The Big Bang is not good science, part 2

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Does the Big Bang theory disprove Genesis?

The Big Bang is a scientific theory that, for many people, replaces God as the Creator of the universe.

If the theory is true then we do not need God to create the universe.  But how accurate is this theory?

The real world is very complex.

The moon rocks and moon dust brought back from the moon by the Apollo astronauts has really complicated things.

Tests have shown that the moon rocks are older than the earth rocks.

So the moon is older than the earth. Science cannot explain that.

Then it gets worse. The moon dust is a billion years older than the moon rocks.

But rocks disintegrate to form dust. So the rocks should be older than the dust.

But on the moon it is the opposite way around. Science is baffled and has no answers.

95 % of our universe seems to be made up of invisible Dark Energy and Dark Matter. But none of that is explained or predicted by the Big Bang. So the Big Bang theory cannot explain 95 % of the universe. So what is the real value of the Big Bang theory. Obviously, not much.

I TIMOTHY 6:20   O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:

:21   Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.

If science theories contradict Scripture then they are simply vain babblings and not true science.

Science wants to dethrone God as the Creator, but science cannot explain the facts of creation.

But science had led a lot of people away from God, where they face an empty eternity on their journey to nowhere good.

There are two types of Science. In good science we know and measure exactly what went into an experiment, and we are able to repeat the procedure and get the same results. This repetition is an essential  check . What we started with is called a boundary condition. We can change the starting conditions by trial and error until we finally achieve the desired end product. This is Science that deals with facts. This type of Science has given us our marvellous technological gadgets – the iPhone, iPad, motor cars, medicine, high rise buildings etc. There is not much contention or argument about scientific facts. We know that the gadgets will work as the ideas have been tested by much experiment and repetition.

Then there is a second type of Science where we never saw or measured the starting conditions. We have to work backwards and try to guess what happened. Secondly, the process cannot be repeated. So there is no check on our assumptions.  This is very contentious science as different people come up with different guesses, each of which is plausible and seems to fit some of the evidence. How do we know who is right? The answer is sadly that we cannot know for sure. So we tend to believe the version that suits us. This type of Science is called a theory. It is simply a speculation or hopeful guess, so we can call it guess science. It is based on a “maybe” or a “perhaps” or a “probably” etc. Lacking certainty, we have no option but to accept the assumptions by simply believing that they happened.  But believing is an attribute of religion. So if you really believe a theory where you have no evidence for what went into the process, then you have an alternative form of religion.

The Big Bang is basically a guess as we have zero evidence for what the conditions were just before the explosion. Thus you are required to believe in the theory. There are no facts for the actual beginning. In the 14 000 million years since it was supposed to have happened, it has never repeated itself. Thus this is not good science - it is guess science. The universe is too big for us to master. We have learned much about it in the last century, which means that there is much more that we will still learn in the future. Do not be too impressed with the half-knowledge of today’s astronomers as they paper over the gaps in their knowledge by trying to dazzle us with statistics and complex calculations.

Be warned. An astronomy professor once said “No one believes an astronomical theory except the person who thought up the theory. But, everyone believes the measured facts of an astronomer except the astronomer himself because he alone knows how many guesses he took in evaluating the data”.

The stars are simply too far away. We cannot get there and check our assumptions.

For example, Venus is the closest planet and the brightest. It is the evening star for part of the year (December 2016) and disappears behind the sun and then reappears much later as the morning star. Why is it so bright? Clouds reflect sunlight well. Astronomers saw it as a featureless disc in their telescopes. They concluded correctly that the planet is covered in clouds.

Then, many assumed the surface of Venus was covered in seas as well as swampy ground at a temperature of about 20⁰C and thus teeming with life. This would cause a planet to be covered with a total cloud cover. When the Russians sent a rocket to Venus they discovered no life as the clouds were sulfuric acid and the temperature was about  480⁰C which is much hotter than your kitchen oven. We would never have guessed that if we did not actually go there.  In good science we only trust something when we can get there and measure it.

The highlands of the moon were thought to be made from volcanic rock just like they are on earth. But when the Americans landed there they found no evidence of volcanic rocks.

