Logic Matters 2008-04-28

Philosophy of Religion 13: Big Bang vs Steady State

In the 1950s and earlier 1960s, there was quite wide support for the Hoyle/Gold/Bondi "steady state" cosmology as a rival to what we now think of as a Big Bang model. The basic idea is that the universe, on the big scale, "looks the same" at every time, as well as in every direction. And this temporal isotropy is reconciled with the observed recession of the galaxies by postulating the continuous creation of matter, to keep the matter density of the universe constant over time. (The creation rate needed is surprisingly low: about one hydrogen atom in the volume of a skyscraper per hundred years.) This is one of those beautiful ideas in physics which ought to have been true. But the discovery in the later 1960s of the cosmic microwave background radiation -- not easy to reconcile with steady ...

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