At present there is a fierce dispute among the supporters of the big bang concerning the supposed age of the universe. In fact, the entire “standard model” is in crisis. We are treated to the spectacle of respectable people of science attacking each other in public with the most ungentlemanly language. And all over something called the Hubble Constant. This is the formula that measures the speed at which things are moving in the universe. This is of great importance for those who wish to discover the age and size of the universe. The trouble is that nobody knows what it is!

Edwin Hubble asserted that the speed with which the galaxies are moving apart was proportional to their distance from us – the further away, the faster they are moving. This expressed in Hubble’s Law: v(elocity) = H x d(istance). In this equation, the H is known as Hubble’s Constant. In order to measure this, we need to know two things: the speed and distance away of a particular galaxy. The speed can be calculated by the red shift. But the distance between galaxies cannot be measured with a slide-rule. In fact, no reliable instruments exist for measuring such immense distances. And here lies the rub! The experts cannot agree on the real value of the Hubble Constant, as was comically revealed in a Channel 4 TV programme:

“Michael Pierce says that, without doubt, the Hubble Constant is 85, Gustaf Tamman asserts 50, George Jacoby 80, Brian Schmidt 70, Michael Rowan Robinson 50, and John Tonry 80. The difference between 50 and 80 may not sound like much,” says the accompanying Channel Four booklet, “but it is crucial to the age of the Universe. If the Hubble is high, astronomers could be in the process of disproving their most important theory.“

The importance of this is that the higher the “Hubble”, the faster things are moving, and the sooner in the past was the moment when the big bang was supposed to have occurred. In recent years, new techniques of measuring the distance of galaxies have been applied, which have led astronomers to revise earlier estimates drastically. This has provoked consternation in the scientific community, since the estimates for the Hubble Constant have been getting higher all the time. The latest estimate puts the age of the universe at just 8 billion years. This would mean that there are stars that are older than the universe itself! This is a glaring contradiction – not a dialectical one, but simply nonsense. Carlos Frank, quoted in the same booklet, concludes:

“Well, if it turns out that the ages of the stars are greater than the expansion time of the universe, as inferred by the measurement of the Hubble Constant and the measurement of the density of the universe, then there is a genuine crisis. You only have one option: you have to drop the basic assumptions upon which the model of the Universe is based. In this case, you have to drop some, perhaps all, of the basic assumptions on which the big bang theory is based.“[58]

There is virtually no empirical evidence to bear out the big bang theory. Most of the work done to support it is of a purely theoretical character, leaning heavily on abstruse and esoteric mathematical formulae. The numerous contradictions between the preconceived “big bang” schema and the observable evidence have been covered up by constantly moving the goal posts in order to preserve at all costs a theory upon which so many academic reputations have been built.

According to this theory, there can be nothing in the universe older than 15 billion years. But there is evidence that contradicts this proposition. In 1986, Brent Tully of Hawaii University discovered huge agglomerations of galaxies (“superclusters”) about a billion light years long, three hundred million light years wide and one hundred million light-years thick. In order for such vast objects to form, it would have taken between eighty and a hundred billion years, that is to say four or five times longer than what would be allowed by the “big bangers”. Since then there have been other results that tend to confirm these observations.

The New Scientist (5 February 1994) carried a report of the discovery of a cluster of galaxies by Charles Steidel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Donald Hamilton of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena with big implications for the big bang theory:

The discovery of such a cluster spells trouble for theories of cold dark matter, which assume that a large fraction of the mass of the universe is in cold, dark objects such as planets or black holes. The theories predict that material in the early universe clumped together from the ‘bottom up’, so that galaxies formed first, then only later clumped to form clusters.

As usual, the initial reaction of astronomers is to resort to “move the goal posts”, adjusting the theory to get round awkward facts. Mauro Giavalisco of the Baltimore Space Telescope Science Institute “believes it might just be possible to explain the birth of the first galaxy cluster at a red shift of 3.4 by fine-tuning the cold dark matter theory. But he adds a warning. ‘If you found ten clusters at red shift 3.5, it would kill cold dark matter theories’.”

We may take for granted that not just ten but a far larger number of these vast clusters exist and will be discovered. And these, in turn, will only represent a minute proportion of all the matter that stretches far beyond the limits of the observable universe and reaches out to infinity. All attempts to place a limit on the material universe are doomed to fail. Matter is boundless, both at the subatomic level, and with regard to time and space.

  1. The Rubber Universe, pp. 11 and 14, our emphasis (Channel 4 publication, 1995).