ITEMS OF INTEREST September 4, 2006 Issue

ITEMS OF INTEREST

with contributions from William Orem, Mara D. Bellaby

"MANY, IF NOT MOST, PEOPLE assume that certain aspects of nature's workings are absolutely known. Outside of intelligent design circles, no modern biologist doubts the theory of evolution by natural selection; it is too well established by harmonious data across a multiplicity of fields. ... And, one might think, no serious cosmologist disagrees with the standard cosmological model.

"The SCM is the official designation of what is informally called 'the big bang': that relatively recent but almost universally accepted notion that the present universe is the result of a primordial fireball that occurred some 13 billion years ago in which time, space, and matter were born. While significant details remain to be worked out—witness the surprise insertion of a superluminal inflationary period by cosmologist Alant Guth in the 1980s—common wisdom is that we already know, in basic form, how the universe began.

"Not so, says Geoffrey Burbidge. Burbidge is one of only a tiny handful of researchers who resolutely disputes the SCM more than half a century after it has reached general acceptance. As such, he is pitted against the whole of contemporary cosmological orthodoxy.

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