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Eternal Universe

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This article is about the cosmological view. For the 2003 book by Karim Amen Khaidarov, see Eternal Universe (book).

The eternal universe is the view that the cosmos has no beginning and no end in time — that there was no moment of creation, no first instant, and no singular origin from which everything else follows. It is a claim about time rather than about extent: a universe may be held to be eternal whether or not it is also held to be spatially infinite, and the two questions are argued separately here and at Infinity.

Among the researchers documented on this wiki the eternal universe is close to a default position. It is the one thing that most critics of the Big Bang hold in common, and it is held by people who agree on very little else — aether theorists and plasma physicists, tired-light advocates and quasi-steady-state cosmologists, philosophers attacking the notion of a first moment and astronomers reporting that distant objects look too old for the standard timeline. What follows reports their arguments and attributes them; it does not assert that the universe is eternal. A substantial minority of contributors here, including several creation-science authors, argue the opposite.

The claim and its history

For most of the history of natural philosophy an eternal cosmos was the assumption rather than the thesis. Aristotle held the world to be everlasting, without generation or destruction, and the medieval dispute over whether the universe had a temporal beginning was fought largely between that inheritance and the doctrine of creation. Newton's universe had no age; the nineteenth-century picture of an unbounded space filled with stars carried no origin date with it.

The finite-age universe is a twentieth-century development. Georges Lemaître's 1927 expanding solution and Edwin Hubble's 1929 redshift-distance relation together made a past state of high density extrapolable, and the primeval-atom idea followed. The last mainstream defence of an eternal cosmos was the steady-state theory put forward in 1948 by Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, which accepted expansion but denied a beginning: matter, on that account, is created continuously at a rate just sufficient to keep the mean density constant, so the universe presents the same aspect at every epoch. It was the detection of the microwave background in 1965 that moved most astronomers to the finite-age model, and Hoyle — who had coined the phrase "big bang" dismissively — spent the rest of his career defending a modified version.

That modified version is represented on this wiki by Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge, Hoyle's collaborator, whose "Quasi-Steady State Cosmology" (2001) sets out the QSSC alternative: an eternally existing universe in which matter is created in explosive events rather than smoothly, and in which the observed expansion is a local and oscillatory phenomenon rather than the aftermath of an origin. Burbidge's historical claim — that the standard model "does not have the strong observational foundations that are frequently claimed for it," and that only two of its properties were ever genuinely predicted rather than fitted — is the argument most often echoed by later contributors here.

Grounds advanced on this wiki

The papers collected here do not argue for eternity from a single premise. Several distinct and partly incompatible lines of argument run through them.

A beginning is a creation event, and therefore not physics

The most direct argument is that a universe with a first moment requires something to have happened at that moment, and that no physical account of such an event is possible; what remains is theology in mathematical dress. Glenn Borchardt presses this hardest. In "The Scientific Worldview and the Demise of Cosmogony" (2007) he calls "the absurd idea that the universe exploded out of nothing" a commonplace among working cosmologists, and argues that cosmology has degenerated into cosmogony — the study of an origin — by conceptually treating the entire universe as a finite, isolated system. His position, developed further in his named programme Infinite Universe Theory, is that infinity and eternity are an unprovable assumption, that finity is an equally unprovable assumption, and that physics adopted the second without noticing it had chosen. On that reading cosmogony is not a hard science but an illegitimate one, having no object at all. He set out the underlying assumptions in "Ten Assumptions of Science and the Demise of Cosmogony" (2004).

Constantin Antonopoulos makes the case logically rather than physically. In "A Bang into Nowhere: Comments on the Universe Expansion Theory" (2003) he argues that the notion of a first ever moment of time is self-contradictory: lacking any moment before it, it lacks a lower barrier, and so recedes inconsistently into an infinitely remote past. His conclusion is that there can be no beginning of time, only a beginning in time. He adds a parallel objection to expansion itself — objects grow by taking up more space, so for space to grow it would have to take up more space than it is.

The same charge is made polemically elsewhere. Henry P Dart titled a 1986 paper "The Big Bang Theory, The Greatest Creation Myth of All Time," and Vincent Sauvé asked in 1994 whether Big Bang cosmology is good science or creation science. Walter van der Kamp, writing from the opposite religious position, treated evolution and cosmogony together as the weak point of the creationist argument.

Redshift is misinterpreted, so the expansion evidence collapses

The largest body of work here attacks the observational foundation directly: if the cosmological redshift is not a recession velocity, nothing in the data requires an expanding universe, and if there is no expansion there is nothing to extrapolate backwards to a beginning. This is the argument that connects the eternal universe to the wiki's extensive redshift literature.