According to our theories, blue stars are young, and it is the older red stars that can explode in a supernova. In 1987 for the first time we saw a supernova that was fairly close to the earth. It was a blue star that exploded. The exact opposite had happened. So, do we really know that much about star formation?

Let us go back to the very beginning of the universe.

Initially there was nothing. The Big Bang begins with a  “cosmic egg” that suddenly explodes to create space, time and all the matter in the universe.

There is no law of Science that can create something out of nothing.

Einstein said that the laws of thermodynamics are the most important laws in physics. The first law of thermodynamics says that we get nothing for nothing. Energy cannot be created. So where did this cosmic egg suddenly come from? No one knows.

We cannot build a pressure machine that can squeeze a glass of water into half of its volume. Yet the Big Bang just starts with the whole universe squashed into a tiny cosmic egg. What achieved this amazing feat? No one knows.

How did it happen?  No one knows.

Experts differ on just how big the "cosmic egg" was. Most say it smaller than the head of a pin. Some say millions of kilometres in diameter. Others say it was extremely dense without trying to guess its size. Many say it was infinitely small, infinitely dense and infinitely hot. Three infinities! Nowhere today can we find a single infinity in the universe. So where did three infinities suddenly appear from?

The "cosmic egg" was somehow, miraculously there before it exploded in the Big Bang.

Atheists object to the word "miracle".  But if they cannot explain how nothing turned into an infinitely compressed "cosmic egg", then they are assuming that a miracle happened. If there is no natural explanation then the only option left over is a supernatural explanation.

But there was no space and no time before the Big Bang.

So where was it? If space was created in the Big Bang then there was no space for the "cosmic egg", whatever its size, before the Big Bang.

Change involves time. We measure time by the changing position of the sun or the changing positions of the hands of a clock. When the "cosmic egg" suddenly appeared out of nothing,  that was a change so there would have to be time. But time was created only in the Big Bang.

Then the "cosmic egg" exploded. To go from unexploded to exploded means that there was a change, which needs time. But there was no time until time was created after the explosion started. So the Big Bang just cannot get started.

If a star is ten times bigger or more massive than our sun, then when it starts to burn out it will collapse under its gravitational forces until it is so small and dense that this gravitational force acting in such a small volume will pull everything, including light, towards itself. We call this a black hole. Nothing can escape from it.

So if the entire universe was squashed into a microscopically small space then we have the ultimate black hole. Nothing could possibly escape from it. There is no known law of physics which could cause this ultimate black hole to explode.

So the scientists guess that a "cosmic egg" appeared out of nothing. Today we can’t make anything out of nothing.

Do not be fooled, the vacuum of space is not empty, as it is full of energy.  From energy we can make matter.

But in the beginning there was no energy and no vacuum. There was absolutely nothing. A vacuum is empty space. In the beginning there was no space at all. There was also no time, so nothing could change and come into existence because there was no time to enable change to happen, and no space for it to happen in.

There was absolutely nothing. There was no energy and no matter. There were not even any laws of physics. There was no gravitational force or any other force. It is simply impossible for any natural causes to produce anything, much less a universe, out of absolute nothing.  At the beginning there was nothing, so there were not even any natural causes or laws of physics.

Scientists cannot explain where the laws of physics come from.

The scientists have absolutely no direct evidence of this "cosmic egg" because no one saw it. We have no direct evidence of what the universe looked like at time zero of the Big Bang.

“We are dealing with a blank page as far as pre-creation information is concerned”

page 58  Genesis and the Big Bang by Dr. G L Schroeder.

So the scientists guess that this ultimate black hole somehow exploded. They cannot tell us how.

“Astrophysicists also have no conventional explanation for what could have started the outward flow of matter” 

page 94  Genesis and the Big Bang by Dr. G L Schroeder.

Are we just bluffing ourselves when we talk about the Big Bang?

Steven Weinberg of Texas University, who won the Nobel prize for physics in 1979, in his classic book on the Big Bang called “The First Three Minutes”  says in the Preface on page viii:

“True, we are not absolutely certain about all this…..”.

On page 9 Professor Weinberg says:

“We will also try to look a little way into an era that is still clothed in mystery – the first hundredth of a second, and what went before” ,,........

