The standard model of the universe has led us into a scientific, philosophical, and moral dead-end. The theory itself is full of holes. Yet it still remains on its feet, though badly shaken, mainly for the lack of an alternative. Nevertheless, something is stirring in the world of science. New ideas are beginning to take shape, which not only reject the big bang, but which set out from the idea of an infinite, constantly changing universe. It is far too early to say which of these theories will be vindicated. One interesting hypothesis, that of the “plasma universe”, has been put forward by the Swedish Nobel Prize winning physicist Hannes Alfvén. While we cannot deal with the theory in detail, we feel we should at least mention some of Alfvén’s ideas.

Alfvén passed from the investigation of plasma in the laboratory to a study of how the universe evolves. Plasma consists of hot, electrically conducting gases. It is now known that 99 per cent of the matter in the universe is plasma. Whereas in normal gases, electrons are bound to an atom and cannot move easily, in a plasma, the electrons are stripped off by intense heat, allowing them to move freely. Plasma cosmologists envisage a universe “crisscrossed by vast electrical currents and powerful magnetic fields, ordered by the cosmic counterpoint of electromagnetism and gravity.”[61] In the 1970s, the Pioneer and Voyager spacecrafts detected the presence of electrical currents and magnetic fields filled with plasma filaments around Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus.

Scientists like Hannes Alfvén, Anthony Peratt and others, have elaborated a model of the universe which is dynamic, not static, but which does not require a beginning in time. The phenomenon of the Hubble expansion needs an explanation. But the big bang is not necessarily it. A big bang will certainly produce an expansion, but an expansion does not require a big bang. As Alfvén puts it: “This is like saying that because all dogs are animals, all animals are dogs.” The problem is not the idea of an explosion, which at some point gave rise to an expansion of part of the universe. There is nothing intrinsically improbable in this. The problem is the idea that all the matter in the universe was concentrated at a single point, and that the universe and time itself was born in a single instant called the big bang.

The alternative model suggested by Hannes Alfvén and fellow Swedish physicist Oskar Klein accepts that there could have been an explosion, caused by the combination of large amounts of matter and antimatter in one small corner of the visible universe, which generated huge quantities of energetic electrons and positrons. Trapped in magnetic fields, these particles drove the plasma apart for hundreds of millions of years.

The explosion of this epoch, some ten or twenty billion years ago, sent the plasma from which the galaxies then condensed flying outward – in the Hubble expansion. But this was in no way a big bang that created matter, space, and time. It was just a big bang, an explosion in one part of the universe. Alfvén is the first to admit that this explanation is not the only possible one. ‘The significant point,’ he stresses, ‘is that there are alternatives to the big bang’.

At a time when almost all other scientists believed that space was an empty vacuum, Alfvén showed that this was not the case. Alfvén pointed out that the entire universe is pervaded by plasma currents and magnetic fields. Alfvén did pioneering work in the field of sunspots and magnetic fields. Later, Alfvén proved that when a current flows through a plasma in the laboratory, it assumes the form of a filament in order to move along magnetic field lines. Starting out from this observation, he then concluded that the same phenomenon takes place in plasma in space. It is a general property of plasma throughout the universe. Thus, we have immense electrical currents flowing along naturally formed plasma filaments, which crisscross the cosmos.

By forming the filamentary structures observed on the smallest and largest scales, matter and energy can be compressed in space. But it is clear that energy can be compressed in time as well – the universe is filled with sudden, explosive releases of energy. One example that Alfvén was familiar with is the solar flare, the sudden release of energy on the sun’s surface, which generates the streams of particles that produce magnetic storms on earth. His ‘generator’ models of cosmic phenomena showed how energy could be produced gradually, as in a well-behaved power station, but not explosively, as in the flares. Understanding the explosive release of energy was the key to the dynamics of the cosmos.

Alfvén had proved the correctness of the Kant-Laplace Nebular Hypothesis. Now, if the stars and planets can be formed by the action of huge filamentary currents, there is no reason why whole solar systems cannot be formed in the same way:

Again, the process is identical, but this time immensely larger: filaments sweeping through a protogalactic nebula pinch plasma into the building materials of the sun and other stars. Once the material is initially pinched, gravitation will draw some of it together, especially slower-moving dust and ice particles, which will then create a seed for the growth of a central body. Moreover, the filament’s vortex motion will provide angular momentum to each of the smaller agglomerations within it, generating a new, smaller set of currents carrying filaments and a new cycle of compression that forms a solar system. (In 1989, this hypothesis now widely accepted, was definitively confirmed when scientists observed that the rotation axes of all the stars in a given cloud are aligned with the cloud’s magnetic field – clearly, a magnetic-field-controlled stellar formation.)

Alfvén’s theories were, of course, rejected by the cosmologists, since they challenged not only the standard model, but even called into question the existence of black holes, which were then all the rage. He had already correctly explained the cosmic rays, not as the remnants of the big bang, but as the products of electromagnetic acceleration.

Thus, in Alfvén and Klein’s scenario, only a small part of the universe – that which we see – will have first collapsed and then exploded. Instead of coming from a singular point, the explosion comes from a vast region hundreds of millions of light-years across and takes hundreds of millions of years to develop – no ‘origin of the universe’ is required.[62]

Whether this particular theory is shown to be correct only time will tell. The important thing, as Alfvén himself points out, is that other alternative hypotheses to the big bang are possible. Whatever happens, we are sure that the model of the universe which is finally corroborated by science will have nothing in common with a closed universe with a big bang at one end and a big crunch at the other. The discovery of the telescope in 1609 was a decisive turning point in the history of astronomy. Since then, the horizon of the universe has been pushed further and further back. Today powerful radio telescopes probe deep into space. All the time new objects are being discovered, bigger and further away, with absolutely no end in sight. Yet man’s obsession with the finite creates the persistent urge to place a “final limit” on everything. We see this same phenomenon repeated time and again in the history of astronomy.

It is ironic that, at a time when technology enables us to penetrate further than ever into the vastness of the universe, we witness a psychological regression to the mediaeval world of a finite universe, beginning with Creation and ending in the total annihilation of space, time and matter. An impassable line is drawn at this point, beyond which the human mind is not meant to enquire, since “we cannot know” what is there. It is the 20th century equivalent of the old maps, which showed the edge of the world, marked with the stern warning, “Here be Monsters”.

  1. Lerner, E., op. cit., p. 14

  2. Lerner, E., op. cit., pp. 52, 196, 209 and 217-8.