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The 'Big Bang' Theory is so much an accepted part of our framework of the creation of our universe that it is hardly questioned by modern science. But there's a problem.
Recent investigations imply that our universe is accelerating at an ever increasing rate. This presents us with a mystery. The Big Bang should have provided enough energy to expand our universe to its current size, and its rate of expansion should now be well into the phase of slowing down.
So what's happened?
Is our universe really as contradictory as it seems?
The Big(ger) Bang Theory
When matter detonates, a powerful chemical reaction produces vast amounts of heat and kinetic energy and its constituent particles fly apart at frankly startling rates. The matter travels great distances and gradually decelerates as its initial momentum depletes, ultimately reaching a resting point. Science supposes that this is what happened to create our universe, its centred mass (and associated gravitational attraction) and its continuing expansion providing strong evidence to support this hypothesis. Due to its sizeable gravity, once expansion ceases, the universe may even begin to contract, ending with what some sources have called the ‘Big Crunch’.
Algorithmic computation indicates that the Big Bang was sufficient to rip asunder the matter it created, after which the forces of gravity gradually formed clumps and clusters that are our galaxies and star systems.
It is fairly well documented, albeit in a rather esoteric manner, that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. This is counterintuitive, we are reliably informed, as the ‘Big Bang’ provided energy sufficient to explode matter and its counterpart, antimatter, into existence and fling it all out from the singularity where it all began at tremendous rates, preventing an immediate reaction of these counterparts that would have resulted in the formation of nothingness.
Science now proposes that ‘dark’ matter provides the anti-gravitational influence that allows the universe to continue accelerating towards its theoretical limit. The mathematics all looks robust, but the difficulty is that it has not yet proved possible to identify dark matter, nor even find evidence of it. As a hypothesis it is looking increasingly unsupportable, yet there are still unsolved problems with the current model that no other hypothesis seems likely to explain.
So here’s a different hypothesis:
The ‘Big Bang’ was significantly bigger than calculated. The calculations that indicate its proportions are undermined by the fact of a currently accelerating expansion. If there had been a far more powerful explosion at the outset, we might still be in the phase of acceleration. This offers a naturalistic explanation of current data sets without reference to ‘new’ science. We call it the Bigger Bang Theory.
The graph shows a standard representation of how our universe has expanded, is expanding and will continue to either expand or contract. The blue line is what we should expect if there is no ‘dark matter’. The red line shows the current state of play with a theoretical ‘dark matter’ influence on the rate of expansion. The green line gives us the same current state of play without any necessity for ‘dark matter’ to influence the outcome.
It’s important to remember that the timescale in the graph is vast (probably around 13.5 billion years) and the actual hard data for measured rates of acceleration cover less than 70 years. The differences in the gradients of the red and green versions is therefore insignificant as the time period is (relatively) short.
As the Bigger Bang hypothesis requires nothing more than a re-evaluation of the amount of energy output at the creation of the early universe, and the Dark Energy version requires new and unfounded science to support it, we consider the Bigger Bang theory more plausible. It may also help to explain the 'missing' matter conundrum: a far greater energy at the instant of creation may have been almost as destructive as it was creative, with a net result that less matter was created. It also allows for a straightforward evaluation of the expansion of the universe in terms of Newtonian physics, with a rapid expansion rate and a steady deceleration, eventually resulting in stasis and a 'cold' universe, in which life is extinct. Oh well, you can't have everything.