‘This Big Bang assumption is much the less palatable of the two. For it’s an irrational process that can’t be described in scientific terms. On philosophical grounds too I can’t see any good reason for preferring the Big Bang idea ... It can never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation.’ Fred Hoyle, radio broadcast 1950, The Nature of the Universe
Every Jill and Jack of us is vulnerable to magical thinking and the temptation of magical language (the universe isn’t ‘built’ on probability). The spell-bound religious victim longs to believe a logical God built a logical universe. But to prophesy that a scientific theory can ‘never be challenged by a direct appeal to observation’ is boldly to burn one’s pocket-marbles where no blow-torch has burnt before. Fred Hoyle believed that the conception of a universe having a beginning was voodoo science and smacking of a Creator.
Belgium priest and professor of physics Georges Lamaitre proposed in 1927 the prospect of an expanding universe, although at first the paper had little impact.
The scrambled-custard calculations of the space-staring egghead Albert Einstein were stirring him to the disturbing conclusion of an expanding universe. Einstein’s cosmological constant was later to haunt him as a quasar mistake, but the volte-face to recognise the custard on the wall was a relative triumph for human reason and science.
High atop our heaven-tree of scientific stars hangs the blue-suited, pipe-smoking Edwin Hubble. Hubble eye-spied through the Mount Wilson Observatory California telescope a rebellion of galaxies rip-roaring away from the Milky Way at a rude rate of knots.
A fleet of physicists led by George Gamow grappled with the Gordian knot of expanding space between the galaxies to contend that the space between the galaxies must have been smaller in the past. The universe, ‘bounded in a nut-shell’ — kick-blasts ker-bang and crackerjacks the biggest bad-boy Kilimanjaro of a johnny-come-lately universe.
‘This is the Holy Grail of Physics. We want to know why it banged; we want to know what banged; we want to know what was there before the bang.’ Michio Kaku, author Physics of the Impossible, interview How the Universe Works
Robert Dicke et al were predicting that along with the matter condensed into galaxies, the Big Bang must have scattered a tremendous amount of background radiation.
In 1946 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were two affable scientists working at Bell Labs, New Jersey, on a modest twenty-foot horn antenna built to detect radio waves bouncing off satellites. Their first task was to eliminate all Earth-bound interference, but they found wherever they pointed their antenna a strange confounding hum more than a hundred times stronger than the signal they expected.
On checking their equipment, Penzias and Wilson found a family of pigeons nesting inside the antenna — intent less on the science but more on coating the insides with a thick layer of dickie doo-doos.
Now, any cuddly warm Big Bang documentary will fill you with the tall tale that the horn-loving pigeons were posted to a new home nearby.
The ploppies had dropped and I had fallen on a blue-ribbon plan for a high-flying doctorate. If I could track down the descendants of the pigeon family, maybe interview them, I would have sufficient filling for a doctorate of tremendous value to science. But as my research delved deeper and darker and down a devil’s dark-hole of dastardly secrets, I discovered that these highrollers of science had lied to us. The pigeons were shot. There lies the truth of the matter. Shot. I can’t tell you the sleepless nights I’ve cried. Not so much over the shot pigeons as over the loss of my doctorate — one small step for man — one giant leap for pigeonkind.
Professor Robert H Dicke rushed to Bell Labs to confirm Penzias’ and Wilson’s evidence of background cosmic radiation — ubiquitous and detectable proof of the Big Bang.
‘The universe was an expanding structure — galaxies flying away from each other, flying away from each other ever more rapidly the further away they were. The implication of course of all this — if you simply send time backwards, everything is closer together in the past. So there’s the idea of something blowing up or flying apart.’ Bob Dicke, BBC interview
Do you remember the first time your virgin eyes beheld the hot stuff of Hubble Telescope’s space-pornography? The lesser-romantic, lesser-remembered 1990s COBE satellite, and the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe of 2001, detected unevenness in the microwave background of the early universe:
‘The cosmic microwave background is the echo of creation itself. It’s the embers, the afterglow, of the original shock-wave that created the universe. If we had microwave eyes, eyes that could see microwave radiation, then every night we would see the Big Bang coming out. Looking at the heavens, we would actually see an explosion ... The discovery of the microwave background radiation ranks as one of the greatest discoveries in all of science.’ Michio Kaku
But the Steady Staters, underscored by the cosmic evidence, stood firm and refused to accept the match result. Behold in bold array the brass-necked, brave-new-world refuseniks of cosmic science!
