Below is the online edition of In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood,
by Dr. Walt Brown. Copyright © Center for Scientific Creation. All rights reserved.
Click here to order the hardbound 8th edition (2008) and other materials.
The Evidence
Slowly Spinning Sun. Our sun spins slowly, about once every 25 days (depending to some extent on latitude). If, as evolutionists teach, our sun and planets formed from a large spinning dust and gas cloud, its spin rate today should be a hundred times faster. This is required by the law of the conservation of angular momentum. A common demonstration of this law is shown in Figure 84 on page 156. [Also see “Angular Momentum” on page 29, and “Star Births? Stellar Evolution” on pages 36 and 97.]
As a result of this effect [the law of the conservation of angular momentum] the sun should now be spinning on its axis at the rate of once every few hours. Actually, it turns at a far slower rate, 100 times less rapid. What has slowed the sun down? A thoroughly satisfactory answer has never been provided.8
However, if the sun formed before space was stretched out, its slow spin rate today would not be unusual.
Star Formation. Astronomers recognize that the densest gas cloud seen in the universe today would have to be thousands of times more compact to form stars by gravitational collapse. [See “Star Births? Stellar Evolution?” on page 97.] According to the big bang theory, stars began to form by the gravitational collapse of spinning dust and gas clouds 420-million years after the big bang’s sudden inflation. Astronomer Martin Harwit, former director of the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D. C., points out that if this were true, the vast energy, angular momentum, and magnetic fields generated by each collapse would be clearly visible—but they are not. [See “Interstellar Gas” on page 96.]
The stretching explanation states that the volume of the universe was much smaller when stars were made. The stretching of space would have given stars the large orbital energy and angular momentum we see. After stretching, we would not expect to see vast amounts of heat, extreme rotational velocities, or gigantic magnetic fields that a collapse of a giant spinning dust cloud would produce.
Binary Stars. “At least half of stars like the Sun are found in multiple systems. And yet the origins of this all-too-normal population are mysterious” 9—unless one considers the stretching explanation. For example, the closest stars to our Sun are two stars that orbit each other: the Alpha Centauri system. Three- and four-star systems are also found.10
Based on the stretching explanation, this is expected, since all stars were initially concentrated within a much smaller volume. Their close proximity to each other allowed the closest pairs, triplets, and quadruplets to become gravitationally coupled—tightly enough to remain coupled during the stretching—days later. Had each star formed from a large spinning dust and gas cloud, as the big bang proposes, pairs could only have formed if one star captured another. Considering the great distances separating stars today, such captures would be highly improbable.
Planet Formation. So many planets have been found outside our solar system that there appear to be about as many planets as there are stars. Many orbits of these planets show that they could not have evolved in any conceivable way.
With so little in common with the familiar Solar System planets, these newcomers [extrasolar planets] spell the end for established theories of planet formation.11
For example, more than 30 sets of binary stars (two stars orbiting their common center of mass) have one or more planets orbiting each star.12 The rapidly changing gravity fields produced by each binary star would have prevented any orbiting cloud of dust and gas from collapsing into one planet. This was recognized before these planets were discovered.
The environment around a pair of stars, [researchers] argued, would be too chaotic for planets to form.13
If planets formed around binary stars millions of years ago, they would have been be so unstable that we would never see them today. But we do!
Even if a planet could form in such a dynamic environment, its long-term stability would not be assured—the planet would wind up being ejected into deep space or crashing into one of the stars.13
Now that planets are often found around binary stars (an unstable situation), it is clear that the planets are young, and they must have formed at about the same time as their binary stars. This contradicts the big bang explanation that stars and planets formed over millions of years from large rotating clouds of dust and gas.
However, in a much smaller universe, both planets and stars could have come into existence at about the same time. First, large clusters of mass would have formed stars and smaller clusters would have formed planets, each moving, because gravity was pulling all matter together. Therefore each would have small amounts of rotational angular momentum. Then, before all matter in this smaller universe collapsed into one massive black hole, the space between these bodies was stretched out, giving each body the great rotational angular momentum we see today.
