8/31/22, 9:21 AM Big Bang or Steady State?

(Cosmology: Ideas)

  Big Bang or Steady State?

spacer Creation of the Elements

 
The 1930s was more a decade of consolidation than of revolutionary
  advance in cosmology. And in the early 1940s, world war limited cosmological
advance. But the war that temporarily absorbed scientific resources also
promoted technologies that would lead to fundamental scientific advances.
 
Advances in nuclear physics helped transform cosmological speculations into
  quantitative calculations. This line of investigation, begun in the late 1940s,
was at first pursued mainly by physicists, not astronomers. In the 1930s
Georges Lemaître had suggested that the universe might have originated when
a primeval "cosmic egg" exploded in a spectacular fireworks, creating an

expanding universe. Now physicists found plausible numbers for the cosmic
Who was abundances of different elements that would be created in an initial cosmic
explosion. But the theory of an initial cosmic explosion was soon challenged by
George Gamow?
a new hypothesis—that the universe might be in a steady state after all.

In 1946 the Ukrainian-born American physicist George Gamow considered

how the early stage of an expanding universe would be a superhot stew of
particles, and began to calculate what amounts of various chemical elements
might be created under these conditions. Gamow was joined by Ralph Alpher,
a graduate student at George Washington University, where Gamow taught,
and by Robert Herman, an employee at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics
Laboratory, where Gamow consulted. Both Alpher and Herman were
 
American-born sons of émigré Russian Jews.
A Gamow joke
Gamow assumed expansion and cooling of a universe from an initial state
of nearly infinite density and temperature. In that state all matter would have
  been protons, neutrons, and electrons merging in an ocean of high energy
radiation. Gamow and Alpher called this hypothetical mixture "Ylem" (from a
  medieval word for matter). Alpher made detailed calculations of nuclear
processes in this early universe. For his calculations he used some of the first
  electronic digital computers—developed during the war for computing, among
other things, conditions inside a nuclear bomb blast. It seemed that elements
  could be built up as a particle captured neutrons one by one, in a sort of
"nuclear cooking."
 
The contribution of this theory was not to set forth a final solution but, no less
important, to set forth a grand problem—what determined the cosmic
  abundance of the elements? Could the observed abundances be matched by
calculations that applied the laws of physics to an early extremely hot dense
  phase of an expanding universe? Gamow did succeed in explaining the relative
abundances of hydrogen and helium. Calculations roughly agreed with
  observations of stars—helium accounted for about a quarter of the mass of the
universe and hydrogen accounted for nearly all the rest. However, attempts to
Read about the make calculations for other elements failed to get a sensible answer for any
solution and what element beyond helium. It seemed that piling more neutrons onto helium
would hardly ever get you stable elements. Gamow joked that his theory
Gamow thought
should nevertheless be considered a success, since it did account for 99% of
of it.
the matter in the universe.

Indeed his theory was not wrong but only incomplete. Astrophysicists soon
realized that if the heavier elements were not formed during the hot origin of
the universe, they might be formed later on, in the interiors of stars. The
theory depended on a special property of carbon, which British astronomer
Fred Hoyle measured and found as predicted. Cosmology had entered the
laboratory.

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8/31/22, 9:21 AM Big Bang or Steady State? (Cosmology: Ideas)

  The Steady-State Theory

Who was Hoyle's triumph in explaining how most elements could be created in
Fred Hoyle? stellar interiors fell outside the theory in which elements were created at the
very start. It was interpreted as favoring a rival theory. And Hoyle did favor a
rival theory, which he had played a large part in inventing and developing. In
this theory the universe had always looked much as it does now. There never
had been a "big bang"—a phrase that Hoyle invented in 1950, intending the
nickname as pejorative.

[The Big Bang] is an irrational process that cannot be

described in scientific terms … [nor] challenged by an appeal
to observation.
       —Hoyle

  There is a charming story, not taken seriously

by all historians, about how steady state theory
Who was began. The idea came in 1947, Hoyle claimed,
Tommy Gold? when he and his fellow scientists Hermann
Bondi and Tommy Gold went to a movie. The
three knew each other from shared research on
radar during World War II. Hoyle was
versatile, undisciplined and intuitive; Bondi
had a sharp and orderly mathematical mind;
Gold's daring physical imagination opened
new perspectives. The movie was a ghost story
that ended the same way it started. This got the
three scientists thinking about a universe that
was unchanging yet dynamic. According to
Hoyle, "One tends to think of unchanging
situations as being necessarily static. What the Photo of Hoyle at
ghost-story film did sharply for all three of us the dedication of the
was to remove this wrong notion. One can have Anglo-Australian
unchanging situations that are dynamic, as for Telescope, with
instance a smoothly flowing river." But how Prince Charles,
could the universe always look the same if it 1974.
was always expanding? It did not take them
long to see a possible answer—matter was
continuously being created. Thus new stars and galaxies could form to fill the
space left behind as the old ones moved apart. (You can read Gamow's verse
about this idea here.)

