New cosmological model does away with the Big Bang

It could work as some have speculated that gravity attracts both matter and energy so light is stretched from both ends by the emitting entity and earth thus the red light shift.

totally awesome, I can dig it. spandex is my life.

This would explain why I have to get rid of crap every year in order to have room in my garage.

Fascinating theory - now the debates begin.

BBB

Since I am no scientist, I never argued with the Big Bang, but it never really made any sense to me. This model, should it prove to be a step in the right direction, might be earier to work with. Where are our scientist posters?

You sure you got this out of a physics article and not some sort of a new-age sex manual??

Interested in seeing where this theory goes!

And when did length become a basic physical dimension? Does it equate to distance?

I'd love to hear LittleK's opinion on this!

Edited: Oops ... there you are.

My opinion? Really?

You seem to understand a lot more of this science then I do. With me it's fascination but not necessarily understanding of the subjects at hand.

I hope I didn't put a misplaced burden onto your shoulders. If so I apologize.

Not a burden. I just don't feel like I know much about it.

This "new model" is merely another way of interpreting general relativity, this time with a variable speed of light.

It doesn't eliminate the still inexplicable singularity at the origin of the visible universe: time, space and energy remain undefined at the singularity.

the concept in cosmology of cyclical (no alpha-omega linear history) is by no means new or radical. It was inherent in greek thought as well as others and had been debated continuously within modern cosmology. the Big-Bang is little more that a convenient metaphor especially relating to time which as always been a sticky-wicket for physics and continues to be a major glitch in Einsteins search for a unified field theory. Hawkings essentially just gave up in his search for a resolution.
As Haawkings stated in his Brief History of Time the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. which leads us to the potential that the total amount of time of the universe is also zero.

Even this concept (which is not really new) is beyond the realm of science.

Try reading the article, because it says it does eliminate a singularity:

yeah georgeob that's what I said in my first sentence.

Copying and pasting two posts I wrote to a friend's Facebook thread on the issue (minus some embarrassing typos, plus an unknown number of new ones):

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The theory sounds interesting, but I'm taking a wait-and-see attitude toward it. So far, Mr. Shu has written a mathematical model that doesn't have some problems the standard model has. That's respectable, but not that hard to do, actually.

The hard part, for any new theory, is twofold: First, it should predict something we don't know already. (So far, Mr. Shu's theory only "p;redicts" features of the universe we have already observed, though we have no adequate theory for them.) Second, the theory shouldn't introduce any new problems that the old theory didn'thave. (The article shows no signs that Mr. Shu checked very hard for those.)

Both points may or may not be worked out over time. Until then, I'll just keep an eye on Mr. Shu and his theory. Thanks for bringing them to my attention!

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PS: Depending on how interested you are at pursuing this topic in-depth, you may be interested in Simon Singh's book "Big Bang". It talks at length about the history of astronomy, when which piece of evidence came in, and how our theories about the cosmos adapted to fit new evidence. I found it extremely interesting, but it requires concentration.

I wonder how his model fits with the CMBR (Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation) among other things. Even though the BB model has a few aspects which don't fit the data well, it also has a whole lot more aspects that fit extremely well. Any new theory which comes along needs to fit the data with at least as much precision in all areas that the old model addressed. Then in order to get really interesting it needs to make new predictions which exceed the previous model.

My suspicion with this new theory is that it meets some of the mathematical dimensional challenges, but that it may not be quite so robust when it comes to thermal and physical predictions. I'll have to read a bit more about it though.

Yeah Ros, the CMBR was predicted by the big bang theory, then discovered by those guys in the Bell labs who weren't even looking for it. Predictive power is pretty powerful evidence toward the acceptance of a hypothesis.

I'm guessing this new idea is explain away the problem of dark matter? What a pity if it does, I think MACHOs and WIMPs were the coolest scientific acronyms ever....