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Big Bang style
Feb. 15th, 2006 08:55 amFred Clark quotes the AP style guide (supposedly followed by NASA) on the phrase "big bang theory":
Also (and this is what prompted me to post) there are a couple of things in this style guideline that are just wrong. The "oscillating theory" was never considered an alternative to the Big Bang; it was a subset of Big Bang theories. (I suppose that the guide can be read to be consistent with this, but it's not made clear.)
Finally, that business about matter "being created to replace matter that is constantly being destroyed" is just bizarre; matter is not constantly destroyed in the steady-state theory, or in any major cosmological theory I know of! The idea is that it's constantly created to keep the density of matter constant as the universe expands. You might object that this was a silly idea, but a similar thing happens in modern theories of dark energy (which in its simplest form is the same thing long known as "the cosmological constant"): the dark energy density doesn't thin out in the normal manner as the universe expands. Granted, doing this with ordinary matter, as the steady-state theorists imagined, did require fudging general relativity, whereas it happens a lot more naturally with dark energy; so proposing that dark energy does this is somewhat more parsimonious.
big-bang theory The theory that the universe began with the explosion of a superdense primeval atom and has been expanding ever since. The oscillating theory, another hypothesis, maintains that expansion eventually will stop, followed by contraction to a superdense atom, followed by another big bang. The steady-state theory, an alternative hypothesis, maintains that the universe always has existed and that matter constantly is being created to replace matter that is constantly being destroyed.It doesn't really have much to do with the Deutsch affair, but I wonder how often these style guides are updated to take scientific developments into account. The reason is that there are several things about this guideline that seem, shall we say, quaint. The oscillating theory hasn't really gotten a lot of attention from cosmologists in decades (if you want world without end, it's more fun to talk about universes that reproduce like budding yeast); the steady-state theory, a former contender, is now a fringe hypothesis. And nobody in cosmology talks about "the primeval atom" any more; that's early-20th-century terminology. It goes with other poetic old terms like "ylem" and "the cosmic egg".
Also (and this is what prompted me to post) there are a couple of things in this style guideline that are just wrong. The "oscillating theory" was never considered an alternative to the Big Bang; it was a subset of Big Bang theories. (I suppose that the guide can be read to be consistent with this, but it's not made clear.)
Finally, that business about matter "being created to replace matter that is constantly being destroyed" is just bizarre; matter is not constantly destroyed in the steady-state theory, or in any major cosmological theory I know of! The idea is that it's constantly created to keep the density of matter constant as the universe expands. You might object that this was a silly idea, but a similar thing happens in modern theories of dark energy (which in its simplest form is the same thing long known as "the cosmological constant"): the dark energy density doesn't thin out in the normal manner as the universe expands. Granted, doing this with ordinary matter, as the steady-state theorists imagined, did require fudging general relativity, whereas it happens a lot more naturally with dark energy; so proposing that dark energy does this is somewhat more parsimonious.