Jayant Narlikar - Theory Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

View all Jayant Narlikar Quotes
Biologists conventionally think that it is a crazy idea. First they argued that micro organisms cannot last through the passage through UV, X rays, gamma rays. Now people have shown in laboratory experiments that bacteria learn to survive. So that argument doesn't work. People are still not receptive. It is like the heliocentric theory of Copernicus. Biologists are going through the same phase.

Jayant Narlikar
Since the universe is infinitely old, you should see some very old stars. According to the big bang theory the universe is only 13 billion years old. No stars should be older than 13 billion years. In our cosmology, stars older than this should exist. So we are on the lookout for very old stars. We made some observations [a year ago] which we are still trying to explain but the simplest explanation seems to be that there stars that are 20 billion years old.

Jayant Narlikar
In 1963, when I completed my PhD, it was mostly on the steady-state theory using mathematical formulations to describe creation of matter. People always argued that you cannot have matter coming out of nothing, what would happen to the law of conservation of matter. It is a normal criticism of the steady-state theory. One could answer it either in one sentence by saying what is the big-bang theory where the entire universe came out of nothing, so you are violating the law of conservation of matter and energy in a big way. But that would be to point out the weakness of the other theories and not answering your own theory.

Jayant Narlikar
In our theory we have multiple mini bangs and these mini bangs are not mysterious like the big bang but they come because of the concentration of what we call negative energy fields. Whenever there are pockets of negative energy, they explode and produce a mini bang. We believe there's a mini bang producing energy in the centre of quasars, which are very bright star like objects. Gamma ray bursts, which are the explosive creations of gamma rays, are another example of a mini bang. These are actually happening. These can be described by normal physics, but the big bang cannot. The big bang theory does not use any mathematical formulation so they can't say why the bang occurred.

Jayant Narlikar
Found that in a universe that is expanding after a big bang event, neutrinos would turn up at a detector before they were emitted. Only future-going neutrinos were possible in the Steady state cosmology while the ever-expanding big bang models gave neutrinos travelling into Steady State theory to the past.

Jayant Narlikar
The Gran Sasso results could be seen as tentatively offering support for the big bang theory – if we could find a way to test that they are indeed travelling backwards in time.

Jayant Narlikar