Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death

Scientific Paper
Title	Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death
Read in full	Link to paper
Author(s)	Paul Marmet
Keywords	Big Bang, Cosmology, classical electrodynamics, Quantum electrodynamics, redshift
Published	1990
No. of pages	15

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Abstract

We are all so accustomed to reading that the universe "began" once a time with the Big Bang that most people no longer think it necessary to question or scrutinize it. A detailed analysis of the Big Bang theory, however, leads to consequences and implications that are inconsistent, or are contradicted by astrophysical observations, including important ones. At the same time, one of the pillars of the model, the all important cosmic redshift- the shifting of spectral lines toward the red end of the spectrum, in proportion to the distance of the source from us- can be explained without invoking the Doppler velocity interpretation(1) so dear to Big Bang theorists. The redshift is explained instead by taking the intergalactic medium into account, and correcting our understanding of how light interacts with such a medium on its way to the observer. Two different theoretical approaches, semi classical electrodynamics and quantum electrodynamics, have shown that all interactions or collisions of electrodynamics waves (photons) with atoms are inelastic; that is, the photons lose a very small part of their energy as a result of the interaction. Hence, the greater the depth of the intergalactic medium through which a galaxy's light must pass, the more toward the low-energy end of the spectrum - that is, toward the red - is the light frequency shifted. These considerations eliminate the limit on the size of the universe imposed by the Big Bang theory. Indeed one can say that the universe far greater than imagined.

Overview

Written for 21st Century Science and Technology in 1990, this is Paul Marmet's most accessible statement of the case against the Big Bang and for a universe "unlimited in time and space." It has two halves. The first is a critical audit of the three observational pillars normally cited in support of the Big Bang — the redshift–distance relation, the cosmic abundances of the light elements, and the 3 K microwave background — arguing that each of them is either explained equally well without a Big Bang or actively contradicted by the data. The second is Marmet's own positive proposal: a non-Doppler redshift produced by the inelastic interaction of photons with the atoms and molecules of the intergalactic medium.

Marmet's mechanism is not a vague "tired light" conjecture but a specific claim about photon–atom collisions. He argues that essentially all photon interactions with matter are inelastic, that the great majority of them occur without any angular dispersion (the photon being absorbed and re-emitted in the forward direction), and that each such interaction sheds a tiny fraction — of order 10⁻¹³ — of the photon's energy into a very-long-wavelength secondary bremsstrahlung photon. Because the fractional loss per collision is constant, the resulting shift satisfies Δλ/λ = constant, which is exactly the signature the Doppler interpretation claims as its own.

The polemical frame is stated plainly. Marmet holds that the Big Bang "leads to the rejection of the principle of causality that is fundamental in philosophy as well as in physics," and calls it "actually a creationist theory that differs from other creationisms ... only in the number of years since creation." He places his own work alongside Hannes Alfvén’s plasma universe — Marmet is photographed in the article with Alfvén and Anthony Peratt at the February 1989 Plasma Universe conference in La Jolla — and cites Millikan, Hubble and Grote Reber as earlier doubters who thought photon energy loss "a simpler and 'less irrational' explanation of the redshift" than recession.

The argument

What the Big Bang requires

Marmet first sets out the standard chronology he intends to attack: an origin at essentially zero volume; a quantum limit at about 10⁻³³ cm and 10⁻⁴³ second; expansion by some 10²⁰ to the radius of an electron (about 10⁻¹³ cm) at an age of 10⁻²³ second; and then 15 billion years of expansion to a 15-billion-light-year radius today.

The three pillars re-examined

Redshift. A large number of redshift observations, Marmet argues, cannot be accommodated by the Doppler theory at all. He points to Halton Arp's 1987 Quasars, Redshifts and Controversies, to J. V. Narlikar's 1989 review of non-cosmological redshifts, and to K. J. Reboul's 1981 catalogue "Untrivial Redshifts: A Bibliographical Catalogue", which lists 780 references to redshift observations inexplicable by the Doppler effect.

Light element abundances. No Big Bang is needed to make helium-4, deuterium and lithium-7. Marmet points to the plasma model of galaxy formation, in which the elements are produced during galaxy formation by early massive and intermediate stars and by the nuclear reactions and cosmic rays they generate. Quoting a reviewer of the plasma theory, the model "accounts accurately for the observed overabundance of oxygen in the lowest metallicity stars, and deuterium, and does not over-produce the remaining rare light elements — lithium, beryllium, and boron."

The 3 K background. Marmet's alternative is that the microwave background is simply Planck blackbody radiation emitted by an unlimited universe that is itself at about 3 K — no highly redshifted 3,000 K decoupling surface required. He then presses a consistency objection that was sharp in 1990: matter today is extremely inhomogeneous — galaxies, clusters, superclusters, the Great Attractor at some 150 million light-years — and if the background originated in a Big Bang, a comparable inhomogeneity must have been present in the matter that emitted it, showing up as a distortion of the Hubble flow and as observable irregularities in the 3 K radiation. He cites A. E. Lange's 1989 report of no observable inhomogeneity even at 10 arc-second resolution and a temperature sensitivity of ΔT = ±0.00001 K.

