Latest attempt to impeach the Big Bang

[Grammatical and brain-less errors corrected at 3:56EST]

A number of physicists have been decidedly unhappy with the Big Bang theorem that emerged from the relativistic discoveries of the early twentieth century. Atheism, in the nineteenth century, was in something of a heyday. It was not necessary, as a scientist, to believe in God as eternal. It was sufficient for the universe to be eternal.

The one problem with this theory: the universe wasn't eternal, according to the observations made by Hubble and the discoveries made by Einstein. It had originated, in a very specific place and time.

Steady state theory persisted for a while, though. The Big Bang had some frighteningly theistic implications. Steady State finally died out in the sixties when it was discovered that the ambient radiation that makes up snow on your television is in part a broadcast of the big bang's echoes. In recent years, this background radiation has even been mapped, such that scientists can even tell what the universe looked like when it was 300,000 old.

Scientists troubled by the idea that the universe might originate in some way, or that the teleological problem might have as a solution a divine source, have constructed all kinds of compensatory devices: the anthropic principle, for instance.

But also some attempted revivals of the steady state theory, such as the Colliding Brane theory. This theory lost some ground when a South Pole radio telescope showed that the inflationary model proposed by the Big Bang (which the Brane theory disputed somewhat) was accurate.

Troubled by the implications of the anthropic principle, the idea that the universe is curiously just ideal for life, a couple of scientists have taken another swing at the Big Bang.

Guardian Unlimited | Science | One Big Bang, or were there many?

But the big bang has some life left in it. Hawking's done the math, as he outlined in his "A Brief History of Time", to show that time itself plausibly has an origin. So once again another unfalsifiable theory comes along, relying on an unprovable preexisting heat dissipated universe completely destroyed by recreation (conveniently wiping away all the evidence for their theory at the same time.)

No, the Big Bang has survived many challenges and will surely survive this one.