Big Bang Blow-up at Scientific American–ICR
The February 2017 issue of Scientific American contains an article by three prominent theoretical physicists from Princeton and Harvard who strongly question the validity of cosmic inflation, an important part of the modern Big Bang theory.1 They argued that inflation can never be shown to be wrong—it cannot be falsified—and therefore inflation isn’t even a scientific hypothesis.Inflation theory was proposed by physicist Alan Guth to solve a number of serious problems in early versions of the Big Bang model. Supposedly, the universe underwent an extremely short period of accelerated expansion right after the Big Bang.However, physicists later realized this version of inflation theory was too simplistic. Newer versions of inflationary models have inflation stopping at different times in different places, leading to the idea of a multiverse consisting of infinitely many “pocket” universes.2Anna Ijjas, the John A. Wheeler postdoctoral fellow at the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science; Paul J. Steinhardt, the Albert Einstein Professor in Science at Princeton University (and a former inflation theorist who has since become a vocal critic of the theory); and Abraham Loeb, the chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University, argued that cosmologists should seriously consider abandoning inflation theory and contemplate alternatives.
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