Big Bang theory is wrong, claim scientists

There was an interesting cosmology article in the Daily Telegraph last week. It was by science editor Sarah Knapton, and it was called Big Bang theory is wrong, claim scientists. I was pleased to see it, because in my humble opinion cosmology articles don’t feature in our newspapers enough these days. Clearly I’m not the only one who thinks like that, because as I speak there are 2,580 comments.

Image from The Daily Telegraph, caption: A black hole pictured by the Spitzer space telescope. Credit: AFP/Getty Images

Oddly enough, the image heading up the story depicts a black hole, not the Big Bang. The caption suggests it’s a real image taken by Spitzer space telescope, but actually it’s an artists’s concept dating from 2010. But no matter, what matters is why is a black hole image heading up a Big Bang article?

The universe is sitting inside a black hole

The answer is in the very first line of the article: “The Big Bang theory is wrong and the universe is sitting inside a black hole, scientists have suggested”. At which point I sighed. Not just because scientists are saying Big Bang theory is wrong. But because they’re saying we’re living inside a black hole. There’s less evidence for that than there was for the four elephants and the turtle:

Public domain image from Wikipedia

Regular readers will know what I think about the Big Bang. By 1917 Vesto Slipher had measured 21 galactic redshifts, Albert Einstein had written his cosmological considerations paper, and Willem de Sitter had come up with the de Sitter universe. A year later Erwin Schrödinger came up with his cosmic pressure. In 1924 Knut Lundmark came up with an expansion rate within 1% of measurements today. In 1927 Georges Lemaître wrote his French paper. In 1929 Edwin Hubble came up with A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae. In 1931 Einstein conceded that the universe wasn’t static, and Lemaître proposed the disintegration of the primeval atom. That was almost a hundred years ago. Since then the evidence indicates that the universe is expanding, and that all the galaxies were in essentially the same place 13.8 billion years ago. I’m happy with that.

Hawking likened the universe to a black hole in reverse

I wouldn’t say I’m happy with all aspects of Big Bang cosmology. I’m happy with much of it, like the Hubble expansion, the dark energy and the dark matter. But not all of it. For example I think inflation is a pseudoscience solution to problems that don’t exist: the monopole problem misses the point that the electron has an electromagnetic field, the flatness problem misses the point that homogeneous space is space without a gravitational field, and the horizon problem misses the point that the universe may have started with no temperature at all. In addition I’m not happy with a Big Bang point singularity. That’s because whilst I’m happy with the way Hawking likened the universe to a black hole in reverse, I don’t think there’s a singularity at the centre of a black hole:

Image from Luke Mastin’s The Physics of the Universe. Quote: “in the centre of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space, where density and gravity become infinite”.

In similar vein I’m not happy with creation ex-nihilo. Or the way cosmologists used to say the universe was once the size of a grapefruit, but now say the observable universe was once the size of a grapefruit. Some now even say the universe has always been infinite. I don’t like that because I think the universe has to be finite to be able to expand. It’s the flip side of Isaac Newton’s infinite universe. All in all I think that whilst there are issues, Big Bang cosmology is essentially correct. You won’t find me promoting tired light theory. Au contraire, I’m the guy who will tell you the ascending photon is not redshifted, but is instead emitted at a lower frequency at a lower elevation, just like Einstein said. I’ll even tell you that the CMBR photons aren’t redshifted either, just like Tamara Davis said.

A variation of the Big Bounce hypothesis

Anyway, the Telegraph article refers to Lemaître, and says researchers have believed in Big Bang cosmology since the 1930s. Then it says this: “An international team of physicists, led by the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, has now suggested instead that the universe formed following a huge gravitational collapse that generated a massive black hole”. Portsmouth is an hour’s drive away from me. The Portsmouth University Institute of cosmology and gravitation (ICG) is headed up by Professor David Bacon, and has 65 staff. Among them is Professor Enrique Gaztañaga, who is quoted in this article. The story goes that the whole universe is contained within a black hole. Then we are told that matter within this black hole was “crunched down” before huge amounts of stored energy caused it to bounce back like a compressed spring, creating our universe. I’m sure we all recognise this as a variation of the Big Bounce hypothesis.