Paul Marmet argued from the 1980s onward for a non-Doppler redshift produced by the interaction of light with intergalactic matter. With the radio astronomer Grote Reber he argued in "Cosmic Matter and the Nonexpanding Universe" (1989) that intergalactic matter is far more abundant than accepted, at roughly 0.01 atom per cubic centimetre, and that this alone yields a non-expanding cosmology; "Big Bang Cosmology Meets an Astronomical Death" (1990) and "A New Mechanism to Explain Observations Incompatible with the Big Bang" (1991) develop the mechanism and press the objection that the 3 K background is too homogeneous for the model that claims it.

Lyndon E Ashmore's New Tired Light proposes a quantum energy loss when photons recoil from electrons in intergalactic plasma. His distinctive contribution is that he treats the Lyman alpha forest as a direct test: in "Hydrogen Cloud Separation as Direct Evidence of the Dynamics of the Universe" (2008) and "An Explanation of Redshifts In a Static Universe" (2010) he reports that hydrogen clouds are on average evenly spaced up to redshift one and that their temperature or degree of disturbance is increasing rather than falling, which is the reverse of what expansion and cooling would give. He extended the case to supernova light curves in 2012.

Ari Brynjolfsson's plasma redshift is derived, he maintains, from conventional axioms of physics rather than from new ones. On his account photons penetrating hot sparse electron plasma lose energy in a way that accounts at once for the intrinsic redshifts of the Sun and of stars, the cosmological redshift, the microwave background, the X-ray background and the supernova magnitude-redshift relation, so that "there is no need for Big Bang, Inflation, Dark Energy, Dark Matter, Accelerated Expansion, and Black Holes." His summary phrase for the resulting cosmos is that "the quasi-static universe renews itself forever."

Halton Arp approaches the question from observation of associated objects. His claim that quasars and compact galaxies carry large intrinsic redshifts and are ejected from nearby active galaxies has a direct bearing on eternity: in "Empirical Evidence on the Creation of Galaxies and Quasars" (1993) he argues that the data require "the creation of matter as an ongoing process" rather than a single episode of matter formation in the distant past. James B Wright builds on this, describing the observable universe in "Cosmology-Galactic Renewal" (2009) as "a tiny sample of an infinite ocean of galaxies" recycling its galactic debris into new galaxies with gravity as the motor and quasars, "a la Halton Arp," as the precursors of new galaxies.

Others reach a non-expanding universe by other routes. Rati Ram Sharma argues in "Theory of Non-expanding Universe" (2010) and related papers that in a genuinely expanding universe the cosmic redshifts should increase exponentially with time, which is not observed, and that redshift is instead produced by depletion of photon energy during long passage through what he calls the sharmon medium; his non-expanding universe conserves its total energy-mass content eternally, with no initial creation of matter from nothing and none of the continuous creation of the steady-state theory either. Alphonsus G Kelly argued in "Big Bang or Full Stop?" (2005) that because redshift reports recession at the time of emission, the nearest galaxies give the most recent information, and the pattern therefore shows recession decreasing gradually to a present steady state. Thomas Smid objects that overall expansion would contradict mass conservation, since the mass density would decrease everywhere in space. Karim Amen Khaidarov reworks the 1998 supernova data from a classical aether position without relativistic adjustments and reports that the apparent acceleration does not survive. Further non-expansion arguments on this wiki come from Paul Wesley and Fred L Walker.

The microwave background has alternative explanations

Since the microwave background is the observation that ended the original steady-state theory, its reinterpretation is load-bearing for every eternal cosmology here. Marmet offered an alternative interpretation of the 3 K radiation in 1994. Brynjolfsson's plasma redshift and Ashmore's tired light each generate a background of roughly the right temperature as a by-product of the same photon-energy-loss mechanism that produces the redshift, so that the background becomes a steady equilibrium feature of an old universe rather than a relic of a young one. Bob Ticer makes this explicit in "The Recycling Universe" (2011): the energy captured from redshifted photons becomes the microwave background, which in turn is reabsorbed by intergalactic plasma to replace the stars and galaxies that burn out, so the background is a stage in a cycle rather than an echo. Vincent W Carpenter takes the sceptical line that what is actually known about the background is its temperature and wavelength, and that inferring a hot origin from those two numbers is not warranted. James Carter asks whether the observed 2.7 K is a prediction of the model or a value fitted to it. In plasma cosmology generally, and in Eric J Lerner's The Big Bang Never Happened, the background is attributed to thermalisation of starlight by a filamentary intergalactic plasma.