“I cannot deny a feeling of unreality in writing about the first three minutes as if we really know what we are talking about”.

On page 134 he says :

Thus our ignorance of microscopic physics stands as a veil, obscuring our view of the very beginning”.

On page 131 he says “However, the first three minutes are so remote from us in time, the conditions of temperature and density are so unfamiliar, that we feel uncomfortable in applying our ordinary theories of statistical mechanics and nuclear physics”.

On page 149  he says:

“That which we do now by mathematics was done in the early universe by heat – physical phenomena directly exhibited the essential simplicity of nature, But no one was there to see it”. 

But seeing the event is the essence of good science. Thus the Big Bang will always be in the realm of guess science.

On page 148 he says :

“With the aid of a great deal of highly speculative theory, we have been able to extrapolate (extend backwards into an era where we have no data) the history of the universe back in time to a moment of infinite density. But this leaves us unsatisfied. We naturally want to know what there was before that moment, before the universe began to expand and cool.”

This is the sad fate of guess science: lacking observational evidence of the very beginning we rely on highly speculative theory (clever guesses that cannot be guaranteed) that still leave us with a gap of ignorance because the laws of  physics cannot handle an infinite density which we assume was there when our entire universe was crushed into one lump.

We have a second problem too. How did this state of infinite density come about? What produced this great compression from nothing? We do not know.

But we pay a sad price when we replace the Creator God with the godless Big Bang.

God has a future home prepared for us, Heaven. This immediately gives human life a destination, a goal and a purpose. Science can make this earthly life interesting and comfortable, but it has nothing to offer after death. Thus there is no real future purpose or destination for us as far as science is concerned. We can indulge in the materialism of this world (assuming you are reasonably clever and well-off) but after death - no hope. But do not forget, the majority of the world are poor. Frustration and struggling to survive is their daily lot. Science does not really help them much at all. And for the poor to have no hope after death is cripplingly cruel. Those who suffered on earth need a heaven to go to, as this earth offered them little.

Professor Weinberg sadly notes on page 154 of “The First Three Minutes”  that we humans irresistibly

“ believe that we have some special relationship to the universe. That human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes…”

Brilliant scientist that he is, he realizes that life on earth without a God to go to, is ultimately pointless.

“It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless”.

Pointlessness is the ultimate fate of replacing God with science. We do not know where our universe came from. We know it will end in a nasty way but are not sure which option it will be. But the ultimate prize that science offers us is that this life has no purpose, however well we can understand it.

No purpose in life is the typical theme of a Greek tragedy. Ironically, the Greeks were the first western scientists.

Microwave radiation comes to earth from all directions at a reasonably uniform rate, telling us that space has a temperature of about 3 degrees Celsius above the lowest possible temperature of  -273⁰C.  This smooth background radiation is claimed to be the background radiation left over from the Big Bang. But space is full of empty spaces and large clusters of galaxies, making space very lumpy. Matter, the left over product of the Big Bang, is so lumpy − and yet the left over radiation of the Big Bang is so smooth. This is a puzzle.

To smooth out the Big Bang and thus force it to fit the smoothness of the cosmic microwave radiation which is assumed to be the remnant of the Big Bang radiation,  a "fudge factor" is required called inflation. An unknown anti-gravity force switched on after one hundred million billion billion billionths of a second (10⁻³⁵ second) after the start of the Big Bang explosion. Scientists cannot tell us what the force was, nor can they inform us of the exquisite timing mechanism that switched in on so quickly. The anti gravity inflation force made the whole universe expand billions of times faster than the speed of light and when the universe had reached the size of a grapefruit the anti gravity inflation force switched off  one hundred thousand million billion billion billionths of a second.(10⁻³² second) later. This phenomenon has never been observed and there is no plausible cause for it. To rescue the Big Bang we have to invoke this sheer impossibility. What mechanism was able to switch on and off in such an unimaginably small time span? We do not know. How was this anti-gravity produced? We do not know.

Steven Weinberg in “The First Three Minutes”  on page 5  says

“At about one-hundredth of a second, the earliest time about which we can speak with any confidence…”. 

So we cannot have confidence in the much, much shorter time spans required for inflation. They are obviously just guesses.

