To get round this and other problems, Alan Guth, the American physicist, advanced his theory of the “inflationary universe”. (It may be no coincidence that this idea was put forward in the 1970s, when the capitalist world was going through an inflationary crisis!) According to this theory, the temperature dropped so rapidly that there was no time for the different fields to separate out or for different particles to form. The differentiation took place only later, when the universe was much larger. This, then, is the most recent version of the big bang. It asserts that, at the time of the big bang, the universe experienced an exponential expansion, in which it doubled in size every 10–35 seconds (hence “inflation”). Whereas the earlier versions of the “standard model” envisaged the whole of the universe squashed to the size of a grapefruit, Guth went one better. He calculated that the universe did not begin as a grapefruit, but instead, it would be a billion times smaller than the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. Then it would expand at an incredible speed – many times the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second – until it reached a size 1090 times its initial volume, that is, 1 with 90 zeros after it!

Let us examine the implications of this theory. Like all the other big bang theories, it sets out from the hypothesis that all the matter in the universe was concentrated in a single spot. The fundamental mistake here is to imagine that the universe is equal to the observable universe, and that it is possible to reconstruct the entire history of the universe, as a linear process, without taking into account all the different phases, transitions, and different states through which matter passes.

Dialectical materialism conceives of the universe as infinite, but not static or in a permanent state of “equilibrium”, as both Einstein and Newton did. Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed, but are in a continual process of movement and change, which involves periodic explosions, expansion and contraction, attraction and repulsion, life and death. There is nothing intrinsically improbable about the idea of one, or many, great explosions. The problem here is a different one – a mystical interpretation of certain observed phenomena, such as the Hubble red shift, and an attempt to smuggle the religious idea of the creation of the universe into science by the back door.

To begin with, it is unthinkable that all the matter in the universe should be concentrated in a single point “of infinite density”. Let us be clear what this means. Firstly, it is impossible to place an infinite amount of matter and energy in a finite space. Just to pose the question is sufficient to answer it. “Ah! say the big bangers, but the universe is not infinite, but finite, according to Einstein’s general theory of relativity.” In his book, Eric Lerner points out that an infinite number of different universes are allowed by Einstein’s equations. Friedmann and Lemaître showed that many equations led to universal expansion. But by no means all of them imply a state of “singularity”. Yet this is the one variant that is dogmatically advanced by Guth and co.

Even if we accept that the universe is finite, the notion of “singularity” leads us to conclusions of a clearly fantastic character. If we take the tiny corner of the universe which we are able to see as being the whole universe – an arbitrary assumption with no logical or scientific basis whatsoever – then we are talking about more than 100 billion galaxies, each containing about 100 billion main sequence stars (like our own sun). According to Guth, all this matter was concentrated in a space smaller than a single proton. When it had existed for a millionth of a trillionth of a trillionth, of a trillionth of a second with a temperature of trillions of trillions of trillions of degrees, there was only one field and only one kind of particle interaction. As the universe expanded and the temperature fell, the different fields are supposed to have “condensed” out of the original state of simplicity.

The question arises where all the energy came from to propel such an unprecedented expansion. In order to solve this riddle, Guth resorted to a hypothetical omnipresent force field (a “Higgs field”), the existence of which is predicted by some theoretical physicists, but for which there is not a shred of empirical evidence. “In Guth’s theory,” comments Eric Lerner, “the Higgs field which exists in a vacuum generates all the needed energy from nothing – ex nihilo. The universe, as he puts it, is one big ‘free lunch’, courtesy of the Higgs field.”[56]

  1. Lerner, E., op. cit., p. 158.