Hot Jupiters. Leslie Sage, an authority on exoplanets (planets outside our Solar System), was perplexed when he learned about hot Jupiters—Jupiter-size planets orbiting so close to their stars that they complete an orbit every few days. Sage explained:
How could a planet be so close to its parent star—it seemed very unlikely that it could form there—and was such a planet stable against evaporation by stellar radiation?14
From his way of thinking, hundreds of millions of years after the big bang, stars formed in swirling and contracting disks of gas and dust. Millions of years later, the remaining gas and dust orbiting the new star contracted to form planets. However, Sage knew that dust orbiting too close to a star could not merge to become a planet. (Particles trying to merge on the side of a growing planet closest to the star would feel a much greater gravitational pull from the star than merging particles on the far side of the planet; those tidal forces would pull a growing planet apart. Sage also knew that dust swirling that near the star would absorb so much heat over those millions of years that the dust would vaporize into the vacuum of space, so no planet would form, especially a Jupiter-size planet.15
Unlike all the planets in our Solar System, many hot Jupiters are orbiting retrograde,16D17 How can that be?
What are astronomers (and Leslie Sage) missing? The early universe was much smaller and contained solid bodies, not a superhot plasma that might become dust million of years later. Therefore, the gravitational sphere of influence of each solid body encompassed many more solid bodies. [See “Sphere of Influence” on page 306.] As stars and planets grew, their spheres’ of influence grew rapidly, so run-away merging occurred simultaneously for both growing stars and nearby planets. A planet’s amount of dust orbiting a star absorbs billions of time more heat than a solid planet having the same mass and at the same distance from the star, because the dust has a total surface area that is billions of times greater. Since a star and its planets were never part of a single swirling gas and dust cloud spinning around the same axis, there is no reason for hot Jupiters to have their spin axes aligned with the star’s spin axis, or for all their orbits to be prograde.
If a big bang occurred, a large spinning disk or cloud must precede the formation of solid or large orbiting bodies. But as we saw with the “Slowly Spinning Sun” and “Star Formation” on page 447, going through that spinning-disk stage would not have produced many features we see today. From the stretching perspective, both large and solid orbiting bodies formed within days—but not from a large spinning cloud. No contradictions arise.
Intergalactic Medium (IGM). Outer space is nearly a perfect vacuum. The IGM (the vast space between galaxies) contains about 10–100 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. However, almost every hydrogen atom in the IGM, out to the farthest galaxies telescopes can see (13 billion light-years away), has been ionized—has lost its electron.
According to the big bang theory, for the first 380,000 years after the big bang, the expanding universe was so hot that all matter was ionized. Only after the universe had expanded (and cooled) enough, could a proton (positively charged) hang on to an electron (negatively charged) and become neutral hydrogen (no electrical charge). Then, with matter no longer ionized, positive hydrogen ions would not repel each other, so stars and galaxies began to evolve, and light was no longer scattered. (Reasons why stars and galaxies could not have evolved are given on pages 33–36.)
This presents a major problem for the big bang theory. What reionized the hydrogen that today pervades the IGM? No explanation has been found.18 Most big bang theorists assumed that radiation from the earliest stars and galaxies—after the universe had already expanded for hundreds of millions of years—was powerful enough to reionize the IGM. This now appears to be implausible.19
According to the stretching explanation, the universe was extremely compact at creation, so the intense light of Day 1 (explained on page 451) ionized the surrounding gases. Then, the heavens were stretched out. Therefore, hydrogen in the IGM has always been ionized, just as it is today.
PREDICTION 54: Billion-dollar telescopes, now being built, will be able to see further back in time—much closer to the beginning of the universe. They will not find the IGM being ionized, because it has been ionized since the creation.
Figure 223: No Gravitational Waves. In 2001, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), a NASA spacecraft, began measuring the extremely uniform temperatures of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation from deep space. The hot spots, shown in yellow and orange, are only 1 part in 100,000 hotter than the dark blue spots. Two interpretations are possible:
1. Big Bang Interpretation: For 13.7 billions years all the matter in the universe has moved rapidly away from the primordial “egg” (the point where the bang began). The early universe would have been filled with gravitational waves (distortions of space-time) that should be easily detected today in the CMB. But they are not found!