‘In the beginning I thought this was pretty bad for the theory ... It’s a completely open question today I believe as to whether this background really comes from the general universe or whether it comes from sources in the general manner of radio-astronomy.’ Fred Hoyle, The Violent Universe, BBC 1969
Would these Steady Staters have listened to you and me and our Parable of the Importance of Evidence? No they would not.
‘What this journey really boils down to is trust in evidence. Because no matter how strange the conclusions may seem, it is only be accepting evidence that we have come to understand not just the universe but also our place in it.’ Michael Mosley, The Story of Science
Will our warnings stop scatter-gun scientists peppering their books and documentaries with a Valentine’s-Day-Massacre of runaway analogies? Not till the last speakeasy in hell freezes over. Will rivals Bob Dicke and Fred Hoyle agree to resolve their differences in the virtual debating chamber of Celebrity Death Match? Science has no higher mission.
‘The primordial atom burst. Sending out its radiation. Setting everything in motion. One particle collides with another. Gasses expand. Planets contract. And before you know it we’ve got starships and holodecks and chicken soup. In fact you can’t help but have starships and holodecks and chicken soup because it was all determined twenty billion years ago.’ Star Trek: Voyager: Latent Image s5e11, Doctor to Janeway
Bob Dicke et al in the star-struck ’60s were preaching a lesson from the high-pulpit of science that if the cosmological constants were slightly different, the universe could go to phut! From such black-and-white beginnings, without planning, was born the baby-booming Anthropic Principle — the universe seems to have been fine-tuned for our benefit. Fred Hoyle hung until the ’80s to wham us with another of his withering analogies comparing, ‘The chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a star system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cube simultaneously.’ Fred Hoyle, Intelligent Universe
Fred Hoyle wasn’t yet converting to the Christianity of a white-bearded God sitting by a tomb-sized radiogram and fiddling an array of knobs to resurrect life from a cosmic sea of interference.
What ho! What is this? Do we detect with the defined value of certain cosmological constants the final proof of a fiddling God? The hearts of theists everywhere skip a beat and burst into a chorus of Onward Christian Soldiers.
‘The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron ... The values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.’ Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
Are these parameters — Martin Rees envisions six — as fine-tuned as we suppose? Have the cosmological constants free agency of value? If not, why those particular values and not others? Do the constants in combination promote other values that give rise to the conditions ripe for life? Could String Theory compose the values of the constants? Might the elusive Theory of Everything explain the values?
‘I am really not impressed with the amount of fine-tuning there is, with the exception of this one — dark energy.’ Steven Weinberg, interview Richard Dawkins
Mutant versions of the Anthropic Principle have infested Earth’s textbooks like alien black mould — attacked by the caustic criticism of the cosmological constants as logical truisms rather than observable reality e.g. D = number of spatial dimensions. The teleologic Anthropic Principle is a straw man. A tautology. An all-encompassing idiom adopted as a lazy surrogate for a proper body of further observation and research.
‘It tends to be invoked by theorists whenever they do not have a good enough theory to explain the observed facts.’ Roger Penrose
The universe is not friendly to carbon-based life-forms apart from a few freak holiday beach-fronts. The universe is not built for our benefit. The Earth is not built like a Raisa-style pleasure planet. But you can bet your bottom dollar the loose-moralled Analogy is right up our alley and riding to the rescue to sucker the susceptible with another highly suspicious death-defying cosmic comparison: Stephen J Gould suggests a sausage made long and narrow to fit the modern hot-dog bun. Ships are made to shelter barnacles. John Leslie puts a man before a firing squad and all ten men miss the target leaving the lucky man to muse that, ‘obviously they all missed, or I wouldn’t be here thinking about it.’