When Scientists Speak Inaccurately in Their Zeal to Show Some Theory Is "Beyond Doubt"

There are in academia quite a few highly intelligent thinkers who have widespread doubt about the reliability of most scientific theories. Such thinkers are often philosophers of science. Philosophers of science have often said that most scientific theories are underdetermined. A theory is said to be underdetermined if there is not sufficient evidence to establish its truth. A scientific theory is said to be underdetermined when there are no observations allowing us to tell that such a theory is true rather than other rival theories that can explain observations equally well. Such theories are called “empirical equivalents.” You can find out more about this topic by doing a Google search for “underdetermination of scientific theory.” The article here gives a detailed discussion of the topic.

In many cases, we can readily think of alternate theories to explain the things that a scientific theory was created to explain. For example, we can easily imagine a rival to the theory that man appeared by evolving from lower species : a theory that humanity was specifically introduced to our planet with help from visiting extraterrestrials. In other cases, we may not be able to readily think of a rival theory to a scientific theory. But in such a case there are typically five or ten possible theories that could be imagined by someone willing to expend enough time thinking up alternatives. When we can't think of some rival theory that might be an empirical equivalent to some popular scientific theory, this usually just reflects the weakness of our imagination, not a lack of possible alternatives.

The current theory of the origin of the universe is the Big Bang theory, which postulates that the universe began expanding from an infinitely dense point at a time nearly 14 billion years ago. There are two strong reasons for thinking that the theory is true. The first is that what are called the redshifts of galaxies suggest that the universe is expanding. An expanding universe seems to imply that the universe was once long ago in some state of extremely high density. Another reason for believing in the Big Bang is that it seems to explain something called the cosmic microwave radiation. 

However, like so many other major scientific theories, the Big Bang theory is underdetermined.  We lack any observations that prove the Big Bang theory beyond any doubt. There are also two major reasons why the Big Bang theory fails to be a predictively successful theory. The first reason is rather small: the Big Bang theory does not correctly predict the level of  ⁷Li (one of the isotopes of the element lithium) that now exists in the universe. This is known as the primordial lithium problem. According to the 2024 paper here, "there is still a disparity of ⁷Li abundance overestimated by a factor of ~2.5 when calculated theoretically." Successful scientific theories are supposed to make predictions that "hit the bulls-eye." Being wrong by a factor of 250% is not hitting the bulls-eye, but is instead missing the target entirely. 

A much larger problem is that the Big Bang theory does not actually predict a universe like the universe we live in. It instead predicts a universe that is either 50% matter and 50% antimatter, or a universe that is pure energy. The problem is illustrated in the infographic below. 

Experimenting with very high-speed particle collisions occurring in particle accelerators, scientists observe that when two very high-energy photons collide, they produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter; and they also observe that when matter collides with antimatter, it is converted into high-energy photons. Such collisions are observed in particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider, where particles are accelerated to near the speed of light before they collide with each other. But such observations about matter, antimatter and photons leads to a great mystery as to why there is any matter at all in the universe.

Let us imagine the early minutes of the Big Bang about 13 billion years ago, when the density of the universe was incredibly great. At that time the universe should have consisted of energy, matter and antimatter. The energy should have been in the form of very high energy photons that were frequently colliding with each other. All such collisions should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. So the amount of antimatter should have been exactly the same as the amount of matter. As a CERN page on this topic says, "The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe." But whenever a matter particle touched an antimatter particle, both would have been converted into photons. The eventual result should have been a universe consisting either of nothing but photons, or some matter but an equal amount of antimatter. But only trace amounts of antimatter are observed in the universe.

It would be incredibly inconvenient if matter and antimatter were equally distributed. So much energy is released when matter makes contact with antimatter that if there were trace amounts of antimatter lying about, you'd have “oops, someone blew up Europe because he stepped on a tiny piece of antimatter” situations all over the place. We know that there is very little antimatter in the universe because of the great rarity of high-energy events observed through telescopes. If there was lots of antimatter in outer space, we would be observing very frequently extremely high-energy events in space; because whenever matter came into contact with antimatter, enormous amounts of energy would be released. 

A scientific paper puts it this way: 

"In theory, a matter [amount] will be immediately annihilated if it meets with its antimatter, leaving nothing unless energy behind, and the amounts of matter with that of antimatter should be created equally in the Big Bang. So, none of us should exist in principle but we are indeed existing."

So the Big Bang theory does not actually predict a universe like ours. It instead predicts a universe that is either half-matter and half antimatter, or a universe with only energy (because all of the matter and antimatter made contact with each other in the early Big Bang, leaving nothing but photons). This shortfall of the Big Bang theory is called the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem or the baryon asymmetry problem. The problem is still unsolved. Do not be fooled by occasional speculative papers that appear claiming to provide a "solution" to such a problem. All such papers will involve extremely wild speculation that no one has verified. 