Physics Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg goes on to say on page 8

“The standard model sketched above is not the most satisfying theory imaginable of the origin of the universe…..there is an embarrassing vagueness about the very beginning, the first hundredth of a second or so. Also there is the unwelcome necessity of fixing initial conditions especially the initial thousand million-to-one ratio of photons to nuclear particles”.

Assuming that there were 1 000 000 000 photons of light energy for each proton or neutron at the start is simply a made-up number that is required in order to get the Big Bang theory to work. There is no physical evidence of those early moments. There is also no theory that logically makes this number inevitable. All these made up numbers in the theories of space are simply fudge factors that cannot be guaranteed. But there are very few honest scientists like Professor Weinberg who are prepared to admit to the guesses that have to be taken in order to get the Big Bang to work.

At the same time, the Higgs field had to switch on in order to provide the other particles with mass. Scientists at CERN in Switzerland have found evidence of the Higgs field. They obviously have not got the slightest idea as to what created the Higgs field. An incredible amount of intricate creation and timing was involved with the Big Bang. Very precise forces and exquisitely accurate constants  of Nature had to be created (we do not know how) and very different masses for various particles were created (we do not know why). And it was all over in a few minutes.

The Big Bang explosion is conveniently smoothed out by the anti-gravity inflation force (one problem solved) but the type of anti-gravity force and the precision timing that were required to switch it on and off in such a short time are totally beyond our comprehension (so new problems are created).

As the big bang fireball started,  matter and energy could freely change places with each other.  They were coupled.  As the fireball expanded,  matter and energy decoupled when inflation was over, as the radiation energy hurtled off at the speed of light.  This scenario is too dull to be of any value.

The Big Bang theory requires the universe to be contained in a perfectly reflecting balloon that keeps in the energy.

As the energy tries to escape,  it pushes against this balloon which is then forced to expand.

Where did the balloon come from ?  The experts say that this is space itself expanding.

Nothing like this has ever been observed.

The Big Bang claims that these photons spread out and their energy dropped into the microwave spectrum.

Another problem is time. A light year is how far light travels in a year. Light can go seven times around the Earth’s equator in 1 second. In one year it will travel about 10 million million kilometres. In 1989 Margaret Geller discovered the "Great Wall" consisting of galaxies clustered together in a wall that is 500 million light years long, 300 million light years wide and 15 million light years thick. The Great Wall is 200 to 300 light years away from Earth. How long would it take for so many galaxies to form and then congregate together?   Much longer than the 14 billion years since the Big Bang.

Speaking of the Great Wall, Margaret Geller said

“there is something fundamentally wrong in our approach to understanding such large scale structures”.

A huge structure like this does not fit in with the idea of a reasonably smooth background radiation.

Astronomers emphasize how uniformly distributed galactic matter should be.  But if these very lumpy superclusters and huge empty holes are what our universe consists of, then :

“If so, it is safe to say we know less than zero about the early universe” says M Davies of Berkeley.

“It (the Great Wall) is far too large and too massive to have formed by the mutual gravitation attraction of its member galaxies.” M Mitchell Waldrop, “Astronomers Go Up Against the Great Wall”, Science, Vol 246, 17 November 1989, page 885.

To form such a big Wall it would be more logical to have two Big Bangs that exploded and their hydrogen gas smashed into each other which would give the gas molecules  a far better chance of sticking together and forming a star.

Carl Sagan in his classic book Cosmos refers to the massive  Virgo supercluster of many thousands of galaxies  on page 257

“In the lifetime of the universe there has apparently not been enough time for an initial gravitational nonuniformity to collect the amount of mass that seems to reside in the Virgo supercluster” ……..

"Perhaps the paradox can be resolved by imagining two or more nearly simultaneous Big Bangs”.

One Big Bang cannot do the job.

On pages 257−258 Sagan discusses some ancient creation myths from areas in the Pacific Basin.

He then makes a surprising  statement

“These myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas”.

Sagan classifies the Big Bang as a scientific myth. We can of course not observe the original Big Bang. We have no evidence for the universe at the moment of the Big Bang. The Big Bang is an experiment that never has been repeated and never can be repeated. Thus Sagan is very accurate in describing this example of “guess”  science as a scientific myth.

