Essay: Is the Big Bang Just Noise?

The Big Bang. What’s It All About?

It’s a great time to be alive. Within the last 90 years incredible advances have been made in technology – instruments to expand and enlarge our observational and mental faculties – telescopes, computers, techniques for measuring time and space, discoveries of our genetic make-up, artistic remnants of historic cultures and fossils of ancient creatures. Much more research is underway and new discoveries are emerging frequently.
Up until the 20th century the overwhelming majority of scientists believed that the Universe was static, had existed from all eternity and so did not have a beginning. It was also believed that the Milky Way that embraces our planet Earth was the only galaxy.

In 1905 a very young Albert Einstein challenged the assumption of the scientific community that the universe was static and had existed from all eternity. He proposed a theory of special relativity that suggested that space and time are flexible and form a special entity called space-time. In 1915 he developed a general theory of gravity that explained gravity in outer space. Then in l919 with the assistance of a team of English scientists who photographed an eclipse of the sun in Brazil and in West Africa he proved with actual photographs that light from stars does actually bend around the sun. All of which seemed to suggest that the universe was neither static nor eternal.

Both Isaac Newton and Einstein had believed that because every object in the universe was pulled toward every other object by gravity the universe was destined to destroy itself. Newton suggested that God would intervene and not let that happen. Einstein cooked up a mathematical trick – the cosmological constant – a new repulsive force that would work against the gravitational attraction of the stars for each other.

In the mid l920s Alex Friedman from Russia and Georges LeMaitre from Belgium, independently of each other, proposed a model of an expanding universe. LeMaitre’s model went beyond Friedman’s. He was the first scientist to give a rational description of what we now refer to as the Big Bang. He described it in poetic language – “The evolution of the universe can be likened to fireworks that have just ended: some few wisps, ashes and smoke. Standing on a well-cooled cinder, we see the fading of the suns, and try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origins of the world.”

Both Friedman and LeMaitre were rebuffed by Einstein and rejection by Einstein meant rejection by the scientific community. Friedman died prematurely and the humbled LeMaitre decided to pursue other issues. But the questions would not go away. Other scientists began to question the cosmological constant and the belief that the Milky Way was the only galaxy. Better telescopes were built. Nebulae – cloud like objects – were discovered as well as cepheids – stars that flare up suddenly after a long period of being faint and gradually fade back to dimness. Other brighter stars were discovered that faded more rapidly. A lady volunteer at the Harvard Observatory – Henrietta Leavitt - studied these cepheids and invented a procedure to measure the variability of the light from these stars that enabled astronomers to estimate their distance.

Then came Hubble. After four years of studying the stars at the Mt. Wilson Observatory, on Oct. 4, 1923 Edwin Hubble took a 40 minute exposure of the Andromeda nebula and noted a small speck in the exposure. On the following night he took a 45 minute exposure of the same area and the same speck was still there, but accompanied by two new specks. Two of the specks were new novae, i.e. very dim stars that had suddenly increased in brightness. The third speck was a cepheid whose distance could be measured. For six months he made comparisons with other photographic plates at the Pasadena library for the Observatory and took more photographs of the Andromeda nebula and discovered a second cepheid which strengthened his initial finding. So in Feb. 1924 he revealed his results to the world. The Andromeda nebula was 900,000 light years from the Earth and was clearly a galaxy in its own right and not a part of the Milky Way.

In 1929 Hubble fitted a new camera and a spectroscope to the Mt. Wilson telescope to study the wavelengths of star light. He learned that an approaching star has shorter wavelengths (blueshift) and a receding star has longer wavelengths (redshift). He soon discovered that the majority of the recently discovered galaxies were racing away from the Milky Way. So he formulated a new law. “If galaxies are receding then:

1. Tomorrow they will be further away.

2. But yesterday they were closer.

3. Last year they were closer still.

4. So at some point in the past all the galaxies must have been right on top of us.”

His measurements implied that the Universe started in a small condensed state, expanded outwards and is still expanding today.

There were several other questions that had to be answered before the Big Bang theory could be fully accepted – time discrepancies as to when the Big Bang occurred, how were heavy elements formed, how did the galaxies form, where was the cosmic microwave background (CMB) or the echo of the explosion? It was not until l992 through the efforts of hundreds of scientists that these questions were answered.

Some of the more prominent scientists who clarified these issues were Walter Baade, Allan Sandage, Fred Hoyle, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson. The final piece of the puzzle was put in place when the Cobe satellite discovered that the variation in density in the early universe seeded the formation of the galaxies.

If anyone is interested in the complete story of the Big Bang we would recommend Simon Singh’s book The Big Bang – The Origin of the Universe from which we gleaned most of this information. It is an incredible story and merits the attention of those who would like to be more fully informed and up to date.

1. When was the last time you looked into a microscope or a telescope?
2. How long has it been since you visited a library, aquarium, museum, planetarium?
3. How about googling Einstein, Jung, LeMaitre, Hubble to say hello?
4. What do you think of Hubble’s Law?
5. How much insurance do you have on your real home – The Planet?

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