Another very severe limitation of the Big Bang theory is that it can never be proven true, given what the theory itself describes. The theory says that during the first 300,000 years of the universe's history, the density of matter was so great that all radiation coming from the universe's beginning must have been hopelessly scattered, because of innumerable collisions of particles in a very dense universe. So even though telescopes can in effect "look back in time" by looking at galaxies billions of light years away, there is no hope that telescopic observations will ever allow us to "look back in time" far enough to observe the very beginning of the universe, given the assumptions of the Big Bang theory. 

If our scientists were to honestly describe the Big Bang theory, they would describe it very humbly, saying something like this: 

"The Big Bang theory is our best guess about the universe's beginning, and there are some reasons for believing in it. But the Big Bang theory cannot be the full story. The theory does not actually predict a universe like ours. And we can never prove that the Big Bang actually happened, given the theory's assumptions. The early density was too great to ever observe what happened in the first 300,000 years. "

Instead of honestly speaking in such a way, some scientists have recently been speaking in a very misleading away about the Big Bang theory. For example, on the site The Conversation we have a long article by cosmologist Konstantinos Dimopoulos. It is reprinted on the Science Alert site with the title "The Big Bang is Beyond Doubt. An Expert Reveals Why." But that wasn't the original title of the article, so we can't use that title as evidence of a scientist claiming certainty where there is no certainty. 

However, reading the article we soon find evidence of just such a thing: a scientist claiming certainty where there is no certainty.  For in the article Konstantinos Dimopoulos says this: 

"The 14 billion year story of our universe begins with a cataclysmic explosion everywhere in space, which we call the Big Bang. That much is beyond reasonable doubt." 

No, such a thing certainly can be reasonably doubted, because no one ever directly observed such a thing, and also the Big Bang has two predictive failures, one of which is fairly small (the failure to correctly predict the abundance of one lithium isotope), and the other one extremely gigantic (the failure to predict a universe like ours, in which matter is very many times more abundant than antimatter). 

What does Dimopoulos say about the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem? He fails to even mention it. He does not even use the word "antimatter." He also fails to mention the problem that the Big Bang theory fails to correctly predict the level of  ⁷Li (one of the isotopes of the element lithium) that now exists in the universe. He says only one thing about predictions, and it is a very false claim. Referring to the theory of primordial cosmic inflation, a kind of offshoot of the Big Bang theory, he claims, "Precision observations of the cosmic microwave background in recent decades have spectacularly confirmed the predictions of inflation." No, that isn't true at all.

The theory of primordial cosmic inflation is actually a large family of theories, consisting of hundreds or dozens of theories. Each one of these theories can predict any of a million different things, based on what you supply as input parameters to the equations of the theory. The result is that the predictions of the theory of primordial cosmic inflation are "all over the map," as some cosmologists have confessed. The main prediction of cosmic inflation theories has been that there would be observed something called primordial b-modes. Huge amounts of money have been spent looking for such primordial b-modes, without any success. 

Dimopoulos has erred.  He has claimed that the basic idea of the Big Bang theory is "beyond reasonable doubt," but it is no such thing. He has claimed predictive success for a "cosmic inflation" offshoot of the Big Bang, a success that never occurred because there are so many versions of such a "cosmic inflation" theory that its predictions are all over the map (and because the primordial b-modes predicted by the theory were never found).  Dimopoulos has also ignored two predictive failures of the Big Bang theory (one very gigantic), which together mean that we have no warrant for claiming that the Big Bang theory is "beyond reasonable doubt." 

As bad as the misstatements by Dimopoulos are, they are nowhere near as bad as the grotesque fiction stated by astrophysicist Pablo G. Pérez González. He makes this huge misstatement:

"The first three minutes of the universe determined the current composition of the universe, along with all of its subsequent evolution. In other words, what we are today — everything that exists, everything that will exist, everything that does not exist and will not exist — was decided in just three minutes!"

Nonsense. Nothing that happened during the Big Bang did anything to guarantee that life and humans would one day exist. No one observing the first three minutes of the Big Bang would ever predict that the results billions of years later would one day include living things or beings as intelligent as humans. To the contrary, what they would predict from observing the first three minutes of the Big Bang is either a universe with 50% matter and 50% antimatter (which would be uninhabitable), or a universe in which all of the matter had combined with antimatter, leaving only energy photons left (which would be even more uninhabitable). 

What does Gonzalez say about this central problem with the Big Bang theory? Nothing at all. He does not even use the word "antimatter." 