Fred Hoyle, on page 179 of THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE, mentions that several little big bangs would be a much better model to explain the possibility of hydrogen gas molecules smashing into each other to form these big structures. Why is this model never considered?  Simply because the mathematics is too complicated for us to solve.  So scientists remain with the simpler mathematics of a single Big Bang, not because they think this is the truth but simply because that is the only Maths that they can cope with.

Explaining the universe is more complicated than what our mathematics can cope with.

Then in 2003 J Richard Gott of Princeton University announced the Sloane Wall that is a billion light years away and has a length of  1,37 billion light years, almost three times longer than Geller’s Wall.

How many other massive structures are there out in the universe that all require more than 20 billion years (the upper limit of the so-called age of the universe) to form?

In 2017 astronomers announced the discovery of a quasar consisting of a supermassive black hole that is 800 million times as massive as our sun. This quasar is 13 billion light years away which means that it formed 690 million years after the Big Bang. The red shift is a huge 7,54.  A black hole forms when a large sun collapses. So this supermassive sun had to form and then collapse in this totally impossibly short time span. The first billion years of the cosmos are usually regarded as the Dark Ages that were just before the first stars appeared. Thus something is very wrong with the Big Bang theory.

The previous record was a quasar that formed  800 million years after the Big Bang. Far too short a time for a super large structure to form.

As better telescopes look further back in time, the Big Bang is left in more and more tatters by being unable to explain early structures that are just hopelessly too big to have formed in so short a time.

Luke McKinney reports on “Dark Flow”. Astronomers use the word dark to describe something they do not understand. Near the edge of our observable  universe are billions of stars in a flow that covers a vast expanse of one billion light years  racing at a constant speed of over 800 kilometers per second towards some cosmic hotspot. We do not know why. If they were being attracted by a massive black hole, they would be accelerating.

But the universe is supposed to be uniform on a large scale. Yet we have a billion light years of constant high speed motion as if these stars are rushing to catch a train. This is not the uniform universe predicted by the almost totally smooth cosmic microwave background.

McKinney says

“The entire makeup of the universe as we understand it can’t be right if this is happening”.

The further out we look into the universe, the less we are able to explain how the universe functions. If we cannot explain what the universe is doing today, then we obviously do not understand how it formed.

COBE was a satellite launched to measure the irregularities in the cosmic background microwave radiation.

Unfortunately the intensity of radiation was about 100 times less than predicted by the theory

The theory predicts a black body spectrum, but  Woody and Richards in  FUSION  March /April 1979  p66,  and  Alfven and Mendes  NATURE vol 266,  April 21 1977  p698, have subsequently pointed out that the background radiation is probably not a black body spectrum as the curve has an embarrassing  “bump”  in it.

There are several other explanations of this background radiation,  but these are rarely mentioned.  The one which may fit the observed spectrum best  proposes that the speed of light has fallen from a very high value.  (Norman T  and  Setterfield B,  ATOMIC CONSTANTS LIGHT AND TIME,  Stanford research International invited research report,  August  1987. Also   Troitski  V S,  ASTRO PHYSICS AND SPACE SCIENCE,  139,  1987   p388 - 411)

Another problem with the background microwave radiation is that it is too smooth.  A lumpy distribution is necessary to explain the very uneven distribution of matter in the universe.

A Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE) examined this radiation in detail.  Its readings also showed the background radiation as perfectly smooth.  An ingenious pattern of corrections and adjustments were later applied to COBE’s readings. These produced tiny variations,  a small fraction of a percent.  The variations are smaller than the satellite’s apparatus could actually detect and are therefore not very convincing.

N C Wickramasinge  NATURE  vol 358,  13 August 1992  p547  has other plausible explanations for a slight graininess of the background radiation.

The slight concentrations found in  COBE’s  adjusted readings are less than one part in ten thousand. This is not much more than the errors in the instruments.

