One of the most famous theories – the Big Bang Theory – maintains that there was indeed a beginning to our universe, when it was compressed into a singularity smaller than an atom. Does the universe have a beginning or not? This question has fascinated scientists and scholars alike, with answers ranging from yes to no and everything in between. But we now know that the Big Bang Theory is wrong in several important ways, which means we need to rethink what science tells us about how the universe began and how it continues to work today.
10 Things we now know are wrong
1. The Big Bang theory
2. Gravity
3. Evolution
4. Dark Matter
6. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
7. How we learned to think about cell division
8. How life formed on earth
9. How old our planet is
10. How old our universe is
There was no moment of creation, rather it was a gradual process from an infinitely small point
An infinitely small point doesn’t sound like much, but it contains more energy than anything we can possibly imagine—our entire universe inside of a tiny particle smaller than an atom. So our theory of creation was wrong, but that’s not important right now. The important thing to remember is that there was no moment of creation, rather it was a gradual process from an infinitely small point. That’s what makes our universe so special; time has no beginning or end and it will continue for as long as there are stars in space to shine light on planets with life on them. Our universe could be infinite, which means there could be other universes out there with other big bang theories describing how they came into being. It also means that there could be another you reading these words right now in another part of space at some other point in time. It’s a mind-boggling concept to wrap your head around, but think about it for a second. If you were standing at one end of an infinite line and I was standing at another, would I eventually catch up to you? And if so, when? Would it happen tomorrow? Next year? In 1 million years? Or maybe never?
Matter cannot be created or destroyed
Rather, matter can transform from one form to another. For example, a cup of coffee with cream and sugar has no more matter in it than its most basic components – beans, water and heat – but it has transformed into something entirely different. And so have you; your body began as a single fertilized egg cell that morphed over time into its current form. The law of conservation of mass simply means there’s always been exactly as much stuff (matter) on Earth as there ever will be. So why do we keep hearing about new discoveries that create or destroy matter? The answer lies in our definition of matter. The early 20th-century physicists who discovered antimatter weren’t trying to invent new forms of matter; they were studying particles called positrons, which are simply electrons moving backward through space-time. As far as scientists know, every particle has an antimatter equivalent with identical properties except for an opposite charge. When these two meet, they annihilate each other in a flash of energy. Matter may not actually be destroyed by particle accelerators like CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, but it does get converted into energy when scientists collide subatomic particles together at incredibly high speeds.
the universe does not have a center
Einstein’s theory of general relativity tells us that our universe has no center. In other words, if we were to look at our galaxy on a cosmic scale, we would see it as a perfect spiral with no focal point. The reason scientists thought they had located a central point was because they were looking through telescopes. Since light takes time to reach us from distant objects (like space), we are actually seeing light that left those objects millions and billions of years ago. This means that when we look at stars and galaxies in outer space, we are looking back in time—we’re seeing how they looked long before humans even existed! This also explains why everything appears to be moving away from us—if there is no center, then every object in our galaxy is moving away from every other object. When you factor in all of these facts together, you can see that not only do we not have a center, but all matter is constantly expanding outward. If you think about it for just one moment, you will realize that there must have been a beginning to our universe—the only question is what caused it?
It would take an infinite amount of time for light to travel across our observable universe
According to a new study, our universe will never be able to be observed all at once. Researchers from MIT and Harvard University used data from NASA’s Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) mission to measure these minute fluctuations in temperature across our universe. Their findings reveal that we won’t ever be able to observe more than about 5 percent of our universe—and perhaps as little as 1 percent—at any one time. This means that even if you could travel at light speed for an infinite amount of time, you still wouldn’t be able to see everything. If you look out into space long enough, you will see every piece of our observable universe, but only during its lifetime, not after it has expanded beyond your view, said Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and lead author on a paper describing the results published online today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Gravity acts in all directions at once
Contrary to what most of us learned in high school, gravity doesn’t act in just one direction. Instead, it pulls with equal strength on every mass inside a given volume of space. If we lived in a hollow spherical shell (which has been known as the perfect solution for centuries), our weight would be equally distributed—and there would be no gravitation at all. In reality, we live on an ever-spherical planet and have an uneven distribution of mass throughout its interior and exterior. When you sit down on a chair, your body isn’t sitting down into Earth; instead, your body is sitting down between Earth and outer space. The pull of gravity from outer space counteracts that from Earth, which means you feel lighter than if you were standing up. You also don’t fall through Earth because there are other bodies exerting gravitational forces upon you as well—namely, everything else in existence. You experience gravity when two objects collide or come close enough together for their masses to interact. That interaction creates a force that draws them closer together over time. It’s not unlike how magnets work: Two like poles repel each other while opposite poles attract each other. This is why planets orbit around stars, moons orbit around planets, and comets orbit around stars or planets.
Dark matter is not made up of black holes
Dark matter makes up 27% of our universe and remains one of science’s greatest mysteries. What we know for sure about dark matter can be summed up in one sentence: nothing. It’s invisible, it has no interactions with normal matter, and it doesn’t even give off heat or light, which means that astronomers have to detect it indirectly by observing how its gravity affects other objects. The leading theory is that dark matter consists of black holes, which are so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull. However, a new study suggests that black holes don’t make good candidates for dark matter after all—and they definitely don’t explain what happened during the early moments of our universe. Scientists used data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and ESA’s XMM-Newton space observatory to observe eight massive galaxy clusters located between 2.5 billion and 5 billion light years away from Earth.
Space and time are linked together as one entity
Space-time, the idea that space and time are linked came from Albert Einstein with his theory of relativity. In special relativity, Einstein showed that measurements of space and time by an observer who was moving relative to another observer would not be equivalent; these measurements depended on a choice of frame. Moving objects were said to change lengths as their speed increased and clocks at rest ran more slowly than ones in motion, and so on. This effect could only be seen when speeds approached or exceeded that of light. To describe what he saw, he proposed a mathematical model for space-time which incorporated into one four dimensional structure what had previously been thought of as two separate concepts—space and time. In general relativity, Einstein used his new understanding of gravity (which he described earlier) to describe how mass caused curvature in space-time.
If you rewound the universe, it would start over again like a DVD on rewind
A few hundred million years would tick by, galaxies would form, stars and planets would be born, life on Earth would develop in its most basic forms, and eventually intelligent beings of some kind (probably humanoids) would evolve. They’d invent telescopes; look up at night and see their starting point. In fact, if you rewound everything—the entire 13.8 billion-year history of cosmic evolution—everything might go back to exactly as it was in just a few seconds. But then things would start over again from that moment onward. The universe would repeat itself infinitely into the future, with no sign that anything had ever happened before. That’s what I thought for decades after my first exposure to cosmology as an undergraduate physics major at Harvard University in 1968. And I still think it’s true of our observable universe, which is about 46 billion light-years across and has been expanding since an explosion called the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years ago.
There’s nothing else out there, no other universes
Our best evidence right now points to us being alone in a vast cosmos. Sure, there may be other planets out there with life on them, but as far as we can tell, we’re it—at least in our universe. It looks like we’re made of ordinary matter, and ordinary matter doesn’t last forever. Eventually, every planet will die. In about 5 billion years, when our sun burns out and expands into a red giant star that will consume Mercury and Venus (and maybe even Earth), everything we know will be gone. So if you want to survive past your own death, you need to go somewhere else—which means leaving our universe entirely. The bad news? Scientists aren’t sure how to do that yet. The good news? There’s still plenty of time for us to figure it out.