There is a lesson to be learned here. The lesson is:  when a theory beloved by scientists has not been proven and when the theory has some gigantic problem that has not been resolved, scientists may speak as if so huge a problem does not even exist, and falsely claim that the theory is "beyond reasonable doubt" or "beyond doubt." It seems that scientists are very good about ignoring "the elephant in the room." 

Periodically Repeating "Big Bang Was Not the Beginning" Story Never Has Substance

The fact that our universe seems to have suddenly originated is one of the most important facts that a human can learn, and also a fact with the utmost philosophical significance.  To understand the importance of this fact, we can consider what positions were taken before it was discovered that the universe suddenly originated. The principle philosophy of ancient materialism was a philosophy called atomism or Epicureanism.  There survives from antiquity one great literary work stating this philosophy, the famous work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius. In that book Lucretius denied all claims of purposeful teleology in nature, and states the doctrine that the universe has always existed. Early in the work he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

Such a doctrine was very convenient for a materialist such as Lucretius. For one thing, it allowed him to deny that there was ever any purposeful creation event in which the universe began, something he did not want to believe in.  Secondly, the doctrine allowed him to suggest a possible explanation for how humans exist on a planet with such enormous biological order.  The explanation was simply that order had arisen from incredibly lucky combinations of atoms,  combinations that we would never expect to occur in, say, a trillion years of time, but which we might expect to occur if the universe had existed for an infinite length of time.  Lucretius stated the doctrine on this page of his De Rerum Natura:

"So much can letters by mere change of order

Accomplish; but these elements which are atoms

Can effect more combinations, out of which 

All different kinds of things may be created."

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock principle of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences  ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation.

Believers in an eternal universe got a rude surprise in the twentieth century. Scientists discovered that our universe had a sudden beginning, seemingly about 13 billion years ago, in an event they called the Big Bang.  There were two types of observations that established this idea. The first were a great number of observations of galactic redshifts establishing that the entire universe was expanding.  The second type of observations were observations of what is called the cosmic background radiation. The scientists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the cosmic background radiation, made around 1965.  Since then fancy space satellites have observed this radiation in great detail. The cosmic background radiation is a type of radiation that was predicted before 1965 as a consequence of a universe that had a hot, dense beginning.  

The discovery of the Big Bang was a very great blow against all those who believe that human existence is accidental or that the universe is accidental. The rather unfortunate term "Big Bang" is somewhat misleading, because it causes some to imagine something like a giant bomb that exploded. The theory actually depicts no such thing, but something far more radical: the idea of all of the matter and energy in the universe arising from an infinitely small mathematical point. It is rather hard to imagine anything that could be more suggestive of a universe being purposefully created out of nothing.   

The Big Bang is a thorn in the side of the modern materialist scientist. Such a scientist wants to believe that the universe has existed forever, because if the universe had existed forever, it takes off the table all talk of the universe being specially created by some divine power.  But, contrary to the wishes of materialist scientists, nature is telling us that the universe has not existed forever. 

It is therefore no surprise that we occasionally get some science news articles giving us what we might call "cosmic beginnings backlash."  There is a type of article that shows up every several months on the science news sites. It is an article that attempts to tell a "the cosmic origins story has been revised" narrative.  The article may claim that now scientists are not so sure that the Big Bang was the beginning. Or, more deceptively, the article may attempt to insinuate that the idea of a sudden cosmic beginning is no longer maintained by most cosmologists. There is never any substance in the articles of this type that periodically appear.  No actual news is being reported. All that is going on is a little "clouding the waters" analgesic activity trying to make atheists feel a little better. 

The latest example of this type of story is an article in the frequently misspeaking and frequently misinforming BBC Science Focus site, an article entitled "Scientists now think we CAN know what came before the Big Bang." The title is bogus, and there is nothing of any substance in the article. We have this deceptive subtitle:

"New theories from leading physicists offer compelling possibilities about what existed before the early Universe. One thing they’re agreed on is that the Big Bang wasn’t the start."

The subtitle is deceptive because no new theories are discussed, and none of the theories mentioned are theories describing a state before the Big Bang with any credibility. No one advancing such wildly speculative theories seems to actually claim that anything can be known about some state before the Big Bang. The theories mentioned are the cosmic inflation theory, something called loop quantum gravity, something called causal set theory, something called horava gravity, something called the epkyrotic universe, cosmic natural selection or cosmological natural selection, a cyclic theory of Paul Steinhardt and a cyclic theory of Roger Penrose.  All of these theories have been around for many years. 

