WHAT if the big bang never happened? Ask cosmologists this and they'll usually tell you it is a stupid question. The evidence, after all, is written in the heavens. Take the way galaxies are scattered across the sky, or witness the fading afterglow of the big bang fireball. Even the way the atoms in your body have come into being over the eons. They are all smoking guns that point to the existence 13.7 billion years ago of an ultra-hot, ultra-dense state known as the big bang.
Or are they? A small band of researchers is starting to ask the question no one is supposed to ask. Last week the dissidents met to review the evidence at the first ever Crisis in Cosmology conference in Monção, Portugal. There they argued that cosmologists' most cherished theory of the universe fails to explain certain crucial observations. If they are right, the universe ...
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