DAY 14 - A NONFICTIONAL BOOK

(NOTE: the link to the original image has 404'd and these entries were written before I got into the habit of captioning them so I don't know what book I chose anymore and the entry itself offered no clues, just that it "was a very interesting read". So although this entry was originally posted to That Other Journal on December 31, 2009, my choice will be from August 14, 2013)

The Big Bang Never Happened by Eric J. Lerner

I think it's safe to say that the claims made in this book are not supported by today's science or else we would be hearing more about this guy. However, in my impressionable college days, I found what he had to say interesting even if it's ultimately false.

I came across this book in my college's library. I don't remember what made me want to read it. It wasn't an article in a magazine nor was it the kind of book you could read in a day. Nevertheless I read it and was fascinated by it enough to buy it later and even read it more than once (something few books I've read can claim). I guess you could describe the feeling I got from this book as something akin to when college students first encounter things like libertarianism and other idealistic philosophies.

It's been a long time since I've last read the book. One of the claims that stuck with me was the idea that the universe isn't all matter but half matter and half antimatter with the two separated. What we call the Big Bang was in fact in a big bang. It was the coming together of matter and antimatter that produced the Cosmic Background Radiation but the energy of the annihilation would ultimately prevent all the matter in the universe from annihilating. The points of annihilation would provide a barrier that the remaining matter and antimatter could not cross. The visual example was that of a Leidenfrost layer. You see that when a drop of water is put on a very hot pan. The water which comes in contact with the pan immediately boils but the drop remains longer than it would otherwise because it floats on a layer of steam. The annihilations would become that layer of steam that kept the matter and antimatter apart long enough to separate as the energy of the annihilations would reverse their trajectories.
     Modern theory calls for CP-violation (charge parity) which allows for a very slight excess of matter to be created over that of antimatter. Something with the behavior of quarks. I guess in its own way CP-violation makes more sense because matter and antimatter are created in pairs very close together. The book would seem to imply that matter and antimatter could generate very far apart somehow. But at the time, I believed matter and antimatter could only be created in equal amounts so the idea that there could be one extra particle of matter for every million seemed ridiculous. Another reason this book spoke to me.

The book also calls for the universe to be eternal in age and gives a lot more weight to forces of electricity and magnetism in shaping the universe. It also discredits the existence of dark matter citing them as unnecessary or resulting from mismeasurement of galactic motions. He mentions that the dominant phase of matter in the universe is plasma which is atomic nuclei stripped of their electrons because they are too energetic to retain them. The Sun is comprised of plasma. Atoms are electrically neutral whereas plasma is not. Plasma has magnetic and electrical fields and Lerner describes a universe whose large-scale structure is dependent on the infinite fields of magnetism and electricity. Or something like that.

Regardless of the science which comes later in the book, I liked the history lesson in its early chapters. It described that how cultures viewed the universe depended on how well their societies were faring. Societies which were doing well and expanding tended to view an eternal universe whereas failing societies viewed a universe with a beginning and ultimately an end. He posited that the Big Bang is a popular theory because our society hasn't created anything new in a long time. He pointed out the last big creations were things like the internet, landing on the moon, and lasers...all of which were made in the 1960s. You might say cellphones, but cellphones are modern telephones and telephony has existed since the 1870s. Lerner said that since we're stagnant creatively we are imagining a universe which must end but should we break out of this and become ascendant again, we will imagine an eternal universe once more.

I guess I recommend the book if only for that. Yeah, I read it before the internet and Wikipedia so finding criticisms of it and disproving science is not difficult now but in 1998 the internet was still modem-based and limited so I remained a believer longer than perhaps I ought. So read it. Read it like you would read an opinion which contradicts your own in order to better inform your own opinion.