Steady State and Plasma Cosmology

Summary

• The steady state was a good theory, and its own field killed it with measurements. Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle proposed it in 1948. It was dead by 1965. Nobody voted it down and nobody suppressed it. Three sets of numbers came in and it did not survive them.
• It said the universe looks the same at every time as well as in every direction. Bondi and Gold called this the perfect cosmological principle. To keep the density constant while space expands, matter has to appear out of nothing, at about one hydrogen atom per cubic metre per 300,000 years.¹ That rate is far too small to catch in a laboratory.
• Its strength was that it forbade things. A steady-state universe cannot have a young epoch or an old one. Distant galaxies must look statistically like nearby ones. That is a hard prediction and it is what made the theory easy to test.
• Radio source counts went first. Martin Ryle and R. W. Clarke found at least three times more faint radio sources than the steady state allows, and wrote that the result was "conclusive evidence against the steady-state model."² The distant universe is not like the nearby one.
• The first version of that argument was wrong, and the article says so. Cambridge's 1955 survey was corrupted by source confusion. Bernard Mills and O. B. Slee in Sydney showed the Cambridge catalogue broke down about ten times higher in flux than Cambridge believed.³ The 1961 result was the one that held.
• The microwave background finished it in 1965. A steady state has no epoch dense and hot enough to make a blackbody covering the whole sky. Hoyle's answer, and later the quasi-steady-state answer, was to thermalise starlight with dust. That gets the energy budget roughly right and the spectrum badly wrong.
• Hoyle coined "big bang" on 28 March 1949, and the story that he meant it as a sneer has no documentary support. Helge Kragh, the historian of the controversy, found none, and points out that Hoyle never used the phrase at all between 1950 and 1965.⁴ The often-repeated tale of a Hoyle-Gamow radio debate is fiction. There was no such debate.⁴
• The quasi-steady-state cosmology of 1993 replaced constant expansion with an oscillation plus many small creation events. Edward Wright showed the next year that it predicts 75 to 90 percent of the brightest radio sources should be blueshifted. None are.⁵ Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar replied that the parameters could be re-chosen, which is true and is the problem.⁶
• Its own authors conceded the deeper failure. Narlikar and Padmanabhan wrote in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics that the model "lacks the simplicity and beauty of the original steady state model" and "cannot continue to survive and hope to make an impact based purely on the shortcomings" of standard cosmology.⁷
• Plasma cosmology is not a cosmology. It is a collection of real plasma astrophysics attached to an unfinished account of cosmic history. Hannes Alfvén won the 1970 Nobel Prize for magnetohydrodynamics and was right about a great deal in space physics. His cosmology needed equal parts matter and antimatter, and the annihilation gamma rays are not there.⁸
• What plasma cosmology gets right is worth stating. Cosmic magnetic fields are real, filaments are real, and Alfvén's complaint that astrophysicists modelled plasma with equations that ignore currents was substantially correct in his own field. What it never produced is a quantitative prediction of the light elements, the background spectrum, or the acoustic peaks.
• The 2004 open letter's best sentence is true. Inflation, dark matter and dark energy have not been observed directly. Its signature list, though, is the alternative-cosmology community signing its own manifesto, which is exactly what the letter says it is. Twenty-two years on, neither named programme has an active observational effort.
• For a Christian the important point is the one creationist writing usually skips. Both of these are eternal universe models. Hoyle's stated motive for the steady state was to avoid a beginning. Citing them to embarrass the Big Bang means borrowing an argument built to remove creation from cosmology, and neither one shortens the universe by a single year.
• "Scientists disagree" is a weak argument once the disagreement has been adjudicated by measurement. The steady state is the best example available of a rival cosmology getting a fair hearing, making real predictions, and losing on data. That history is far more useful to an apologist than the fact that a few people still object.

Part 1: The steady state

What the theory actually said

In 1948 two papers appeared in the same volume of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.  Bondi and Gold submitted theirs on 14 July.  Hoyle submitted his on 5 August.  Between them they proposed that the universe has always looked the way it looks now.

Bondi and Gold started from a principle rather than an observation:

This combination of the usual cosmological principle and the stationary postulate we shall call the perfect cosmological principle, and all our arguments will be based on it.  The universe is postulated to be homogeneous and stationary in its large-scale appearance as well as in its physical laws.¹

The ordinary cosmological principle says the universe looks the same from everywhere.  The perfect version adds and at every time.  That single word does a lot of work.  A universe that looks the same at every time cannot be thinning out, so an expanding universe of that kind has to be topped up.  Bondi and Gold worked out how fast:

It is clear that an expanding universe can only be stationary if matter is continuously created within it.  The required rate of creation, which follows simply from the mean density and the rate of expansion, can be estimated as at most one particle of proton mass per litre per 10⁹ years.¹

Later in the paper they give the figure in a form that shows how hopeless it would be to catch in a laboratory:

Accordingly we assume that the rate of creation is everywhere about 10⁻⁴³ g. per sec. per cm.³, although variations by a factor of, say 100, are quite permissible.  This rate corresponds to one new atom of hydrogen per cubic metre per 3 × 10⁵ years.  Accordingly we cannot expect the process to be directly observable.¹

One hydrogen atom, in a cube a metre on a side, every three hundred thousand years.  That is the whole creation mechanism.  Critics called it creation from nothing, which it is, and the steady-state authors did not deny it.  Their reply was that the Big Bang creates all the matter in the universe from nothing in one instant, so the difference is bookkeeping rather than principle.  That reply is a fair one and it is worth conceding.

Why this was a serious theory

Four things separate the steady state from the material this article covers in Part 2.

