The conclusion, if true, is going to cause decades of dogma to be tossed out the window. And this is good. Because as history teaches us, once old theories, propped up and supported by the iron fist of the prevailing ideologies established by the scientific authorities of the era are thoroughly discredited, an explosion of new knowledge follows.
It happened in the recent past when the changes wrought by the acceptance of plate tectonics burst on to the scene as quickly as did the changes that accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain.
My personal prediction of the next Big Fall will be that of the Big Bang, or at least the relation of redshift to cosmic distance, and the vindication of Halton Arp and his long published observations that have yet to be explained within current cosmological models.
Arp et.al. propose what they once called "The Gang Bang" theory of cosmic evolution (circa 1990) as contrasted to the Big Bang, in which matter is continuously being created in the universe, and redshift is inversely proportional to the age of matter.
P.S. The innocently named title of a paper by Arp and a dozen or so collaborators containing the phrase "Gang Bang", resulted in a firestorm of condemnation that quickly resulted in the retraction of the article. Their report is probably still out there, but with a different title. I know I have the original somewhere in my files and I searched for it more than a decade ago and couldn't find it, so it would probably be even more difficult for me to find it today.
Can anyone point me to the original source?
"My personal prediction of the next Big Fall will be that of the Big Bang, or at least the relation of redshift to cosmic distance, and the vindication of Halton Arp and his long published observations that have yet to be explained within current cosmological models." ~ StopGlobalWhining
Big Bang theory in doubt?
17/03/2003 08:35 - (SA)
Alabama - Images of galaxies four billion light years away threaten to rip apart modern theories about space and time.
The rays of light that have travelled half way across the universe may force astrophysicists to completely re-think their ideas about the Big Bang which gave birth to the cosmos.
They suggest that time does not flow in incredibly small but finite and measurable bits, or "quanta", as most scientists believe.
Instead of time being made up of many individual moments, like grains of sand running through an hour-glass, it appears to move in a seamless, continuous flow. If this proves to be the case it will cause consternation in the world of astrophysics.
Concerns
One of the biggest problems concerns the Big Bang. It implies that in the first instant of creation the singularity or "point" that became the universe had infinite temperature and density - something cosmologists have strenuously tried to avoid.
According to current theories, time should be divisible into 20 million trillion, trillion, trillion Planck intervals. The shortest possible spatial measurement, "the Planck length", is the distance light can travel in one Planck interval - about 0.000000000000000000000000000000001 centimetres (10 to the power of minus 33).
Scientists say time and distances smaller than Planck scales are "fuzzy" because in a fundamental way they cannot be measured.
The theory allows for Planck-scale fluctuations in time and space which translate o minute variations in the speed of light. However these variations would only be evident in light that has travelled a great distance.
In a similar way, a sprinter running one percent faster than his opponents might win a 10 metre race in a photo finish, while a one percent faster marathon runner will finish hundreds of metres ahead of the rests of the field.
After billions of years, the faster components of a light wave would be far enough ahead of the slower components to make the beam's wave front noticeably distorted, or blurred.
Two astrophysicists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville, tested the theory of quantum time by looking for this blurring in Hubble Space Telescope images of galaxies at least four billion light years away.
Taken by surprise
Dr Richard Lieu and Dr Lloyd Hillman were taken by surprise when they did not find it. Instead each image showed a sharp, ring-like interference pattern around the galaxy. Not finding the expected blurring suggested that time was not a quantum function and flowed fluidly at intervals infinitely shorter than Planck units of time.
The findings were released in the online "Astrophysical Journal Letters". Dr Lieu said: "If time doesn't become 'fuzzy' beneath a Planck interval, this discovery will present problems to several astrophysical and cosmological models, including the Big Bang model of the universe."
The Big Bang theory supposes that at the instant of creation, the quantum singularity that became the universe would need to have infinite density and temperature. To avoid that sticky problem, theorists invoked the Planck time.
They said if the instant of creation was also a quantum event, when space and time were both blurry, then you don't need infinite density and temperature at the start of the Big Bang.
"If time moves along like business as usual even at Planck scales, however, you have to reconcile the Big Bang model with an event that isn't just off the scale, it's infinite," Lieu said. - Sapa-DPA
Astrophysical Journal Letters
2003 March 10 Volume 585, Number 2, Part 2
Posted electronically 2003 February 19
The Phase Coherence of Light from Extragalactic Sources: Direct Evidence against First-Order Planck-Scale Fluctuations in Time and Space
Lieu & Hillman, ApJL, 585, L77
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/contents/ApJL/v585n2.html ====
Astrophysical Journal Letters
2002 April 1 Volume 568, Number 2, Part 2
Posted electronically 2002 March 12
Planck-Scale Spacetime Fluctuations -
The Effect of Planck-Scale Spacetime Fluctuations on Lorentz Invariance at Extreme Speeds
Lieu, ApJL, 568, L67
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/ApJ/journal/contents/ApJL/v568n2.html Big Bang Theory in Doubt?
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,6119,2-13-1443_1334160,00.html