The Big Bang Never Happened

Eric Lerner

Big Bang supposedly occurred only about twenty billion years ago, nothing in the cosmos can be older than this. Yet in 1986 astronomers discovered that galaxies compose huge agglomerations a billion light-years across; such mammoth clusterings of matter must have taken a hundred billion years to form..

There has always been an intimate relation between the ideas dominant in cosmology and the ideas dominant in society. It would be astonishing if that relationship had come to an end in our present enlightened times. Not that cosmologists directly derive their theories from social or political ideas—far from it. But what sounds reasonable to them cannot but be influenced by events in the world around them and what they and others think about it... The Big Bang's golden age in the seventies.. corresponds to the end of the postwar boom and a new decade of growing pessimism. In fact, the links between cosmological and social ideas were made explicit by both cosmologists and political writers of the period...

But there is probably no better example in this century of the interaction of social ideology and cosmology than the development of the inflationary universe in the eighties. Nineteen eighty, with the coming to power of conservative administrations in America and elsewhere, marked the end of a period of fashionable pessimism and the beginning of a decade of speculative boom. Alan Guth arrived at his idea of cosmic inflation just as the worst monetary inflation of the century was coming to a climax. He concluded that the universe is a "free lunch" just as the American economy began its own gigantic free lunch—a period of speculation which rewarded its wealthy participants while actual production stagnated...

Throughout the decade, the rise of financial speculation in Wall Street was shadowed by the rise of cosmologists' speculations in Princeton, Cambridge, and elsewhere. As Witten and his colleagues were acclaimed by the press as geniuses for theories that produced not a single valid prediction, so men like Michael Milken.. earned not only far greater fame but also incomes that peaked, in Milken's case, at half a billion dollars per year for paper manipulations that added not a single penny to the nation's production...

Obviously, the small-scale speculators of cosmology did not, in any conscious way, imitate the large-scale speculators of Wall Street. Yet, as in every other epoch, society's dominant ideas permeated cosmology. If the wealthiest members of society earned billions by mere manipulation of numbers, without building a single factory or mill, it didn't seem too strange that scientific reputations could be made with theories that have no more relation to reality. If a tower of financial speculation could be built on debt—the promise of future payment—then, similarly, a tower of cosmological speculation could be built on promises of future experimental confirmation...

[I]t is fundamental research—investigations whose findings don't seem to be immediately useful—that suffer first when technological development slows. Today those areas are clearly cosmology and particle or high-energy physics—where the link between science and technology, theory and human progress, has been broken as in postclassical Greece, the stagnation of society has led to the return of mathematical myths, a retreat from the problems of base matter to the serene contemplation of numbers..