The following is an excerpt of an email of mine.
Subject: Evidence for and against expansion and evolution of the universe.
Date: 11/27/98
To: bigbangiswrong@angelfire.com (John Kierein)
I'm pleased to learn that you enjoyed the materials I sent you. I'm also pleased to hear that another BB critic is moving away from one of the creationist's models of cosmology. It's difficult to comprehend everything going on forever both in space and in time, but it is even more difficult (at least for an atheist like myself) to imagine a non universe becoming a universe, especially the one we see, which has a geometry that is [properly] characteristic of an infinite non expanding universe.
I recently asked a professional astronomer (who investigates the "early" universe) at a public talk the following: The standard cosmological picture is that galaxy groups are bound together by their own gravity and do not expand apart, that it is space between galaxy groups [clusters, if you prefer] that is partaking in the cosmological expansion [or course, I don't believe this], this being so, do astronomers observe the space between galaxy clusters being any closer together in the distant universe as compared to our part of the universe? His answer was that there isn't any unambiguous evidence that distant galaxy groups are any closer together than local ones.
Another interesting news development. Do you recall the news articles that came out after the Hubble Deep Field image was released? There was talk of little misshapen blue blobs in the image that may be precursors to mature galaxies. This would be evidence that there is evolution on a scale that supports the BB model and does not support an infinite model where evolution would be on a smaller, probably galactic scale. Astronomy magazine (Jan. '99) reports that new images taken with Hubble's infrared camera "shows that some of the small blips seen in the original Deep Field were just parts of larger galaxies. Intriguingly, one of the galaxies appears to be a mature spiral galaxy seen edge-on." And this is from a region that they believe to be "about 700 million years after the Big Bang." Although they report that "much work needs to be done to know exactly how far away these galaxies really are." They haven't obtained their spectra yet. Scientific American of Dec. '98 has a nice little news bit on it too: "Now the craft has reexamined the region using the Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), which has a greater viewing range. In comparison, the infrared pictures show many more distant galaxies--some of which are probably 12 billion years old. Also, the NICMOS pictures suggest that the mysterious blue clumps in the optical set are simply areas of intense star formation within ordinary galaxies." I suspected all along that the optical images were not revealing the correct picture. Vindication!
With my best regards,
Vincent Sauve