding. But it's been expanding forever and will continue forever. So it's like a twist on the eternal universe idea. And if you're like, hey, where would this matter come from?

What is creating? If this sounds a little weird, well, Fred Hoyle would shoot right back and say, Well, big bang theory says matter was created out of nowhere, so you actually don't have much of an argument. In fact, it was Fred Hoyle who coined the term Big Bang as a as a derogatory way, or at least a snarky way of describing the Big Bang theory. Uh, he was on a radio program, he says he wasn't being snarky or derogatory, But, you know, we all know what's up now. For decades, there was a big debate between the two, because all we had at the time in the early 20th century after Edwin Hubble's observations was that Galaxies were receding away from us. So either that means the universe is getting bigger. Or it means that the universe is always expanding and always replacing and replenishing itself. Eventually, there are two sets of observations that killed steady state theory. One was the observation of these things called quasars, these super bright radio sources who cares about super bright radio sources?

Well, the the weird thing about the super bright radio sources is that they were only found in the distant universe. There are no quasars close to us. They're always far from us, and in the big bang model. This this isn't weird at all, because in the Big Bang model, the universe changes with time. The universe of yesterday is a different place than the universe day. There's a different density of matter. There's a different arrangement of Galaxies, so you can have quasars far away when our universe was younger. And then something happened to make the quasars go away in the present-day universe. In steady state theory, that shouldn't be the case. If there are quasars far away, there should be quasars close by because the physics of the universe, the densities of the universe, everything should be the same throughout eternity. So we should see quasars everywhere, and we don't. The next thing we found was the cosmic microwave background. And like once you have an afterglow light pattern that surrounds us on all sides, matching what we predict from the Big Bang theory where the universe was at one time so small and so hot and so dense it was a plasma.

And then it wasn't and it generated the CMB. You don't get that from a steady state model from a universe that has always been here through eternity and is constantly replenishing yourself. There shouldn't be AC MB, but there was. And so by by steady state theory, uh, and and the success of the Big Bang model caused a radical rethinking of the order of the cosmos. You know, once we observe quasars, once we observe the CMB, it's it was really game over for eternal universe, steady state theory, any kind of model where the universe at the largest scales is constant in time, it simply isn't. Our universe was radically different in the past. It will be radically different in the future. And this is a radical reimagining of how our cosmos works. Any mythology, any religion, any non-physical cosmology, even if there are creation events or cyclic events, the universe is just the way the universe is.

But that is not the story we get from the Big Bang theory, which is one of the most powerful lessons from it is that our universe itself is a dynamical, changing, evolving entity. Before I continue, I want to let you know that this show is brought to you by the wonderful folks at better help. That's better help dot com I. I know a lot of you listen to this show as a form of therapy. A as a way of, of escaping the world and and just going among the stars on this wonderful journey. Uh, I am a big advocate for therapy. I personally see a therapist, and you would be surprised if you don't currently see a therapist how much they can really help you Just navigate a difficult life just like you see a doctor to help you with physical conditions, you should see a therapist Better help dot com is a way to do that. That's convenient. It's affordable. Uh, these are licensed professional counselors that you can connect to online a range of expertise worldwide.

It really is an invaluable resource. Uh, as a listener, you can get 10% off your first month by visiting our sponsor at better help dot com slash spaceman. You can join 1 million people who have taken charge of their mental health again. That's better. Help. HE LP dot com slash spaceman. We're gonna fast forward to be here for the next one. The next one is called the Mix Master Universe, literally named after a brand of kitchen blenders. I'm sorry, but the time frame. Here is the late 19 sixties. Big Bang theory is pretty dominant. Steady state is no more. Everything is groovy. We're pretty proud of ourselves because the seventies haven't happened yet. Uh, but the Big Bang theory had some weaknesses. One of the biggest problems and I've talked about this problem before is the horizon problem. We have a pretty lumpy universe, you know. There's like a galaxy over here, and then a big empty void over there that's that's relatively lumpy.

But at the very biggest scales, our universe is pretty smooth. If I look at the average temperature of the cosmic microwave background over here, it's very, very, very similar to the average temperature way over there. And if I look at, say, the average distribution of Galaxies over here and the average distribution over there, they're pretty much the same. So So how do you get a lumpy universe, a chunky universe that at large scales is somehow smoothed out. This is a problem, because in the amount of time that the universe has existed 13 and change billion years, there isn't enough time to have both to have both smooth uniformity and big scales where everyone talks to each other. Everything evens out. But then at small scales have all these these big, big differences. Uh, it you can't have both. Either there isn't enough time and you just get a a choppy, lumpy universe. But then one side of the universe should look different than the other.