• Cosmic inflation theory has been around since about the year 1980, wasting endless millions in research money without producing any results. Cosmic inflation theory is not a theory of something happening before the Big Bang. It is a theory that something special (exponential expansion) happened during a tiny fraction of the first second of the Big Bang. Cosmologist Ethan Siegel likes to pull a very misleading hairsplitting trick in which he redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it is defined as everything that happened at the beginning of the universe after the first tiny fraction of a second. That is misleading trickery, designed to sneak in some illegitimate claim of "before the Big Bang." The BBC article tries a little of the same empty semantic trickery, saying, "Therefore, if we use the Hot Big Bang definition (which most physicists believe we should), then inflation must be considered a pre-Big Bang scenario." No, the cosmic inflation theory is a theory of what happened during the first second of the Big Bang, and is not a theory of something before the Big Bang. 
• Loop quantum gravity is a theory that has been around since at least 2002, and is some version of quantum gravity, which is well-known to be a groundless never-well-established swampland of speculation. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Loop quantum gravity was chosen by only 5%. 
• Causal set theory is another version of quantum gravity, and since quantum gravity is a very much a "castle floating in the clouds" type of thing, it is premature to grant any weight to causal set theory. The theory dates from 2008, as shown here. Page 7 of the 2024 paper here asks some cosmologists what is the "best candidate for a theory of quantum gravity." Causal set theory was one of the choices, but 0% chose that choice. 
• Cosmological natural selection is a very silly theory that I have discussed in four posts dating back to 2014.  The theory was some nonsense about black holes spitting out universes, which failed to ever explain how that could happen. The author of the theory (Lee Smolin) stated in a 2004 paper (page 38) that the theory made a firm prediction. He stated, "There is at least one example of a falsifiable theory satisfying these conditions, which is cosmological natural selection. Among the properties W that make the theory falsifiable is that the upper mass limit of neutron stars is less than 1.6 solar masses. This and other predictions of CNS [cosmological natural selection] have yet to be falsified, but they could easily be by observations in progress.” By now this prediction has been falsified. A 2019 news story told us that a neutron star has been discovered with a mass of 2.17 solar masses. A Google search for "most massive neutron star" will tell you that one neutron star (the "black widow pulsar") has a mass of 2.35 solar masses. Smolin now seems to have lost interest in his cosmological natural selection theory, which never actually explained how a universe could be born from a black hole. 
• Horava gravity is another version of quantum gravity, and at present no theories of quantum gravity have any credibility. The theory dates from 2009, so it is not a new theory. The wikipedia.org article on the theory states, "Observations of gravitational waves emitted by the neutron-star merger GW170817 contravene predictions made by this model of gravity." The article makes no mention of the theory predicting a state before the Big Bang. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Paul Steinhardt. It's something called the ekpyrotic universe theory, and has existed since 2001.  The theory has not attracted any support outside of Steinhardt and his handful of collaborators. 
• The article mentions a cyclic theory of cosmologist Roger Penrose. It is something called conformal cyclic cosmology, and has since existed since the year 2012. The theory has not attracted any substantial number of supporters. 

None of the speculations mentioned above have any substance, because none are supported by observations. It is intrinsically impossible that there could ever be any observations supporting some theory of what happened before the Big Bang. The reason is that the Big Bang was a state of such extreme heat and incredibly high density that any traces of a state before the Big Bang would have been wiped out. 

An important fact of nature that will never change is that it forever will be physically impossible for any technology to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe," or to look back prior to such a moment. In its  first 100,000 years the universe was so dense that every type of radiation coming from such a time must have hopelessly scattered, with all of its information as mangled as a top secret document passed through 1000 different paper shredders, and all of the resulting paper scraps being passed through 1000 paper scrap shredders.  It will therefore be forever impossible to ever "look back at the earliest moments of the universe," or to ever get signals from a time before the Big Bang. Such an impossibility is one reason why all theories of a state before the Big Bang are pseudo-science. Because no such theory can ever be verified or falsified, no such theory should be called scientific.  

Be Suspicious When Materialists Use Metaphors or Analogies

Materialists are always using metaphors or analogies to try to spread their ideas.  The figures of speech they have used are often misleading. Frequently repeated metaphors or analogies of materialists include the following:

"DNA is a blueprint for building bodies." It would be charitable to call this  a misguided metaphor, and avoiding such charity you can simply call the claim a lie. As discussed here, DNA does not contain any specification of the anatomy of a human, and does not even specify the structure of any of the cells that make up a human body. Even the building blocks of cells (organelles) are not specified by DNA. 

"Evolution is a blind watchmaker." A watchmaker is an agent that has the intention of creating a very complex device, along with knowledge of how to create such a device. Darwinian evolution has neither any intention nor any knowledge of how to construct things it has not yet invented. So this metaphor is profoundly misleading. 

