Abstract

The essence of the Big Bang theory is the origin of space and time in the gigantic explosion of a singularity. The momentum of that explosion was, and continues to be, imparted only to newly created, energy-rich space, which continually forces everything not bound by gravity to become farther apart. The high energy of the initial space spreads, cools, and condenses to become matter. New space continues to be created even today, adding ?dark energy" at the ambient temperature between galaxies. To avoid edge problems, exceeding-the-speed-of-light problems, and fine-tuning problems, an early period of rapid expansion called "inflation" was added to the theory in the 1980's. Inflation is expansion of the universe much like expansion when air is pumped into a balloon. It is exempt from the light-speed velocity limit because such expansion involves no motion of matter through local space, analogous to objects taped to the balloon's surface getting farther apart without moving on the surface. Over the past two decades, numerous serious problems with the Big Bang theory have arisen. We presented 50 such problems at the 2005 NPA meeting, but new ones continue to appear at the rate of 4-5 per year. Now, observational contradictions have arisen to the Big Bang's two fundamental pillars: that cosmological redshift is caused by expansion, and that the cosmic microwave radiation originates from the background, beyond all visible galaxies. At first, supernova data appeared to confirm expansion by showing evidence of "time dilation", which would imply that distant galaxies really are getting farther away from us. However, Malmquist bias is a well-known, well-understood phenomenon in cosmol-ogy, and correcting for it is not optional. In brief, for any population having a more-or-less normal distribution of member properties such as size or brightness, there will be both more members and more extremes of properties with distance because increasing distance samples a volume proportional to distance cubed; and at the same time, samples are absent more of the small or faint end of the distri-bution with distance squared because those members are harder to see. The net of these two effects is a continuing skew in samples with increasing distance, biased toward seeing the most extreme on the high side (e.g., largest and brightest) members of the popula-tion. In the case of supernovas, the brightest have the slowest light curves, emulating a time dilation effect. So when the supernova data is corrected for Malmquist bias, all evidence for "time dilation" vanishes. This means the universe cannot be expanding. In addition, studies of the microwave radiation showed two unexpected results: (1) the octopole moments of the distribution of this radiation are strongly correlated with the ecliptic plane and solar velocity component through the local interstellar medium; and (2) the "SZ effect" showing heating of the radiation by x-rays in some galaxy clusters now shows cooling in roughly half the cases, consistent with random fluctuations but not with x-ray heating. Both of these studies indicate that at least the major part of the cosmic micro-wave radiation must have a local or intermediate-distance origin, but cannot be from the background. By any objective judgment, the air has now gone out of the balloon (deflation), and these new results mean that the Big Bang is no longer a viable hypothesis. It should be taken off the scientific table to make room for better models. Already-well-discussed possibili-ties are QSSC (quasi-steady-state cosmology), PC (plasma cosmology), VMC (variable-mass cosmology), and MM (meta model).