Unfortunately, the search for inflationary gravitational waves has not panned out. Although cosmologists first observed hot and cold spots with the COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) satellite in 1992 and with many subsequent experiments, including even more recent Planck satellite results from 2015, they have not found any signs of the cosmic gravitational waves expected from inflation, as of this writing, despite painstaking searches for them.51
2. Stretching Interpretation: These are early gravity-driven concentrations of matter (stars and even black holes52) soon after the creation. All matter in the universe was created in a much smaller universe. Then on Day 4, space was stretched out. Gravity waves produced before the stretching were quickly dissipated in the smaller universe. However, during the stretching, matter—embedded in and carried along by the expanding space—did not move relative to the expanding space. Therefore, we should not expect to see gravity waves in the CMB. But we do see other particles produced before the stretching by the many impacts in the smaller universe: neutrinos, cosmic rays, and radiations at practically ever possible wave length. Those who believe in the big bang, see these products in the CMB but do not know how they were produced.53
Black Holes. Black holes come in two varieties: massive black holes (MBHs) and stellar black holes (SBHs). MBHs are millions to 21 billion times more massive than the Sun. They lie at the center of every large galaxy near enough to be studied—and perhaps every galaxy.20 (Later, the very important reason for this will be explained.) SBHs are only a few tens of times heavier than the Sun. If our Milky Way Galaxy is as old as evolutionists believe, tens of millions of stars heavier than ten solar masses should have collapsed into SBHs.21 However, our galaxy has only about 50 known SBHs—so our galaxy may be young. In both types of black holes, mass is so concentrated that nothing within a specific distance of a black hole, called the event horizon, can escape its gravity—not even light.
Astronomers admit that galaxies22 and black holes23 must have existed very soon after the universe began, but the big bang theory says that 380,000 years after the big bang (before stars formed) all matter was spread out with almost perfect uniformity. [See Figure 223.] That uniformity would prevent gravity from forming galaxies and black holes, even over the supposed age of the universe.32 However, black holes would easily form soon after the creation of all matter in a much smaller, lumpier universe. Then, before all mass collapsed into one huge black hole, space was stretched out.
Standard cosmological models [the big bang and its variations] implied that matter in the universe was not concentrated tightly enough to have formed black holes so early on. Clearly the models were wrong.33
Jets are often seen traveling away from black holes and along their spin axis—some at “up to 99.98 percent of the velocity of light. These amazing outflows traverse distances larger than galaxies”34 and are powered by the gigantic magnetic field generated by the spinning disk of matter spiraling in toward the event horizon.
Colliding Galaxies. Galaxies frequently contain two distinct rotating systems, as if a galaxy rotating one way collided with another rotating the opposite way. Because distances between galaxies are so vast today, such mergers were thought to be rare.35 But the Hubble telescope, in its furthest look back in time, has photographed dozens of galaxies in the process of colliding.36 Obviously, galaxies formed quickly in the early, much more compact universe.
Also, some massive black holes (MBHs) orbit each other inside a galaxy, and four galaxies contain triple MBHs.37 Astronomers believe galaxy mergings produced these systems, but as already stated, galaxies rarely merge today, because they are so far apart.
Does this mean that the universe is billions of years old? No. For one thing, if some galaxies merged billions of years ago, why haven’t the different rotations within merged galaxies become uniform rotations by now? Clearly, those mergings did not happen billions of years ago.38
In fact, before the heavens were stretched out, galaxies were closer to each other, resulting in much greater speeds and frequent collisions. Likewise, much of the expansion of supernova remnants over great distances may be due to the stretching, not the passage of millions of years.
Galaxies and Their Black Holes. The mass of MBHs are positively correlated with several characteristics of each MBH’s galaxy: the galaxy’s mass, luminosity, the number of associated globular clusters, and especially the mass of the galactic bulge. Typically, the larger the galaxy, the larger its black hole. According to standard explanations for galaxy formation, this should not be, because black holes are so small compared to the volume of galaxies today.
For reasons not fully understood, it appears that the sizes of central black holes and the masses of their galaxies, especially the central bulges, are almost perfectly in step [perfectly correlated].39
Here’s the problem for those who believe a big bang preceded the formation of black holes, stars, and galaxies: black holes are too small to affect something as huge as a galaxy that formed long after the universe expanded, and there is no reason a galaxy should form a large central black hole. Therefore, “the correlation means that the black hole and galaxy had to form together.”40 But how?
Before the universe was stretched out, the densest concentrations of matter began forming MBHs; less dense concentrations formed stars. But before all those stars surrounding the growing MBHs collapsed into the MBHs, space was stretched out, so the surrounding concentration of stars became galaxies—all which appear to contain a central MBHs. This is inconsistent with the big bang theory, but is consistent with the stretching theory.