It was built on a stated methodological worry, not on an anomaly.  Bondi and Gold's argument was that physics done in a laboratory in 1948 can only be applied to a distant past if the laws have not changed, and there is no way to check that in a universe that has a history.  Their defence of the principle is the sharpest sentence either of them wrote:

We do not claim that this principle must be true, but we say that if it does not hold, one's choice of the variability of the physical laws becomes so wide that cosmology is no longer a science.  One can then no longer use laboratory physics without relying on some arbitrary principle for their extrapolation.¹

That worry is real.  It is the same worry that makes radiometric dating arguments hard, and creationists raise a version of it constantly.  Bondi and Gold's answer was to postulate away the history.  The answer did not work, but the question was a good one.

It made predictions that could kill it.  In a steady state the deceleration parameter has to be exactly −1, the density has to be exactly constant, and the population of any class of object has to look the same at every distance.  There is no adjustable epoch of galaxy formation, no era of quasars, no first stars.  Compare that with the standard model, where source evolution is fitted from the data.  The steady state had almost nothing to tune.

Its authors were first-rate and the theory was not a fringe position.  Bondi became a Fellow of the Royal Society, Master of Churchill College, and chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defence.  Gold was a professor at Cornell and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.  Hoyle worked out how stars make carbon and won a share of the credit for stellar nucleosynthesis.  Through the 1950s the steady state was a genuine competitor in Britain, not a curiosity.

Hoyle's route into it was different from Bondi and Gold's, and that matters.  Instead of arguing from a principle, Hoyle put a creation term into Einstein's field equations directly.  His summary:  "By introducing continuous creation of matter into the field equations of general relativity a stationary universe showing expansion properties is obtained without recourse to a cosmical constant."⁹  This is a real modification of general relativity, with a field, later called the C-field, doing the creating.  It could be written down, solved and tested.

Hoyle also said plainly why he wanted it, and the sentence is worth having because it settles a question people argue about:

This possibility seemed attractive, especially when taken in conjunction with aesthetic objections to the creation of the universe in the remote past.  For it is against the spirit of scientific enquiry to regard observable effects as arising from 'causes unknown to science', and this in principle is what creation-in-the-past implies.⁹

The motive was to avoid a beginning.  Hoyle said so himself, in the founding paper, in 1948.  Keep that in view for Part 4.

What killed it, first: counts of radio sources

The steady state died from a test that needs no cosmological model at all.

Count radio sources by brightness.  In a static Euclidean universe filled uniformly with sources, the number brighter than a flux S goes as S^−1.5.  Any expanding model bends that curve downward at faint fluxes, because distant volumes are smaller than Euclidean geometry says and the light is redshifted.  A steady state bends it down by a specific, calculable amount, because it forbids the source population from having been different in the past.  Count the faint sources and you have a number to compare.

Martin Ryle's group at Cambridge did the counting.  Their result in 1961, from the summary of the paper:

A comparison of these observational results with those predicted by the steady-state model shows a marked discrepancy, the number of sources observed with a flux density in the range 0·5 to 2 × 10⁻²⁶ watts (c/s)⁻¹ m⁻² being at least 3 ± 0·5 times that predicted by the model.  No attempt has been made to select an alternative model to account for the observations, but the results appear to provide conclusive evidence against the steady-state model.²

Three times too many faint sources.  Faint means far, and far means long ago.  So there were more powerful radio sources in the distant past than there are now, and the universe has a history.

Ryle's first attempt at this argument was wrong, and it is worth saying so.  The Cambridge 2C survey of 1955 gave a count slope of about −3, which would have been a spectacular result.  It was an artifact.  Cambridge's interferometer could not separate close sources, so faint blends were being counted as single objects, a problem called confusion.  Bernard Mills and O. B. Slee at Sydney surveyed the same sky with better resolution and reported bluntly:

It has been shown that the Cambridge catalogue does not agree with ours and that errors in the former due to poor resolution might be expected to occur just at the level where agreement begins to break down.  On the other hand, the corresponding level of reliability in our catalogue is nearly 10 times lower at a flux density of 8 × 10⁻²⁶ W m⁻² (c/s)⁻¹.³

Ten times.  The Cambridge catalogue was unreliable from a flux level ten times higher than Cambridge thought.  Mills and Slee's own count slope was only slightly steeper than the Euclidean value, and they were careful to say instrumental effects had to be checked before reading anything cosmological into it.

Ryle was hostile to the steady state and had announced a result that turned out to be an instrument artifact.  A critic in 1957 was entitled to say so.  Then Cambridge built a better telescope, redid the survey, and got a smaller but real effect that Sydney's data also showed.  The point survived the correction.  A wrong first measurement that gets corrected and then confirmed is the normal history of a hard observation, and treating the first error as though it discredited the final result is a mistake creationist writing makes often.

Second: quasars

The radio-count argument said the source population changed.  Quasars showed what changed.

Maarten Schmidt measured redshifts for the quasi-stellar radio sources in the revised 3C catalogue and asked a simple question.  For each source, compute the largest volume within which it would still have been bright enough to make the catalogue.  Compare that with the volume out to where it actually is.  If sources are spread uniformly, the ratio averages one half.  Schmidt's sample did not.  His abstract:

The distribution in space is found to be strongly non-uniform.  The space density, in co-moving coordinates, is increasing with redshift z, such that at z = 1 the density is around 150 and 80 times the local (z = 0) density, for q₀ = 0 and q₀ = 1, respectively.¹⁰

Between eighty and a hundred and fifty times more quasars per unit volume at redshift 1 than nearby.  In a perfect cosmological principle universe that number has to be one.  There is no parameter anywhere in the steady state that can absorb a factor of a hundred.

Third: the microwave background

Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found an excess antenna temperature of about 3.5 K at 4080 Mc/s in 1965, isotropic and unpolarised, with no seasonal variation.¹¹  Interpreted as relic heat from a hot dense phase it fits the Big Bang.  Interpreted in a steady state it has nowhere to come from.

The reason is worth stating carefully, because the popular version of the argument is weaker than the real one.

The energy is not the problem.  Convert a quarter of the universe's hydrogen into helium and you release about 0.7 percent of that mass as radiation.  That is within a factor of two of the energy actually sitting in the microwave background today.  Any model that makes helium in stars therefore has roughly the right energy budget lying around.  Hoyle knew this.  It is why the steady state's answer to the background was always to thermalise starlight.

