======================== Fred, Colin and Jayant ======================== Fred Hoyle, Colin Rourke and Jayant Narlikar. :: The Big Bang is an Exploding Myth Jayant Narlikar Fred Hoyle was the original Big Bang sceptic, and founder of the term, Big Bang. Fred Hoyle guided Jayant Narlikar through his doctorate in theoretical cosmology at Cambridge in 1963. Colin Rourke provided a geometric model for the universe. All three are no longer with us. Hoyle died in 2001. It was around that time that Rourke started his work on cosmology, so this was not in time to point Hoyle in the right direction. Rourke died in December 2024, believing it could be another 50 years before the community moves away from the big bang theory. With Rourke's passing it seemed more important than ever for me to explore gravitational waves in the context of his geometric model for the universe. Rourke developed his ideas before the gravitational wave era, although he does mention LIGO in :ref:`gotu`, whilst discussing the sophisticated observational equipment used to support the Big Bang theory. :: Cosmology -- the study of the universe in the large -- is a topic which arouses a great deal of public interest, with serious articles both in the scientific press and in major newspapers, with many of the theories and concepts (eg the ``big bang'' and ``black holes'') discussed, often in depth. The observations that support these discussions use sophisticated and expensive machinery both on the earth (eg the LIGO equipment used to detect gravitational waves) and in orbit around the earth (eg the Hubble telescope). There is a consensus for the theoretical framework supporting and interpreting these observations, which is known as the *standard model*. It starts with the big bang and expands from there to fill the entire visible universe. The image presented is of a complete and full theory that (with a few minor unsolved problems) explains all the observations that we have. This image is (like many images) completely false. There are huge problems with the standard model, some of which will be discussed shortly. It is the aim of this book to present an alternative model to the standard one, which avoids the most glaring of these problems. The model is complete in outline with several topics covered in full detail, including the dynamics of galaxies and the nature of quasars. An issue being raised here is that observations are only being interpretted through a single model. Examples include the Cosmic Microwave Background, quasars and galaxy growth, black hole mergers and kilanova's creating gamma-ray bursts. This is fine if the theory being used is indeed correct. If it is false, then it can lead to many other false beliefs, which quickly manage to re-inforce each other. I am writing this piece to outline an alternative explanation for gravitational waves, which also has Einstein's General relativity at it's heart. When you do General Relativity without the Sciama Principle it is like doing quantum mechanics and ignoring the waves. It turns out much of the time this works really, really well. Notable exceptions are very large masses and masses that are close. Rourke's idea of adding the Sciama Principle to General Relativity is what is needed to unify quantum mechanics and General Relativty. The detection of gravitational waves itself also provides solid evidence for part of the Sciama Principle: if the amplitude of a wave is *m* at some point, then it is magnitude *km/r* at distance *r*. I did exchange several communications with Rourke, discussing gravitational waves. We discussed multi-messenger events and whether the LIGO waves could be the gravitational analogue of gamma-ray bursts, and consistent with both the Sciama Principle and the de Sitter Space model. We also discussed whether the Sciama Principle prevents in-spiral of black holes. We also discussed the Pulsar Timing Array's detection of nano-hertz gravitational waves and how those were consistent with the Sciama Principle and the magnitude of wave we might expect from giant black holes at the edge of the visible universe. Glasgow was an excellent opportunity to explore the world of gravitational wave science and seek out others that might have an interested in static universe theories. Sadly, it was during the conference that I learn of Jayant Narlikar's passing in June 2025. I spoke to a number of researchers from India during the conference, there was a lot of excitement about the prospects for the Indian LIGO. One recalled the quote on Jayant's office door and also broke the news of his passing. It is not clear if Jayant Narlikar was aware of Rourke's work, but he remained confident that the Big Bang theory was a mistake. He explored models based on Hoyle's continuous creation idea. Hoyle had noted that it was only necessary to create one new proton, for every skyscraper sized volume of space, per year, in order to balance the observed expansion. :: >>> from gotu import spiral >>> from astropy import units as u, constants as c >>> skyscraper = (100 * u.m) ** 3 >>> sm = spiral.SkyMap() >>> sm.volume_of_universe / skyscraper >>> suns_per_galaxy = 1e12 >>> (c.m_p * sm.volume_of_universe / skyscraper) / (c.M_sun * suns_per_galaxy) So based on a sky-scraper being a 100m cube, and galaxies of a mass of 1e12 solar masses, we would need 9000 new galaxies arriving each year. The number of large gamma-ray bursts per year that we see each year is somewhat lower than this. There are some details missing from Hoyle's calculation. With a larger Hubble constant, the universe is smaller and the calculation gives a good match, if we also increase sky-scraper height by a factor of 3. :: >>> lcdm = cosmology.FlatLambdaCDM(H0=100, Om0=0.3) >>> lcdm .hubble_distance >>> >>> hd = lcdm.hubble_distance >>> >>> volume_of_the_universe = (pi * 4/3) * (hd**3) >>> >>> ((volume_of_the_universe / skyscraper) * c.m_p / (c.M_sun * suns_per_galaxy)).decompose() >>> skyscraper = ((100 * u.m) ** 3) * 3 >>> ((volume_of_the_universe / skyscraper) * c.m_p / (c.M_sun * suns_per_galaxy)).decompose() There is no continuous creation in Rourke's model for the universe, but there is a continuous replenishment of matter in our visible universe through new arrivals. The idea is that the universe is vast and ancient, a view shared by this trio, myself and many others, including Einstein. It is also curved, that curvature creates a visibility horizon at the Hubble distance. This is what creates the redshift we see, but it also creates blue-shift. When a galaxy becomes visible for the first time, we see it's entire history in a short period of time. Rourke suggests this as an explanation for gamma-ray bursts and provides a model which fits the observations. Is it the same for any gravitational waves that we see? All the gravitational waves it has emitted through it's life time arrive at the same time! There are natural parallels with the merging black hole model. We are seeing the effects of horizons in our visible universe. PTA === Rourke's model can also inform models of galactic potential, the Pulsar Timing Array can help test models and Rourke's belief in a much larger black hole than Sagittarius A*, at the galactic centre, which he suggested might be further.