Margaret Geller said

“ Gravity can’t, over the age of the universe,  amplify these irregularities enough to form huge clusters of galaxies" (Travis  p1684)

In space-theories there are always numbers that can be altered to suit the evidence. Hubble established the Hubble constant to be 170 kilometers per second per million years when working out the speed of galaxies that he claimed were dependent on their distance from the Earth. This only gives the universe an age of 2 000 million years, which is much too short for evolutionists. So the Hubble constant was changed to 15 instead of  170. Hey presto. We now have about 20 billion years to play with instead of 2 billion years. Others say the Hubble constant is 22 or 30. A range from 15 to 30 is a 100% error. And this hotly contested number is what they base the distance to the stars on. Thus we get the age of the universe varying between 10 and 20 billion years. This ability to change numbers to suit our theories is a major reason why space theories are not taken too seriously by many scientists.

Evidence in favour  of the Big Bang was the discovery of the cosmic background microwave radiation that is 3⁰C above absolute zero (− 273⁰C) as predicted by the Big Bang theory.  − But this is not actually the truth.

Tom van Flandern  “Did the Universe Have a Beginning”,  META RESEARCH BULLETIN  Vol 3  No 3,  15 September  1994  p33  shows that the initial prediction of the background radiation was in fact  30⁰C  above absolute zero.

The constants were changed (or fudged) to produce agreement with the measured result of  3⁰C  above absolute zero.

However, Eddington had calculated in  1926  that the temperature of space produced by the radiation of starlight would be found to be  3⁰C.  And he was right. His calculation was  far more accurate than the Big Bang theory originally was. His ideas were not mainstream, so he is ignored. Star light is thus sufficient to warm up deep space to 3 degrees above absolute zero. Thus this temperature does not have to be the remnant of the Big Bang. Why is it so smooth? Inside our galaxy starlight is shining  out in all directions. The light is thoroughly mixed up until it is uniform rather like the uniform gray sunlight on a misty day where the sunlight is bouncing around between the water droplets and getting uniformly mixed up.

In favour of the Big Bang is that it predicted the ratio between hydrogen and helium in the universe to be about 80% hydrogen and 20% helium.

This figure can be juggled somewhat.

It is the minimum value for  helium in a star as a star only turns hydrogen into helium,  not vice versa.

"B - type,  bright blue stars which astronomers believe are young,  have only about  1 %  of the required helium"

says  D W Sciama in MODERN COSMOLOGY  p150 -153.

The Big Bang can’t explain this.

Again, Van Flandern says on page 33  that

“ no element abundance prediction of the big bang was successful without some ad hoc parameterization (changing numbers in the calculations so as to get the right answers) to adjust predictions that otherwise would have been judged as failures “

The theory was adjusted to fit the amount of helium in the universe but it still can’t explain the lack of helium in B-type stars and the presence of beryllium in other stars

Ron Cowen in  “ Starlight casts doubt on Big Bang Details ”  SCIENCE NEWS  Vol 140  7 September 1991  p151  says that

“ examining the faint light from an elderly Milky Way star,  astronomers have detected a far greater abundance of beryllium atoms than the standard Big Bang model predicts ”

The Big Bang theory predicts the existence of Population III  stars having only hydrogen and helium with no heavy metals.  These were the first stars to be made.  Hydrogen was made in the Big Bang and the stars that formed from this hydrogen got so hot that they were able to fuse hydrogen atoms together to form helium in their cores. So the earliest stars (population III) should only have hydrogen and helium in them.

Bernard Carr,  in “Where is population III ?” (Stars that only have hydrogen and helium) NATURE  Vol 326     30 April 1987,  p829  says

“ the problem is that,  despite extensive searches,  nobody has ever found a zero - metallicity star”  (a star that only has hydrogen or helium)Lief Robinson in SKY AND TELESCOPE  July  1982  p20 asks

  “ are there any stars older than population II ?  (i. e.  why can’t we find population III stars that only have hydrogen and helium)

“There should be,  if our ideas about the early history of the universe are correct”

He goes on to say that

“ there is no statistically significant evidence for Population III objects ”.

No one has ever explained where the “ cosmic egg ” came from.  If it contained all the mass in the universe,  there is no current science theory to explain how it could explode.

• We live in a universe subject to the decay of the second law of thermodynamics.

