(This article appears in Alex Caldon's book The Quest for Truth: On Finding the Grail, which is published, sometimes FREE from the site www.thequestfortruth.co.uk. There are more forums and videos shown there too.  Happy Questing...)

There may be some adjustments to be made to our understanding of how the Universe works. The telescopic observations which astrophysicists used to conclude that the Universe is expanding from a Big Bang, may in fact be providing us with evidence that the Universe is contracting. Let’s take a look at how the Big Bang Theory came about, and then go on to look for an alternative theory which might explain the observations.

The history of the Big Bang Theory developed and changed and improved over many years. We find one piece of the jigsaw, which causes another to fall into place; human understanding grows ever onward. We are going to begin our review somewhere after creationism and somewhere before a Theory Of Everything. A convenient year to start would be 1917, for it was in this year which Einstein published his paper entitled: “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity”. It was Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity which provided the first theoretical argument that the Universe must be either contracting or expanding. The accepted model of the Universe prior to the General Theory was that it was static and infinite. This view was so widely held that Einstein himself tried to make his new Theory fit the wisdom of the day. Almost unthinkingly he tweaked his theory in order to make it match the static model - he introduced an arbitrary figure, what he called the Cosmological Constant, which caused the relativistic equations to fit a static Universe. In hindsight, years later, Einstein called it “the biggest blunder of my life”. Nevertheless, the maths which came out of his General Theory of Relativity (without the Cosmological Constant) provided scientists with the first hint that they should be searching for evidence for an expanding Universe.

So for quite some time the static model of the Universe prevailed. But evidence started to come in which would change perceptions. It was while Einstein was content with his static version of the General Theory that a certain Vesto Slipher was making spectrographic readings of distant stars at the Lowell Observatory, Arizona. The observations clearly showed that there was a Doppler shift in the light spectra from the distant stars. Light is subject to Doppler shifts in the same way that sound is. When we listen to a car which approaches and passes us, we notice its sound is high pitched on approach, and the sound drops in pitch on passing. It gives us that particular meeee-owwwmmm effect which we all know. As the car approaches, the sound waves are kind of bunched up, and as a result the pitch of the sound is higher. After the car passes, the waves are stretched out and make the sound lower in pitch. Light works in much the same way. Now, Slipher observed that light from distant stars was red shifted – in other words the light was of lower frequency than would be seen from a static star. The obvious conclusion was that all the stars Slipher was observing were moving away from us. The findings and the conclusion were of enormous relevance, but the study remained in obscurity for a good while yet.

Slipher’s work was taken up by Edwin Hubble. Hubble applied the Doppler shift principle and one or two other cunning tricks and made studies of the distances and velocities of other galaxies. In fact, his work helped prove that other galaxies exist. Prior to 1919, when Hubble took up astronomy, there was thought to be only one galaxy: the Milky Way. The model of the known Universe was taking massive leaps forward, and the Universe was found to be really rather large indeed. After Hubble had found new galaxies, he started applying the Doppler principles to the galaxies’ spectra. By the early 1930’s it was found that all the galaxies that had been discovered were moving away from us. Not only that, but the further galaxies were moving away faster than nearby galaxies. The “obvious” inference was that the Universe was expanding in all directions. By logical extension, way back in time the Universe must have been at a point in space. The model of the Universe had developed, and now there seemed to be a beginning to it all.

But Hubble somehow managed to remain largely ignorant of Einstein’s General Theory and so he missed the full cosmological significance of his observations. Instead, the idea of an expanding Universe kicked off by a Big Bang was first put forward by the Belgian priest and academic Georges Lemaître in the 1920’s in his “fireworks theory”. The observational evidence was amassing to back up Lemaître’s theory, but he was ahead of his time; more evidence was yet to come.

In 1965 new observations brought with them a new piece of the jigsaw. Two radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson were working with a radio-telecommunications antenna at Bell Laboratories, New Jersey, and they found that a constant background “hiss” of stray microwaves was hindering their work. No matter which direction they aimed their receiver, the same noise was detected, day and night, every day. Their initial reaction was to assume there was something wrong with their equipment, and they spent a good year checking every piece of the radio-telescope for faults. Famously, they even climbed into the telescope dish to sweep out “white dielectric material” - bird shit to you and me. But the noise remained.

