Missing Antimatter: A Huge Problem for the Big Bang

The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Image courtesy of NASA.




Joel Kontinen

Cosmic inflation or the unexpected acceleration of the baby universe for no known reason is not the only serious problem with the Big Bang.

The other dilemmas include quantum fluctuations, dark matter, dark energy, too rapidly forming galaxies and missing antimatter.

The very idea of a quantum fluctuation hardly sounds like science.

Recently, some researchers acknowledged that they doubt the existence of dark energy.

Early galaxies grew too fast for the Big Bang.

And then there’s the issue of antimatter. Or, to put it more precisely: There isn’t any antimatter, although there should be, if the Big Bang were true.

This is no laughing matter. ABS Science says:

“The Standard Model of particle physics — which accurately describes all the particles and interactions that make up our universe — says our universe shouldn't exist.

Or at least, the matter that makes up all the stuff in existence shouldn't be here. It should have been wiped out by the matching antimatter that was created with it in the first second after the Big Bang.”

The BB should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but the antimatter has obvious gone AWOL and is not about to return.

Matter and antimatter would have destroyed each other, thus leaving no universe for us to study.

Each particle (electron, proton, neutron etc.) should have a matching antiparticle with the opposite charge.

Researchers are currently trying to simulate the assumed conditions following the Big Bang. They are smashing particles together near the speed of light in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in order to figure out how the world of matter got rid of the antimatter.

But all the facts suggest that there never was a Big Bang. The BB has to be propped up with unknown and totally hypothetical entities or features to keep it alive.

Some of the attempts used in bolstering up faith in an old solar system are beginning to sound like the epicycles that were used to explain the movements of the planets in the ancient Ptolemaic (geocentric) system.

An even more desperate attempt is to speculate about multiverses or multiple universes that are totally unscientific.




Source:

Hobbs, Bernie. 2016. The antimatter mystery: Annihilation and a universe that shouldn't exist. ABS Science (24 June).

Big Trouble for Big Bang: Dark Energy Is An Illusion, Astronomer Says

A ring of dark matter? Image courtesy of NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University), public domain.




Joel Kontinen

Dark energy and dark matter are supposed to account for over 95 per cent of the matter and energy in the universe. No one knows whether they actually exist, but Big Bang cosmology requires them.

Some astronomers think that it is time to get rid of dark energy, or the assumed 68 per cent. Thomas Buchert of the école Normale Supérieure in Lyon, France, predicts that in ten years' time, dark energy will be gone. He and other dissidents believe that it is an illusion “created by the machinery of the standard model [i.e. the Big Bang]”.

According to evolutionary logic, we are ultimately the products of a quantum fluctuation that occurred for no reason at all.

Evolutionist think that they are formed of stardust.

The Big Bang model has run into dire problems. Early galaxies formed too fast and the horizon problem still causes headaches for big bangers.

Cosmic inflation cannot salvage it as it lacks evidence.

No wonder some have proposed even weirder solutions, such as multiverses which belong to the realm of science fiction.

When one tries to explain away the amazing fine tuning that exists practically everywhere in the universe by invoking purely naturalistic causes or even luck, logic loses and the illogical sphere gets bigger.

Source:

Ananthaswamy, Anil. 2016. Dark energy must die – these rebel physicists can take it down. New Scientist (15 June).

Evolutionary Logic: We Are the Product of Quantum Fluctuations

Something from nothing? Image courtesy of Strobridge Litho. Co., Cincinnati & New York. (Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).




Joel Kontinen

The universe is fine tuned for life. Astronomers know it and some of them don’t like it, as it suggests a Creator God, who made life possible.

In a desperate attempt to evade accountability to Him, they have designed theories that attempt to explain the origin of everything by purely naturalistic means as though He did not exist at all. One fairly popular attempt is to suggest the existence of multiverses or many parallel universes.

There is no scientific evidence for them. Physicist Rob Sheldon says that the only motivation behind the thinking is to defend atheism.

A recent article in New Scientist looks at the problems in this kind of thinking: “Quantum fluctuations in the early universe made matter denser in some regions than others, resulting in a cosmic web of galaxies, stars, planets and, ultimately, people.”

The biggest problem in this scenario is that no one knows whether quantum fluctuations have the power to create or even increase genetic information without which the theory would be dead.

Big bang based models have their fair share of problems.