Drawings of an early and a later stage for two different

models of an expanding universe. The left model obeys the
cosmological principle, according to which the universe is
homogenous and appears the same to an observer anywhere
in the universe. The right model obeys the perfect
cosmological principle, which adds to the cosmological

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8/31/22, 9:21 AM Big Bang or Steady State? (Cosmology: Ideas)

principle the additional requirement that the universe be

unchanged over time—new galaxies emerge continually
within the expanding space.

spacer
 

From Introducing Hawking: Hoyle and big bang

spacer To many philosophical minds, the steady-state universe proposed  

  by Hoyle, Bondi and Gold had a major advantage over the big-bang expanding
universe. In their universe the overall density was kept always the same by the  
continuous creation of matter. In the big-bang universe with its radically
  changing density, various physical laws might not apply the same way at all  
times. It would be impossible to extrapolate with confidence from the present
  back to the super-dense origin of the universe.
 
How Old Steady-state theory also had an
Is The Earth? observational advantage over  
big-bang theory in 1948. The rate
  of expansion then observed,  
when calculated backward to an
initial big bang, gave an age for  
  the universe of only a few billion
years—well below the known age
  of the solar system! That was
 
certainly an embarrassment for
  the big bang theory.  
Tommy Gold (left) with Hermann
Bondi (center) and Fred Hoyle  
  For some time cosmologists had
measured ideas against a (right), circa 1960.
"cosmological principle," which asserted that the large-scale properties of the  
 
universe are independent of the location of the observer. In other words, any
theory that put we humans at some special place (like the center of the
   
universe) could be rejected out of hand. Bondi and Gold insisted that the
universe is not only homogenous in space but also in time—it looks the same at
  any place and at any time. They grandly called this the "perfect cosmological  
principle," and insisted that theory should be deduced from the axiom that we
  are not at any special place in either space or time.  

  Hoyle was less insistent that the perfect cosmological principle was  
a fundamental axiom. He preferred to have theory follow from a modification
  he proposed to Einstein's relativistic universe, adding the creation of matter.  
The two different steady-state theories had enough in common, however, to be
considered one for most purposes.  
 
Much of the later development of steady-state theory came in response to
   
criticism. In Great Britain, especially, scientists gave considerable attention to
elaborating the theory. Their arguments were largely of a philosophical nature,
  with little appeal to observation.  

  The cosmological debate acquired religious and political aspects.  

Pope Pious XII announced in 1952 that big-bang cosmology affirmed the
  notion of a transcendental creator and was in harmony with Christian dogma.  
Steady-state theory, denying any beginning or end to time, was in some minds
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8/31/22, 9:21 AM Big Bang or Steady State? (Cosmology: Ideas)

  loosely associated with atheism. Gamow even suggested steady-state theory  

was attached to the Communist Party line, although in fact Soviet astronomers
  rejected both steady-state and big-bang cosmologies as "idealistic" and  
unsound. Hoyle himself associated steady state theory with personal freedom
and anti-communism.
   
Astronomers in the United States found the steady-state theory attractive, but
  they took a pragmatic approach. The rival claims of big-bang and steady-state  
theory must be settled by observational tests. One test involved the ages of
  galaxies. In a steady state, with continuous creation of matter, there would be a  
mixture of young and old galaxies throughout the universe. In a big bang, with
  only an initial creation, galaxies would age with time. And astronomers could  
look back in time by looking at more distant galaxies, for observing a galaxy a
billion light-years away meant seeing it in light that had left it a billion years
  ago. Observations reported in 1948 purported to find that more distant  
galaxies were indeed older. Score one for the big bang. Bondi and Gold
  reviewed the data carefully, and in 1954 they showed that the reported effect  
was spurious. Score one for steady state. The age test might be able to
  distinguish between the rival theories in principle, but in practice it could not.  

  Another possible test involved the rate of expansion of the universe.  

 
Who was
Martin Ryle?
Ryle, on the right,
soldering part of the
antenna with his
colleague Hewish.
In a big bang, the expansion rate would slow; in a steady state universe it
would remain constant. Data from the Mount Wilson Observatory seemed to  
favor the big bang, but not certainly enough to constitute a crucial test.
Meanwhile there was a solution to the embarrassing calculation that put the
age of a big-bang universe less than the age of the solar system. Walter Baade
showed that estimates of the distances to galaxies had mixed together two  
different types of stars (as explained here). As a result, the size of the universe
had been underestimated by about a factor of two. If galaxies were twice as  
distant as previously thought, then calculation with the observed rate of
expansion gave an age of the universe twice as great as previously calculated —  
safely greater than the age of the solar system. That argument against the big-
bang universe thus dissolved.
The most serious challenge to steady-state theory came from the  
new science of radio astronomy. Fundamental knowledge in the techniques of
detecting faint radio astronomy signals advanced greatly during World War II,
especially with research on radar and especially in England. After the war,  
research programs at Cambridge, at Manchester, and at Sydney, Australia,
built radio telescopes to detect signals from outer space. They dominated radio  
astronomy for the next decade.
The program at Cambridge was led by Martin Ryle, who in 1974 would receive
the Nobel Prize in physics for his overall contributions to radio astronomy. In  
1951 Ryle believed that radio sources were located within our galaxy, and hence
were of no cosmological interest. But over the next few years he became
MORE about
convinced that most of the radio sources he was detecting were extragalactic.
Radio Astronomy
His observations, then, could be used to test cosmological models. Ryle argued
that his survey of almost 2,000 radio sources, completed in 1955, contradicted
steady-state theory, because more distant/older sources seemed to be
distributed differently from nearby ones. But he overstated the significance of
his initial data. Only after more years of work would radio observations argue
strongly against steady-state theory.

