© 1988 Ken Glasziou
© 1988 ANZURA, Australia & New Zealand Urantia Association
Most of us will have been confronted with television documentaries, popular science articles and even serious papers by professional scientists that tell us, without qualification, that our universe started with the Big Bang about 15 to 20 billion years ago. This information is usually presented as if it is proven fact.
URANTIA Book readers will be aware that the Book assigns an enormously greater age to the universe and makes no mention of any big bang. Undoubtedly some readers will be troubled by the contradiction, and this article is an effort to help readers to be objectively and sensibly critical about science.
The rules of the scientific method are quite simple. Few scientists heed them properly. Firstly, data used to construct a theory should be verifiable, secondly, unnecessary hypothesis should be eliminated, and thirdly, the simplest theory that explains the facts should receive priority.
Many scientists believed and most still believe that if these simple rules are followed, man will eventually comprehend all things. The reasons why this cannot be, have been known for a long time, but unfortunately are more or less ignored. I first came to grips with the problem as a young scientist when I read a book by a then well known physicist, Prof. M. Polanyi. The name of the hook was “Personal Knowledge” and it told me I could not know anything of real significance with absolute certainty. It also recommended that a probability estimate of truth between 0 and 1 accompany all scientific statements. It is a pity nobody does this for it would certainly help both scientist and layman.
Polanyi’s book is probably out of print, but a recent book entitled “Godel, Escher, and Bach” by Hofstadter covers sone of the same ground. Godel’s theorem .should be known to all scientists, but I doubt that 1 in 10,000 has heard of it. Paraphrased it says “All consistent axiomatic formulations of number theory include undecidable propositions”. Put another way. it says that if a formulation of number theory does not include undecidable propositions, it will be inconsistent. Undecidable means that we do not know whether they are true or false.
Number theory is at the very foundation of mathematics, which is at the very foundation of science. Hence Godel is saying all scientific theories must contain statements that cannot be shown to be true. But that does not mean they are false, simply that we cannot know. This is one of the reasons Polanyi says no scientific theory can have a probability estimate of truth of 1.0.
I think black boxes are a little easier to understand, and Shannon’s formulation of black box theory has profound implications for science and certainly for the Big Bang. The black box problem investigated by Shannon was a war time one concerned with devices that were booby trapped to explode if any attempt was made to open them. For example, secret radar devices in aircraft might be set to self-destruct if an enemy scientist tried to look inside. But such a device could still be investigated by feeding it input signals and examining its output on the radar screen. The smart scientist could then guess at how it might work. Shannon’s mathematical examination of the general problem of black boxes showed that though there may be a single simplest circuit or mechanism that would produce the same result, there would be an infinite number of more complex circuits that could do the same thing. In other words a black box problem does not have a single unique solution.
At first sight Shannon’s finding might seem trivial. But not so, it has profound implications for all of science as science is riddled with black boxes both obvious and hidden. An example is the Big Bang theory. We cannot go backwards in time to verify exactly how the universe came about, thus we cannot open the “box”. Though a set of data may have a simple interpretation, there is no possible way of knowing if it is correct as there will be an infinite number of alternative explanations that could also be true. The origin of life is another obvious black box problem, as is the question of whether there was or is a First Cause. Also the problems of the workings of the living cell, the fine structure of the atom, the workings of the brain, etc., all have their black boxes.
The physical phenomena of the material universe do not obey the laws of science as formulated by men. They do what they did before man ever thought about them. All that man can ever do is to formulate subjective, descriptive beliefs about the observable behaviour of matter to which he must assign his own subjective probability factor regarding their truth. He cannot truthfully assign a factor of 1.0. But 0.9 or greater may be possible.
But getting back to the Big Bang, Godel and Shannon are not its only problems. There is also the quality of the data, the interpretation of the data, and the fact that it does not explain all of the observed “facts”.
In the Nov/Dec issue of 6-0-6, Richard Bain referred to a paper appearing in the Sept. issue of Scientific American concerning the large scale streaming of galaxies, from which was inferred the existence of a great gravitational attractor. Richard thought this a good name for the Isle of Paradise and also reviewed evidence that the Big Bang may have been a fizzer. The Scientific American paper is one of the many that confuses fact with hypothesis, it starts by stating, without qualification, that in the 1920 's it was SHOWN that distant galaxies ARE receding in all directions from the Earth. This “fact” eventually gave rise to the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. let us examine a little further the “facts”.
In the 1920’s Edwin Hubble and his associates measured shifts in the spectral lines of light coming from other galaxies. Hubble believed he was obtaining experimental confirmation of a theory proposed by the Dutch mathematician de Sitter, that included the proposal that spectral lines from galaxies having no relative motion to the Earth would nevertheless show a red shift that increased with distance. I am not sure whether de Sitter has ever been shown to be in error. However as time went by, one of the alternative interpretations of Hubble’s results that takes an opposite view gained popular acceptance when it was found that a graph plotting the apparent brightness of galaxies against the degree of red shift showed a fairly reasonable correlation. If one then assumes that apparent brightness is a measure of distance and the red shift a measure of recessional velocity from the Earth, it is possible to extrapolate backwards in time to the moment when all matter may have been concentrated at a singularity (a dimensionless point). The explosion of the point gives us the Big Bang and the time of origin of the universe — a beautiful simple theory of great intellectual appeal. (Note that there are at least 4 unproven assumptions in this hypothesis. Grant a generous 0.7 probability factor to each and the estimate for all four being correct in the same theory comes to 0.24 , that is 24% chance of being right). Later theorists came up with the proposal that during the early expansion phase, light given off by high temperature gas should be drastically red shifted and appear today as a uniform background microwave radiation. The subsequent discovery of such a background radiation gave an enormous boost to the Big Bang theory even though, in computer simulations, no satisfactory explanation forthcoming for the formation and clustering of galaxies. The recent evidence for the clustering of the “great attractor” has made this particular problem even more disturbing for Big Bang theorists.
Other problems keep popping up for the Big Bing. One is that some quasars having very large red shifts appear to be physically connected via luminous material with galaxies having much smaller red shifts. Since it is unlikely that two such connected bodies could have enormously different recessional velocities, it is suggested that red shifts may indicate something other than recessional velocity.
The URANTIA Book tells us that large red shifts do not signify enormous recessional velocities for distant galaxies. Nu alternative explanation for red shifts comes from Emil Wolf of Rochester University who proposed that a spectrum can shift when certain forms of coherent light travel with their waves “in step” with one another. Recent laboratory experiments on both light and sound waves have confirmed this prediction.
What of the uniform background microwave radiation initially taken as conclusive evidence for the Big Bang? Well Hannes Alfven, Nobel prize winner for physics in 1970 believes that electro magnetic forces generated by high temperature plasma have much to do with the shaping of the galaxies, stars, and planets, and doubts the universe has ever been less than 1/10th its present size. One computer simulation of Alfven’s theories has shown that plasma filaments proposed by Alfven could generate the uniform microwave background radiation, which also illustrates how right Shimnon was when he showed that in black box problems there will always be more complex interpretations that are also valid.
In another contribution to 6-0-6, would like to propose from a philosophic viewpoint that The URANTIA Book may have been permitted to contain serious misinformation.
Ken Glasziou, Maleny, Qld.
