Well the Big Bang itself may be plausible but other connected ideas aren't
Like the assertion that the singularity was always there before the Big Bang. THat would imply time to be infinite.
Every division of infinity is infinity, so if time was infinite, every period of time would be infinite. The fact that we advanced from one moment to the next would mean we had passed an infinity which isn't possible. The only Logical conclusion? Time is finite. If it wasn't always here it was created and time has to be created by something living outside of time. (Eternal).
Likewise with matter and space because all 3 elements of the universe are relative to each other. If time hadn't always existed neither have matter/space. The creator of matter would have to be not consisted of matter (immaterial) and the creator of space must not occupy space (omnipotent). So whatever created the universe was omnipotent, eternal, and immaterial. What does that sound like?
Hello CrisMoser and members,
Your posted subject which is very fascinating from many perspectives caught my eye and read with interest the contributions of other members's views to the topic. Mine is that The Big Bang never happened but it has been an interesting theory that "filled a gap" with many supporters jumping into the bandwagon and others that jumped off before it crashes...
The "Big Bang" cosmological theory proposes that the entire universe began at a definite moment in the distant past at which time the universe was crammed into a point of infinite density. According to the Big Bang cosmological model, the universe began in a sort of explosion - starting out from infinite density and temperature - and then expanded, thinned out, and cooled. The Big Bang model holds that at all times subsequent to the universe's initial moment of creation, the universe has been controlled by gravity only, and its mathematical description thus follows logically from Einstein's theory of gravity.
The Big Bang theory of the origin and evolution of the universe began to develop major problems throughout the 1970's and 1980's as new astronomical observations became inconsistent with more and more of its theoretical underpinnings: generally, the astronomical observations simply did not square with a system controlled only by gravitational forces. Such observations have resulted in the current "crisis in cosmology" which begs for the Big Bang theory to be replaced with another cosmological model.
If galaxies were flying away from each other, they would have been closer together in the past; thus it was felt that the universe was more dense at earlier times. If this backward extrapolation were continued, there would be some definite moment in the past when all matter in the universe was crammed together in a state of almost infinite density. From the rate of expansion, when this point in time occurred could be estimated: about 10 - 15 billion years ago. This concept of the beginning of the universe came to be called the "Big Bang" model, according to which the universe began in a sort of explosion, starting out from infinite density and temperature, and then expanded, thinned out, and cooled. The Big Bang model logically follows from Einstein's theory of gravity to provide a mathematical description of the universe.
The Big Bang was not like an ordinary explosion in which a localized region of flying debris spreads out into a surrounding region of non-moving space, but instead it was to have occurred everywhere. Under such a view there would be no surrounding space for the universe to move into, because any such space would be part of the universe; the concept of the individual particles in the universe flying away from one another is like marks on the surface of a balloon all receding from one another as the balloon is blown up.
Today, in a trend reminiscent of the methods of Ptolemaic astronomers until Copernicus came to the rescue, cosmologists are ignoring facts that fail to fit the Big Bang model. When the theoretical model first appeared, it was a reasonable and seemingly scientific explanation for a relatively small amount of astronomical data taken earlier in the century: it was consistent with the Hubble redshift of galaxies and large-scale expansion; it seemed to explain the observed abundances of light elements such as helium and hydrogen which had not been created in the fusion furnaces of existing stars, but created in the earliest moments of the Big Bang. In what probably was its finest hour, the Big Bang model predicted the microwave background radiation at about the temperature that was consistent with a creation explosion out of a formless nothingness 15 billion years or so ago.
However, the troubling observational and theoretical problems of the 70's and 80's increasingly have challenged the Big Bang model. The Big Bang model also began having more and more difficulty reconciling the latest observational details found by astronomers with the fundamental assumption that on the galactic and cosmic scales gravity was the sole player. In other words, the theory failed to explain convincingly how matter had become organized in clusters of galaxies and superclusters in the time period allotted since the Big Bang.
Also for the universe to be structured in a manner consistent with current observations, more than 90 percent of its matter would have to be in the form of some unknown, unseen, but unbelievable massive dark matter which would not only have to be present in such a huge quantity that it would account gravitationally for the size and behavior of the new clusters and superclusters, but it also would have to be of such a bizarre quality that it could not possibly be detected by even the most sophisticated technology.
For instance, gravity working alone would have taken something like 100 billion years to create the supercluster two and a half billion light-years across that was recently discovered by American and German observers. This was a time scale at least five times longer than permitted by even the most generous of the Big Bang models.
To salvage the Big Bang, theorists have brought in a number of ad hoc assumptions such as inflation, to supposedly cause the universe to expand exponentially, but which suffers from the same malady as the Big Bang, an inability to make predictions that can be tested.
Today the long odds are that the Big Bang never happened. Perhaps the Big Bang was just a "big splash," a stellar disgorgement in our little neighborhood of the universe that was neither the beginning of time nor the creation of the cosmos.
How long will the Big Bang theory survive? Whether the Big Bang goes down in five years or twenty-give years, it appears inevitable that it soon will be overwhelmed by more and more uncompromising new observations and experimentation. In the next century or sooner, scientists and other people looking back likely will regard it much the way we look back on the cosmology of Aristotle, a quaint theory that people believed in for a while. My 2c