 Laws of decay cannot explain the creation of the universe

Our laws of physics are designed to work in a universe that is losing useful energy due to friction and the radiating away of radiant energy. Thus the universe is like a wound up spring that is winding down. We bluff ourselves if we think we can use these same laws of physics  to explain how the universe was originally wound up with energy. That is a problem that we have never solved : how the universe got its energy at the beginning. Because energy cannot be created.

Do we know how stars are made?

Scientists do not know if galaxies formed first and then the stars appeared or if it was the other way around with the stars forming first and then clustering together into galaxies.

If hydrogen was formed in the Big Bang, the explosion would have hurled the hydrogen gas out in all directions, basically in straight lines.

Hydrogen gas, expelled into the vacuum of space, is far more likely to disperse rather than contract.

The expanding hydrogen  gases from the Big Bang must lose almost all their moving  energy by being cooled down until they have a temperature of only 5⁰C above absolute zero if their mutual gravity forces (which are incredibly weak) are to make them contract together to form a star. Hot means moving fast at the atomic level. If the gas is hotter than 5⁰C then its molecules will be moving around too fast for the gravitational forces to pull the hydrogen molecules together.

Measurements of gas clouds in the universe that are supposed to be forming stars reveal that their temperatures are about 100⁰C above the absolute zero.  This is much too hot to cause the gas cloud to contract.

Back in the early days of the Big Bang, the temperature was even hotter and thus it was even less likely that hydrogen gas would condense to form a star.

So how did stars form?

An exploding supernova would drive away dust clouds that are near it. It would not make these dust clouds contract to form a star.

A Big Bang would drive particles away from it in straight lines.  So where does all the spinning and orbiting movement come from ?

A protostar is a condensation of hydrogen gas that clumps together before self-igniting into a burning sun.

“This condensation process is very difficult theoretically, and no essential theoretical understanding can be claimed. In fact, some theoretical evidence argues strongly against the possibility of star formation”

John C Brandt, The Physics and Astronomy of the Sun and Stars (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1966) page 111.

“If stars did not exist, it would be easy to prove that this is what we expect”

Geoffrey R Burbridge as quoited by R L Sears in “Stellar Structure” (Chicago University Press, 1965) page 577.

“ No one has unambiguously observed material falling into an embryonic star, which should be happening if the star is truly still forming. And no one has caught a molecular cloud in the act of collapsing”.

Ivars Petersen, “The Winds of Starbirth”, Science News, Vol 137, 30 June 1990, page 409.

“The origin of stars represents one of the most fundamental unsolved problems of contemporary astrophysics”. Charles J Lada and Frank H Shu, “The Formation of Sunlike Stars”, Science, Vol 248, 4 May 1990, page 564.

“No one really understands how star formation proceeds. It is really remarkable.”

Roger A Windhorst as quoted by Corey S Powell, “A Matter of Timing”, Scientific American, Vol 267, October 1992, page 30.

The universe has about ten thousand billion billion stars.

“The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form”.

Martin Harwit, Book Reviews, Science, Vol 231, 7 March 1986, pages 1201 - 1202

 “The process by which an interstellar cloud is concentrated until it is held together gravitationally to become a protostar is not known… it has simply been assumed that the number of atoms per cm³ has somehow increased about one thousand-fold over that in a dense nebula. The two principal factors inhibiting the formation of a protostar are that the gas has a tendency to disperse before the density becomes high enough for self-gravitation to be effective. And any initial angular momentum would cause excessively rapid rotation as the material contracts”.

Eva Novotney’s  Introduction to Stellar Atmospheres and Interiors (New York, Oxford University Press, 1973) pages 279 – 280

There is no known mechanism for removing this rapid angular motion. When the star has formed it has a much smaller angular momentum than the original gasses had. Where did the angular momentum go to? We do not know.

This rapid spinning motion, like a discus thrower, will throw the gas outwards and not make it condense into a lump.

Gas particles that are further apart have more potential energy than gas particles that are closer together. If a gas cloud were to contract, it must radiate away this excess potential energy in order to continue its contraction. The potential energy that is liberated in this phase as the star is forming would be observable in some manner. However, no one has yet managed to detect it or identify it.

A further problem.

