For nearly 60 years, the hot Big Bang has been accepted as the best story of our cosmic origin. Could the Steady-State theory be possible?
Since the mid-1960s and the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the Big Bang has stood alone, largely unchallenged, as the leading theory of our cosmic origins. Our Universe, at least the Universe as we observe it, started off in a hot, dense, mostly uniform state some 13.8 billion years ago, and has expanded, cooled, and gravitated ever since, giving rise to the star-and-galaxy-rich cosmos we see today.
But the Big Bang didn’t emerge as our consensus position because we cannot consider any alternatives, but rather because every serious alternative that makes quantitative predictions fails to reproduce the Universe we have. Even the Big Bang’s most enduring competitor, the Steady-State theory, can’t replicate the Big Bang’s observational successes, despite an enormous, herculean effort by some of the most brilliant minds in history.
Does that mean that all alternatives, including the Steady-State Universe, have been completely disproven?
In science, we don’t really prove or disprove hypotheses, but the data can either validate or refute the predictions of any particular hypothesis. In the case of the Steady-State…