Internal and observational difficulties

Marmet adds two further objections. The first is a self-consistency point about General Relativity: on the Big Bang's own account, the universe at the size of an electron and an age of 10⁻²³ second was "clearly a black hole," a concentration of mass whose self-gravitation forbids the escape of mass or radiation, so it could not have expanded — unless one assumes gravity switched on only gradually afterwards, which he calls "changing the laws of physics arbitrarily to save the Big Bang model."

The second is the age problem: structures that are too big or too mature to have formed in the time available. He cites Simon Lilly's 1988 discovery of a mature radio galaxy at redshift 3.4 (Sky & Telescope commenting that "the appearance of a mature galaxy so soon after the Big Bang poses a serious threat"), and the 1989 discovery by Geller and Huchra of the Great Wall — a sheet of galaxies 500 million light-years long, 200 million wide and about 15 million thick, its dimensions limited only by the scale of the survey. Marmet quotes Margaret Geller's comment that with a structure this size "something is really wrong that makes a big difference," and that "no known force could produce a structure this big in the time since the universe was formed."

Why photons are not scattered out of the beam

The heart of the paper is Marmet's answer to the standard objection to any interaction-based redshift: that photon interactions would blur the images of distant galaxies, and they are not blurred.

His reply turns on the index of refraction. For air, n = 1.0003, meaning light traversing 100 metres of air is delayed by about 3 cm relative to vacuum. That delay is roughly a billion times an atomic size, so it cannot be produced by a handful of encounters — it requires on the order of one billion photon–molecule collisions over that 100 metres. Yet an object seen at 100 metres through calm air is not fuzzy, even in a telescope. Therefore, Marmet concludes, a billion interactions have occurred with no significant angular dispersion, and "photon-molecule collision without angular dispersion is an everyday experience that has been completely overlooked."

The usual textbook picture — that a fraction of photons undergo Rayleigh scattering while the rest pass through with no interaction at all — is on this account "inconsistent and incomplete": the derivation of the refractive index assumes a homogeneous medium and neglects individual atoms, and the reduced group velocity applies to all the light. Marmet's replacement picture is that most interactions consist of an atom absorbing a photon and re-emitting it in the forward direction. In space, where the gas density is more than 20 orders of magnitude lower, he estimates the same process gives about one interaction per week per photon, with Rayleigh scattering enormously rarer still.

Why every such interaction costs energy

Since the collisions produce a measurable delay, there is a finite interval during which the photon is absorbed before being re-emitted. During that interval the atom is polarized transversely by the passing wave — the nucleus pulled one way, the electron cloud the other — and part of the wave's energy is transferred to the electron in the axial direction. The momentum of that transferred energy accelerates the electron, and an accelerated charge radiates: a secondary bremsstrahlung photon is emitted.

Marmet reports that the energy loss per collision under ordinary conditions is about 10⁻¹³ of the incoming photon's energy, a result he obtained from semi-classical electrodynamics in 1988 and which he says is also implied by quantum electrodynamics (Jauch and Rohrlich; Bethe and Salpeter), though only his own treatment predicted the amount. Because the loss is a fixed fraction, the redshift obeys the same rule as a Doppler shift: Δλ/λ = constant, independent of the emitted wavelength. The secondary photon carrying off the lost energy has a wavelength of several thousand kilometres — far beyond the longest wavelength yet observed in radio astronomy, 144 metres (Reber) — so it is predicted by the theory but not currently detectable.

The solar limb redshift as a test

Marmet's chief claimed confirmation is the solar limb effect: light from the edge of the Sun's disk is redshifted relative to light from the centre, over and above the Doppler shift from solar rotation. The anomaly was first reported in 1907 and, he notes, has been confirmed by all experts in the field.

His explanation is geometric. Light seen at the centre of the disk traverses a short path through the solar atmosphere; light seen at the limb traverses a much longer one, hence more photon–atom interactions, hence more redshift — a monotonic increase from sin θ = 0 to sin θ = 1.0. Figure 3 of the paper compares the observed curves (Adam 1948; Finlay-Freundlich 1954) with the prediction of Marmet's mechanism and with two Doppler-based accounts — Schatzman and Magnan's motion of gas in the solar granules, and Finlay-Freundlich's motions in the photosphere and chromosphere — both of which lie well above the data. Marmet describes his as "the only 'non ad-hoc' explanation predicting the amount and the rate of change of the solar redshift." He adds that the model also accounts for the absence of redshift in several spectral lines, in terms of their known origin in very high layers of the Sun, and for the stronger shift of the iron line at 5,250 Å, which originates in a deeper layer.

Is there enough matter in space?

The mechanism needs a medium. Marmet states that an average concentration of about 0.01 atom/cm³ is required to produce the observed redshift as given by the Hubble constant, and concedes frankly that this is larger than what has been measured to date. His defence is that detection methods are selective and spectroscopic, and that the most likely constituent is invisible to them.

