We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough.
One of the staunchest opponents of the Big Bang idea was Fred Hoyle, an outstanding, prolific scientist in his own right.
In the 1950s, Fred Hoyle found it inconceivable that all of the heavy elements in the Universe — practically everything we find on Earth — would have been made in the Universe’s infancy. He thought, instead, that there must be a much simpler source of these heavy elements, one very close to home. Any guesses?
Of course! The very process that powers the Sun — nuclear fusion — is the only process in the Universe that turns the light elements of the Big Bang (Hydrogen and Helium) into the heavy elements we have on Earth today. There’s a brilliant scientific paper, co-authored by Hoyle in 1957, showing how all of the elements heavier than Lithium (which is only element #3!) are made in greater abundances in stars than in the big bang. How? Just by fusing the light ones together. (Click for your own, hi-res nuclear physics chart.)
This man — somehow overlooked for a Nobel Prize — was legitimately the father of not just stellar nucleosynthesis, but of explaining how every living thing came to be.
What? Are you serious, Ethan? Yes. He explained how every living thing came to be, because, as far as we know, life requires carbon. And Fred Hoyle was the one who figured out how this must happen.
Here’s the deal. Carbon has 6 protons and 6 neutrons in its nucleus, for a mass of 12. In the Big Bang, things are hot and dense enough that any two nuclei can collide. But to make Carbon from a sea of Hydrogen (mass 1) and Helium (mass 4), you would need to have three Helium atoms collide at once. Why? Because there is no stable nucleus with a mass of 8. You can’t make Beryllium-8 and then whack it with Helium, because Beryllium-8 doesn’t exist. (Well, it decays after 10^-17 seconds, so for all intents and purposes, it doesn’t exist for long enough to be interesting.)
So if we couldn’t make this during the Big Bang, Hoyle reasoned, we must have made it in stars. Carbon exists, he said, and it must have been made from hydrogen and/or helium alone. So he proposed a new process, never seen by nuclear scientists before, the triple-alpha process. If you have three helium nuclei close together, like in the center of a star, you can fuse them together to make Carbon, like so.
Here comes the part that makes Fred Hoyle the man of the 1950s for me: he did the math, and found that if you add up the mass of 3 helium nuclei, it turns out to be more massive than a carbon nucleus. So, Hoyle reasoned, there must be an atomic resonance of carbon that is almost exactly equal to the combined mass of three helium nuclei. One of his colleagues, Willie Fowler, looked for it, and found it, almost exactly where Fred Hoyle said it would be. This is now known as the Hoyle State.
This is the only instance in all of scientific history that the anthropic principle has been used to successfully predict anything. And for this, Willie Fowler won the Nobel Prize, and although he credits Fred Hoyle tremendously, Hoyle was left out. Somehow, understanding where practically all the matter on our world comes from — and on all worlds, for that matter — didn’t merit it.
Why? Because for all of his contributions, for all of his innovation, and for all that he advanced our understanding of the Universe, he did something that was unforgivable in a scientist.
He loved his Steady-State Theory so much that he refused to accept the Big Bang, even when the evidence became overwhelming. And the evidence became overwhelming in 1964; Hoyle railed on against the Big Bang until his death in 2001. He would speak at conferences, declaring,
We live in a fog,
calling the leftover glow from the big bang a “mysterious fog” that his steady-state model simply didn’t explain. Not only didn’t, but couldn’t. Serious scientists pointed out irreparable flaws in this model, making it incompatible with our observations. And our observations support this:
The real tragedy is that this brilliant man simply couldn’t accept new evidence and adjust his world-view accordingly. And so he died in ignorance, clutching onto his discredited theory, in futility, for nearly the last forty years of his life. As a scientist, I don’t believe in string theory, extra-dimensions, technicolor, chaotic inflation, proton decay, or fundamental scalar particles, among other things. But if the evidence comes in validating these theories, I hope I’m savvy enough to change my world view, rather than hang on to my old prejudices. And this may come sooner rather than later, depending on what turns up at the LHC!