Image from Wired magazine, caption: In a cyclic universe, periods of expansion alternate with periods of contraction. The universe has no beginning and no end. Illustration: Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine

Check out the Wikipedia article on that. Note the bit that says “the so-called fundamental physical constants, including the speed of light in vacuum, need not remain constant during a Big Crunch”. Compare and contrast that with what Einstein said about the speed of light varying with gravitational potential. Also note that the Big Bounce hypotheses has been around since 1922. That’s when Friedmann wrote his paper On the curvature of space. It used to be called the Cyclic Model.

Chinese universes

However we are led to believe that the authors have come up with a new theory, where they claim that the edge of our universe is the event horizon of a black hole. The Telegraph article says this is why they’ve called it “The Black Hole Universe”. Only if you search the internet on that, you soon find a Space.com article called Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind. It dates from March 2025 and it was written by Robert Lea, who tells us that “the idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good”. Check out the Wikipedia article on Black hole cosmology where there’s a reference to Pathria’s 1972 Nature paper The Universe as a Black Hole, and a reference to Good’s 1972 Physics Today letter on Chinese Universes. The Space.com article features theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski from the University of New Haven. It tells how in Poplawski’s theory, “the coupling between torsion, the twisting and turning of matter, and spin becomes very strong and prevents the matter from compressing indefinitely to a singularity”. It would seem that Poplawski has never read Friedwardt Winterberg’s 2001 paper Gamma ray bursters and Lorentzian relativity. That’s about the black hole firewall:

Gamma ray burst image from UCL see Cosmic explosions – detecting the highest energy light

Poplawski is quoted as saying the matter stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding. He also quoted saying this: “Extremely strong gravitational forces near this state cause an intense particle production, increasing the mass inside a black hole by many orders of magnitude and strengthening gravitational repulsion that powers the bounce”. It would seem that Poplawski has never read what Einstein said in 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916, and 1920. Or much else, because strong gravitational fields do not cause particle production, because mass is a measure of energy content and energy is conserved, and because particle production does not result in gravitational repulsion. Sigh.

The bounce is inevitable under the right conditions

Back in the Telegraph article, we can read a quote by Professor Gaztañaga: “We’ve shown that gravitational collapse does not have to end in a singularity and found that a collapsing cloud of matter can reach a high-density state and then bounce, rebounding outward into a new expanding phase”. Could it be that Gaztañaga and Poplawski are co-authors? No they are not. Gaztañaga is also quoted saying this: “What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own. Even more surprisingly, the rebound naturally produces a phase of accelerated expansion driven not by a hypothetical field but by the physics of the bounce itself”.

Image from The Daily Telegraph. Caption: 1: Accretion disc collapses to form black hole with matter crunched down to highly dense point. 2: Matter reaches max density, and bounces back forming universe. 3: The edge of the universe is actually the event horizon of a black hole, from which no light can escape

He goes on to say that he and his co-authors have a have a fully worked-out solution that shows that the bounce is inevitable under the right conditions. Inevitable under the right conditions is, of course, a bit of a cop out. If you didn’t spot that, try this for size: my rise to become leader of the free world is inevitable under the right conditions. But don’t hold your breath.

Defying quantum mechanics

It gets worse, because then comes the quantum mechanics. Apparently the new theory aligns with both general relativity and quantum physics. Which tells me that somebody else has never read anything by Einstein, and hasn’t heard Gerard ‘t Hooft saying quantum mechanics is nonsense. Not only that, but we gert the stupendous claim that “the Black Hole Universe also offers a new perspective on our place in the cosmos. In this framework, our entire observable universe lies inside the interior of a black hole formed in some larger ‘parent’ universe”. Oh boy. Apparently we are not special, we are not witnessing the birth of everything from nothing, but rather “the continuation of a cosmic cycle – one shaped by gravity, quantum mechanics, and the deep interconnections between them”. This isn’t just any old turtle. This is Cosmology and Gravitation turtles all the way down. What a pity that your average cosmologist wouldn’t know what quantum mechanics was if it jumped up and bit him on the arse.

