JMJ + OBT
Good afternoon! This is a neat thread; many thanks to jaygerbs for getting it started.
From childhood I’ve had an interest in physical cosmology and in related philosophical inquiry – I think this has a lot to do with my Dad who has always been fascinated by such subjects as well.
I remember reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time when I was in the 5th grade (same year I read the Rings trilogy
); of course, I understood it a bit better when I read it again in high school. Later in life, as my study of mathematics had progressed, I was able to tackle more advanced treatments of such ideas. And I’ve kept up with other popular treatments as well, such as Greene’s The Elegant Universe. I never ascended to graduate studies, though, and can’t and won’t claim to have a deep understanding of modern theoretical physics, as say a postdoctoral researcher has.
Last July I made an interesting “discovery” – I got turned on to an alternative approach to physical cosmology called
Plasma Cosmology. This also entailed learning about a branch of “PC” which is called the
Electric Universe model-concept. Both PC and EU posit a far greater role to electrodynamic phenomena – in terms of plasma physics – in the large scale structure and workings of the physical universe.
Interestingly enough, if the PC and/or EU advocates are correct, the interpretation of observed “cosmological redshift” as an indicator of spatial distance is incorrect (it must be understood as something else, something intrinsic to the redshifted bodies, perhaps indicative of their age). If this understanding is coupled with PC’s explanation of the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background as a “local” plasma physics phenonmena (that is, local to the local galactic supercluster), then support for the idea that the universe is expanding and originated in finite real time “at” a space-time singularity is completely undercut.
What picture do PC and EU paint then as far as the spatial and temporal extent of the universe? In a nutshell, they suggest that the universe has a fractal structure of quasi-infinite extent in space and time. The “quasi” part owing to the notion that empirically one cannot prove something to be infinite; yet if the PC/EU model is correct, then through empirical methods one would likely never be able to dectect an “edge,” in space or time, of the cosmos.
I encourage you to look at the article in the Wikipedia (link given above); and look at the “discussion page” for the article to see an interesting, sometimes fierce, debate between the advocates and critics of the ideas presented, who are also acting as the article’s editors.
Also take a look at the following websites:
Plasma Cosmology .Net
(provides a nice overview of PC and EU)
Thunderbolts.info
(this is an EU advocacy site; see especially the
“picture of the day” archive)
The Plasma Universe
(website of respected plasma researcher Dr. Anthony Perrat, of the Los Alimos National Labs; and take a look at his paper,
Characteristics for the Occurrence of a High-Current, Z-Pinch Aurora as Recorded in Antiquity)
The ideas presented on those websites are not a “smokescreen” for Christian creationism or any other such thing. In fact, you many notice some overt anti-Christian or anti-religious sentiment in some of the writings. These ideas genuinely represent an alternative scientific approach to physical cosmology and interpretation of astrophysical data that will, I believe, in the next few decades (sooner?) lead most of the scientific community back to a quasi “steady-state” (PC/EU aren’t steady-state in the traditional sense) empirical model of the universe.
So what then, for us Christians who hold creation “ex nihilo” of the universe in finite time to be a core doctrine of our Faith? I don’t think it poses any problem at all! But explaining why is for another post.
Finally, if indeed the “standard model” of the Big Bang + Inflation + cold dark matter (known as “lambda-CDM”) gets tossed in the dust-bin of scientific theories, I have to wonder how many Catholic minds will be discovered to have wedded their religious beliefs too closely to a physical cosmology which seemed to support them, i.e. “Big Bang == Creation.”
In the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.
IC XC NIKA