Or there has been enough time to smooth everything out and you get even even this on all on the biggest of scales. But if you've had time to smooth it out, it should be smooth. It's like having smooth peanut butter and chunky peanut butter in the same jar. It that's just not how it works. You can't have both folks. I'm sorry. So one solution is called the Mix Master Universe, uh, proposed by general relative theorist Charles Misner, who said maybe the early universe was really chaotic instead of just smoothly expanding In the early days, uh, space time itself was was vibrating, and patches of the universe would expand and others would contract and they would crash into each other. Uh, you know, and there was this brief period of time where everything got mixed up before the general gradual expansion of like, settled down. There's all sorts of sloshing of gravitational fields. You You can imagine the inside of a kitchen blender and apply that to the early universe. And you basically have the mix. Master cosmology.

It wasn't a bad idea. It wasn't a bad idea, but, uh, in an an alternative theory called inflation eventually won out. I've done episodes on inflation. I encourage you to listen to them. Inflation turned out to be much more elegant. Uh, much simpler, Uh, was able to solve the horizon problem and other problems in cosmology and has been, uh, to some extent, observation experimentally verified. Uh, whereas the mix master cosmology, it it it couldn't produce. Even though it was a cool idea, it couldn't actually reproduce the observations that we see in in our universe. So? So Inflation one and mix Master was out my next one. My next one failed theories of the universe. The electric universe. Now, now hear me out on this one. Hans Alphen, Swedish physicist. Super smart. Basically invents Magneto Hydrodynamics. What is that? It's the physics of plasmas. So you've got a plasma.

You've got some charged particles. You've got electric fields. You've got magnetic fields to my favorite of the fields. And when you're trying to do the physics of a plasma, uh, it gets kind of complicated. But then here comes Alphin and develops the theory of how to deal with these kinds of problems and invents an entire field. A branch of physics called magneto Hydrodynamics. Plasmas are kind of important. We see plasmas in a lot of places. So he ended up winning the Nobel Prize in 1970. He was like Mr Plasma. He had an awesome theory. Magneto Hydrodynamics is super successful, super powerful. He had lots of ideas. He noticed that plasmas are everywhere as our magnetic fields, and he kind of took things a little bit too far. His basic argument was that, you know, gravity is really lame. The gravitational force is super duper weak. The electromagnetic force, however, is way strong. Is super strong. It's It's an awesome force.

Electromagnetism for the wind all the time. You know, head to head competition pound for pound. Electromagnetism is always gonna be gravity. I mean, that's obvious. But where Alphin went off the rails a little bit is that he argued that gravity is essentially meaningless that gravity is so weak. It's so useless as a force that it's too weak to do anything. And I know you're thinking like, Well, what about, like the solar system and the orbit of mercury and the Apollo missions and and you know, everything in space Well, he argued, it was all a big mistake and that we were barking up the wrong tree. And yes, we had developed these fancy gravitational theories. But they were missing the mark, that we were adding too much complexity to the universe and that we could more simply explain phenomena in space by appealing to electricity and magnetism and, most importantly, Magneto hydrodynamics, which he invented. He said that the physics of plasma could explain everything. It could explain the solar system.

It could explain the formation of the planets. It could explain orbits, it could explain the whole entire universe, He said, that our universe was composed of big giant bubbles where you had big bubbles of matter and then big bubbles of antimatter, and these were expanding up against each other, be just through electrostatic repulsion like the material was was repulsing itself and expanding. And then there were collisions these regions between the bubbles where, uh, there was understandably a lot going on and that this is what we would see as the quasars in the in the high energy, distant universe was really these these domains rubbing up against each other Sounds cool. You know, I'm not gonna knock anyone for developing a cool idea, even if it's a little unorthodox and out of the box. Uh, but there are a few problems with the electric universe. In fact, the electric universe idea never really gained a lot of traction because it it was It was wrong from the start, but he he tried, uh, like, there are a few problems, um, plasmas at large scales.