It was known at the time that the further away one looks in distance, the further back in time one is seeing. For instance, the light from the Sun takes some 8 minutes and 18 seconds to reach Earth: when we look at the Sun we are looking back in time more than 8 minutes. If we look at further stars we are seeing light which left them many years previously. Now, in the 1940’s the Russian born astrophysicist George Gamow first put forward the idea that if one looks far enough one may see the radiation which was first generated during the birth of the Universe at some kind of Big Bang. He calculated that the Big Bang radiation should today be found as background microwaves. And that is exactly what Penzias and Wilson found. It was another team, led by Robert Dicke at Princeton University, who then interpreted the observations as further evidence to support the Big Bang Theory.

The Big Bang Theory is the accepted wisdom today, and is by and large quoted as established fact. But it isn’t an established fact. Let’s take a side-ways look at the Universe, and see if the expanding Universe model represents certain truth.

Our Universe is commonly considered to have four dimensions. To us mortals there appears to be three space dimensions and one of time, but this is not how it is - this model was proved to be inadequate by Einstein’s theories of relativity. In his theories the time and space dimensions of the Universe are shown to be intimately combined into four dimensions of space-time. The model he created defies our Earthly intuition, but has been shown to be accurate from many observations. To help us to explore a contracting Universe, we are going to work with a four dimensional space-time model. It will help us if we first consider a one dimensional Universe and then add dimensions one at a time to build up a model in four dimensions.

Imagine a one dimensional Universe, something like a piece of string. Let’s fill a one dimensional Universe like this with little 1D creatures which bob to and fro along a single line. (It would probably be quite an inconvenient place to live as it’s so difficult to get past your best 1D friend to visit the 1D pub on the other side. It just isn’t practical. It is thought by some scientists that the reason we live in a Universe with about four dimensions is that that is the number which is needed to allow life to happen.) Imagine a 1D Universe stretching out to infinity in each direction. The problem with this Universe is that maths finds infinities uncomfortable. A short piece of string-Universe would have a finite size on the other hand, but it would have ends, and similarly maths doesn’t like ends. It poses the problematic question – what’s on the other side of the end? A more convenient 1D Universe therefore, would be to tie the two ends together to form a ring – our Universe now has a finite size and also has no ends. Much better. We can extend this idea up to two dimensions. Consider a Universe which is a 2 dimensional plane – like a sheet of paper – it could stretch out to infinity, or it could have edges like a regular piece of paper. Again, both options are mathematically undesirable. But wrap it around to form a sphere and the Universe is still two dimensional, but it has a finite area, and no edges. Obviously, little 2D creatures on the surface of the sphere would appreciate the ease of being able to move around in an extra dimension. And the 2D creatures would be completely oblivious of the fact that their Universe was bent into a third dimension – they are completely incapable of looking into the third dimension, and even the concept of it is impossible to hold in their 2D heads. If a 2D creature had a telescope powerful enough, it could see all the way around the spherical Universe and actually be able to look at the back of its own head. (Incidentally, in Stephen Hawking’s book A Brief History of Time he concludes that a 2D Universe couldn’t harbour life because of its impracticalness. He moots the argument that to consume food, a 2D dog, for example, would require a tube going all the way through it. And if you draw a tube going all the way through a 2D drawing of a dog, the result would be to cut the dog in two, by its own innards. Hawking neglects to consider the amoeba, which consumes food by enveloping it, and then re-moulding itself around what it is consuming. It shows there would be no eating difficulties for a 2D animal.)

Anyway! We can add another dimension again, to examine a 3D Universe. If our Universe stretched out to infinity in all directions it’s uncomfortable, and likewise if it had edges. Now, it is possible that our Universe is bent into an additional dimension which we are completely incapable of observing, just like our other 1 and 2 D Universes were bent into an additional dimension. Again if we had a powerful enough telescope we could see far enough to observe the back of our own heads. (Not that this is a good enough reason to justify the expense of building such a huge telescope, which would obviously be required to do this. No, it is far easier to use a system of mirrors.)

Now consider the 2D Universe on the surface of a sphere, shown in the picture on this hub...