"Evolution is a tinkerer." A tinkerer is a person who engages in trial and error changes in a device, with the intention of making improvements but without a plan. The only changes a tinkerer makes are changes he thinks may make an improvement. So, for example, a tinkerer may fiddle with the dials or knobs on his furnace, but will never try something like yanking out a pipe. Lacking any intention of making improvements, and lacking any policy of "only make changes that might improve things," Darwinian evolution is not a tinkerer. 

"Your brain is a computer." Human beings are able to do mathematical operations and remember things, but the brain bears no resemblance to a computer. In the post here I discuss seven things found in computerized systems that perform fast retrieval. The brain has nothing like any of these seven things.  Trying to explain human understanding, consciousness and experience with the idea that the brain is a computer is nonsensical, because computers don't understand things, are not conscious, and do not have experiences like human experiences.

"Arising from neural activity, the mind is like the scent that rises from the bubbling soup." This is a profoundly misleading analogy. Consisting of gaseous vapor, a soup scent is a disorganized physical thing that arises from another disorganized physical thing (a soup). But the mind is not a physical thing, and things such as your memory and thoughts can be very organized.  There are very good reasons for disbelieving that the mind arises from the body, and even if it did, that would be a case of something organized arising from a physical thing that is also extremely organized (the body), not a case of something disorganized arising from something disorganized.  

"Science is like a game that has special rules."  This claim is used by people who try to argue you that the "game of science" involves special rules rather comparable to board game rules such as the Monopoly game rule that you get $200 whenever passing "Go" or the chess game rule that bishops can only move diagonally. Such persons tell us that the "game of science" involves rules such as the rule that you must always assume natural causes, that it is forbidden to admit the possibility of mysterious human powers such as ESP, that you cannot admit the possible of invisible spiritual causes, and that you can never admit that what looks so much like design in biology really is purposeful design.  There are no such rules in science. Science has always been an activity lacking any formal set of procedural rules. In law there are large texts giving written rules of procedure in federal court. No such formal rules of procedure have ever been codified for scientists. Science has always been something with loose rules, little more than basic principles such as "don't fake data" or "document observations carefully." Games such as chess and Monopoly have a formal and precise set of rules that players are supposed to follow. Science has no such codified rules. And so in theoretical physics these days there is pretty much an "anything goes" type of atmosphere where speculation runs amok. 

In a recent post a physicist (Marcelo Gleiser) gives us another example of a misleading  metaphor. Digging up a metaphor that was buried long ago, for very good reasons, the physicist describes the universe's beginning by saying "it all started with a cosmic egg." The post is entitled "The quantum egg that birthed the universe."  Cosmologists are the scientists who study the beginning of the universe and the large-scale structure of the universe. Cosmologists do not typically maintain that the universe began in some state that could ever be reasonably described as a cosmic egg. 

The theory of the Big Bang arose from observations that the universe is expanding. Tracing the history of an expanding universe back in time, going back billions of years ago, cosmologists are forced to assume greater and greater temperatures and greater and greater densities. Can they trace things back far enough to reach some point of stability, where you might postulate the existence of some stable state of matter or energy that  might have existed in a static state, before the universe's expansion began? Not at all. 

It's easy to explain why no such stable state can ever be postulated at the universe's beginning. Let's imagine the universe at some very dense and hot state, a state so hot that it was too hot for atoms to be formed. In such a state of very high density all the universe's matter and energy would have created a tremendously high force of gravity acting to cause the universe to collapse in on itself. The only thing preventing such a collapse was the universe's expansion. If you take away the expansion, you have something like what exists when a very large star runs out of its nuclear fuel, and stops burning. Astrophysicists say that at such a time the star collapses into a state of infinite density called a singularity.  The star becomes not a stable unit of matter with a specific density, but a black hole of infinite density. 

The basic description that cosmologists give of the universe's beginning is therefore not an expansion from some "cosmic egg" but an expansion from a singularity point of infinite density. The schematic diagram below shows the situation at the time of the Big Bang. Only with the expansion of the universe (shown by the black arrows) can you have something that counteracts the enormous inward force of the gravity. Stop that expansion (as in the case of some static "egg") and the inward force of gravity causes everything to very quickly crush into an infinitely dense singularity, like a collapsing very massive star that collapses to become a black hole. 

Of course, cosmologists like to speculate, and they pay their rent by churning out endless speculative models.  So there are thousands and thousands of speculative theories that cosmologists have created speculating about alternate possibilities. But the real question is: what the does the basic data generically suggest? What it suggests is a universe suddenly beginning to expand from a point of infinite density and temperature. 

