Cosmology has recruited ghosts to explain the existence of the universe. This month’s New Scientist Magazine (Issue 2940 page 10) announced, “OUR universe rose from the ashes of a dying cosmos, thanks to a push from a ghostly force. So says a model supporting the idea that the universe was born not with a bang, but a bounce.” This new model was developed to eliminate the need for the big bang’s big inflation; a period of microseconds that energized the expansion of the big bang explosion to speeds in great excess of the speed of light. Instead of a single big bang how about an oscillating universe that expands and collapses just short of creating the singularity? It may get rid of the need for inflation but at the expense of recruiting ghost fields; and this doesn’t explain much either!
If the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) is a result of the big bang, how can it be so uniform and yet the matter of the universe so well structured? The big bang is believed to have experienced a moment of inflation lasting only a very brief period of time (10 to the minus 32 sec) before continuing a relatively sluggish expansion. This allowed matter/energy to interact briefly but evenly and when the expansion took over from inflation, the structure of the universe and the uniformity of the CMB were established. Like dark matter and dark energies and the concept of an unbounded universe (the universe having no edge) inflation was
simply made-up as a period of time created by inflaton particles to account for the unaccountable; particles which caused the young universe to inflate and then the particles disappeared.
The idea of a bouncing universe eliminates the need for the inflaton particle but then rests on the collapse of a previous universe that never reaches the point of a singularity; it never fully collapses. Instead, at a critical moment, a ghost field of negative energy reverses the collapse of the universe, negating the need to account for the evenness of the CMB radiation or the structure of the physical universe. Confused? New Scientists explains it this way: “ In their theory, a previous universe went through a phase of slow contraction, crunching space-time. Then something reversed the process and it expanded again to make a new universe.
Compression explains cosmic smoothness without the need for inflation because high pressures during the crunch would
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