Could THIS Prove The Big Bang Theory Is WRONG?

 

If you dig up the roots of your family tree far enough someone believed the earth was supported by a turtle with major contributions from elephants or is it a cube or a sphere or a flat and while the notion that all our ancestors howled that the planet is flat until Columbus convinced them otherwise is patently false humanity has plowed through several interesting explanations for our universe being the way it is now there's general consensus that 13.8 billion years ago the universe existed in an infinitely hot and dense point called a singularity then it expanded thus the big bang and matter and space and time all flung apart violently and exponentially fair enough but science isn't science if it's not questioning itself right without examining evidence and rethinking conclusions we'd still be teetering on turtles and elephants welcome to Science Reads in today's article we plunge into issues with the big bang problems that cosmology has not solved yet and how these are being reconciled with what we know and what we think we know this is a leftover signal signature

 from an explosion that started

 in one hot primeval fireball

 from its first proposal in 1927 by Belgian Catholic priest George Lemaître to Edwin Hubble's discovery two years later of the expanding universe the big bang theory took root and fought with alternate theories for decades cosmic microwave background was first predicted in 1948 and when confirmed in the mid-60s

 the pendulum swung towards the big

 bang as the universe's origin where it sits today with most of the scientific community astrophysicist Ethan Siegel proclaims there is nothing else that carries the weight of scientific evidence as this model to this very day there is no other model that is both consistent with general relativity and explains the Hubble expansion of the universe the abundance of light elements and the existence and properties of the cosmic microwave background the big bang is the only one even so there are aspects of the universe that this model simply does not explain and while these do not disprove the theory outright they are stark reminders that much is left to learn and all the puzzle pieces are yet to be assembled one of the first objections to the big bang is that it violates the first law of thermodynamics simply that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed but only converted from one form to another however technically the big bang is not an explanation for the origin of the universe but rather how it developed from being infinitesimally small and expanded from there space and time as we know them began then and evolved into our universe so defenders say there's no violation of the first law of thermodynamics noteworthy however is that while the laws of science break down at the time of the big bang and certainly before the concepts of before the event and outside the universe are largely left to philosophy if the big bang theory were a physical structure it would be supported by three legs a tripod if you will for understanding the cosmos the first leg is cosmic microwave background radiation you can see the CMB with your naked

 eye but it's everywhere in the universe in fact nasa says this afterglow of the big bang showed up on old TVs before the advent of cable as the screen static when turning between channels wouldn't you like to have one of those gargantuan old-school TVs just to check this out the second leg is cosmic expansion seen in red-shifted light from distant supernovae and galaxies the further away the light source is the faster it is moving and this is consistent with an explosion or in this case a bang leg number three of our tripod underpinning the big bang theory is the primordial abundances of hydrogen helium and lithium they were forged in the crazy heat and density of the first minutes of the universe and the pervasive presence of hydrogen and helium across the cosmos fits the standard model with remarkable precision two out of three is great for gambling and most sporting achievements but falls very short of scientific certainty and number three is lithium lithium is it's extremely abundant on earth um i mean lithium is the third most common element in the universe and i mean the reason we don't have just free hydrogen available is because it's bound up in water and then the reason we don't have a lot of helium is because it floats away uh but um but lithium does not float away and um and so it is there's lithium in salt form virtually everywhere with the standard big bang model there should be three times the amount of lithium isotopes 7li across the universe than there is a recent collaborative study published in the astrophysical journal concludes that nuclear physics offers no explanation for this quandary conclusion either we do not completely understand stellar processes or there exists some exotic new physics awaiting our discovery behind door number three is another possibility the big bang is flawed like crime scene investigators cosmologists vigorously dig for elusive clues to tie up loose ends to an otherwise remarkably consistent conception of how we got to where we are and while the universe is clearly expanding as the big bang predicts points of contention still dangle like fruit we can't quite reach such as dark matter and dark energy which is theoretically 95 of the universe attempts to identify individual particles of dark matter using a highly sophisticated particle accelerator like the large hadron collider has not yet revealed any such particles a succession of deep underground laboratories to detect individual collisions between a dark matter particle and atoms have turned up nothing it is possible that the very first moments of the universe played out far differently than we presently think remember the hubble constant the rate of expansion of the cosmos while this shows clear evidence that the universe is flying apart calculating the actual rate has proven difficult and resulted in contradictory findings and the more precise our measurements have become in recent decades results reached from using different methods are even wider apart throw in factors like the relative flatness of the universe and the puzzlingly consistent temperature of the cosmic microwave background and cosmologists are not

 likely to be bored anytime soon

 but then the idea of nothing is fascinating in fact i give lectures on nothing these days because nothing turns out to be very interesting because how they get a universe from nothing is by redefining nothing there's no shortage of alternate models for our universe's development including the steady-state model which suggests the universe always had and will always have the same density no beginning and no end the big bounce involves both expansion and contraction of the universe repeatedly other ideas range black holes to the matrix and everything in between but thus far none are as widely accepted in the scientific community as the big bang theory so what do you think about the big bang and its loose ends are they enough to make you question the entire model or will we neatly tie them up one day as our understanding of physics and the universe grows tell us in the comments