From Martin Baker
Eric Lerner comments that virtually all financial and experimental resources in cosmology are devoted to big bang studies (22 May, p 20). I would interested to know if the Hubble Space Telescope and the COBE and WMAP microwave background probes would have been designed differently if the prevailing cosmological paradigm was not the hot big bang, but instead a plasma cosmology or a quasi-steady-state model.
I suspect not. Whichever model appears to steer the experiment, surely the principal task of collecting evidence on apparent galactic red shifts and the structure of background microwave radiation remains the same. It might be appropriate to consider the following wise observation:
“In the beginning, when a new instrument is proposed, humans control the scientific programme completely. But, as the instrument is constructed, it is as if humans exercise less and less control, until in the end it is the instrument that overrides the humans who service it and those who use it.” (Fred Hoyle, Geoffrey Burbidge and Jayant Narlikar, A Different Approach to Cosmology, Cambridge University Press)
Musselburgh, Midlothian, UK