The spectrum is the problem.  Starlight is not a blackbody, and dust re-emission is not a blackbody either, because dust at different temperatures at different places radiates a sum of blackbodies, which is not one.  COBE's FIRAS instrument measured the background against a reference blackbody and found root-mean-square deviations below 50 parts per million of the peak, with limits on spectral distortion of |y| < 15 × 10⁻⁶ and |µ| < 9 × 10⁻⁵.¹²  Producing that by reprocessing starlight requires an absorbing medium that is optically thick at millimetre wavelengths, at a uniform temperature, everywhere, in a universe that is transparent enough for us to see quasars through it.  Nobody has built one that works.

The isotropy is the second problem.  Starlight follows galaxies, and galaxies are clumpy.  The background is smooth to about one part in 100,000 after the dipole is removed.

Kragh's summary of what happened is the fair one:

The sensational discovery of 1965 had no natural explanation within the framework of classical steady-state theory.  In effect, the cosmic microwave background killed an already dying theory.¹³

Already dying.  The radio counts had done most of the work four years earlier.

The cosmic microwave background article covers the spectrum, the acoustic peaks and the temperature-redshift measurements in detail.

Fourth: helium, and the story most people get backwards

Creationist and popular accounts often say the helium abundance killed the steady state.  The real history is messier and better.

In 1964 Fred Hoyle and Roger Tayler published "The Mystery of the Cosmic Helium Abundance" in Nature.  Their point was that helium sits near 25 percent of ordinary matter by mass almost everywhere, including in old, metal-poor stars that have made very little of anything else, and that stars cannot have made it all.  Their predicted primordial mass fraction was 0.36 ± 0.04.¹⁴  The modern value is 0.2458 ± 0.0013, so their number was wrong by more than three of their own error bars.  But they stated it as a testable claim, and the argument that the helium must be pre-stellar was right.

Hoyle co-wrote the paper that made the case against his own theory.  He did not accept the conclusion, and spent the rest of his life looking for a way out.  He deserves credit for publishing the problem anyway.

The big bang nucleosynthesis article gives the modern numbers, including the lithium-7 problem, which is still unsolved and is a genuine point for critics.

The name, and the story that should stop being repeated

Hoyle coined "big bang" in a twenty-minute BBC Third Programme talk on 28 March 1949.  The text was printed in The Listener within two weeks.  He used the phrase three times, contrasting the steady state with "the hypothesis that all the matter of the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past."⁴

The story everyone repeats is that he meant it as mockery.  Helge Kragh, who wrote the standard history of the controversy and then a paper specifically on the name, checked and could not find support for it:

Another popular misconception is that Hoyle coined the term to ridicule or disparage theories with a definite origin of the universe, such as Gamow's.  Although one cannot rule it out, there is no documentation in the historical records for this often repeated view. … Had Hoyle intended the term in this way, he would presumably have used it frequently during the cosmological controversy, which he did not.  Between 1950 and 1965 he did not refer to Big Bang at all.⁴

Sixteen years of silence is the strongest evidence in the case.  A man who invents an insult uses it.

There is also a specific anecdote in circulation that is simply false.  Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman wrote that Hoyle first used the phrase pejoratively during a BBC radio debate with George Gamow.  Kragh:  "There never was such a radio debate between the two cosmologists!"⁴  Gamow, for his part, disliked the name.  In a 1968 interview he said "I don't call it 'big bang,' because it is a kind of cliché.  This was invented, I think, by steady-state cosmologists."⁴

Hoyle's own explanation was about radio.  He had "no visual aids, nothing except the spoken word," and needed an image that would separate two models for listeners.⁴

None of this makes Hoyle a friend of the theory.  He detested it, and said why in print more than once, on philosophical grounds he stated openly.  The parent article collects those statements.  The narrow point here is that "even the man who named it was mocking it" is a story, and a Christian writer who repeats a story a historian has checked and rejected is spending credibility for nothing.

The quasi-steady-state cosmology, 1993 to now

Hoyle did not give up.  In 1993 he, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant Narlikar published a successor model in the Astrophysical Journal.  The quasi-steady-state cosmology keeps the eternal universe and abandons the constancy.

What it changed:

The abstract states the core idea plainly:  "The model is based on the idea that creation takes place in little big bangs each involving about 10¹⁶ M_⊙ distributed over all space and time, the universe itself being without a beginning."¹⁵

Edward Wright answered it within eighteen months, and his answer is the sharpest thing written about the model.  Wright is a UCLA astronomer and was a COBE co-investigator.  He had refereed one of the QSSC papers for Monthly Notices, recommended against it, and been overruled.  He then wrote the objection up.

His argument is elegant.  The QSSC gets steep radio source counts from the huge volume the universe had during earlier oscillation maxima.  But sources seen from an earlier maximum are seen across a cycle in which the scale factor was larger than it is now, so their light arrives blueshifted.  You cannot have one without the other:

Note that the blueshifted fraction jumps to more than 90% for the brightest sources that show a steeper than Euclidean source count.  Thus the 3CR sample, which has source counts that are significantly steeper than Euclidean, should be dominated by blueshifts if the QSSC were correct. … At the peak of N F^1.5, the blueshifted fraction predicted by the QSSC is > 75%.  The 1 Jy sample of Allington-Smith et al. (1988) is at the peak of N F^1.5, has a secure redshift completeness > 80% … and no blueshifts.  Since one can not fit a > 75% blueshifted fraction into a < 20% unidentified fraction, the QSSC prediction is false.⁵

Not one blueshifted radio galaxy has ever been found.  Wright's summary:  "The QSSC is disproved by the same data that disproved the Steady State: counts of bright radio sources."⁵

Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar replied, and the reply is the most revealing document in the exchange.  They accepted that the survey was a problem, then fixed it by adding an assumption:  powerful radio sources are concentrated in the half of each cycle around the scale-factor minimum, so the blueshifted ones never get bright enough to see.  Their own summary of the situation:

The exact values of the free parameters of the theory are not known.  The points in dispute are related to the numerical values we have chosen when we compare with observational details.  Suitable choices can and do make the theory compatible with the observations, i.e. it is obvious that the theory is not disproved by Wright's analysis of the data.⁶

That sentence is true, and it is the whole difficulty.  Wright had already named the cost:

The only problem with this approach is that it eliminates the observational differences between the QSSC and the Big Bang, and there is nothing left to motivate the introduction of new physics.⁵

In fairness, they landed one good counterpunch.  Standard cosmology also requires radio source populations to evolve, and to evolve most sharply in the recent past.  Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar asked why:  "the density of the Universe is supposed to have fallen by some thirty powers of ten.  And yet radio source evolution is required to have occurred in the last decline of the density by a factor only ∼ 2.  Why?"⁶  That is a real question, and the standard answer is that the driver is the supply of cold gas to supermassive black holes rather than the mean density of the universe.  But the QSSC people were right that the standard model's source evolution is fitted rather than derived.

Then the model kept going, and its own authors kept conceding ground.  In 2003 Narlikar, Vishwakarma, Hajian, Souradeep, Burbidge and Hoyle published a QSSC fit to the microwave background angular power spectrum in the Astrophysical Journal.  It works, in the sense that six adjustable parameters produce a curve through the band powers.  But the peaks come from three unrelated causes:  the first from curvature at the last scale-factor minimum, the second from clusters of galaxies, the third from groups.¹⁶  Three separate physical effects landing at three harmonically related multipoles is not an explanation.  In the standard model the peaks are overtones of one sound wave, which is why the polarization peaks have to sit on the temperature troughs.

Four years later the authors said so themselves:

It should be noted that the small scale anisotropies do not constitute as crucial a test for our model as they do for standard cosmology.  Our general belief is that the universe is inhomogeneous on the scales of galaxy-cluster-supercluster and the QSSC model cannot make detailed claims of how these would result in the anisotropy of CMBR.  In this respect, the standard model subject to all its assumptions (dark matter, inflation, dark energy, etc.) makes much more focussed predictions of CMBR anisotropy.¹⁷

The same paper is equally frank about the heavy elements.  In a universe with unlimited cycles of star formation, the metallicity of stars in the Milky Way should be far higher than it is:

This is still an unsolved problem.  We believe but have not yet established that it may be that the initial mass function of the stars where the elements are made is dominated by stars which are only able to eject the outer shells while all of the heavy elements are contained in the cores which simply collapse into black holes.  Using theory we can construct a mass function which will lead to the right answer (we think) but it has not yet been done.  But of course our handwaving in this area is no better than all of the speculations that are being made in the conventional approach when it comes to the "first" stars.¹⁷

Give them credit for the word "handwaving."  Very little cosmology on any side is written that plainly.

One QSSC claim did get tested and failed.  The model needs dark matter to be burnt-out stars from earlier cycles, and it named the surveys that would check this.¹⁷  Those surveys reported.  The EROS-2 microlensing survey watched 33 million stars in the Magellanic Clouds for 6.7 years.  About 39 events were expected if the halo were made of half-solar-mass objects.  One candidate turned up.  Compact objects are less than 8 percent of the halo mass at 95 percent confidence, and are "ruled out as the primary occupants of the Milky Way Halo" across a mass range running from 6 × 10⁻⁸ to 15 solar masses.¹⁸  Burnt-out stars are not the dark matter.

And a review by the group conceded the strategic problem.  Narlikar and Padmanabhan, writing in the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics in 2001, complained about "the snowball effect arising from the social dynamics of research funding" and then said that the QSSC "lacks the simplicity and beauty of the original steady state model" and "cannot continue to survive and hope to make an impact based purely on the shortcomings" of standard cosmology.  It needed to make clear predictions instead of post facto explanations.⁷

Twenty-five years later that has not happened.  Hoyle died in 2001, Burbidge in 2010, Narlikar in May 2025.  There is no QSSC observing programme, no QSSC survey, and no group carrying it forward.

Part 2: Plasma cosmology

Alfvén was not a crank, and that is the first thing to get right

Hannes Alfvén won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for magnetohydrodynamics.  He discovered the waves that carry his name.  He worked out how charged particles move in magnetic fields in a way that is still taught.  He was right about several large disputes in space physics, and the field came round to him.

His central complaint was methodological, and he made it in the Nobel lecture itself:

The cosmical plasma physics of today is far less advanced than the thermonuclear research physics.  It is to some extent the playground of theoreticians who have never seen a plasma in a laboratory.  Many of them still believe in formulae which we know from laboratory experiments to be wrong.¹⁹

He then put the two ways of doing it side by side.  The "first approach" treats cosmic plasma as homogeneous, with infinite conductivity, zero electric field, magnetic field lines frozen into the fluid, and no double layers or filaments.  The "second approach" says space plasmas are inhomogeneous, that the electric current is at least as important as the magnetic field, that the frozen-in picture is "often completely misleading," and that filaments and thin current sheets matter.¹⁹

On the space-physics half of that argument, Alfvén largely won.  Kristian Birkeland had proposed in 1908 that the aurora is driven by currents flowing along magnetic field lines into the atmosphere.  Sydney Chapman's school rejected field-aligned currents for decades.  Satellite magnetometers settled it:  the Triad spacecraft mapped the currents directly in the 1970s, and field-aligned currents, now called Birkeland currents, are standard magnetospheric physics.²⁰  Magnetic reconnection, which requires the frozen-in approximation to break down, is likewise standard.  Alfvén was arguing against a real habit of thought and he was substantially right about it.

None of that is a cosmology.  It is a claim about how to model plasma.  The step from there to a model of the universe is where the trouble starts.

