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Reviving Steady State Cosmology?




As regular readers of this blog and its precursor know, I'm always happy to find support for myown prejudice against Big Bang cosmology.

Sometimes my search for such support has led me into blind alleys, and I back out of those as quickly as I can. Recall this discussion from September.

Here are a couple of pieces I've written that mention alleys that might not prove to be so blind.

Maxwell's demon

and

panspermia

might both bear upon the big cosmological questions.

Today, I can report something else worth further investigation.

Something from Robert Matthews' website:

Cosmology and other questions

Matthews, a Brit, is a professor who teaches at the Dept of Information Engineering at Ashton University, is a working scientist (a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, author of dozens of articles for refereed publications about statistics, encryption, neural networks, and related matters)  as well as a science journalist. Here is the full CV.

The money quote from the above-linked page on his blog:

within recent years there has been renewed interest in the notion that the Big Bang may have been just a interlude in the otherwise infinitely long history of the spatially infinite cosmos.  Seen in that light, the Steady State model may yet be worth considering as the asymptotic state towards which our universe will revert as t tends to infinity. The pay-off is impressive: the observational fact that the universe is expanding (H >0) allows the symmetries of the space-time metric to lead us to a unique model of a spatially flat universe undergoing exponential expansion with negative deceleration constant. This is, of course, the currently preferred kinematic description of our universe - yet spacetime symmetry principles have led us to it without recourse to any field equations !  The Steady State model may thus be the correct model after all, its original proponents having erred through "temporal parochialism".

Okay I don't understand that either, but I'm going to work on it.

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