Say a Big Bang explosion occurs at the North Pole. All the stuff from the explosion is blasted away and heads off, in the direction of the South Pole. At the South Pole, the space debris eventually starts colliding and compacting into a Big Crunch. As more stuff accumulates at the South Pole, its mass becomes bigger and bigger, and therefore so does it’s gravitational attraction to the rest of the stuff which is on its way from the Big Bang at the North Pole. The great mass at the Big Crunch pulls the Universe’s contents towards it. Say we are in this 2D Universe, observing it at A, somewhere near Cornwall, in the UK. We, of course, have also in the past been blasted away from the North Pole, and the accumulating mass at the South Pole is dragging us southwards. What do we see? Well, if we look east or west, we may see nearby stars moving away from us, as the space stuff is stretched out moving towards the equator. Looking north or south from A, it is anybody’s guess what would be seen. Maybe stars to the north or south of A are also moving away from each other. But now let’s look at the southern hemisphere. Here, one would intuitively expect to make observations which would show all the stars moving closer together heading towards the Big Crunch. But paradoxically, this is not the case. Since the Big Crunch will be accelerating everything southwards, a star to the south of B (near Zanzibar) will be moving faster southwards than a star slightly to the north. So in a contracting Universe, we may see stars and galaxies moving away from us in all directions! Which is exactly what Slipher and Hubble deduced from their observations of Doppler shift. Not only that but in our model, the further away the galaxy being observed, the faster it is moving away from us – just as in the observations. So our established belief that our Universe is currently growing may not be the case at all: we may be on the home run, and we’re all going to be crushed in the Big Crunch a lot sooner than we previously thought¹.

What about the background microwaves as detected by Penzias and Wilson? Looking far away in our Big Crunch model we will see galaxies moving away at ever greater speeds. The Doppler shift to the lower frequency red end of the spectrum will become ever greater, and for very distant galaxies, the Doppler shift might stretch out their visible light until it enters the microwave part of the electromagnetic spectrum. And (this may be a bit of conjecture going on) that’s exactly what Penzias and Wilson found. (!)

(An aside…While we’re on the subject of background microwave radiation, there’s another hypothesis about the nature of the Universe which is worth going over. There is an argument which refutes the possibility of an infinite Universe. Olbers’ Paradox provides a well known argument against an infinite Universe. The Paradox says that if the Universe is infinite then it wouldn’t matter which direction we looked on a starry night, our line of sight would always be incident upon a star; even in between the closer stars there would be ever more stars stretching out to infinity in all directions. If this were the case then the appearance of the night sky would consequently be completely bright, with no blackness. It has been said that since our night sky is quite dark then it proves that the Universe is not infinite. However, this argument does not take into account time. If the age of the Universe were less than the time it takes for the light from the more distant stars to reach us, then those lines of sight would still appear dark. There would then exist a spherical limit, centred on our Earth within which we can see and beyond which the light would be yet to reach us. The “sphere of known universe” would consequently be growing all the while. AH! The reader retorts, the obvious error here is that this implies there was a birth to the Universe, which means, okay it may still be infinite in space, but a clearly defined beginning in time implies it is not therefore infinite in all four of the space-time dimensions. Hmmm. Well there it is anyway, just to let everyone know that the old “the-sky-would-be-all-shiny-and-bright” chestnut is possibly wrong.

An aside to the aside…In fact, if you think about it, the background microwaves observed by Penzias and Wilson were observed in every direction – maybe that provides evidence for an infinite Universe? Curious. Hmm….anyway, I’ll have to finish this one some other time….)

Okay. This Contracting Universe Theory which we’ve arrived at may of course, be wrong. But that’s the point! The Big Bang and Expanding Universe theories may well be true. But then again they may well be wrong! The truth is that in contemplating such mighty themes as the birth of a Universe, scientists are working at the limits of reason. We have no way of knowing for sure what really went on at the birth of the Universe, or indeed if there was a birth. There is nothing to say that the laws of physics as studied now on Earth are the same as those which brought the Universe into being. And yet the Big Bang Theory is so often regurgitated as though it were a firmly established fact. And there is no limit to the academic qualifications of those who claim it to be the truth. The greatest professors and gurus on the planet are sometimes guilty of claiming such hypotheses to be firm facts. What the discussion here has given us is not just another view of the Universe, but it has shed some light on how we think. The telescopic observations could easily have been wrongly interpreted, but now scientists have dug themselves into a hole. The collective psyche of the scientific community is as prone to dysfunction as is the psyche of any individual. When scientists believed the creationist theory they were sharing a delusion which now is by and large cured. In claiming the irrefutable truth of the Big Bang Theory, scientists are allowing their egos to gain the upper hand. And when the psyche grows excessive ego, it becomes unreceptive to change and perception starts to drift away from reality. The pattern of ego resisting truth and growth may be repeated in the theories of the Universe.

We have found another example of how the human race can be too complacent. Why did scientists automatically assume the evidence showed expansion and not contraction? Perhaps somewhere in the subconscious of us all are those nagging questions about how and why we were created. And in our subconscious pre-occupation with where we came from we neglected to think about where we are heading to. It’s curious to think that this Contracting Universe Theory may show we have less time to live than we previously thought. If it is to be of any use to us, we need to ask how does that affect the way we live?