What plasma cosmology actually claims

The model has two layers, and critics often attack only the second.

Layer one is the physical claim.  Most of the visible universe by volume is plasma.  Plasma responds to electromagnetic forces, which between elementary particles are about 10³⁹ times stronger than gravity.  Therefore electromagnetism, not gravity alone, should control large-scale cosmic dynamics.  Alfvén put the argument, and its qualifier, in the same sentence:

Because the ratio of Coulomb attraction to Newtonian attraction between elementary particles is 10³⁹, electromagnetic effects are decisive to the dynamics in all cases when the number of positive charges are not almost exactly compensated by the same number of negative charges.²¹

That qualifier is the whole argument, and Alfvén stated it himself.  Bulk cosmic plasma is neutral to extraordinary precision, because any charge imbalance sets up a field that pulls it back.  What survives is currents and magnetic fields, not net charge.  So the question is not whether 10³⁹ is a big number.  It is how much energy actually resides in cosmic magnetic fields.  The next section returns to that with measurements.

Layer two is the cosmological model, and it is where the trouble is.  In the Alfvén-Klein version the universe contains equal amounts of matter and antimatter, separated into cells by a plasma mechanism.  Where a matter cloud meets an antimatter cloud, only a thin surface layer annihilates, which produces a hot low-density layer that pushes the two apart.  Alfvén called it a fireworks model.  Superclusters repel superclusters, clusters repel clusters, and each local region gets its own expansion.  The redshift-distance relation is then local and explosive rather than cosmological, which he thought explained why different observers were getting different values for the Hubble constant in the 1970s and 1980s.²²

Alfvén was also blunt about what he thought of the alternative:

The Big Bang is indeed a cosmology of the same character as the Ptolemaean:  absolutely sterile.  Will it have the same life-expectancy?²¹

And:

In reality, with the possible exception of the microwave background condition, there is not a single prediction which has been confirmed.²¹

Written in 1984.  Part 3 scores that claim against the record.

Eric Lerner supplied the microwave background mechanism and it is the sharpest, most testable piece of the whole programme.  In a 1990 Astrophysical Journal paper he argued from the infrared-radio correlation of 237 spiral galaxies that radio luminosity at fixed infrared luminosity falls with distance, which he read as absorption by intergalactic plasma.  His model:

In this model, CBR photons are absorbed and reemitted by GeV electrons trapped in the filaments emitted by active galactic nuclei.  This synchrotron process, based on well-known physical laws, in effect scatters the CBR producing the observed isotropy.  The main source of energy for the CBR is taken to be dust heated by early intermediate mass stars.  The filaments are spread throughout intergalactic space, following the large-scale magnetic field.²³

He drew the necessary conclusion himself, and it is what makes his model testable:

The CBR must therefore originate locally, if radio absorption is strong.²³

That is a real prediction.  It is also, thirty-six years later, decisively false.

Five measurements that plasma cosmology does not survive

1.  The annihilation gamma rays are not there.  A matter-antimatter universe has to annihilate somewhere.  Andrew Cohen, Alvaro De Rújula and Sheldon Glashow worked out how much, with the most general assumptions they could manage:

We demonstrate that, after recombination, it is impossible to avoid annihilation near regional boundaries. … The former signal exceeds observational limits unless the matter domain we inhabit is virtually the entire visible universe.  On general grounds, we conclude that a matter-antimatter symmetric universe is empirically excluded.⁸

Their conclusion:  "we have ruled out a B = 0 universe with domains smaller than a size comparable to that of the visible universe."⁸  They give the hedge themselves, and it should be printed:  "it is not possible to exclude the existence of small and distant pockets of antimatter."⁸  Direct searches already required any domain to be bigger than 20 megaparsecs before their analysis started.  Alfvén's cells were supposed to be cluster-sized.

2.  The microwave background is not local.  The temperature of the background at high redshift can be measured directly, by looking at how strongly it excites the rotational levels of carbon monoxide in gas clouds seen against distant quasars.  A local thermalising fog gives the same temperature everywhere.  An expanding universe gives T proportional to (1 + z).  The measurement:

T_CMB(z) = (2.725 ± 0.002) × (1 + z)^1−β K with β = −0.007 ± 0.027²⁴

β = 0 is the expanding-universe answer.  β = 1 is what a local origin requires.  The measured value sits within one part in forty of zero and roughly thirty-seven standard deviations from one.

3.  The blackbody spectrum is too good.  A synchrotron process re-emitting starlight from electrons at many different energies in filaments at many different temperatures produces a sum of spectra.  COBE measured the background against a reference blackbody:  root-mean-square deviations below 50 parts per million of the peak.¹²  Nothing in plasma cosmology has ever been shown to produce that.

4.  There is no account of deuterium.  Stars destroy deuterium.  They do not make it, because deuterium burns at a lower temperature than hydrogen fuses.  Any cosmology that makes the light elements in stars therefore has to explain where the deuterium came from, and plasma cosmology does not.  Standard nucleosynthesis predicts the deuterium abundance from one number, the baryon density, and the measurement agrees at the one percent level.  The nucleosynthesis article has the figures, including the lithium-7 problem, which is a real failure on the standard side.

5.  The magnetic energy is far too small to run the universe.  This is the measurement that answers Alfvén's 10³⁹ argument, and it is not close.

Clusters of galaxies are the largest bound structures there are.  Their gas is hot, about 10⁸ K, and thin, about 10⁻³ electrons per cubic centimetre.  Their magnetic fields have been measured many ways and come out around one microgauss, rising to tens of microgauss in the cores of cooling-flow clusters.²⁵  Put those numbers together and the magnetic energy density is roughly a thousandth of the thermal energy density.²⁶  Even at five microgauss it is a few percent.  Magnetic fields in clusters are real, are worth studying, and are not holding anything up.

On larger scales the limits are tighter still.  Planck constrained a primordial magnetic field smoothed on one megaparsec to less than 4.4 nanogauss at 95 percent confidence.²⁷  A nanogauss field carries about a millionth of the energy density of a microgauss one.