Anomaly of galaxies’ rotation

The article goes on to tell us that recent JWST images showed that two thirds of galaxies were spinning clockwise, with the remaining third spinning anti-clockwise. One alleged explanation for this is that “the universe was born rotating, which would occur if it had been created in the interior of a black hole”. Sigh. And did you know that black holes cannot be seen “because of the strong gravity that is pulling light into the black hole’s centre”? Sigh. Or that each and every black hole could produce a baby universe which is connected to the outside universe by a wormhole? Sigh. Your average cosmologist has never read Einstein and Rosen’s 1935 paper on the particle problem in the theory of general relativity. Your average cosmologist doesn’t know how gravity works either. But no matter, you can read what they say in places like The Conversation, which bills itself as Academic rigour, journalistic flair. That’s where you can read about the “quantum exclusion principle”. That’s the Pauli exclusion principle to you. The one that only applies to fermions. The fermions that disintegrate in a gamma ray burst before they even make it to the event horizon. You can also read that “one of the strengths of this model is that it makes testable predictions. It predicts a small but non-zero amount of positive spatial curvature – meaning the universe is not exactly flat, but slightly curved, like the surface of the Earth”. What a pity WMAP found that space was flat in 2001, and Planck confirmed it in 2018.

Image from the Phys.org article How do we know the universe is flat? by Fraser Cain

Of course it’s flat, because the electromagnetic field is curved space, not the gravitational field. See the Baez preliminaries article dating from 2006: “Similarly, in general relativity gravity is not really a ‘force’, but just a manifestation of the curvature of spacetime. Note: not the curvature of space, but of spacetime. The distinction is crucial”. And in case you didn’t notice, there is no overall electromagnetic field in the universe. By the by, Einstein said a gravitational field is a place where space is neither homogeneous nor isotropic, and modern cosmology says the universe is homogeneous and isotropic. Combine the two, and the universe has no overall gravitational field either. That’s why it didn’t collapse 13.799999 billion years ago.

Gravitational bounce from the quantum exclusion principle

The Conversation article is also given on the University of Portsmouth website. The paper concerned is Gravitational bounce from the quantum exclusion principle. It was published in Physical Review D on the 29^th of May 2025. It’s paywalled, but you can read a preprint. It’s 21 pages, and it’s heavy on the maths, so you might find it tough going. So before you start, I recommend that you read what Einstein said about the speed of light varying with gravitational potential. Here’s an example: “a curvature of rays of light can only occur in a place where the speed of light is spatially variable”. You can find Irwin Shapiro saying much the same thing in 1964: “according to the general theory, the speed of a light wave depends on the strength of the gravitational potential along its path”. Now take a look at Einstein’s 1939 black hole paper. He said light rays “take an infinitely long time (measured in “coordinate time”) in order to reach the point r = μ/2”. That point is the event horizon. The descending light beam slows down, and then it stops. Because at the event horizon, the speed of light is zero. Then since a gravitational field is a place where there’s a vertical gradient in the speed of light and light can’t go slower than stopped, there is no gravitational field inside the event horizon. So there’s no gravitational collapse in there, and no gravitational bounce. The black hole wasn’t called a frozen star for nothing. It isn’t black because the gravitational field pulls back the upward light beam. It’s black because the speed of the upward light beam is zero.

Do we live in a world where the speed of light is zero?

All this is Einstein’s general relativity, and it constitutes a big problem for people who would tell you that the we live inside a black hole. Take a look around you. Do we live in a world where the speed of light is zero? No, we do not. So all of this stuff about the universe being some multiverse of Russian-doll black holes is just pseudoscience garbage. But sadly, too many science editors peddle this crap. Including the Independent, which is now only an online newspaper. Including the Times of India which says “the idea that our universe could exist inside a black hole is no longer confined to science fiction”. Only I am afraid, dear Times of India, that it is science fiction. The University of Portsmouth Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation has a research with us web page. Perhaps I should look into that.

19^th Century cat amongst the pigeons image, source unknown