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Aug 22, 2006 | Post Archive
Historically, religion is perhaps science's chief antagonist -- and vice versa. Among the greatest of the debates between the two groups concerns the origin of the universe as we know it. But what happens when science opposes science? This sort of thing happens all the time, but some new and radical ideas about the Big Bang theory from Professor Neil Turok have led to a hostile debate in the scientific community.
Turok, a professor of applied mathematics and theoretical physics at Cambridge University in England, presented some fundamentally different ideas about the origins of the universe at a conference last week. These ideas were radical enough to elicit open scorn from his fellow physicists and mathematicians.
Professor Alan Guth of MIT fiercely contested Turok's theories. Jonathan Leake of "The Australian" reports, "The conference, organised by the U.S.'s National Academy of Sciences, froze in embarrassment as Guth attacked Turok and his theories - and called up a slide of a monkey to illustrate his comments." Childish? Perhaps, but Guth and a host of scientists have based their careers upon the Big Bang theory. To question it poses a grave threat to their life's work.
It all started with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. The theory showed that the universe could both expand and contract, which opened the door to the Big Bang theory. Leake explains, "The clear implication was that if things are flying apart now they must once have been much closer together – and that perhaps they all began at one single, tiny point." From this point, the Big Bang theory evolved. "The Big Bang theory has a lot going for it," Leake says. "It fits with the observed expansion of the universe, the age of oldest stars and the ratio of light and heavy elements found around the universe."
But what caused the Big Bang? That's the source of Guth and Turok's clash. Leake gives the back story:
In the 1970s, Guth was one of those who realised that the Big Bang theory failed to explain how a hot chaotic fireball could become the cool universe with stable clusters of galaxies we see today. Rather than challenge the idea that time and space began with the Big Bang, he suggested the new universe had suddenly expanded trillions of times in a millionth of a second. That idea, called inflation, did such a good mathematical job of explaining the shape of the universe that it was adopted far and wide. Guth himself has built his career on it. Recently, however, it has become clear that the theory has major flaws. There is, for example, no widely accepted way for physics to explain how such "inflation" could have happened.
Turok and his associates are simply fed up with these flaws. Renowned theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University are among Turok's supporters. Steinhardt's theory asserts that the Big Bang was not the beginning of history but rather one of many events like it. His belief is that the bang was actually a collision of two universes each existing in separate dimensions -- something that happens every trillion years, he theorizes. Essentially, those in opposition to the theory are threatened because, if it proves correct, "...time has always existed and so has the universe. What’s more they will always exist, and so there is no need for inflation or for a creation event – or perhaps even a creator." Link
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