Filaments are real, and gravity makes them

The most persuasive thing plasma cosmology has going for it is a picture.  Laboratory plasma discharges make filaments.  The galaxy distribution is filamentary.  The resemblance is genuine and it is why the argument keeps finding new audiences.

The resemblance is also explained.  Richard Bond, Lev Kofman and Dmitry Pogosyan showed in 1996 that a filamentary web is what gravity does to a field of small random density fluctuations, and that the pattern is already present in the initial conditions:

We present a simple quantitative explanation of why this is so, showing that the final-state web is actually present in embryonic form in the overdensity pattern of the initial fluctuations, with nonlinear dynamics just sharpening the image.  The web is largely defined by the position and primordial tidal fields of rare events in the medium, with the strongest filaments between nearby clusters whose tidal tensors are nearly aligned.²⁸

Filaments in a plasma discharge and filaments in the galaxy distribution come from different physics and look alike.  A resemblance is a reason to look, not a reason to conclude.

What plasma cosmology has produced, counted

Anthony Peratt's two 1986 papers in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, the technical core of the galaxy-formation claim, have 40 and 37 citations.  Lerner's 1990 Astrophysical Journal paper has 14, and his 1993 follow-up has 8.²³  Those are not zero, and Lerner's papers passed refereeing at a top journal.  They are also, after three and four decades, very small numbers, and no observational programme was ever built on them.

One thing should not be laid at Alfvén's door.  The "Electric Universe" movement, which claims among other things that the Sun is powered by an external electric current rather than by fusion in its core, is not what Alfvén argued and is not plasma cosmology.  It is also directly refuted:  the Borexino detector detected the neutrinos from the primary proton-proton fusion reaction in the solar core.²⁹  A Sun heated from outside would not produce them.  Criticising plasma cosmology by pointing at the Electric Universe is unfair, and citing the Electric Universe as though Alfvén's Nobel Prize backs it is worse.

Part 3: The 2004 open letter, scored

What it said, and its best paragraph

On 22 May 2004 New Scientist published a letter organised by Eric Lerner under the headline "Bucking the big bang."  Thirty-four scientists signed.  The full text is still online at the Alternative Cosmology Group's site.³⁰  Its first paragraph is the strongest thing the dissident side has written:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed — inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples.  Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory.  In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation.³⁰

That is true and should be conceded.  Nobody has detected a dark matter particle in a laboratory.  Nobody has measured a dark energy field.  Inflation is an unfalsified framework rather than a specific confirmed theory.  The parent article grants all three at length.

The letter's other claims fare worse, and the article scores them below.

Who signed, and why the list cuts both ways

Two of the three authors of the steady-state theory signed it.  Hermann Bondi gave Churchill College, Cambridge.  Thomas Gold gave Cornell.  Jayant Narlikar, Hoyle's student and co-author of the quasi-steady-state model, gave IUCAA and the Collège de France.  Hoyle himself had died in 2001.  Bondi was a Fellow of the Royal Society and had been Master of Churchill College and chief scientific adviser to the British Ministry of Defence.  Gold was a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.  Halton Arp signed from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and Jean-Claude Pecker from the Collège de France.

These are not cranks and it is dishonest to write as though they were.  Anyone dismissing the letter on the strength of its signatories has to explain away three of the most distinguished cosmologists of the previous half-century.

But the list is not a cross-section of astronomy, and the letter does not claim to be one.  Read the affiliations the signatories gave themselves.  Ten of the thirty-four give a company or national-laboratory address rather than a university or observatory:  Applied Radiation Industries, Plasmas International, Superconix, ATK Propulsion, Lawrenceville Plasma Physics, The Aerospace Corporation, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, BAE Systems Advanced Technologies, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.³⁰  Several more work on the specific alternative programmes the letter names.  Lerner and Peratt are the plasma-cosmology programme.  Bondi, Gold and Narlikar are the steady-state programme.  Arp, Pecker and Narlikar are the discordant-redshift programme.

Timing worth knowing.  Gold died on 22 June 2004, one month after the letter appeared.  Bondi died on 10 September 2005.  Arp died in 2013.  Narlikar died on 20 May 2025.

So the letter is the alternative-cosmology community signing its own manifesto.  That is exactly what it says it is, and it is a legitimate thing to do.  It is not a poll of cosmologists, and it should never be presented as one.

The claims, twenty-two years on

Sean Carroll's reply, which cuts both ways

Carroll answered a week later.  On the "no validated predictions" charge he simply listed them:

How about acoustic peaks in the power spectrum of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background?  And the polarization signal, and its spectrum?  And the baryon density as deduced from light-element abundances agreeing with that deduced from the CMB?  And baryon fluctuations in the power spectrum of large-scale structure?  And the transition from acceleration to deceleration in the Hubble diagram of high-redshift supernovae?  And the relativistic time delay in supernova light curves?³¹

He also caught Lerner in a straightforward physics error.  Lerner had argued that dark energy violates conservation of energy.  Carroll:  "there is a field of physics in which energy is not conserved: it's called general relativity."³¹  Every redshifted photon loses energy while the photon count stays the same.  That is old, measured, and has nothing to do with dark energy.

Then he conceded the letter's sociological charge, and this article prints that too:

And yes, young people who disbelieve in the Big Bang are unlikely to get invited to speak at major conferences, or get permanent jobs at research universities.  Likewise astrophysicists who believe in astrology, or medical doctors who use leeches to fight cancer.³¹

And:  "the alternatives to the Big Bang are just silly… They just aren't, for the most part, very smart."³¹

The signatories were entitled to read that as confirmation of their complaint.  What makes Carroll's position defensible is not a denial of the fact but his reason:  finite resources, and a theory with a long record of successful prediction.  That is a real argument.  It is also what a field would say if it were wrong, which is why the question has to be settled on measurements rather than on who gets invited to conferences.