Cold atomic hydrogen, detectable by its characteristic radio emission, will largely condense into molecular hydrogen H₂, which has no permanent electric dipole and therefore neither emits nor absorbs readily. Where an ordinary excited molecule radiates in about 10⁻⁸ second, spontaneous emission from the first rotational state of H₂ is practically nonexistent even over thousands of years; the second rotational state takes some 30 billion seconds, about 18 orders of magnitude less probable than an ordinary dipole transition; even the sixth rotational state takes about a year. Only in the far ultraviolet near hot stars can some H₂ be seen. So molecular hydrogen may be extremely abundant and still undetected.

He supports the general point with the missing-mass evidence from galactic rotation: orbital velocities that should fall off toward the periphery are instead found to remain roughly constant, from which observers conclude that 90 to 99 percent of a galaxy's matter is invisible and may extend to ten times the visible radius (Rubin 1983, 1988). If that much is unseen within galaxies, Marmet argues, it is reasonable to expect much more further out.

Conclusion

The observations, Marmet concludes, are consistent with a universe unlimited in time and space; the intergalactic density needed by his model is compatible with what molecular hydrogen could supply; and the background radiation of an unlimited universe is compatible with the observed high homogeneity of the 3 K background. He ends on an explicitly theological note: "It is clear that God did not limit Himself to a finite universe at one time and place, but made the universe in His own image, infinite in space and time."

Assessment

The paper's real contribution is the refraction argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously on its own terms. The observation that n = 1.0003 implies an enormous number of photon–molecule encounters over 100 metres of air, while the image stays sharp, is a clean and checkable piece of everyday physics, and it does undercut the crude version of the anti-tired-light objection — the version that assumes any interaction must scatter the photon out of the beam. Marmet's insistence that the mechanism must predict a number rather than merely gesture at energy loss, and that the number must reproduce Δλ/λ = constant, is also the right methodological instinct: it is what separates his proposal from earlier tired-light hypotheses that had to be tuned by hand. The solar limb effect is a genuine, long-standing and still-debated anomaly, and offering a quantitative curve for it is a real test rather than a rhetorical one.

The difficulties are substantial and, in several places, have grown worse rather than better since 1990.

The required density is the sharpest. Marmet needs about 0.01 atom/cm³ of intergalactic matter and concedes it exceeds measurement; his defence rests entirely on molecular hydrogen being both abundant and unobservable. That is an argument from undetectability, and it does the heavy lifting for the whole model. Since then, deuterium abundance measurements and the Lyman-alpha forest have placed direct constraints on the intergalactic baryon density that are far below what the mechanism requires, and cold H₂ in the required quantity has not been found.

The background-radiation argument has been overtaken by data. In 1990 Marmet could point to Lange's null result and argue that the absence of anisotropy told against a Big Bang origin. COBE announced the detection of primary CMB anisotropies at the level of ΔT/T ≈ 10⁻⁵ in 1992, and WMAP and Planck have since mapped the acoustic peak structure in detail. The very inhomogeneity Marmet said must be there and was not has been found, and it is now the strongest single body of evidence for the hot-big-bang picture. His alternative — thermal emission from an unlimited universe at 3 K — must also explain why that emission has a blackbody spectrum to the extraordinary precision COBE/FIRAS measured, which a superposition of sources at differing temperatures and path lengths does not obviously give.

Third, an interaction-based redshift faces the time-dilation test of distant supernova light curves. Type Ia supernovae at redshift z are observed to evolve slower by a factor (1 + z), exactly as expansion predicts; a photon energy-loss mechanism acting on individual photons in flight does not naturally stretch the duration of an event. This measurement postdates the paper, so Marmet does not address it, but it is the observation a modern defender of the model would have to answer first.

Fourth, the blurring objection is weakened by the refraction argument but not fully retired. Forward re-emission with essentially zero deflection is required over gigaparsec path lengths and for all wavelengths; the paper argues the case from the atmospheric analogue rather than deriving the angular distribution in the intergalactic regime.

Finally, some of the framing is polemical rather than physical. The claim that the Big Bang "leads to the rejection of the principle of causality" and is a form of creationism, and the closing appeal to what God would or would not have done, are philosophical and theological preferences, not evidence, and readers assessing the mechanism should separate them from the refraction and bremsstrahlung arguments, which stand or fall on measurement. Conversely, several of Marmet's 1990 complaints were sound in their own right — the Great Wall and the mature high-redshift galaxies were real formation-timescale problems, and structure formation and early-galaxy maturity have remained live issues.

See also

• Paul Marmet
• A New Non-Doppler Redshift
• Cosmic Matter and the Nonexpanding Universe
• The Cosmological Red Shift in an Unlimited Universe
• A New Mechanism to Explain Observations Incompatible with the Big Bang
• An Alternate Interpretation of the 3 K Radiation
• Tired Light
• Plasma Cosmology
• Halton Arp
• Grote Reber