Comments on: Hoyles’ ” Frontiers” Online https://habitablezone.com/2012/05/19/hoyles-frontiers-online/ Fri, 03 Apr 2026 22:41:18 -0700 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 By: ER https://habitablezone.com/2012/05/19/hoyles-frontiers-online/#comment-15132 ER Sat, 19 May 2012 17:21:37 +0000 http://habitablezone.com/?p=15206#comment-15132 The Steady State theory rejected the idea of the Big Bang because it involved less assumptions. In other words, it was all about Occam's Razor. The Steady State was the ultimate expression of the Principle of Mediocrity, a fundamental philosophical prejudice that guides all science, that is, that there is nothing special or unique about us, or our time and place in the Universe. SST assumed the Universe has always looked pretty much the way it does now, and will continue to look that way forever. Furthermore, SST also claims that statement holds wherever in the Universe you happen to be located. The Universe is infinite and eternal and unchanging. It had no beginning and will have no end, it does not evolve. It will always remain the same. Individual stars and galaxies may burn out, but new ones will form to replace them...forever. This absolute minimum of assumptions and conditions is called The Perfect Cosmological Principle. It fit perfectly into the philosophical prejudices of scientists. And for a long time, it actually fit the data. Even the discovery that the Universe was expanding in the 1920s did not alter this idea. It was posited that as the Universe expanded into nothingness, new matter was created spontaneously out of nothingness at just the right amount to replace what was being diluted by the expansion. The gradual spontaneous creation of matter from nowhere was not as objectionable as the idea that all matter was created instantaneously at one moment--the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle, by the way, coined the phrase "Big Bang", to poke fun at the idea of instantaneous creation. It was calculated that this "new matter" that had to appear to make the whole thing work was simple monatomic hydrogen. As I recall, the rate required to just balance the expansion was on the order of one atom of hydrogen per cubic meter per century. A rate that dilute could never be experimentally verified in the laboratory. The rest of the nucleides would be generated by Hoyle's nucleogenesis, in the cores of stars that could then go supernova and return the rest of the Periodic Table to the interstellar medium where it would be available to meet the observed abundances in the cosmos. And nucleogenesis fit in perfectly with new work on stellar structure and evolution from the first half of the 20th century. But the Big Bang partisans had also predicted several other consequences of their theory, consequences which could be measured. Foremost among these was the cosmic microwave background radiation, and when it was finally confirmed in the 1960s, Steady State was finished. The result is that the universe we're now stuck with is far from Cosmologically Perfect. It had a birthday, and it will die, and it will evolve in between. And the longer we look, the stranger it gets. <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e4/HubbleUltraDeepFieldwithScaleComparison.jpg/600px-HubbleUltraDeepFieldwithScaleComparison.jpg" alt="." /> The Steady State theory rejected the idea of the Big Bang because it involved less assumptions. In other words, it was all about Occam’s Razor. The Steady State was the ultimate expression of the Principle of Mediocrity, a fundamental philosophical prejudice that guides all science, that is, that there is nothing special or unique about us, or our time and place in the Universe.

SST assumed the Universe has always looked pretty much the way it does now, and will continue to look that way forever. Furthermore, SST also claims that statement holds wherever in the Universe you happen to be located. The Universe is infinite and eternal and unchanging. It had no beginning and will have no end, it does not evolve. It will always remain the same. Individual stars and galaxies may burn out, but new ones will form to replace them…forever. This absolute minimum of assumptions and conditions is called The Perfect Cosmological Principle. It fit perfectly into the philosophical prejudices of scientists. And for a long time, it actually fit the data.

Even the discovery that the Universe was expanding in the 1920s did not alter this idea. It was posited that as the Universe expanded into nothingness, new matter was created spontaneously out of nothingness at just the right amount to replace what was being diluted by the expansion. The gradual spontaneous creation of matter from nowhere was not as objectionable as the idea that all matter was created instantaneously at one moment–the Big Bang. Fred Hoyle, by the way, coined the phrase “Big Bang”, to poke fun at the idea of instantaneous creation.

It was calculated that this “new matter” that had to appear to make the whole thing work was simple monatomic hydrogen. As I recall, the rate required to just balance the expansion was on the order of one atom of hydrogen per cubic meter per century. A rate that dilute could never be experimentally verified in the laboratory.

The rest of the nucleides would be generated by Hoyle’s nucleogenesis, in the cores of stars that could then go supernova and return the rest of the Periodic Table to the interstellar medium where it would be available to meet the observed abundances in the cosmos. And nucleogenesis fit in perfectly with new work on stellar structure and evolution from the first half of the 20th century.

But the Big Bang partisans had also predicted several other consequences of their theory, consequences which could be measured. Foremost among these was the cosmic microwave background radiation, and when it was finally confirmed in the 1960s, Steady State was finished.

The result is that the universe we’re now stuck with is far from Cosmologically Perfect. It had a birthday, and it will die, and it will evolve in between. And the longer we look, the stranger it gets.
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