The Vindication of the Big Bang: Breakthroughs and Barriers

About a year and a half ago a colleague from a nearby university came to ISU to give a talk. His topic was "Why the Big Bang Theory Is Wrong." During his talk he listed the tests that a good cosmology should be able to pass, and he attempted to show that other theories passed the tests just as well as the big bang theory did. He was quite emphatic in his assertion that the big bang theory was no better than certain other theories.
I thought about the talk for several days. Was the big bang really that bad? I had always had considerable confidence in it, but I was also intrigued by some of the evidence Halton Arp and others had pre- sented showing that it might not be the correct theory. But if there were problems with the big bang theory, the rival theories had always seemed to me to be much more unsatisfactory. I decided to look into the problems in more detail. The result is this book.
There has, indeed, been considerable controversy surrounding the big bang theory in recent years. Anyone who has read the science sections of the New York Times or Time magazine knows this. And most astronomers agree that the theory is far from complete. Still, it has a lot going for it. Its successes have been quite phenomenal. Most of its predictions, things such as the cosmic background radiation and light-element nuc1eosynthesis, have been shown to be correct. Fur- thermore, recent breakthroughs such as the discovery of fluctuations in the cosmic background radiation have enhanced the popularity of the theory.
In this book I have started with the earliest discoveries in cosmology-the discovery of galaxies and the expansion of the universe-and have shown how they led to the formulation of the big bang theory. I have also talked about the obstacles that the theory has had to overcome, and the difficulties that it still has to face. I have not, however, neglected its competitors. I have discussed all of the rival cosmologies, showing their strong points, and their downfalls. In presenting the theories, I have tried not only to present the details of the theory, but also to present the people behind the theory. The story of the scientists who have struggled to understand how the universe began is an intriguing one, and as much as possible I have tried to include it.
It is difficult in a book such as this to avoid technical terms. I have avoided them as much as possible, but for people unfamiliar with some of the words I use, I have provided a glossary at the end of the book. Very large and very small numbers are also difficult to deal with so I have used scientific notation in presenting them. In this notation, large numbers such as 10,000 are written as 104; small numbers such as 1110,000 are written as 10- 4