The basic reasoning establishing the Big Bang is of primary school level. And yet, from recent observations, it is probably erroneous. I propose that the universe is 100 billion years old rather than 13.7 billion [sic!]. Why do I think the universe is much bigger, and older than most accredited, professional cosmologists do? Why are celebrity physicists misinforming the public?
It has been observed that, in our neighborhood, galaxies located 3.2 million light years away recede at 72 kilometers per second. Divide that inter-galactic distance by that speed, and that should tell a primary school student when it all started. The good news: physicists understand this. The bad news: they got it wrong.
Let’s do the computation in detail.
(We will use the notation “^” to indicate powers; so 10^2 is (10) (10), 10^4 is 10,000, etc.)
Light covers (3) (10^5) kilometers in one second, and there are around 100,000 = 10^5 seconds in a day. So light covers (3) (10^10) ( 3) (10^2) ~ 10^13 kilometers in a year (=10,000 billion kilometers). Multiply that by (3) (10^6), the distance to that receding galaxy, to get:
(3) 10^19) kilometers (3 times ten billion billion kilometers). Divide by 70 kilometers per second, to find how many seconds it took for galaxies to separate 3.2 million light years: that’s ½ (10^18) seconds. Now there are around (3) (10^5)(10^2) seconds in a year. One gets roughly 14 billion years.
14 billion years ago, or so, the material of that 3.2 million light year away galaxy was next door.
From, there, applying the Principle of Homogeneity (PH: that everything is everywhere roughly the same), one deduces that all those things that became galaxies were next to each other. Notice that this recourse to PH is a philosophical jump: it seems likely, but it’s not a sure thing.
The only way this could have happened is if this expansion all started in the same place. Presto, you have the result that the history of the universe is that of a Big Bang that started 14 billion years ago. So far, so good.
Notice a second philosophical jump occurred: to get to the conclusion that there was a Big Bang, we assumed that the expansion happened at the same rate, all along. That sounded like the easiest hypothesis, 40 years ago. But there was no proof, that the expansion had been at that rate all along, and some observers, or theoreticians, begged to differ. I certainly did not agree with the certainty that the reasoning was a sure thing, because it was not.
However, in the last ten years, it turned out that, to everyone’s amazement, the rate of expansion was found to be increasing noticeably.
A force expanded the fabric of space ever more. It was called “Dark Energy” (energy, because that’s what one needs to expand space, dark, because the force vector itself could be not be seen; also there already was one problem, called “Dark Matter”, mass distributed all over, dwarfing the visible mass).
“Dark Energy” immediately busted the “universe is 14 billion years old” conclusion. Indeed, one cannot assume the expansion was 71 kilometers per second, all along, when we see it’s now accelerating. It’s more logical to suppose it accelerated all along, that the expansion accelerated in the past as it does now.
On the back of an envelope, your generous servant can determine the universe ought to be 100 billion years old, rather than 14.
Some will whine: and what of the Cosmological Background Radiation? Well I have a Quantum answer to that.
Why is it that physicists are presenting the date of 13.7 billion years for the age of the universe with so much certainty? Because smug, god like certainty, is what sells. To know things that only an oligarchy knows, especially if this esoteric knowledge violates common sense, can only make one famous. Hence well fed, the pelt lustrous and the mien proud.
Some do not require more than this: they are simple apes, greed is their event horizon. Real thinkers are made of nobler stuff. Meanwhile, the universe is out there: just one look carefully at the picture above: millions of galaxies, as far as we can see. One cannot avoid the feeling that this universe is much older than thrice the age of the Earth
Patrice Ayme
