קרא ובכה
כל כולך מתבסס על תיאוריה במשבר שלא כל כך תואמת את המציאות המוכרת היום. The Big Bang theory concerning the origin of the universe was spawned about 50 years ago, and soon became the dogma of the evolutionary establishment. It has had many dissenters, however, including the British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle, the Nobel laureate Hannes Alfven, and astronomers Geoffrey Burbidge and Halton Arp. According to the Big Bang theory, some 10 to 20 billion years ago, all of the matter and energy of the universe was compressed into a cosmic egg, or plasma ball, consisting of sub-atomic particles and radiation. Nobody knows where the cosmic egg came from, or how it got there -- it was just there. For some equally inexplicable reason, the cosmic egg exploded. As the matter and radiation expanded, so the theory says, it cooled sufficiently for elements to form, as protons and electrons combined to form hydrogen of atomic weight one, and neutrons were subsequently captured to form helium of atomic weight four. Most of the gas that formed consisted of hydrogen. These gases, it is then supposed, expanded radially in all directions throughout the universe until they were so highly dispersed that an extremely low vacuum and temperature existed. No oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, carbon, sulfur, copper, iron, nickel, uranium, or other elements existed. The universe consisted essentially of hydrogen gas. Then somehow, we are told, the molecules of gas that were racing out at an enormous speed in a radial direction began to collapse in on themselves in local areas by gravitational attraction. The molecules within a space of about six trillion miles diameter collapsed to form each star, a hundred billion stars somehow collected to form each of the estimated 100 billion galaxies in the universe, and our own solar system formed about five billion years or so ago from a cloud of dust and gas made up of the exploded remnants of previously existing stars. No satisfactory theory exists to explain any of these events, but cosmologists remained firm in their conviction that all of these marvelous events would eventually yield to credible explanations. But now a cruel fate has befallen the grandest theory of all -- the Big Bang theory. Based on the Big Bang theory, cosmologists predicted that the distribution of matter throughout the universe would be homogeneous. Thus, based upon the so-called Cosmological Principle, it was postulated that the distribution of galaxies in the universe would be essentially uniform. No matter in which direction one looked, if one looked far enough, one would see the same number of galaxies. There would be no large scale clusters of galaxies or great voids in space. Recent research, however, has revealed massive superclusters of galaxies and vast voids in space. We exist in a very "clumpy" universe. The present crisis in Big Bang cosmologies began in 1986, when R. Brent Tully, of the University of Hawaii, showed that there were ribbons of superclusters of galaxies 300 million light-years long and 100 million light-years thick, stretching out about a billion light-years, and separated by voids about 300 million light-years across.[1] These structures are much too big for the Big Bang theory to produce. At the speeds at which galaxies are supposed to be moving, it would require 80 billion years to create such a huge complex, but the age of the universe is supposed to be somewhere between 10 and 20 billion years. In November of 1989, Margaret Geller and John Huchra, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announced the results of their research. Their map of the sky revealed what they termed the "Great Wall" -- a huge sheet of galaxies 200 million light years across and 700 million light years long.[2] A team of American, British, and Hungarian astronomers, it is reported, discovered even larger structures.[3] They found galaxies clustered into thin bands spaced about 600 millon light years apart. The pattern of these clusters stretched across about one-fourth of the diameter of the universe, or about seven billion light years. This huge shell and void pattern would have required nearly 150 billion years to form, based on their speed of movement, if produced by the standard Big Bang cosmology. Even more recently (January 3, 1991), Will Saunders and nine fellow astronomers published the results of their all-sky redshift survey of galaxies detected by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite. This survey revealed the existence of a far-greater number of massive superclusters of galaxies than can be accounted for by Big Bang cosmologies.[4] In an attempt to salvage the Big Bang theory, cosmologists have invented hypotheses to explain the failures of their hypotheses. One of these is the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory. According to this theory, 90-99% of the matter in the universe cannot be detected. If CDM existed, it would supply sufficient gravitational pull to create large clusters of galaxies. The structures discovered during the past few years, however, are so massive that even if CDM did exist, it could not account for their formation. Saunders and co-workers thus state that the CDM model can be ruled out to at least the 97% confidence level. In the same issue of Nature, in which is found the article by Saunders, et al, there appears an article by David Lindley in the "News and Views" section (p. 14) entitled "Cold Dark Matter Makes an Exit." Caltech cosmologist S. George Djorgovski, taking into account the astronomical observations that contradict the CDM theory, states that the demise of the notion of the existence of cold dark matter is inevitable.[5] Also very recently, the U.S.-European Roentgen Satellite (ROSAT), detecting x-ray emissions, discovered evidence of giant superclusters of quasars on the edge of the universe, supposedly eight to 12 billion light years from the earth.[6] Physicist Paul Steinhardt, of the University of Pennsylvania, states that "This may be the start of the death knell of the cold-dark-matter theory. " Even if this hypothetical matter existed, it still could not explain the existence of these giant clusters of quasars.