No Big Bang, No Beginning of Time, No Inflating Universe

From: New Scientist Date: 9/8/2007

"I AM a heretic," Cristiano Germani announced to an audience of cosmologists last

month. Few would disagree, as he is proposing a radical alternative to standard
cosmology: a universe with no big bang creation moment, and no rapid inflation.
Rather than a big bang, he suggests a slingshot.
In the early 1980s, Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
proposed that our universe underwent inflation -- a period of rapid expansion in
the first 10−34 seconds after the big bang. Germani, a cosmologist at the
International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, says that inflation is
beautiful and successful, yet he insists that we need to replace it.
"We don't have any fundamental physical explanation for how or why it occurred,"
he says. "Yet cosmologists today accept it as though it is a religion."
Germani's alternative, unveiled at a cosmology conference at the University of
Sussex, UK, last month, is based on a string-theory model in which the three
visible dimensions of space are confined to the surface of a membrane, or brane,
floating in a 10-dimensional space. The extra dimensions are wrapped up into a
complex shape known as a Calabi-Yau space . The forces and particles in our 3D
world are shadows of the < a href="motion of branes and strings in the Calabi-Yau
space">motion of branes and strings in the Calabi-Yau space .
The problem with the simplest versions of this model is that the Calabi-Yau space
is unstable, constantly vibrating and changing size. Each wobble of the surface
creates unwanted particles and extra forces in the universe -- none of which have
ever been observed. Attempts by string theorists to stabilise the space always
warp it, forcing strange spikes and throats to pop out, Germani says. This
warping, he believes, is the key to explaining the evolution of our universe.
Germani and his colleagues examined what would happen if a brane containing our
universe fell down one of these throats. At first things looked bleak: the
universe dropped like a stone, getting squeezed until it was crushed at the tip of
the throat, corresponding to a big crunch in which the universe collapses in on
itself.
But then Germani considered a spinning universe. "In fact, it is much more
realistic that the universe will be rotating as it drops," he says. Something more
interesting happens to a rotating universe as it hurtles down the throat. Because
it is spinning, it avoids falling into the tip of the throat and whirls round it
instead. Like a boomerang or a stone from a slingshot, it then flies back up
again. Germani realised that the second leg of this journey could correspond to
the expanding universe we observe today.
Other cosmologists have suggested that our . Germani's slingshot mechanism is
different from these because it never sends the universe through a big bang
singularity. As a result, the model can solve the so-called "horizon problem"
without resorting to inflation.
The horizon problem runs like this. No matter where you look in the universe, the
background temperature is about the same, but not enough time has elapsed since
the big bang for radiation to travel across the universe and back, exchanging
temperature information. Inflation solves this problem because regions of space
which sit on opposite sides of the visible universe today could once have been
close together, and been blown far apart during inflation.
With the slingshot picture, there is no big bang and so no horizon problem. "We
have no beginning of time, so the universe is easily old enough for regions on
both sides of the sky to have been in contact in the past," Germani says. "In the
slingshot scenario we could have an ever-existing universe." His team's
calculations also show that the apparently finely tuned density of today's
universe arises naturally using the slingshot, though inflation is also able to
account for this.
Last year, support for inflation was bolstered by measurements of the pattern of
cold and hot spots in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) made by the , which
seem to fit perfectly with the predictions of inflation. When Germani calculated
how temperature imprints would develop in his slingshot universe, he found that
they also matched the data. Germani and his colleagues are now working out what
signatures in the CMB could distinguish it from inflation, in the hope that they
might turn up when the European Space Agency's Planck satellite begins more
detailed measurements in 2008.
Cosmologist Paul Frampton at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, likes
the idea. "They have solved the key problems that inflation solves and have good
agreement with the latest observations," he says.
String theorist Damien Easson at the University of Durham, UK, agrees that
inflation needs an explanation based on fundamental physics. However, he does not
see the cosmological slingshot model as the answer. "It's extremely controversial
to claim to have found an alternative to one of the most respected theories in
cosmology," he says.
Easson points out that string-theory models usually represent the universe as a
stack of branes in the non-warped region of the Calabi-Yau space, and have
successfully used this to explain why we see the forces and particles that we do.
"It's difficult to see how this can be achieved if our universe is flying down the
throat," he says.
Germani accepts that his model still needs work, but he believes that he will
eventually meet this challenge. "Remember, inflation theory has been around for
more than 20 years, while my theory is still young," he says.