Cosmology in crisis—a conference report

‘I May 2004, a group of about 30 concerned scientists published an open letter to the global scientific community in New Scientist in which they protested the stranglehold of Big Bang theory on cosmological research and funding.’ This was the opening sentence in a paper presented to Progress in Physics in October this year by Hilton Ratcliffe. It was entitled The First Crisis in Cosmology Conference (CCC1) and reported on a conference held in Moncao, Portugal, between 23 and 25 June 2005.1 This sentence referred to ‘An Open Letter to the Scientific Community’,2 which had to be a paid advertisement in New Scientist,3 because that was the only way it would be published. It reflected the growing disregard of the big bang even in the secular science community. It began with: ‘The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities—things that we have never observed. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying [big bang] theory [emphasis added]. ‘But the big bang theory can’t survive without these fudge factors.’ They outlined a few basic problems that they agreed upon, which are devastating to the standard big bang model. Their advert was also published on the web and, as a result, many more people added their names to the list.4 They also said: ‘[Q]uestions and alternatives cannot even now be freely discussed and examined. An open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences.’