One Universe at a Time

There’s a new article at Nautilus that asks “Do We Have the Big Bang Theory All Wrong?” It outlines a “radical” new idea that the cosmic microwave background isn’t due to cosmic inflation, but rather to virtual particles in vast emptiness of space. There’s an old saying that if the title of your article is a question, and the answer is no, then you probably shouldn’t write the article. In the article the author chose to portray Hans-Jörg Fahr, the proponent of the idea, as a lone genius who questions the established model of cosmology, and who is definitely not a crackpot. Fahr is compared to Halton Arp, Sir Fred Hoyle, and even Hannes Alfvén (who won a Nobel prize for his work on magnetohydrodynamics, which is central to modern astrophysics). These scientists were all clearly brilliant, and they were definitely not crackpots. They were just wrong.