Subject: Flawed alternatives to Big Bang cosmology; a Plasma cosmology model
March 9, 1997
Dear Les,
I dislike seeing flawed ideas being supported or being undermined (at least apparently) by theory and assumption laden flawed ideas. Martin Gardner’s article that you recently gave me (“The Big Bang Theory Still Lives,” Skeptical Inquirer, Summer 1992) is full of flawed ideas by others as an alternative to the flawed Big Bang concept. For example, Gardner writes:
Although Alfvén’s universe is infinite in time and space, it is not a steady-state model like some of its rivals. Drawing on the views of Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, it is a universe that began in chaos and is steadily evolving more and more complex forms of order. At the beginning was a uniform hydrogen plasma that had always existed. Over trillions of years it began to develop vortices and gravitational instabilities that finally, after hundreds more billions of years, formed galaxies, stars, and planets. Unlike the BB model, Alfvén’s universe is not running down as its entropy increases, but is being continually wound up in ways that Prigogine seeks to explain. Its future is unlimited and unpredictable.To me it is just as wrong to make the assumption that the universe “began” in chaos....as another often implied or explicated belief or assumption that the universe was once empty. The illogic of a “uniform hydrogen plasma that had always existed” becoming a universe that appears to have always had order and chaos, the discordance between the theoretical assumption and observation of nature is truly gargantuan. Such an idea should have never been seriously proposed.To the degree that plasma cosmology uses reasonable assumptions, based upon observed realities, I can support it -- but it must begin with the type of universe that we currently observe. Only then will I be enthused about plasma cosmology. To go with a theory that goes far beyond what we observe (the BB included, of course) is not justified to me.
Vince