Such a point cannot be reasonably described as a "cosmic egg." An egg is a stable structure which has within it complex arrangements of matter. Analyzing the proteins in an egg, we would find many complex arrangements of amino acids that have to be just-right to allow the egg to be the starting point of an organism. No such organized arrangement of matter could exist at some earliest state of the universe, which would be no more comparable to an egg than the beginning of a hydrogen bomb explosion would be like an egg. Of course, you could evoke the metaphor of some carefully constructed hydrogen bomb as being the "egg" of an H-bomb explosion. But that would be the careful design at the beginning that materialists such as Gleiser wish to avoid. 

In the paper "Did the Universe Have a Beginning" by Tufts University scientists Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, the authors describe several speculative scenarios, one of which they call the scenario of an "emergent universe."  They describe this speculative scenario like this: "This universe can be thought of as a 'cosmic egg' that exists forever until it breaks open to produce an expanding universe."  At the end of the paper we have a short section entitled "Did the Universe Have a Beginning?" The authors give this as their answer to the question of their paper title:

"At this point, it seems that the answer to this question is probably yes. Here we have addressed three scenarios which seemed to offer a way to avoid a beginning, and have found that none of them can actually be eternal in the past. Both eternal inflation and cyclic universe scenarios have H_av > 0, which means that they must be past-geodesically incomplete. We have also examined a simple emergent universe model, and concluded that it cannot escape quantum collapse. Even considering more general emergent universe models, there do not seem to be any matter sources that admit solutions that are immune to collapse." 

It seems that there could not have existed any "cosmic egg" at the beginning, because such a thing would have been too prone to the kind of collapse the paper refers to, something comparable to what happens when a very massive star very quickly undergoes a gravitational collapse to become a black hole. Gleiser's assertion that "it all started with a cosmic egg" is not a correct description of the Big Bang, and such language is not typically used by today's scientists who study the Big Bang.  

Another way in which materialists try to avoid a beginning of the universe is by theories of a cyclical universe. There is the theory that the universe's current expansion is only one of an infinite series of cycles, each consisting of an expansion of the universe (lasting billions of years) followed by a contraction of the universe (lasting billions of years). In his 2021 paper "Three Impossible Theories," the well-known physicist Leonard Susskind mentions why such an idea of an oscillating universe does not work, referring to the second law of thermodynamics:

"Besides being very bizarre this behavior violates the second law. The eternal oscillations constitute a perpetual motion machine of the third kind, whereas the second law requires the oscillations to eventually dissipate and the system to come to thermal equilibrium."

The idea of a universe that had existed forever was long a pillar of materialist thought. Early in the work De Rerum Natura by Lucretius,  the principle surviving work of ancient materialism,  he states this about changeless simple particles that were called "atoms" before the modern atom was discovered:

"The various bodies of which things are made

Must have continued from eternal time"

This idea of an eternal universe was a bedrock tenet of materialists for centuries after Lucretius. In the eighteenth century the principle atheist writer was Holbach, who asked in his main book, "Is  is  not  evident  that  the  whole  universe  has  not been,  in  its  anterior  eternal  duration,  rigorously  the same  that  it  now  is?"  Holbach wrote this: "Motion,  then,  is  co-eternal  with  matter :  from  all eternity  the  particles  of  the  universe  have  acted  and reacted  upon  each  other,  by  virtue  of  their  respective energies  ;  of  their  peculiar  essences ;  of  their  primitive elements ;  of  their  various  combinations." Later he wrote this: "Matter  has  existed  from  all  eternity, seeing  that  we  cannot  conceive  it  to  have  been  capable of  beginning."  Holbach and  atheists of the nineteenth century believed that the universe had existed forever, an idea that conveniently allowed them to dispose of any idea of a divine creation. Nowadays materialists have to resort to something much flimsier than the notion of an eternally existing universe: the word trick used by Gleiser of using the misleading term "egg" to try to plant in our minds the physically untenable idea of some egg that existed a while or maybe forever before exploding.  They're not candid enough to say: "We don't understand how we get such a lovely universe out of nothing."

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.”

When Cosmology Clickbait Uses a Silly Switcheroo

Scientists have told us innumerable times that the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, a mysterious event in which the universe kind of exploded into existence, expanding from a point of possibly infinite density.  But nowadays we will sometimes read an article in our science news feeds (or our science news sites) claiming that the Big Bang was not the beginning. 

Some of these articles are articles describing some new super-speculative paper describing some wildly imaginative scenario that has yet to gain appreciable acceptance among cosmologists.  Such "hot-off-the-presses" theories are of very little significance, since they are 99% speculation. 

But more than one of "the Big Bang was not the beginning" articles published in mainstream media in recent years have been authored by a single person: Ethan Siegel, a cosmology PhD who works as a tireless writer on science topics.  The latest example of Siegel's dubious reasoning on this topic may be found here, an article entitled "We now know the big bang theory is (probably) not how the universe began."