What the two programmes produced

The honest way to score a manifesto is to ask what its signatories did next.

The steady state and the quasi-steady state.  No observational programme, no survey, no instrument.  The last substantial QSSC papers are the 2003 microwave-background fit and the 2007 review, both by Narlikar's group.  All three founders are dead.

Plasma cosmology.  Lerner published one refereed astronomy paper after 2004:  a sole-authored 2018 Monthly Notices paper arguing that galaxy sizes and surface brightnesses contradict every published size-evolution model for an expanding universe.³²  It passed refereeing at a major journal and has never been rebutted in print.  This article says that plainly, as the parent does.  It has twenty-seven citations, nearly all in alternative-cosmology venues.  The substantive answer is that galaxy size evolution at fixed stellar mass is now measured directly in Hubble and JWST data rather than assumed, but no one has written the reply.  His widely circulated claim that JWST refutes the Big Bang appeared in a magazine, not a journal, and should never be called a paper.

The organisation itself.  The Alternative Cosmology Group still runs the website that hosts the letter.  Its own navigation lists two conferences, one in 2005 and one in 2008, and none since.  Its newsletter ran from 2005 to July 2024 and has not appeared since.³³  That is a discussion group, not a research programme, and the difference matters because funding was the letter's central demand.

The fair way to put it:  the letter asked for money to test alternatives.  Twenty-two years later, the alternatives it named have not produced the kind of quantitative, falsifiable predictions that would make the money worth spending.  Narlikar and Padmanabhan said as much themselves in 2001, three years before the letter was written.

Part 4: What a Christian should take from this

Creationist organisations cite both programmes, and one of them noticed the problem

The 2004 letter is still in circulation in creationist apologetics.  Jake Hebert quoted it approvingly for the Institute for Creation Research in 2020 and added "Creation scientists heartily agree."³⁴  Carl Wieland wrote Creation Ministries International's response in 2005 under the title "Secular scientists blast the big bang: What now for naïve apologetics?"³⁵

Wieland saw the trap and named it, and he deserves credit for it.  After several pages of quoting the letter, he wrote:

Those who developed the big bang were guided by secular worldview filters just as much as those who are now crying that the emperor has no clothes.  They wanted a universe that created itself; their opponents want an eternal, uncreated universe.  From a Christian perspective, both are in open defiance of their Creator's account of what really happened.³⁵

That is the correct analysis and it should be the movement's standard line.  (One small correction:  Wieland counts 33 signatories.  The list carries 34.)

Danny Faulkner made the same point about Halton Arp specifically, writing for Answers in Genesis's Answers Research Journal:

Furthermore, contrary to common misconception among recent creationists, Arp and other astronomers who questioned whether quasars had cosmological redshifts never doubted that the universe was expanding.  Indeed, Arp and his colleagues clung to the steady state model long after nearly everyone else had abandoned it.  The steady state model is not possible if the universe is not expanding, so it would have made no sense for Arp and his colleagues to have doubted universal expansion.  Consequently, Arp's work is greatly misunderstood in the recent creation community.³⁶

Elsewhere in the same paper he puts the danger in one sentence:

acceptance of expansion of the universe does not inevitably lead to the big bang model.  For instance, the steady state model was based upon universal expansion too.  What if the universe truly is expanding?  If we reject that out of hand, then we have no hope of establishing a proper biblical cosmology.³⁶

Three things follow, and none of them is comfortable

First, neither model gives a young universe.  Both give an infinitely old one.  The steady state has no beginning at all.  The quasi-steady state has no beginning at all.  Plasma cosmology has no beginning at all.  A young-earth Christian who cites these to embarrass the Big Bang is citing theories whose entire selling point is the removal of a first moment.

Hoyle said so in the founding paper of the steady state, in 1948, and the sentence bears repeating:  the model was attractive "when taken in conjunction with aesthetic objections to the creation of the universe in the remote past."⁹  Bondi and Gold's perfect cosmological principle exists for the same reason.  The whole programme was built to keep the universe from having started.

On this specific question the standard model is closer to Genesis than its rivals are.  That is not an argument that the standard model is right, and this article is not making one.  It is a reason to be careful about which side you borrow from.

Second, refuting the Big Bang would not shrink the universe by one light-year.  The distances come from parallax, standard candles and geometric measurements, not from cosmology.  Every young-earth cosmology on the market accepts them.  The cosmic distance ladder article works through the measurements one rung at a time.  Killing the Big Bang leaves the light-travel-time problem exactly where it was.

Third, and this is the one that matters most:  the steady state is the best evidence available that this field is not rigged.

Look at what actually happened.  Three brilliant, well-connected, well-funded scientists proposed a model whose entire motive was philosophical.  It was published in the leading journal.  It was taken seriously for seventeen years.  Its predictions were worked out.  Measurements were made.  The first measurement was botched and a rival group in Australia showed the botch.  The corrected measurement went against the theory.  Two more measurements went against it.  The field abandoned it.

That is not a conspiracy.  That is the process working, including the part where somebody's first result is wrong and gets caught.

The general lesson, which applies to more than cosmology

"Scientists disagree" is a weak argument once the disagreement has been adjudicated by measurement.

There is a version of this argument that works.  If a question has never been decided, or if the decisive measurement has not been made, then disagreement among competent people is real evidence that the matter is open.  Creationists are entitled to use that, and this site does, on the lithium-7 abundance, on the Hubble tension, and on the initial conditions problem in inflation.

There is a version that does not work.  Pointing at a rival theory that was tested and lost, and treating its former existence as evidence that the winner is doubtful, proves nothing.  The steady state was contested by first-rate people.  It was also wrong, and everyone found out how.

The test to apply is simple.  When a critic says a theory is contested, ask three questions.  Who is contesting it, and in what venue?  What measurement would settle it?  Has that measurement been made?

