A NEW YEAR 2014

I blew my resolution last year to post every week to this blog. I will renew my resolution and see if I can do better this year.
I am really offended by the entire idea of a Big Bang origin to the universe. As anyone who knows anything about basic physics an initial explosion releasing particles into the vacuum of space would have the particles expanding ad infinitum with no natural forces that would allow them to bump into each other to form more complex matter or to form into the galaxies, stars, planets, etc. And all studies of the universe show that only the earth contains life, especially intelligent persons.

I just ran into these stories in a Scientist magazine that were part of a list of things that don't make sense:

The big bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts – so why didn't the universe disappear in a puff of self-annihilation.

OUR best theories of the early universe also tell us which atoms should have been forged in the first 5 minutes after the big bang. The existing amounts of hydrogen and helium match theory perfectly - so well, in fact, that cosmologists claim this is the best evidence we have for the big bang. Things aren't so good for the third element, lithium, however (New Scientist, 5 July 2008, p 28).

When we count up the lithium atoms held in stars, there is only one-third as much of the lithium-7 isotope as there should be. Another isotope, lithium-6, is overabundant: there may be as much as 1000 times too much of it.

So something in the big bang is not adding up. Is it a serious problem? Yes, says Gary Steigman of Ohio State University in Columbus, but it is not fatal. "There are too many successes for big-bang cosmology to be troubled by these lithium problems," he says.

Others disagree. "The lithium problem is one of the very few hints that there may be a problem with the big bang," says Jonathan Feng at the University of California, Irvine.

One thing that everyone does agree on is that things are getting worse. "The lithium-7 problem is more serious than ever," says Joseph Silk at the University of Oxford. Improved observations of stars suggest they contain even less lithium-7 than previously thought. "The gap between prediction and observation has widened," Steigman says.