The gas clouds between stars are permeated by magnetic fields. As the clouds contract and get smaller, this would compress the magnetic field lines making the magnetic fields enormously strong, long before the collapse of the gas cloud was completed. These strong magnetic fields would resist further collapse which would prevent the star from forming.  Yet we observe no evidence of strong magnetic fields.

“The problem of explaining the existence of galaxies has proved to be one of the thorniest in cosmology. By all rights, they just shouldn’t be there, yet there they sit. It is hard to convey the depth of frustration that this simple fact induces amongst scientists.”

James Trefil, The Dark Side of the Universe (New York : Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988) page 55

“A completely satisfactory theory of galaxy formation remains to be formulated.”

Joseph Silk, The Big Bang (San Francisco : W H Freeman and Co, 1980) page 22

“We cannot even show convincingly how galaxies, stars, planets and life arose in the present universe.”

Michael Rowan-Robinson, “Review of the Accidental Universe”, New Scientist, Vol 97, 20 January 1983, page 186.

Particles colliding into each other tend to bounce apart.

“…there is no reasonable astronomical scenario in which mineral grains can condense.” 

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, “Where Microbes Boldly Went”, New Scientist, Vol 91, 13 August 1981  page 413.

So how do planets form?    We simply do not know.

 “ In its simplest form, the Big Bang scenario doesn’t look like a good way TO MAKE GALAXIES. It allows too little time for the force of gravity by itself to gather ordinary matter – neutrons, protons and electrons – into the patterns of galaxies seen today. Yet the theory survives for want of a better idea.”

Petersen in “Seeding the Universe” page 184 

If scientists cannot explain how stars form then the Big Bang is doomed because it is supposed to be the source of the stars.

Assuming the Big Bang did produce the stars, the total mass of stars produced by the Big Bang must be a very critical amount if it is to produce the observed universe. If the total mass was very slightly bigger than the critical value, all the matter would have collapsed and crunched together into a big ball due to the bigger gravitational attraction. If the total mass was ever so slightly smaller than the critical value, the gas particles would have expanded indefinitely and would never have been able to group together to form stars.

But the mass of the observable universe is less than 10% of this critical mass.

Thus the Big Bang could not have occurred.

However, as the Big Bang is the only possible theory that the scientists can think of, they must rescue it at all costs.

So they have a stunning solution: missing mass or dark mass. Astronomers always say “dark” if they cannot find something. Scientists claim that 71% of the universe is some unknown dark energy.  25% of the universe is some unknown dark matter. So 96% of the universe is missing. Everything that can be seen in deep space only makes up 4%  of the universe. Trying to rescue the Big Bang has created this extra problem as scientists now have to track down invisible dark matter and dark energy that must just be accepted by faith, because faith is the evidence of things not seen.  So scientists are believers, but they believe in the invisible missing mass and energy, not God. Strangely, many scientists are critical towards those who believe in an invisible God as Creator. So both sides do the same thing as they both believe in the Unseen.

In favour of the Big Bang is the expansion of the universe.

When scientists photograph distant galaxies, they observe that there are short dark vertical lines superimposed on the long horizontal multicoloured smear which is the galaxy’s spectrum. The dark lines are produced by the different atoms in the star’s atmosphere as each different kind of atom absorbs specific frequencies out of the white light, leaving a dark vertical absorption line.

These specific absorption lines from certain atoms are shifted towards the red end of the spectrum (usually to the right in the photographs) when the scientists look at smaller and dimmer galaxies which would seem to be further away . Red has a long wavelength so this red-shift implies that the light waves have been stretched.

This can imply that the galaxies are moving away from us as the universe expands.

But this red shift can be explained by the Compton effect in a non-expanding universe.

When an electromagnetic wave like light or an X-ray collides with a free electron in space, the electron recoils and absorbs some of the light energy. The light now has less energy which makes it shift towards the low energy red part of the colour spectrum. The further away the star is from Earth, the longer the light has to travel and the more times it collides with free electrons in space. Losing energy with each collision it will shift further and further to the red. Thus the light from further away will be more red shifted without any expansion of the universe being needed. And then as a bonus we will not need any dark energy to explain the expansion of the universe.