The black holes that power quasars probably started their lives in miniature and grew exponentially by accretion—whereby matter close to a black hole cannot escape the strong gravitational field and is ultimately pulled into the black hole. To have assembled such a huge mass so quickly, the bright quasars discovered in the early Universe are thought to have resided in regions that had a particularly high density of matter. Such an environment not only would have fueled the rapid growth of the black holes powering these quasars, but also would have spurred the growth of galaxies in the quasars’ immediate vicinity.41
Why would the correlation of the black hole’s mass be even stronger for the mass of the galaxy’s central bulge than the mass of the entire galaxy? The strength of gravity diminishes as the square of the distance between gravitating masses. Therefore, as the galaxy was stretched out, gravity’s strength dropped faster for the outer portion of the galaxy than the inner portion, which produced the central bulge. (Without this understanding, central bulges are a mystery.42
To summarize this very important point, the universe was initially quite small. Some regions contained more mass than others. The densest concentrations collapsed rapidly, forming massive black holes. Before all nearby stars collapsed into growing black holes, space was stretched out, so nearby stars formed galaxies. The closest matter to the black hole became the central bulge. Thus each galaxy that can be seen clearly enough has at its center a MBH, so the masses of the MBH, galaxy and galactic bulge are highly correlated.
A few small galaxies have a huge MBH.43 Possibly the largest black hole known to be in the center of a small galaxy is 21 million times the mass of our sun! It lies in the compact galaxy NGC 1277, but has an event horizon five times the radius of our solar system!44 What can explain this monster? Did enough time pass for a normal MBH to devour most of the stars in its galaxy? If so, we should see many examples of extremely large MBHs in small galaxies. Did multiple galaxies collide, merging several of their MBHs? As discussed above, galaxy collisions are statistically improbable in today’s immense universe. However, in the smaller, early universe, some growing black holes and nearby stars might have merged before the heavens were stretched out leaving extremely large MBHs in small galaxies.45
Central Stars. About 40 stars orbit within a few dozen light-hours of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Those stars could never have evolved that close to a black hole, which has the mass of 4,300,000 suns, because the black hole’s gravity would have prevented gas from collapsing to become a star.46 However, those stars could have formed in a much denser environment, before space was stretched out during creation week.
In principle, this [collapse] could have occurred if the density of the gases in the centre of the Galaxy was much higher in the past. Higher density would allow clumps in the clouds to collapse to form stars, even in the presence of a [black hole’s] strong gravitational field.47
Some astronomers say that these stars evolved far from the black hole and then migrated great distances toward the black hole. Such a migration, which seemingly violates laws of physics,48 must have been fast, because the stars are so massive that their lifetimes are very short in astronomical terms. Also, matter migrating toward black holes must radiate vast amounts of energy as happens with quasars, but that energy is not observed in any wavelength for these central stars.
Spiral Galaxies. If spiral galaxies formed billions of years ago, their arms should be wrapped more tightly around their centers than they are. Also, nearer galaxies should show much more “wrap” than more distant spiral galaxies. [See Figure 229 on page 465.] But, if space was recently stretched out, spiral galaxies could appear as they do.Why are some galaxies spirals and other elliptical? Astronomers don’t know,
“It’s hard, for example to tell why one [galaxy] turns into a graceful spiral but another evolves into a blob.”49
It was a matter of timing. When the stretching occurred before a large group of stars collapsed, the galaxy was became spiral.
Strings of Galaxies. Long strings of hundreds of thousands of massive galaxies have been discovered.50 Obviously, gravity would pull matter, not into long strings, but into spherical globs. Long strings of galaxies would develop if the universe was stretched out as galaxies began to form—much like pulling taffy into long strings. Many of these galaxies appear connected or aligned with other galaxies or quasars. [See "Connected Galaxies" on page 43.]
Dwarf Galaxies. Dwarf galaxies are sometimes embedded in a smoothly rotating disk of hydrogen gas that is much larger than the galaxy itself. [See Figure 224.] The mass (hidden or otherwise) of each dwarf galaxy is insufficient to pull the gas into its disk shape,54 but if this matter was once highly concentrated and then the space it occupied was recently stretched out, those characteristics would be explained.
Figure 224: Dwarf Galaxy. An enormous hydrogen disk (blue) surrounds the dwarf galaxy UGC 5288 (bright white). This isolated galaxy, 16 million light-years from Earth, contains about 100,000 stars and is 1/25 the diameter of our Milky Way Galaxy, which has at least 100,000,000,000 stars. The dwarf’s mass is about 30 times too small to gravitationally hold onto the most distant hydrogen gas, so gravity could not have pulled the distant hydrogen gas into its disk. Because the gas is too evenly distributed and rotates so smoothly, it was not expelled from the galaxy or pulled out by a close encounter with another galaxy.
