title: The Big Bang Never Happened: A Startling Refutation of the Dominant Theory of the Origin of the Universe
author: Eric Lerner
description: Plasma physicist Lerner opens one of science's inner rooms to a popular audience in this headline-making history of time, space and the humanistic sociology of science. Illustrated. <br />Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: **The Anthropic Principle**
  
   **and the Science and**
  
   **Religion Debate**
  
   **John Polkinghorne**
  
   **Summary**
  
  Carbon-based life could only develop in a universe that was remarkably
  specific in its given laws of nature. Possible explanations of this fine-
  tuning appeal either to the conjecture of a multiverse or to the concept of
  creation. This paper weighs up these competing explanations.
  
  The universe we observe today originated, some 13.7 billion years **About the
  Author**
  
  ago, in the singular state of extreme density and temperature that The Revd Dr
  John Polkinghorne KBE FRS
  
  colloquially we call the ‘big bang’. The very early universe was worked in
  theoretical elementary particle
  
  structurally very simple, being an almost uniform expanding ball physics for
  25 years and was previously
  
  of matter/energy. One of the reasons why cosmologists can talk Professor of
  Mathematical Physics at
  
  Cambridge University and then President of with a fair degree of confidence
  about that early 