Siegel tries the same old trick he has tried in similar articles:

(1) Going against what cosmology professors have been teaching for decades, Siegel effectively redefines the term "Big Bang" so that it does not refer to the very beginning of the universe, but to something that only started the tiniest instant after the beginning of the universe, at a time a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe. 

(2) Switching the chronological order that cosmologists have taught for decades, that a hypothetical "cosmic inflation" phase occurred the tiniest fraction of a second after the start of the Big Bang, Siegel speaks as if such a hypothetical "cosmic inflation" phase occurred the tiniest fraction of a second before the start of the Big Bang. He refers to "the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation." 

Having made this little switcheroo involving such shady redefinition, Siegel then claims that the Big Bang was not the beginning, his reasoning being that the Big Bang did not occur until after some "cosmic inflation" phase lasting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second.  This kind of word parsing and hair-splitting and semantic skullduggery is as silly as the claim below:

"My client Waldo Wipkins denies that he caused the accident by pressing down on the accelerator of his car with his foot. He says the movement of the car was first started by the the rolling of his car downhill produced by the force of gravity, which preceded his pressing down of the accelerator by a tiny fraction of a second."

In his article, Siegel speaks (as he usually does) as if the "cosmic inflation" theory was a single theory that has been predictively successful.  It is no such thing. There are many hundreds of versions of the cosmic inflation theory. Most of these are mathematical models with input parameters that can be varied. What is predicted by any of these models always depends on what input parameters the model is given.  Each of these models predicts a very wide variety of things, like some political theory that predicts that the next election might be won by either the Republicans or the Democrats or the Green Party or the Libertarian Party (depending on what input parameters you give the theory). Given many hundreds of versions of the cosmic inflation theory, each predicting a wide range of outcomes depending on what input parameters they receive,  the truth is that the predictions of cosmic inflation theory are all over the map. 

There are no observations establishing any cosmic inflation theory, and since the predictions of the cosmic inflation theory are all over the map, there is no basis for claiming that it has any impressive record of predictive success.  To the contrary, scientists have failed in their attempts to find evidence for the main prediction of the theory (primordial b-modes). Noting the complete failure of searches for the primordial B-modes, a scientist recently stated, "If, however, future measurements continue to find no gravitational-wave signal, it will likely imply that we must seriously reconsider our inflationary models or perhaps dismiss inflation altogether, which would be a significant paradigm shift." 

Below is a NASA visual giving a chronology of cosmic events, one of countless visuals I could produce to show that the long-standing habit of cosmologists has been to describe the Big Bang as coming before an alleged "cosmic inflation" phase, not after such a phase as Siegel claims. 

Credit: NASA

Should we trustingly bow to the authority of Siegel, when he makes boasts about the cosmic inflation theory being predictively successful or supported by observations? I see no strong reason why we should. Although he is a cosmology PhD,  Siegel is not a cosmology professor, and he has apparently never authored or co-authored any scientific journal paper dealing mainly with the Big Bang, the universe's beginning, or the theory of cosmic inflation.  A search for his scientific papers on the physics paper server (https://arxiv.org/) gives us the following scientific papers, all written before 2009:

• Dark Matter in the Solar System
• Non-linear structure formation and the acoustic scale
• What Millisecond Pulsars Can Tell Us About Matter In The Galaxy
• Probing Dark Matter Substructure with Pulsar Timing
• Dark Matter In Minimal Trinification
• Dark Matter on the Smallest Scales
• Can Electric Charges and Currents Survive in an Inhomogeneous Universe?
• Cosmological Structure Formation Creates Large-Scale Magnetic Fields
• Effects of Inhomogeneities on Cosmic Expansion
• A Thermal Graviton Background from Extra Dimensions
• Towards a Precision Cosmology from Starburst Galaxies at z>2

None of these papers deals mainly with the extremely specialized topics of the Big Bang theory or the cosmic inflation theory.  Since Siegel has no published scientific journal papers dealing mainly with the Big Bang theory or the cosmic inflation theory, it seems there is no strong reason why we should think that he is qualified to be redefining the term "Big Bang" so that it comes after some proposed "cosmic inflation" phase (contrary to the majority of cosmologists), and also no strong authority-trust reason why we should put much weight on his claims about the cosmic inflation theory being well-grounded.  Siegel has written many articles on cosmic inflation theory, but on this topic he tends to keep repeating the same old dubious cheerleader talking points over and over and over again from one article to the next, just as he keeps repeating over and over and over again in different articles a set of selling points trying to get us to believe in the dubious hypothesis of dark matter, something never observed.  We see in such articles an uncritical repetition of very dubious triumphal legends of the cosmologist tribe. 