Before space was stretched out, gravitational forces and rotational velocities would have been much greater, so after the stretching, the hydrogen gas would have assumed this smooth, rapidly rotating pattern, even though the galaxy did not have the gravitational strength to hold the gas. This stretching must have occurred recently, because the gaseous disk has not dispersed into the vacuum of space. (The galaxy is seen in visible light; the hydrogen disk is seen by a fleet of 27 radio telescopes.)
Distant Galaxies. Massive galaxies and galaxy clusters are found at such great distances that they must have formed soon after the universe began—exactly as the stretching explanation maintains. The big bang theory cannot explain how such distant and massive galaxy concentrations could have formed so quickly that their light had over 13.0-billion years to travel to planet Earth.5, 55, 56
Furthermore, stars in the most distant galaxies contain heavy chemical elements.56 Therefore, according to the big bang theory, several generations of stars must have preceded those stars. That makes it even less likely all those time consuming events could have been completed and still have over 13,000,000,000 years for light to travel to Earth.
The stretching explanation says that during creation week, galaxies, galaxy clusters, and stars with heavy elements formed in a much smaller universe. Then the heavens were stretched out, producing today’s immense universe.
Starburst Galaxies. While we frequently see stars die, individual stars have never been seen forming. [See “Star Births? Stellar Evolution?” on page 36 and corresponding endnotes on page 97.] Therefore, evolutionist astronomers believe that star formation rates in our galaxy and nearby galaxies are too slow to be observed, but that amazingly high star formation rates occur in “starburst galaxies”—the brightest galaxies with the greatest redshifts. To achieve such ultrafast rates, those astronomers imagine 10-trillion solar masses of dark (invisible) matter were present.57 Because those galaxies have high redshifts, they are extremely far away, so we see them far back in time, as they looked soon after the universe began. Because they are so bright, their stars must have all formed quickly.
Actually, there is nothing unusual about those galaxies; we just are seeing them far back in time, as they appeared soon after they were created, but soon after the universe was stretched out. According to the big bang theory, stars could not form, until after 420,000,000 years, because all matter in the universe would have been spread out too uniformly—and dark matter would be needed (matter that doesn’t exist, except in some people’s minds).
Stellar Generations. According to the big bang theory, there are three generations of stars, each with increasing amounts of heavy elements. The first generation should contain only hydrogen, helium, and a trace of lithium—the only chemical elements a big bang could produce. Millions of years later, second-generation stars would begin forming with heavier elements supposedly made inside first-generation stars that finally exploded. If so, some first-generation stars should still be visible, but not one has ever been found. [See Endnote 56n on page 94.] Actually, the most distant stars, galaxies, and quasars that can be analyzed contain some of these heavy chemical elements.25
Matter and Antimatter. Albert Einstein explained why matter and energy are interchangeable. For example, energy can produce matter, but when it does, it always produces equal amounts of antimatter. If the big bang produced the universe, half the matter in the universe should be antimatter. However, the universe has almost no antimatter. Therefore, the big bang did not produce the universe—or half the universe disappeared. [See “Antimatter” on page 35 and related endnotes.]
Helium-2 Nebulas. Clouds of glowing, blue gas, called helium-2 nebulas, have been set aglow by something hot enough to strip two electrons from each helium atom. No known star—young or old—is hot enough to do that,62 but the compressed, “pre-stretched” universe, filled with blazing quasars, would be.
Figure 225: Stretching Out Light. Huge amounts of energy were required to stretch out the heavens—in effect, to lift massive gravitational bodies and move them billions of light-years away from other gravitational bodies. The same energy source that stretched out space (represented above by the blue springs) also stretched out—redshifted—light (represented by the yellow arrows). The law of conservation of energy says that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system. According to the big bang theory, the universe is an isolated system, so that energy could not have come from within the universe, as the big bang theory claims. Instead, it came from outside the universe. Thus, we can see distant stars and galaxies in a young universe.
“The horizon problem” has perplexed advocates of the big bang theory for decades, because they see no way that opposite sides of the universe, which are so far apart today, could ever have interacted with each other—even at the speed of light. Nevertheless they do have the same temperature and other physical properties. Stretching explains this, because all matter was initially confined to a volume only a few light days in diameter. Therefore, temperatures throughout that small volume reached equilibrium before the stretching began, on Day 4 of the creation week.