When you look at big chunks of the universe, there are equal numbers of protons and electrons, so the electromagnetic force kind of gets neutralized out. And if, like, if you look at a plasma inside a plasma, there's all sorts of crazy physics Nobel Prize winning physics right there. But then you as soon as you go outside the plasma and there's a bunch of electrons and protons and they're all mixed up, you don't feel any electromagnetic force because it's all been canceled out. Uh, he the electric universe cannot explain the properties of the cosmic microwave background. The electric universe cannot explain the Hubble law. You say it's one thing to say, Yeah, we live in an expanding universe. Anyone can say that. But you have to get the Hubble law, which is that when Galaxies are twice as far away, they're receding twice as quickly, and when they're four times further away, they're receding four times as quickly. That's a very peculiar relationship that you don't get generically from just a random, expanding universe. You need a very special kind of expanding universe, like one where space time itself is expanding. That gets you the Hubble law.

The electric universe does not. It also does not predict the abundance of the elements. Uh, it turns out we know what quasars are. They're radio Galaxies. Uh, they're not places where domain walls are rubbing up against each other. Also, if there's all this matter in antimatter regions hitting each other, there should be some high energy photons coming from the distant universe, which they they aren't, uh, electric universe, I would say, is the number one alternative to standard cosmology among people who are not scientists and want to be outside of the mainstream is the number one. Hey, hey, hey, Paul, I've got a theory subject in my email inbox. Uh, theories are great. Ideas are wonderful. But what really matters is patreon. That's right. Patreon dot com slash PM Southern is your contributions that make a difference in this universe? I. I mean evidence I. I meant to say evidence, not patreon. What matters is the evidence. You can have a great idea. You can think that the universe is all electric and that gravity doesn't matter.

Great. Confront the evidence. Take your ideas seriously. Look at charge. Neutrality. Look at the cosmic microwave background. Look at Hubble Law. Hubble's Law. Look at the lack of high energy photons. Look at the abundance and formation of the elements. All of these things look at the nature of quasars. All of these things are understood in the framework of the big Bang theory. And in fact, some are the major triumphs of the Big Bang theory. The electric universe is not able to account for any of them. And so, yeah, Hans Alen went to his grave pursuing the electric universe idea. Uh and that's that's about as as far as it went. Lastly, perhaps the biggest hurdle when contemplating the Big Bang theory is that it has a beginning. There's a start, an initiation. There was a before the universe, and then there is a A during the universe. The bit we're in now, this is a part of the Big Bang theory. At one point, our universe was so small it was an infinitely tiny point.

Uh, we don't know exactly what went down then. We don't know if there was a a time before, but like, no matter what, that's a hard pill to swallow because immediately you start asking questions like, Well, where did it come from? So there are many attempts to replace the big Bang theory with some other preexisting process. You say OK, I get it. The big bang started, but then what triggered the big bang? What was there before? What was there some? Was there some sort of physical process? If you just replace the Big Bang with a one off set of physical circumstances, well, then you haven't made much intellectual progress because you've just replaced the mystery of the Big Bang in this apparent, seemingly singular special event with some other seemingly random special event. So you haven't gone far, so almost always when you want to replace the Big Bang theory with a preexisting process, you end up with a cyclic process where the Big Bang, our big bang in our universe, is just one part of a much larger, longer cycle where, instead of just one big bang, there have been, say, an infinite number of big bangs before us, and there'll be an infinite number of big bangs after us.

So these are models that don't try to eliminate the Big Bang itself, but try to put it inside of a larger framework that is largely cyclic. You know what, maybe what we see as a big bang and CMB and a phase of expansion is just one of many repeated cycles. There are many variations. There are many ideas out there. Perhaps the most popular in the popular imagination is Roger Penrose Conformal Cyclic theory. Roger Penrose won a Nobel Prize for his theoretical work on black holes. Overall, smart guy came up with the a cyclic universe idea that is very popular in public imagination. The conformal cyclic theory, even though it has a fancy name, is pretty straightforward. You say? OK, at one time in the past, our universe was pretty boring. You know, it got interesting. It got interesting for a little bit. You know, uh, a matter formed, uh, clusters group. Together, we get the large scale structure, life evolves, you know, we take some selfies and then we move on.

