Quantum Physicists Claim to Have Disproved "The Big Bang" and Proven That Universe Is Actually Eternal

One of the biggest problems in physics -- so I'm told; I'm not up nights crunching numbers or anything -- is the fact that two cornerstone theories, Einstein's General Relativity (the rules of large objects and long distances) and Planck's Quantum Mechanics (the rules of incredibly small things and tiny distances) cannot be reconciled and, if I have this right, are actually contradictory in places.

A pair of scientists trying to reconcile them claim they've done so, but their solution (if it is a solution) would establish a universe which has always existed and which always will exist. With no Big Bang. Expansion over the aeons yes, but no gigantic explosion out of a superdense singularity.

Two physicists are trying to revive one of the great debates of twentieth-century science, arguing that the Big Bang may never have happened. Their work presents a radically different vision of the universe from the one cosmologists now work with....

"The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the laws of physics appear to break down there," says Dr. Ahmed Farag Ali of Benha University, Egypt...

Ali and Das are keen to point out that they were not seeking a preordained outcome, or trying to adjust their equations to remove the need for the Big Bang. Instead they sought to unite the work of David Bohm and Amal Kumar Raychaudhuri, connecting quantum mechanics with general relativity. They found that when using Bohm's work to make quantum corrections to Raychaudhuri's equation on the formation of singularities, they described a universe that was once much smaller, but never had the infinite density currently postulated.

This article is sort of the #VoxTake which tells you that everything else you've read is wrong. It claims the new paper does not claim there was no Big Bang, but only that the Big Bang did not burst out of a singularity (a superdense, microscopic dot which contains all the matter and energy of the current universe) but rather out of a cosmic egg which, while small, was not so microscopically small as to be a true singularity where the laws of physics don't operate.

Eh, so anyway, this second article claims the "Big Bang" theory involves a hot, dense state of the early universe, and the new paper still describes the young universe as hot and dense, so it's not really saying there was no Big Bang, just not the specific kind of Big Bang we've come to think of as "The Big Bang" in the past decade.

Here is the actual paper, if you want to read it.

Look, all I know is that this proves Global Warming.

posted by Ace at 01:56 PM

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