Since the dawn of humanity we have always wondered where we came from
not just as a species but also how the entire universe came into being
perhaps that is why every religion offers its own take on how the universe was created
but after thousands of years of staring at the stars we're led to believe that things were a
bit more complicated than somebody proclaiming let there be light for a century or so the big
bang theory has been reigning supreme as the most probable scientific answer to this question
but not for a lack of options over the decades many theories have challenged
the big bang theory for the title of the reason why everything exists welcome to Factnomenal and
today let's find out what these alternative origin theories are and why they FAILED
the big bang theory states that the universe began as an extremely hot and dense point that inflated
over roughly 13.8 billion years becoming bigger and colder all the evidence that the universe
offers us about what the past was like supports the idea of the big bang origins the expansion of
the universe the formation of the light elements the existence of the cosmic microwave background
the evolution of the cosmic web and many more but before the big bang theory was developed
the prevailing consensus among everybody who had an interest in science and cosmology
was that the universe just sort of always existed like this and always will the idea of a certain
point of creation of the universe only existed in religions myths and legends but those origin
theories also proposed that the universe always functioned and existed in a similar state that it
is like today none of them ever talked about the evolution of the universe it was always considered
the brightest constant of our reality scientists agree that yeah once in a while a star blows up
and a random comet appears in our night sky but on the whole the universe simply is it is one
great cosmic tapestry that at large scales at least remained unchanged for eternity however this
eternal universe theory proved to be wrong when astronomer edwin hubble discovered the expansion
of the universe that discovery immediately threw a wrench in the idea of an eternal universe because
in an expanding cosmos the universe is obviously different in the past than in the present
and the future will be even more different the universe was now alive a dynamic evolving being
that has a life cycle just like us and everything else but that wasn't the end of the debate
even dr stephen hawking once suggested that the universe mustn't have had a beginning
in 1981 many of the world's leading cosmologists gathered at the pontifical academy of sciences a
vestige of the coupled lineages of science and theology located in an elegant villa in
the gardens of the vatican about 50 years after the belgian physicist and catholic priest george
lemaire pioneered the big bang theory people were beginning to cast out on the idea of the universe
beginning as a hot dense bundle of energy they were arguing that an expanding bundle of energy
would grow into a crumpled mess rather than the huge smooth cosmos that modern astronomers observe
also another burning question was about the mystery of where did the initial energy come from
even in 1980 cosmologist alan guth realized that the big bang's problems could be fixed
within addition the possible prehistory is a more controversial thing more speculative there
certainly could have been a prehistory various theories predicted there probably was a prehistory
the theory that i've worked on called inflation
seems to imply that there almost certainly was a prehistory but still there would be a beginning
someplace an initial exponential growth spurt known as cosmic inflation would have rendered the
universe huge smooth and flat before gravity had a chance to wreck it this idea was well perceived
as it did present a reasonable explanation of what happened immediately after the big bang
but there was one new mystery that arose from this explanation what was the source of the miniscule
patch that allegedly ballooned into our cosmos and of the potential energy that inflated it
hawking in his brilliance saw a way to end the interminable groping backward in time hawking
who was 39 at the time and still able to speak proposed that there is no end or beginning at all
instead he suggested there ought to be something very special about the boundary conditions of
the universe and what can be more special than the condition that there is no boundary
the no boundary proposal which hawking and his frequent collaborator james hartle fully
formulated in a 1983 paper envisions the cosmos having the shape of a shuttlecock
just as a shuttlecock has a diameter of zero at its bottommost point and gradually widens on the
way up the universe according to the no boundary proposal smoothly expands from a point of zero
size honking and hardell defined the no boundary wave function by describing such a universe
using an approach invented by hawking's hero the physicist richard feynman the wave function here
is a probability distribution indicating the different possible states of the particles
after the collision however calculating the wave function wasn't as easy as harlan hawking thought
while using feynman's method harlan hawking had to drastically simplify the situation
ignoring even the specific particles that populate our world
it means that this formula was nowhere close to being able to predict the stock market
let alone the functions and events of the universe and this brings us back to the big bang theory
still reigning as the most accurate explanation of the universe where the universe expanded from
a singularity not from a rounded off cap of pure space as harlan hawking predicted
edwin hubble's discovery of the universe expanding consistently wasn't enough for many astronomers to
agree with the big bang theory one such astronomer was fred hoyle who proposed the steady state model
of the universe in this model the universe is always expanding but there is always new matter
appearing in the void to replace it so according to fred no matter how big the cosmos becomes
the density of the universe remains the same fred hoyle was basically advocating
yet again the idea of an eternal universe he just accepted the idea of the universe being dynamic
but not dynamic enough to have a starting and an end but overall remaining unchanged for a