Uh, but then, in the far, far, far, far, far distant future our universe will expand, all the lights will go out, matter will dilute, and it's gonna be boring again in the future. And we know the universe was boring in the past. That's that's one of the major cornerstones of inflation is that at the largest scales, the universe is boring. That means in the early universe, the universe was boring. And then it got interesting. So maybe there's a connection. If we had a boring past and we'll have a boring future, maybe there's a connection. I've been emphasizing that conformal cyclic theory is popular in the public imagination because it's not very popular in physics circles because, well, well, there is no physics like There's no math, there's no technical journal article. It's just a rough sketch and a of an idea that that's literally all. All there is, there is. There is no journal article that you can point to that clarifies the math of how this works of how you go from a boring past to a boring future. Uh, Roger Penrose idea says OK, in the far, far, far distant future, the universe is boring, and then big bangs happen out of that naturally.

But those are words and and in physics, we deal with math so we can actually make predictions and connect to the reality that we observe. And there is no math. There's no actual theory here. It's it's more of an idea, and even the idea doesn't really hold up. It requires that all matter eventually decay all matter. Every proton, every electron eventually has to go away. Otherwise, the far future universe isn't boring enough to lead to a new big Bang. As long as there's still something going on. You don't have the conditions that mimic the very early vacuum of the first moments of the universe. And so, yeah, conformal stick like theory isn't much of a theory, and it's not popular in physics because there's nothing to talk about. Honestly, if Roger Penrose wasn't Roger Penrose, if no one knew what who he was, and no one would have even paid attention to this idea, Um, I actually get a lot of questions on conformal cyclic theory, and this episode was originally gonna be about just conformal cyclic theory. But it would have been, seriously, a five minute episode, so I needed to expand it a little bit so I could at least talk about it.

I call conformal cyclic theory a failed theory because it never even got started. It's like a stillborn theory. It it's it's not even wrong. It's It's not even a fully fleshed out idea, but it's not the only cyclic universe idea out there. There are other versions. Uh, there's one called bouncing brains where you have these, uh, higher dimensional structures that you find in string theory. And then they, uh, uh collide against each other and then bounce off and then reat attract and then collide. And every time they collide, they spark a new big bang, um, their ideas in loop quantum gravity where you can run the universe in reverse and get a big crunch, and then it reaches a small finite point and then rebounds and explodes again. These ideas are interesting, but all cyclic universe ideas require super speculative physics and currently don't produce any observable differences from vanilla big bang theory. So in that sense, there are also failed theories because if you can't, if you're if you make a theory more complicated, if you add a lot of steps and you can't distinguish between that and the simpler one, well, then Ockham's razors tells us there's no need to believe the more complicated one, because the simpler one is able to explain all the observations that more complicated one might be true, but we can't tell the difference.

So why bother wasting our time? And all these cyclic universe ideas must confront the reality of dark energy? Our universe isn't just expanding, it is accelerating in it in its expansion, and man, it is hard to stop that train. We don't know what dark energy is. It may slow down. Stop. It may transform. It may do something funky in the future. You got me there. But for now, the expansion of the universe is accelerating. How do you get a cyclic universe out of that? It's hard. I don't know how and and really nobody knows how. I view sick like universe ideas as trying to resurrect or keep alive. Keep the flame alive of an eternal universe. Some sort of OK, yes, our big bang. We live in a in a dynamic, evolving, changing cosmos. But on an even grander picture, there is something that has always existed and always will exist. That explains our current reality. They may be true. They may be true, but we don't know for sure.

And I wonder if we've just spent the past 100 years trying to fight the evidence. What the evidence is telling us. The evidence is telling us that at the very largest scales our universe changes is dynamic evolves. Yesterday is different than today. Today will be different than tomorrow and then that's it. I don't know why that's so bad. Thank you to at Creamer Fan one on Twitter and on email. Matt A. On email Robert be on email at Unplugged Wire on Twitter. Mark H on email Asher F on Facebook. Jamie J on email and ty on email for the questions that led to today's episode. Please please please go to patreon dot com slash PM Sutter. That's P MS U TT ER to help contribute, I'd like to thank my top my tippy top Patreon contributors this month. Justin G Chris L, Barbara Kay Duncan M Corey D, Justin Z, Nate H Andrew F, NAIA Aaron S Scott M, Rob H, Lowell T, Justin Lewis M Paul G, John W, Alexis Aaron J Jeff, Jennifer M, Gilbert M, Tom B, Joshua and Kurt M It seriously is all your contributions that keep this show going.

I really do appreciate it. That's patreon dot com slash PM Sutter Send me questions. Hashtag ask us Spaceman. Ask the spaceman at gmail dot com website. Ask us spaceman dot com Hit me up on social media. I'm at Paul Matts Sutter on all channels, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space

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