Run the steady state through those questions in 1955 and it passes all three:  contested by Fellows of the Royal Society, in Monthly Notices, and the deciding measurement was radio source counts, which had not yet been done properly.  Run it through in 1966 and it fails the third.  The measurement had been made.

Run plasma cosmology through them today.  Contested by a Nobel laureate and by working plasma physicists, in IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science and occasionally in the Astrophysical Journal.  The deciding measurements are the annihilation gamma-ray background, the microwave background temperature at high redshift, and the deuterium abundance.  All three have been made.  All three came out against it.

A Christian apologist who wants to argue against the standard model has better material available than either of these.  The lithium-7 discrepancy is real and unsolved.  The Hubble tension is real and has not gone away.  Inflation's initial-conditions problem is stated most forcefully by one of the people who invented it.  Dark matter has not been detected in a laboratory in forty years of trying.  Those are live arguments and they are made by people inside the field.  Recycling a manifesto signed in 2004 by the surviving members of two dead programmes is a much weaker move, and a skeptic who checks the signature list will notice.

Objections and responses

"Two of the steady state's three authors signed the 2004 letter, so serious cosmologists still doubt the Big Bang."  Bondi and Gold signed, and they were serious cosmologists.  They were also the authors of the theory the letter was defending, and both were in their eighties.  Gold died a month later and Bondi fifteen months later.  A signature from the losing side of a settled dispute is not independent testimony.  The right question is not who signed but what has been measured since.

"Nobody has ever refuted Lerner's 2018 galaxy-size paper."  True, and this article says so.  It passed Monthly Notices refereeing in 2018 and no reply has appeared in the eight years since.  But "unrefuted" and "unanswered" are different things.  The substantive answer, that galaxy sizes at fixed stellar mass are now measured to evolve rather than assumed to, appears in the size-evolution literature rather than in a paper addressed to Lerner.  A catalogue of problems has no single claim to reply to, which is why the field answers such papers piecemeal or not at all.  Say "answered piecemeal."  Never say "never refuted" without the rest of the sentence.

"Alfvén won a Nobel Prize, so plasma cosmology deserves a hearing."  He won it for magnetohydrodynamics, which is correct physics that everyone uses.  A prize in one field is not evidence in another.  Fred Hoyle worked out how stars make carbon and was wrong about the microwave background.  Linus Pauling won two Nobel Prizes and was wrong about vitamin C.  Alfvén's cosmology gets a hearing because of what it predicts, and what it predicts has been measured.

"Filaments in the galaxy distribution look exactly like plasma discharge filaments."  They do.  Bond, Kofman and Pogosyan showed that a filamentary web is what gravity produces from small random initial fluctuations, with the pattern already present in the starting conditions.²⁸  Two different mechanisms produce similar-looking structures.  Resemblance is a reason to check, and the check has been run.

"The microwave background is just thermalised starlight, so it proves nothing."  The energy budget does work out, and this article concedes it in Part 1.  What does not work is the spectrum, which is a blackbody to 50 parts per million, and the temperature at high redshift, which rises as (1 + z) to within a few percent, and the fact that the background is gravitationally lensed by structure it must therefore be behind.  A local source fails all three.

"Hoyle only called it the 'big bang' to mock it."  There is no documentary support for that, and the historian who checked says so.  Hoyle did not use the phrase at all between 1950 and 1965.⁴  He disliked the theory for stated philosophical reasons and said so in print.  The mockery story is an embellishment and repeating it costs credibility for nothing.

"The Big Bang is just the current fashion.  It will be overturned like the steady state was."  It might be.  But notice what that sentence concedes.  The steady state was overturned by measurement, in public, in the journals, by a field that had every social reason to keep it alive in Britain and did not.  If the Big Bang is overturned the same way it will be by the same process, and the argument that got there will be a measurement rather than a manifesto.

"If the Big Bang falls, does Christianity gain?"  Not by itself.  The two serious twentieth-century rivals were both eternal-universe models designed to avoid a beginning.  Carl Wieland's own summary is the right one:  one side "wanted a universe that created itself," the other "an eternal, uncreated universe," and "from a Christian perspective, both are in open defiance of their Creator's account."³⁵

Sources

Primary papers for the steady state:  Bondi and Gold, MNRAS 108 (1948);  Hoyle, MNRAS 108 (1948);  Ryle and Clarke, MNRAS 122 (1961);  Mills and Slee, Australian Journal of Physics 10 (1957);  Schmidt, ApJ 151 (1968);  Penzias and Wilson, ApJ 142 (1965).

For the quasi-steady state:  Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar, ApJ 410 (1993);  Wright, astro-ph/9410070;  Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar, astro-ph/9412045;  Narlikar and colleagues, ApJ 585 (2003);  Narlikar, Burbidge and Vishwakarma, J. Astrophys. Astron. 28 (2007);  Kragh's historical review, arXiv:1201.3449.

For plasma cosmology:  Alfvén's Nobel lecture (1970);  Alfvén, J. Astrophys. Astron. 5 (1984);  Lerner, ApJ 361 (1990);  and the sympathetic modern account in López-Corredoira and Marmet, arXiv:2202.12897.

For the measurements against it:  Cohen, De Rújula and Glashow, ApJ 495 (1998);  Fixsen and colleagues, astro-ph/9605054;  Noterdaeme and colleagues, A&A 526 (2011);  Govoni and Feretti, astro-ph/0410182;  Planck Collaboration XIX (2016);  Tisserand and colleagues, A&A 469 (2007);  Bond, Kofman and Pogosyan, Nature 380 (1996).

For the 2004 letter and the reaction:  Lerner and 33 co-signatories, New Scientist 182 (2004);  Carroll's blog reply of 29 May 2004;  Wieland in Creation 27 (2005);  Hebert for ICR (2020);  Faulkner, Answers Research Journal 11 (2018).

Companion articles on this site:  the standard model overview, the microwave background, big bang nucleosynthesis, tired light, discordant redshifts, and the cosmic distance ladder.