Stellar Velocities. Stars in the outer parts of spiral galaxies travel much faster than they would if they were in equilibrium. Therefore, these galaxies are flying apart. We cannot see that directly, because they are so far away and have been flying apart for only a few thousand years—since the stretching during creation week. [See Figure 226.]
Those stars got their higher velocities before space was stretched out—when they were nearer the center of their galaxy, where the galaxy’s gravity was much more powerful. Stretching did not remove those speeds. Appeals to so-called dark matter, which has never been seen or measured, is not needed to explain those high velocities. Dark matter is a fiction, created by astronomers wedded to the big bang theory.
Figure 226: Why are Galaxies Spinning?
Galaxy rotation and how it got started is one of the great mysteries of astrophysics. In a Big Bang universe, linear motions are easy to explain: They result from the bang. But what started the rotary motions? 58
Notice how the stretching of space spread the stars in spiral galaxies into the same pattern as a spinning lawn sprinkler spreads water droplets.
Both spiral galaxies and lawn sprinklers spin, but for different reasons. Spiral galaxies spin because gravity causes bodies in space to orbit more massive bodies that are nearby. A lawn sprinkler spins because of the jetting action of water squirting out of nozzles. In both spiral galaxies and lawn sprinklers, the spiral arms trail behind the direction of rotation.
Before the heavens were stretched out, those stars had high velocities, because they were near a galaxy’s center of mass where a black hole was growing. This is why a massive black hole appears to lie in the center of every large galaxy. Had the heavens not been stretched out, each growing black hole would have eventually consumed those stars. Instead of the awesome night sky we see, we would be living in a dark, forboding universe, and the “the heavens would not be telling of the glory of God,” contrary to what Ps 19:1 states. Abraham Lincoln famously noted,
As space was stretched out, light’s velocity remained unchanged, even though light’s wave lengths were stretched and, therefore, redshifted. Likewise, as space was stretched out, each star’s velocity (relative to space) remained unchanged while space’s expansion transported the stars radially outward.
Astronomers don’t understand this. Since the 1980s, they have imagined that these galaxies must contain some invisible substance (they call “dark matter”) causing the outer stars to travel faster than the laws of physics would allow with the observed galaxy’s mass. Millions of dollars have been wasted in experiments trying to discover “dark matter.” “Dark matter” simply reflects ignorance.59, 60
Their frustration will increase, until they understand how the universe began.
Speeding Galaxies. Galaxies in galaxy clusters are also traveling much faster than they should, based on their distances from their clusters’ centers of mass. They too are flying apart, because the volume of space containing those clusters was stretched out.
The Flatness Problem. R. H. Dicke first explained the flatness problem in his 1969 Jayne Lecture, which was later published in “Gravitation and the Universe” for the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 1970. The density of the universe, as shown in Equation (4) on page 456, had to be fine tuned to one part in 1062. Had the universe been slightly denser by one part in 1062, the expansion would have slowed and collapsed back on itself in a “big crunch” after 13.7-billion years (today’s age of the universe according to the big bang theory).63 Had the universe been slightly less dense by one part in 1062, “the universe would have expanded “so quickly and become so sparse it would soon seem essentially empty, and gravity would not be strong enough by comparison to cause matter to collapse and form galaxies.64 The stretching explanation does not have this problem.
Cut-Off Problem. Nor does stretching have the big bang’s “cut-off problem. If you stretch something, you do not need to stop the stretching at a precise instant to achieve the spread you want. However, because for 10-32 seconds inflation was accelerating, it had to stop within a tiny fraction of those 10-32 seconds. Had inflation stopped too soon, the universe would have eventually collapsed back on itself. Had inflation overshot its cut-off time, every particle in the universe, including every subatomic particle in your body, would have continued on a hyperbolic orbit. Atoms would never have come together. You wouldn’t exist!
Dark “Science.” The big bang theory must invoke unscientific concepts, such as “dark matter” and “dark energy,” to try to explain the “stretched out heavens.” What is dark matter? What is dark energy? Even believers in those ideas don’t know, and some admit that those phrases are “expressions of ignorance [by those who accept the big bang theory].”
No one knows what dark matter is, but they know what it is not. It’s not part of the “standard model” of physics that weaves together everything that is known about ordinary matter and its interactions.60
We know little about that sea [of dark matter and dark energy]. The terms we use to describe its components, “dark matter” and “dark energy,” serve mainly as expressions of our ignorance.59