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Big Bang, Big Crunch, Big Headache?

by Elise Matthesen Special to The Gleaner

09-MAR-98 Hardwood ND USA

The universe will end. Not soonтАФperhaps it will take another two hundred billion years or moreтАФbut the universe will end.

Recent findings from astronomers have left scientists with that uncomfortable conclusion. Five separate teams of scientists from
Princeton, Yale, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Harvard have all recently announced studies that show that the
universe, which began with the cosmic explosion called the "big bang" approximately fifteen billion years ago. will expand
forever, until nothing remains throughout space but widely scattered hydrogen atoms and cold rocks.

Scientists investigating the possibility of a future "big crunch," where all the matter in the universe combines to form a single
extremely dense package and then blasts outward in a rerun of the big bang, discovered that the universe contains only twenty
percent of

the mass needed. The universe is "open" and will not "close," they say.

The results of these years-long studies are provoking an uproar among those scientists wedded to the steady state hypothesis, the
notion that the universe is "closed." The skull-splitting question: if the steady state hypothesis is true, at least eighty percent of the
matter in the universe is undetected and undetectable. Where is, they ask, the missing eighty percent of the universe's mass
necessary to bring on the next big crunch/big bang cycle?

Dr. Erwin Rice, director of the Astronomy Department at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, is unsurprised by the
findingsтАФor the furor. At a Macalester College debate in Minneapolis last week on the implications of the study, Rice said,
"These steady staters believe in a universe that goes back and forth like a yoyo. No grand designтАФit's a video game: push the big
bang button and start over."

Rice calls the steady staters' theories "wishful thinking and sloppy scienceтАФlike running another study if you don't like the results
you got the first time." Rice says the five studies are "jointly and severally conclusive" and says, "It proves what we already
know."

Assistant Professor Kim Co-leman of the University of Minnesota's Astronomy Department, speaking at the same gathering, said

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the study doesn't answer as many questions as it raises. "Where did the matter go? Why can't our instruments detect it? If it's gone,