spacer Hoyle bitterly complained that Ryle was motivated not by a quest
for the truth, but by a desire to destroy steady-state theory. Ryle, and many
other observational astronomers as well, did not in fact respect theoretical
cosmologists. (You can read a verse about Ryle versus Hoyle by Barbara
Gamow, George Gamow's wife, here.)

Even if we never actually succeed in [radio] measurements

with sufficient accuracy to disprove any cosmological theory,
the threat may discourage too great a sense of irresponsibility
[on the part of cosmologists, who] … have always lived in a

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8/31/22, 9:21 AM Big Bang or Steady State? (Cosmology: Ideas)

happy state of being able to postulate theories which had no

chance of being disproved.        
       —Ryle

spacer The Cosmic Microwaves  

 
A powerful blow against steady state theory was struck in  
  1965 with a surprising discovery. In a 1948 paper, Gamow had argued that the
big-bang universe would at first be dominated by radiation — a raging sea of  
energy. As this expanded the energy would mostly be converted to matter.
  Alpher and Herman predicted that a remnant of the radiation would remain — a  
cosmic background radiation permeating all space. As the universe expanded
  this would cool. Radiation that had initially been far more than white-hot would
 
by now have very low energy. They predicted the temperature of the universe
  now should be around 5 degrees Kelvin, barely above absolute zero.
 
  There was little communication in those days among nuclear physicists,
observational astronomers and theoretical cosmologists. Furthermore, the fact  
that Alpher and Herman were employed in industrial research laboratories may
  have lowered their visibility in the university research community. Gamow,  
Alpher and Herman were more interested in the physics than the cosmology.
  Their estimate of radiation was far from certain, and varied in subsequent
 
calculations. Anyway, at the time they published their idea nobody could test it,
  for radiation of such a low temperature would be microwaves, a hard-to-detect
type lying between infrared rays and radio waves. In the late 1940s, no  
  equipment existed that could detect microwave radiation with a temperature
much below 20 degrees Kelvin.  

Who was Techniques rapidly improved as microwaves were found useful for More About
radar and communications. In 1963 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, studying Penzias &
Robert Dicke? Wilson
the sky's microwave "noise" for Bell Telephone Laboratories, realized that they
had detected microwaves coming from all around the sky, a universal
background radiation. Robert Dicke, a physicist nearby at Princeton University, MORE about
learned of the measurement and in 1965 correctly interpreted it as radiation of seeing
about 3 degrees Kelvin, left over from the big bang. Dicke had not known about microwaves
Alpher and Herman's prediction, and had independently thought of the cosmic
background radiation. Even before learning of Penzias and Wilson's
observation, Dicke had set his former student James Peebles to work on
calculating the nature of this radiation. Only later was Alpher and Herman's
predition recovered and appreciated.

The Debate Ends

Penzias and Wilson had mixed feelings about the theoretical fallout
from their discovery. Wilson, who had studied cosmology with Hoyle, later
spacer recalled that he "very much liked the steady-state universe. Philosophically, I  
still sort of like it. I think Arno and I both felt that it was nice to have one
explanation but that there may well have been others." Few astrophysicists
shared Wilson's reservations. Eager to bury the steady-state theory, already
largely discredited by surveys of radio sources, they quickly described Penzias
and Wilson's observation as the death-blow to steady-state theory.

The minority who still preferred steady-state theory were not  

convinced that the big bang had been detected. Couldn't Penzias
and Wilson's single observation have some other explanation?
Hoyle argued that the radiation could come from interaction
between stellar radiation and interstellar needle-shaped grains of
iron. Only a number of measurements at different frequencies
could confirm that the radiation had the properties predicted for
a remnant of the big bang. It was not until the early 1970s that
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8/31/22, 9:21 AM Big Bang or Steady State? (Cosmology: Ideas)
techniques advanced enough to make these measurements,
bringing abundant confirmation.

For most purposes, however, the debate between the big bang
and the steady state was over in 1965, with big bang the clear
winner. Steady-state advocates were reduced to making ad hoc
arguments of little plausibility, and they were increasingly
marginalized.

A note by Gamow: “I am glad

to say that it isn’t necessary
any more to pour Hoil on the
troubled waters of
cosmogony.” (Cosmogony is
the study of the universe’s
origin.) Date unknown.

SEE the confirmation By the early 1970s, cosmology was increasingly an observational How old is the
measurements science, its controversies and debates assigned to empirical arbitration. Yet universe?
despite the greatly improved, and sometimes entirely new, instrumentation,
philosophical considerations remained at the center of cosmology. They
played a crucial role in the next major development in cosmology, the theory
of the inflationary universe.

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