A New Speech Taboo for Big Bang Experts?

In 2015 in the New York Times astrophysicist Adam Frank said this: "We also can’t know how to truly understand the Big Bang, the cosmic event that marked the beginning of time." But recently Frank changed his tune, when he made the untrue claim that "the Big Bang says nothing about the creation of the cosmos." Not based on any new evidence, or even any new scientific paper, Frank's claim seems like just some bit of scolding finger-wagging that goes against what the majority of experts on the Big Bang have been telling us for decades. Very incorrectly, he says, "Cosmology says nothing about how the cosmos came to be."

Very strangely, Frank begins describing the Big Bang theory as if it was some theory of the evolution of stars and planets. He states this:

"We are often told that the Big Bang is a theory of cosmic creation — that it tells us how the Universe was created out of nothing and went on to evolve into all the galaxies, stars, and planets. The problem with that characterization is that only the second part of it is true."

No, the second part of that is not true. The Big Bang theory only deals with the universe's dense and hot beginning, before there were any galaxies, stars and planets.  Frank repeats this misstatement later, by saying this:

"Big Bang cosmology does not describe the Universe’s creation. It describes what happens after creation. It does so with spectacular success, giving a detailed roadmap for how a super-high-temperature, super-high-density Universe expanded and cooled, leaving us with everything we see today."

No, Big Bang cosmology does describe the universe's creation, and the Big Bang cosmology does not explain how we got "everything we see today." Big Bang cosmology describes the earliest physical state of our universe, a state of very extreme temperature and density. Big Bang cosmology does not deal with the evolution of the universe after its first billion years. 

And it isn't true that either cosmology or Big Bang cosmology has had "spectacular success" in predicting the current state of our universe. This claim by Frank is just another example of scientists doing what they so often do, which is making untrue boasts of having spectacular successes they haven't actually achieved. Such unfounded boasts mainly go on in biology and psychology, but also go on abundantly in astrophysics and cosmology. 

The basic theory of the Big Bang (with or without its optional "cosmic inflation" embellishment) fails to explain any of these things:

(1) The asymmetry of matter and antimatter. A long-standing unsolved problem not solved by the Big Bang theory is known as the baryon asymmetry problem or the matter/antimatter asymmetry problem.  This is why we live in a universe in which matter is billions of times more abundant than antimatter. The Big Bang theory in its current form does not predict such a universe, but instead predicts a very different universe: one with equal amounts of matter and antimatter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe."

(2) Why galaxies behave the way they do.  Stars in galaxies have a rotation behavior (in relation to galactic centers) that does not match what is predicted from what we observe about the abundance of ordinary matter in galaxies. Cosmologists have tried to fix this problem by advancing a theory of dark matter, a theory that does not at all derive from the Big Bang theory, and is not any kind of consequence of such a theory. This dark matter theory is in big trouble, as there has been no direct support for it, with dark matter never being directly observed. Dark matter also has no place in the standard model of physics, and many cosmologists say the theory conflicts with observations of satellite galaxies. 

(3) Why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.  Thirty years after the triumph of the Big Bang theory in the 1960's, cosmologists were surprised to discover something that they had not predicted: that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. The Big Bang theory predicts an expanding universe, but not a universe expanding at an accelerating rate. To account for the acceleration of the universe's expansion, cosmologists had to introduce a speculation that most of the universe's mass-energy is something called dark energy, which no one has ever seen. Such an idea was not at all predicted by the Big Bang theory.  

(4) Why we got galaxies so quickly. The latest observations from the James Webb Space Telescope show large galaxies existing when the universe was only about 600 million years old, contrary to what cosmologists had predicted before such observations, that such galaxies should have taken more than a billion years to form. 

(5) The current abundances of elements. Dealing only with the early universe, the Big Bang theory does nothing to explain the current abundances of oxygen and carbon, which are believed to have arisen through stellar activity long after the Big Bang. The Big Bang theory does make predictions about the abundances of elements simpler than carbon: hydrogen, helium, lithium and beryllium. But the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the amount of lithium. This shortfall is called the cosmological lithium problem.  A university press release tells us, "The standard models of the Big Bang that are currently used predict an abundance of Li-7, the main lithium isotope, which is three or four times more than that determined via astronomical observations.

The five items above show that it is way wrong for Frank to claim that the Big Bang theory "describes what happens after creation," and "does so with spectacular success." It was equally incorrect for Frank to be claiming that the Big Bang theory "says nothing about the creation of the cosmos" on the grounds that it does not tell us how we got the matter and energy in our universe. A theory that describes the physical state at the beginning of our universe is a theory that is saying very much indeed "about the creation of the cosmos," regardless of whether it explains why such a beginning occurred. And the Big Bang theory does very literally describe the creation of the most abundant element in the universe,  describing the creation of hydrogen from a non-atomic super-hot "quark soup." 

Frank is right about one thing: the Big Bang theory does not tell us what caused the universe's origin. It simply describes the universe's origin, beginning as a state of seemingly infinite heat and density that seems basically the same as the universe suddenly popping into existence, with such heat and density dropping quickly as the universe expands. And because of a little-known facet of the Big Bang, we will never be able to get any observations that explain such a mystery. 