In 1980 Alan Guth invented inflation as an attempt to solve the horizon problem caused by the almost uniform temperature of the different parts of the universe.

If, as Big Bang advocates believe, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, then this is a huge problem. One edge of the universe would be 27.6 billion light years away from the other edge and there would not be enough time for the temperature to become uniform.

Guth proposed that in its infancy the universe had a quick growth spurt in which it exceeded the speed of light. No one knows what caused it and what caused the universe to decelerate.

The New Scientist article points out some problems in multiverse thinking:

“THE multiverse is dead, long live the multiverse. A radical new way of looking at quantum mechanics suggests that even the multiverse will come to an end.

A popular view of the multiverse says that our universe is just one of an ever-inflating multitude of discrete ‘bubble’ universes. These bubbles are eternally budding off new universes even as individual universes age and die.”

Now, this is nothing more than wishful thinking. New Scientist nonetheless introduces a new view of quantum effects suggested by Sean Carroll at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues that attempts to solve the difficulties.

They basically postulate that in the beginning, before anything else – including quantum fluctations – there was the inflaton that “decayed into different types of ordinary particles, which could then interact with each other” and eventually underwent quantum fluctations.

If this sounds like science fiction, the obvious explanation is, that it is.


Source:

Grossman, Lisa. 2014. Quantum twist could kill off the multiverse. New Scientist 2969. (14 May).

Cosmic Inflation: When Is Evidence Evidence?

Evidence for this – or something else? Image courtesy of NASA/WMAP Science Team.



Joel Kontinen


The Big Bang model has been struggling for decades. In 1980 Alan Guth invented inflation as an attempt to solve the horizon problem caused by the almost uniform temperature of the different parts of the universe.

If, as Big Bang advocates believe, the universe is 13.8 billion years old, then this is a huge problem. One edge of the universe would be 27.6 billion light years away from the other edge and there would not be enough time for the temperature to become uniform.

Guth proposed that in its infancy the universe had a quick growth spurt in which it exceeded the speed of light. No one knows what caused it and what caused the universe to decelerate.

Reports of recent research claim that the Smoking Gun of the Big Bang has been found. According to a news in focus article in Nature:

“Astronomers have peered back to nearly the dawn of time and found what seems to be the long-sought ‘smoking gun’ for the theory that the Universe underwent a spurt of wrenching, exponential growth called inflation during the first tiny fraction of a second of its existence.

Using a radio telescope at the South Pole, the US-led team has detected the first evidence of primordial gravitational waves, ripples in space that inflation generated 13.8 billion years ago when the Universe first started to expand.”

The Nature article acknowledges that up to now “conclusive evidence for it [i.e., inflation] has been lacking.” It sees the discovery as a great breakthrough although the evidence could be interpreted in other ways as well.

However, this is not the first time that theory trumps evidence. Other astronomers are already calling for caution, as inflation is by no means the only possible explanation for what has been detected.

In a purely naturalistic /materialistic universe, there could be no cause for sudden inflation and no mechanism for slowing it down. In contrast, everything in the universe appears to be fine-tuned for life.

A much more plausible explanation begins with the words “In the beginning God created”.


Source:

Cowen, Ron. 2014. Telescope captures view of gravitational waves Nature 507 (7492): 281–283.

Early Galaxies Grew Too Fast

M104 Sombrero galaxy. Image courtesy of NASA.



Joel Kontinen


The Big Bang has a new problem: galaxies grow too fast. Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii to examine five distant galaxy clusters were surprised to discover that they did not correspond to their expectations of galaxy formation.

Recently, Nature published a letter by Chris Collins of Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues on the rapid growth of galaxies.

The galaxies, estimated to be five billion years old, had a mass that roughly equals that of the largest galaxies in the present universe.

This is not the first time the big bang is in trouble. Alan Guth suggested a theory of cosmic inflation to explain why the universe has a surprisingly homogenous temperature. The very existence of spiral galaxies is a mystery. They should not be able to keep their shape for billions of years.

There are planets and other objects in our solar system that do not fit in well with the idea of billions of years, either, for instance, short term comets, the weakening of Mercury’s magnetic field and Saturn’s moon Titan.



Source:

Hand, Erich. 2009. Early galaxies surprise with size. Nature News (1 April) http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090401/full/news.2009.225.html