HOW WELL DO WE KNOW THE UNIVERSE?

Remembering renowned Indian scientist Dr Jayant Narlikar who dared to disagree with the Big Bang Theory

- BY MAKARAND R. PARANJAPE | Special to Gulf News

Everyone has heard of the “Big Bang Theory.” Naturally. Because it is the most widely accepted, now quite the standard, model of how the universe began.

Its staunchest critics are those who take the narrative of creation literally. But few are aware that this very term was coined, somewhat derisively, by its principal opponent, the Cambridge astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle. That too on a BBC show.

What is equally astonishing, if one thinks of it deeply, is how closely the “Big Bang” theory resembles the creationist religious beliefs of its staunchest opponents. It was proposed by a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, the Belgian cosmologist who thought that everything came out of an original “super-atom.”

For a few decades, the principal competitor of the “Big Bang” theory was Hoyle’s “steady-state model,” which evolved into the Quasi-steady-state cosmology (QSS) model and, eventually, and relatedly, to the Oscillating Universe Theory. These theories hold that the universe always existed, whether in a steady state or, now much more likely, in cycles of expansion and contraction across very large intervals of time, going into billions of light years.

Proponent of an alternative view