while the steady state universe model was the biggest contender against the big bang theory
but two major observations brought the campaign for this theory to a screeching halt
intensely bright sources of radio emission found exclusively in the distant universe quasar showed
astronomers that almost all of the hydrogen gas in the early universe was ionized into proteins and
free electrons within a billion years after the big bang a combination of observations and theory
suggests that the first quasars and galaxies formed about a billion years after the big bang
and since then larger structures have been forming such as galaxy clusters and superclusters
thus the observation of star formation galaxy and quasar distribution and larger structures
agree well with the big bang simulations of the structure formation likewise when pansies
and wilson discover 2.72 k cosmic microwave background radiation in 1965 as predicted by
the big bang theory they proved that the universe is indeed cooling down also the temperature of
these decoupled photons will continue to drop as the universe expands on the other hand
the steady state model had no explanation for these two important phenomena of our universe
after the steady state model of the universe was done and dusted the electric universe theory
stepped up as the number one contender to the big bang theory nobel prize-winning physicist
hannes alphin was a master of understanding the forces inside electrically charged gases
known as plasmas and he developed an entire branch of physics known as magnetohydrodynamics he also
argued that because electromagnetic forces are far stronger than gravitational forces what we
observe in the cosmos should be better understood as consequences of electromagnetism not gravity
by using the argument that the universe is composed of large pockets of matter and antimatter
he explained the process of the birth of stars the evolution of star systems and the expansion of the
universe are byproducts of the competition between the two types of matter he proposed that standard
matter and anti-matter expand against each other and this territorial war is what causes the
expansion of the universe he also theorized that cmb is generated because of the friction caused
by the matter war now he could be on to something here but unfortunately for alfin there is no way
for an electric universe to match all observations most importantly hubble's law for nearby galaxies
the speed of their recession is proportional to their distance but in alphans version all galaxies
receded at an equal rate the speed of recession for galaxies is neatly explained by general
relativity and the expansion of space sorry to say mr alfin but your model is wrong as well
the reason why there are so many opponents to the big bang theory is that it's not perfect but the
same is true about most scientific theories which is why we call them theories not facts
another puzzling feature of the universe is how smooth it is at large scales regions of
the cosmos vastly separated from each other have roughly the same temperature there simply wasn't
enough time in the early universe for all of these patches to even out scientists address
this mystery as the horizon problem whether or not the entire universe is infinite and our horizon is
the universe could be twice our horizon or infinitely larger than our horizon same with
the ocean you don't know how much bigger the ocean is than your horizon is you can keep sort
of wandering around maybe you'll hit land as we've done of course so now you go there if the universe
is really really big that will be the center of their own horizon in 1969 physicist charles
meisner attempted to come up with a solution to it calling it a mix master cosmology after
the popular brand of kitchen blenders in a mix master universe he suggested that the early cosmos
was incredibly chaotic with space constantly sloshing back and forth this chaotic action
did two things it mixed up material at small scales that eventually gave rise to structures
such as galaxies and even things out at large scales to make the overall universe homogeneous
unfortunately despite being a very simple and straightforward idea the math never checked out
in favor of meesner's theory the inflation theory by alan guth was way better at explaining how the
early universe worked with backing evidence however there is still the question about
the mysterious catalyst that caused the rapid inflation in the early days of the universe
the biggest shift caused by the big bang theory in the world of cosmology was that it gave the
universe a beginning that meant that there was a time with no universe and then a time with
a universe the big bang model doesn't attempt to explain the true beginning of the universe
there have been many attempts over the years to come up with some scenario that generates a big
bang from some other physical process most of the theories that tried to improve upon the big
bang model of the universe ended up giving us a cyclic universe according to these theories
the current universe is just one of an infinitely long string of universes where every universe is
born from a singularity with a big bang and then collapses back into a new singularity with time
ready to cause yet another big bang to repeat the process all over again
in essence the cyclic models represent an eternal universe but with more steps
another problem is that all of these cyclic models rely heavily on highly speculative physics
such as higher dimensional brains colliding to trigger the big bang other possibilities proposed
by these models are eternal inflation causing the birth of a multiverse and the probability
of the universe eventually collapsing back to a singularity to bounce back again
all of these models found themselves lacking at pretty much the same milestone
they failed to answer for dark energy the force behind the accelerating expansion of our universe
which has no plans of slowing down so as far as we can tell the cosmos is a one and done affair
maybe just like us the universe 2 has only one chance at everything
and it seems like the big bang will remain the most widely accepted story of its birth
that is until something truly revolutionary is discovered so tell us in the comments how you
think our universe came into being and as always thank you for watching Factnomenal