One such legend is that the cosmic inflation theory reduced the amount of fine-tuning needed at the universe's beginning, by eliminating the need for an initial expansion rate fine-tuned to one part in 10 to the fiftieth power.  The claim was never true, because cosmic inflation theories require so much fine-tuning of their own (in at least three places) that the need for fine-tuning of initial conditions is not actually reduced.  A 2019 paper states "the theory of inflation requires finely tuned initial conditions" and that it "is therefore far from clear that inflation truly solves the fine-tuning puzzles that it was designed for." Another paper (referring to fine-tuning required by the cosmic inflation theory) says, "The staggering amount of fine-tuning which is required disturbs many cosmologists."

What writers such as Siegel do is endlessly repeat boasts that the cosmic inflation theory solves several problems. We will never know whether such boasts are just tribal folklore of the small tribe of cosmologists. This is because no can ever reproduce the imagined cosmic inflation to verify that it actually solves any problem.  For example, would cosmic inflation (exponential expansion) actually result in a smooth universe? There's no way to ever know.  We can't reproduce cosmic inflation and see how smooth a universe results.  We can also never look back far enough in time to verify that cosmic inflation actually occurred, because the density of matter and energy was so great during the universe's first 300,000 years that nothing can be observed from those years (all light being scattered a billion times by such density). 

I may note that the scientific papers advancing versions of the cosmic inflation theory are some of the most obscure and hard-to-read papers that have ever appeared in scientific literature, rivaled in obscurity only by the papers of string theory.  An example from last month is here. Such papers are typically filled with huge numbers of obscure mathematical equations that are very poorly documented.  All kinds of obscure italicized symbols will appear that are almost never explained.  It is as if most of the writers of such papers were thinking that the only people who can ever understand such cosmic inflation papers are people like themselves who write cosmic inflation papers.  But since Siegel is not a writer of published scientific journal papers on cosmic inflation, what confidence can we have in his pronouncements about such a theory? 

Relying on an appeal to a never-observed "inflaton field" as imaginary as werewolves, the ever-changing cosmic inflation theory is like a continually shape-shifting monster. The very great obscurity of papers presenting versions of cosmic inflation theories is one of the major reasons for thinking that cosmic inflation theory (not to be confused with the Big Bang theory) should be dismissed as pseudoscience.  When there are many hundreds of versions of a theory, presented in papers written in the most hard-to-decipher text and the most intractable and poorly documented mathematics, then it can rightly be said that no one can justifiably claim to know that the predictions of the theory tend to be successful. Similarly, the works of the philosopher Hegel are so very obscure that no one can convincingly claim that  Hegel did or did not correctly predict the general features of modern society. 

Speaking about the cosmic inflation theory, Cal Tech physicist Sean Carroll says here, “When perturbations are taken into account, inflation only occurs in a negligibly small fraction of cosmological histories,” and then spells that out as a fraction less than 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. The leading cosmologist Roger Penrose has described cosmic inflation as a thermalization process, and has stated, “There is, however, something fundamentally misconceived about trying to explain the uniformity of the early universe as resulting from a thermalization process.” He states that any thermalization process doing anything would have “been even more special before the thermalization than after” (The Road to Reality, page 755). Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt says this:

"The irony is that our understanding of inflation has changed dramatically. We no longer believe that inflation makes any of those predictions so that none of the magnificent observations made over the last 30 years can be viewed as supporting inflation. Since 1983, it has become clear that inflation is very flexible (parameters can be adjusted to give any result) and generically leads to a multiverse consisting of patches in which any outcome is possible. Imagine a scientific theory that was designed to explain and predict but ends up allowing literally any conceivable possibility without any rule about what is more likely. What good is it? It rules out nothing and can never be put to a real test."

Why does Siegel keep writing these articles claiming that the Big Bang was not the beginning, on the basis of some semantic hair-splitting claiming that something starting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe was not the beginning? I suspect the reason is that such claims facilitate sensational-sounding clickbait headlines causing high readership of poorly reasoned articles.  Such articles create the impression that something new and very important has been discovered, which is not at all true. In this century gravitational waves were observed for the first time, but only from freak cosmic events with no major relevance to cosmology. There have been no really major discoveries in cosmology this century.  If scientists ever start modifying their definition of the Big Bang, that will not be a discovery, but merely some semantic jiggling. 

Siegel's article contains an ad, which gives us a clue as to why so many clickbait false alarm articles appear in the science press these days.  Web sites get ad revenue money when people click on sensational-sounding headlines to reach web pages containing ads.  A good rule might be: be less trustful of any dubious-sounding online science story whenever the story contains an ad.