Thermodynamic arguments do not close the case

The "heat death" objection — that an eternal universe would long since have run down to thermal equilibrium — is met here in two ways. Borchardt's "Resolution of the SLT-Order Paradox" (2008) argues that the second law's prediction of heat death applies only because the universe has been conceived as a finite isolated system; on an infinite universe with no outside, the systems philosophers' repeated failures to explain locally decreasing entropy are traced to a persistent bias in favour of the system over its environment, and the paradox dissolves once no portion of the universe is ever isolated. Bernard R Bligh approaches thermodynamics from the other end in "Has Cosmology taken a Wrong Turn in its Historical Development?" (2011), arguing that cosmology went wrong by starting from relativity rather than from the chemical, physical and thermodynamic properties of matter, and that two centuries of accumulated thermodynamic data provide a means of testing cosmological theories that has simply not been used.

A singular origin is a mathematical artefact

A further line holds that the initial singularity is a defect of the mathematics rather than an event. Stephen John Crothers argues that the point-mass singularity of general relativity arises from a corruption of the original Schwarzschild-Droste solution, and that the black hole and the Big Bang alike are artefacts of an incorrect analysis; the argument is set out at Infinity and in his own papers. Tom Van Flandern made the observational version of the complaint in "Did the Universe have a Beginning?" (1994), noting that the idea "had no serious constituency" before Hubble's redshift discovery and that not a single important prediction of the theory has since been confirmed. His catalogues "The Top 30 Problems with the Big Bang" (2002) and "The Top 50 Problems with the Big Bang" (2005) are the most-cited such lists on this wiki, and "Big Bang Reaches Deflation Stage" (2008) treats inflation as a patch rather than a discovery.

Age paradoxes support the same conclusion from the data. Van Flandern's "A Universe Older Than Itself?" (2002) reports iron abundances in a high-redshift quasar that leave, on the standard timeline, too little time for the many generations of supernovae needed to produce them; Frank Twiss argued in 1991 that some distant galaxies appear more evolved than expected. Borchardt's prediction that galactic ages will show no correlation with distance is the eternal universe's sharpest observational commitment.

Relation to spatial infinity

Main articles: Infinity and Infinite Universe Theory

Eternity in time and infinity in space are logically separable, and the researchers here separate them in practice. Steady-state and quasi-steady-state models are eternal without necessarily being spatially infinite. Ticer's recycling universe is explicitly "neither assumed to be finite nor expanding." Tuomo Suntola's Dynamic Universe, by contrast, takes space to be finite but edgeless. In the largest body of work here, however, the two claims travel together: Borchardt treats infinity in space, in time and in the microscopic direction as a single assumption, and Stavros T Tassos, Peter F Browne, Lee Coe, Richard A Waldron, Eit Gaastra and Arnold G Gulko all argue for an infinite as well as an unoriginated cosmos. Those arguments are set out at Infinity and are not repeated here.

Matter creation, recycling and cosmic cycles

An eternal universe must explain why it has not exhausted itself. Three answers appear in this collection.

Continuous creation. The original steady-state answer, retained in Burbidge's QSSC in the modified form of creation in discrete explosive events, and supported observationally on this wiki by Arp's claim of ongoing matter creation at high intrinsic redshift and by Billie Westergard's spin-and-matter-creation account of structure formation. Miles F Osmaston's Continuum Theory yields what he calls a Continuous Auto-Creation cosmology with no Big Bang.

Recycling. William C Mitchell argues in Bye Bye Big Bang, Hello Reality (2000) that stars and galaxies continuously shed matter and radiation into intergalactic space, where it accumulates in clouds from which new galaxies form, in "a vast, non-expanding, recycling universe"; he notes as a difficulty that hydrogen is largely absent from the ejected matter. Wright's galactic renewal and Ticer's recycling universe are variants of the same idea, the latter closing the loop through the microwave background itself.

Cycles. Mitch Emery's "A Closed-Loop Self-Organizing System for Cosmological and Biological Evolution" (2010) proposes a universe following an infinite cycle of recurring events, with evolution proceeding across successive cycles — his motivation being that an infinite number of trials removes the improbability of life originating spontaneously. Gulko's Universe Cycle theory and, in a different register, the nested-cycle work of Stephen J Puetz and Borchardt collected under Universal Cycle Theory take the cyclic route.

