by John Cowley

Created on: September 16, 2008   Last Updated: May 22, 2011

The writer has embarked on writing this article in response to the large amount of scientific literature which treats the Big Bang idea about the origin of the Universe as though it were an indisputable fact. In scientific circles, opinions either for or against any particular idea are sometimes swayed more by the number of articles that are written and the reputations of the scientists involved, rather than the strength of the arguments put forward. Could this be what is happening with the idea of the Big Bang?

The evidence used to support the idea that our Universe was created with a Big Bang is considered by some to be rather superficial and full of conjecture. It's superficial because it fails to take into account some of the deep underlying truths about particles and energy embodied in the science of quantum physics.  It's full of conjecture since no-one could possibly know exactly what happened at the moment of the Big Bang and no amount of experimentation with Super Colliders will ever recreate that moment, if indeed it ever happened.

Although Einstein spent much of his working life disputing the ideas embodied in quantum physics, as espoused by Bohr and his colleagues, he eventually accepted that this new way of explaining the laws of physics was superior to the old classical way based on Newton's laws. In the world of quantum physics the idea of a beginning and an end have no real meaning as such, since information contained in the quantum wave function (quantum waves) is able to travel almost instantaneously across an apparently infinite universe.

The wave/particle duality of light is a well understood concept in which photons (light particles) and light waves become interchangeable aspects of light energy. Sometimes light behaves like waves as can be demonstrated by the use of lenses; at other times it behaves like a stream of particles, a solar wind capable of driving a foil-like sail. Photons are examples of a group of particles called bosons and they have no rest mass, unlike electrons which are examples of a group of particles called fermions. Photons stand at the border between matter and energy and serve as a useful analogy when thinking of the quantum waves associated with mass type particles like electrons and protons.

Classical scientists tend to have a deeply instilled concept of the primacy of particles over waves: the idea that particles produce quantum waves, rather than quantum waves producing particles. The writer suggests that

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