According to the Big Bang theory, the entire first 300,000 years of the universe's history were a state of extreme heat and density, with the density so great that all light and radiation from the beginning of the universe is hopelessly scattered a trillion quadrillion times.  There are no possible telescopes or scientific devices that will allow us to see back to the first years of the Big Bang. All radiation and rays and photons and waves from the first years of the Big Bang must have been scattered and mangled a billion trillion times over, making it forever impossible to telescopically determine what happened at the very beginning. Scientists may yearn to discover some merely physical cause that produced the Big Bang, but that can never happen. Scientists will merely be able to make unverifiable speculations about a cause of the Big Bang, speculations as unverifiable as theological speculations about the exact number of angels in heaven. 

It sounds to me like Frank is going a bit woke on us, by trying to introduce some new speech rule that cosmologists should not use the word "creation" when referring to the beginning of the universe. That will come as quite a surprise to cosmologists, who have been using the term "creation" in connection with the Big Bang for many years, as you can see from this query listing about 100 cosmology papers referring to creation while discussing cosmic origins. Frank is not actually a cosmologist (one of the scientists who specializes in the study of the early universe and the large-scale structure of the universe), but instead an astrophysicist dealing mainly with stars and galaxies. Cosmologists may not take kindly to him attempting to set up some new speech taboo that they must follow. We can imagine why a scientist might want to scold other scientists for using a phrase such as "creation of the universe," as such a phrase may create theological suspicions. 

Will we be seeing official speech guidelines like the imagined one below?

INSTITUTE OF SCIENTIFICALLY SCIENTIFIC SCIENTISTS
Professors: please examine these new speech guidelines, which you must very carefully tiptoe to be deemed as "ideologically correct."
Forbidden speech: “The creation of the universe occurred 13 billion years ago.”	Approved speech: “Visible matter in space is mostly hydrogen which was suddenly created 13 billion years ago, but please don't call that a creation event.”
Forbidden speech: “Our universe's fundamental constants and laws are very well-designed and very precisely fine-tuned.”	Approved speech: “Our universe looks so very well-designed because the multiverse has fooled  us, with an infinity of universes conspiring to create a huge cosmic illusion."
Forbidden speech: “The biochemistry and physical organization of our bodies is incredibly well-designed.”	Approved speech: “Chance or random mutations have created the gigantic  illusion that our bodies are very well-designed, endlessly acting like some extremely skillful and determined  counterfeiter."
Forbidden speech: “There are two sexes, male and female.”	Approved speech: “Number of sexes? It's like Baskin-Robbins 31 flavors of ice cream.”
Forbidden speech: “Once again scientists failed in their attempt to create life from lifeless chemicals.”	Approved speech: “Although not creating either life or proteins, this experiment further vindicates the belief that life arose from a chance combinations of chemicals.”
Forbidden speech: “Our space observations found amino acids in only negligible amounts of about 1 part per billion.”	Approved speech: “Our observations show that the universe is teeming with the building blocks of life.”
Forbidden speech: “Scientists don't agree on this topic, and they have many different theories about it, which are kind of all over the map.”	Approved speech: “The scientific consensus on this topic speaks loud and clear in a single voice."
Forbidden speech: “Even the simplest living cell requires millions of very specially arranged atoms organized in just the right way.”	Approved speech: “To get life started, you just need some building blocks, or maybe some special spark.”
Forbidden speech: “Very many people have floated out of their bodies and reported traveling through a tunnel towards a mysterious light, or arriving at some realm where deceased relatives were seen.”	Approved speech: “Coincidentally very many people have had the same hallucination that begins with them traveling out of their bodies and ends with them seeing deceased relatives.”
Forbidden speech: “In natural history there are many times when many types of dramatic new biological innovations suddenly occur, such as the Cambrian Explosion.”	Approved speech: “Phenotypic variants can rather suddenly appear, resulting in biological diversification.”
Forbidden speech: “We don't understand the contents of the universe, which doesn't behave like we predict.”	Approved speech: “We understand the universe consists of 70% dark energy, 20% dark matter, and 5% regular matter, and don't accuse us of guessing just because we haven't actually seen any of that dark stuff."
Forbidden speech: “No one understands how a brain could store or instantly retrieve memories.”	Approved speech: “Although we cannot find them by microscopic examination of brain tissue, we may presume memories which last for decades are formed by the strengthening of synapses built from proteins lasting only a few weeks, a process we hope to understand one day after discovering some incredibly complex 'neural code' we still can't find.”
Forbidden speech: “No one understands how a brain could think, decide or imagine."	Approved speech: “We think we understand how a brain thinks: that it computes electrically, like a computer, like some strange computer with no software we can find. But don't be concerned when we zap brains with electricity or high-intensity MRI magnetic fields which would instantly destroy all data on a computer.”
Forbidden speech: “Psychical research and research on savants show the human mind is something of oceanic depth,  with a gigantic wealth of little-understood powers and capabilities.”	Approved speech: “We're all pretty much just monkey minds. Trust this statement, though it comes from little more than a monkey mind.”