Objections

The mainstream case for a finite age rests on three observations, stated at Big Bang and summarised here. The cosmic microwave background has a near-perfect blackbody spectrum and a pattern of anisotropies that the standard model fits with a small number of parameters; the observed abundances of hydrogen, helium, deuterium and lithium are reproduced quantitatively by nucleosynthesis in a hot dense early phase; and the redshift-distance relation, together with supernova standard candles and the observed time dilation of distant supernova light curves, is taken to establish expansion. Mainstream cosmologists hold that no eternal-universe model has reproduced these to comparable precision, and that tired-light and plasma-redshift mechanisms face difficulties with blurring of distant images and with the supernova time-dilation data. Advocates here reply, with Borchardt, that these are interpretations resting on the prior assumption of a finite universe, and that an eternal universe requires different interpretations of the same observations rather than different observations.

The internal disagreements are as sharp as the external one, and this wiki does not present a single eternal-universe model. Sharma explicitly rejects the steady-state theory along with the Big Bang, since continuous creation of matter from nothing is on his account no better than a single creation from nothing. Arp's intrinsic-redshift claim and Ashmore's tired-light claim are alternative and not complementary explanations of the same data; Arp rejected tired light. Ticer's recycling universe adopts Ashmore's mechanism, while Brynjolfsson's plasma redshift is a distinct derivation reaching similar conclusions by other means. Borchardt's aether-absorption redshift is different again. Burbidge's QSSC accepts expansion, which Marmet, Sharma, Wesley and Smid deny outright.

Most directly, several contributors here reject an eternal universe altogether. David L Bergman argues in "Science of Origins, Part 2" (2007) from five doctrines of creation — among them that God, and not the universe, is what is eternal — and holds that empirical data and the laws of physics favour a supernatural origin; he traces the opposing tradition to Epicurean atomism in "Conflict of Atomism and Creation-Science in History" (2011). Gerardus D Bouw offers a creationist scenario for the origin of the universe, and Charles William Lucas has written on the electrodynamic approach to what he describes as God's creation and daily sustaining of the universe. For these authors the objection to the Big Bang, where they raise one, is not that the universe had a beginning but that the standard account of that beginning is wrong.

Researchers on this wiki

Researchers whose work here bears on whether the universe has a beginning in time.

No beginning: the argument from principle

  • Glenn Borchardt — cosmogony as an illegitimate pursuit; infinity and eternity as the founding assumption
  • Constantin Antonopoulos — the logical impossibility of a first moment of time
  • Tom Van Flandern — "Did the Universe have a Beginning?"; the standing catalogues of Big Bang problems
  • Henry P Dart — the Big Bang as a creation myth; photon decay as the alternative
  • Vincent Sauvé — Big Bang cosmology assessed as creation science
  • Mogens True Wegener — steady-state models derived from the light principle; cosmic time and new axioms for cosmology
  • Bernard Guy — time as relation rather than substance
  • Zifeng Li — a return to a Newtonian space-time view

Steady state, quasi-steady state and continuous creation

  • Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge — Quasi-Steady State Cosmology; matter creation in explosive events
  • Halton Arp — ongoing creation of matter at high intrinsic redshift
  • Miles F Osmaston — Continuous Auto-Creation cosmology from a particle-tied aether
  • Billie Westergard — structure formation by spin and matter creation, without Big Bang cosmology
  • Francis Sanchez — large-number correlations read as evidence for a steady-state cosmology

The non-expanding and static universe

  • Paul Marmet — non-Doppler redshift; intergalactic matter; the homogeneity objection to the 3 K background
  • Grote Reber — radio-astronomical evidence for a nonexpanding universe
  • Lyndon E Ashmore — New Tired Light; the Lyman alpha forest as a direct test
  • Ari Brynjolfsson — plasma redshift; "the quasi-static universe renews itself forever"
  • Rati Ram Sharma — the non-expanding universe of Unified Theory, rejecting both Big Bang and steady state
  • Alphonsus G Kelly — recession decreasing to a present steady state
  • Paul Wesley — evidence against expansion
  • Thomas Smid — expansion as a violation of mass conservation
  • Fred L Walker — whether the galaxies are really receding
  • Karim Amen Khaidarov — the Hubble constant reinterpreted from a classical aether position; author of Eternal Universe (2003)
  • Thierry De Mees — the Karlsson peaks read as circling light in a non-expanding universe

Recycling, renewal and cycles

Thermodynamic and structural objections to a finite age

Dissent from the dissent: authors here who argue for a created universe

Papers on this wiki

Grouped by theme; each paper is listed once.

The impossibility or illegitimacy of a beginning

Steady state, quasi-steady state and cosmic time

Redshift without expansion

Intrinsic redshift and ongoing matter creation

The microwave background reinterpreted

Recycling, renewal and cycles

Thermodynamics, age paradoxes and the singularity

Arguments for a created universe

See also

External links

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