Machan's Musings - Big Bang or Steady State?
by Tibor R. Machan
Let’s briefly ponder the idea of the age of the universe. Is that idea even intelligible, that the universe might have an age or duration? Aren’t durations what go on within the universe, all that which exists?
During the early 20th century the view that the universe had existed forever, the so called “Steady State” view, was still in contention but around the middle of the century the evidence began to mount in favor of what has come to be known as the Big Bang. (Actually, just as the enemies of it coined the term “capitalism,” so “Big Bang” was a term of ridicule coined by those who found the idea of such a beginning of the universe hopeless. But in both cases they stuck.)
I have to confess that I, too, find the idea of the Big Bang very difficult to make sense of. It goes something like this:
To start with, a tiny volume, no bigger than the head of a pin, containing all the matter and energy that occupies or constitutes the universe, exploded and henceforth the matter and energy in that tiny volume has been expanding. As you can probably gather, all this might make clear enough sense about some tiny object within the universe; but when one tries to think of the universe itself as some tiny thing that blew up and is still now expanding, things get somewhat murky.
For example, into what did the Big Bang explode and into what is it expanding? If we think of explosions of any kind, something blows up and expands into the surrounding region. But there is no such region, no “outside” of the universe into which the universe could blow up and expand.
This hasn’t been made clear to me in all my reading on the subject, as well as my dutiful watching of a rather fascinating educational TV program, Universe: The Infinite Frontier. Since there are only testimonials and reports by various scientists in the books I’ve read and the programs I have watched, I never get to ask the questions generated from my reflections about the Big Bang.
There is another question. Although the Big Bang is supposed to discredit the Steady State theory, according to which the universe has been and will be around forever, I do not see why the Big Bang isn’t also a kind of Steady State theory. After all, that tiny pin sized thing that the universe had been – at the time of the Big Bang – didn’t come from nothing, or at least it makes no sense that it could have come from nothing. (That God put it there raises so many puzzles that it is a completely unhelpful idea – how did a purely spiritual being such as God make an object with all the matter and energy that exists, from nothing? What mechanism could possibly have made that transition from the spiritual to the physical? And, anyway, what about God – how did God get to exist eternally? If God could, then why not the universe?)
But now what about the supposed contrast between Big Bang and Steady State? Steady State does not presuppose some particular state, only that the whole of existence or universe is eternal, without beginning or end. Big Bang could be compatible with this, as well – only now it is specified that the whole of existence or universe is not only eternal but undergoes, among other possible ways of carrying on, a cyclical stage of development from a Big Bang to a possible collapse. Even if no scientific explanation exists (yet?) of this new Steady State idea, there is a good metaphysical reason - namely, that nothing can come from nothing and something cannot vanish into nothing.
If we keep with the image presented by its proponents, Big Bang occurs when this tiny, pinhead volume of all the matter and energy that exists blows up; but there is no word about how that little but incredibly heavy object originated. Again, given that it’s impossible for something to come from nothing – and to dispute this would be very strange indeed – that thing probably came from something, too. Perhaps from the contraction of the expanded matter and energy, so, as I suggest above, a cycle may be the Steady State that obtains and, indeed, the universe didn’t begin nor will it end (other than in its specific – currently deemed to be time-space – configuration).
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