I suppose this belongs in the science and technology forum. I just found these two links to be very interesting and thought I'd share them. Perhaps those of you who know a lot more about this than I do would be willing to share your thoughts.

Ref: Hannes Alfven, 1970 Nobel Prize winner in Physics
ALFVEN VERSUS THE BIG BANG

For 30 years, based on plasma physics, Alfven and his colleagues proposed an alternative cosmology to both the Steady State and the Big Bang cosmologies. While the Big Bang theory was preferred by most astrophysicists for nearly 30 years, it is being challenged by new observations, especially over the last decade. In particular, the discovery of coherent structures of galaxies hundreds of millions of light years in length and the large-scale streaming of superclusters of galaxies at velocities that may approach 1,000 kilometers per second present problems that are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with the Big Bang theory.

To Alfven, the problems being raised were not surprising. "I have never thought that you could obtain the extremely clumpy, heterogeneous universe we have today, strongly affected by plasma processes, from the smooth, homogeneous one of the Big Bang, dominated by gravitation."

The problem with the Big Bang, Alfven believed, is similar to that with Chapman's theories, which the scientific community accepted mistakenly for decades: Astrophysicists have tried too hard to extrapolate the origin of the universe from mathematical theories developed on the blackboard. The appeal of the Big Bang, said Alfven, has been more ideological than scientific. When men think about the universe, there is always a conflict between the mythical approach and the empirical scientific approach. In myth, one tries to deduce how the gods must have created the world - what perfect principles must have been used."

To Alfven, the Big Bang was a myth - a myth devised to explain creation. "I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaitre first proposed this theory," he recalled. Lemaitre was, at the time, both a member of the Catholic hierarchy and an accomplished scientist. He said in private that this theory was a way to reconcile science with St. Thomas Aquinas' theological dictum of creatio ex nihilo or creation out of nothing.

But if there was no Big Bang, how -and when- did the universe begin? "There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time," Alfven explained. "It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago."

"Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion he said. An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not, he admited, be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200" he noted. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science."

Alfven admited that his plasma universe theory may take a long time to penetrate the popular consciousness. "After all," he asserted to a group of physicists, "most people today still believe, perhaps unconsciously, in the heliocentric universe." The group, at first incredulous, quickly nods in agreement as Alfven continueed, "every newspaper in the land has a section on astrology, yet few have anything at all on astronomy."
Full story

And:

The present situation is characterized by rather desperate attempts to reconcile observations with the hypothesis to "save the phenomena." One cannot avoid thinking of the state under the Ptolemaic epoch. An increasing number of ad hoc assumptions are made, which in a way correspond to the Ptolemaic introduction of more and more epicycles and eccentrics. Without caring very much for logical stringency, the agreement between these ad hoc assumptions and the Big Bang hypothesis is often claimed to support the theory.

In reality, with the possible exception of the microwave background condition, there is not a single prediction which has been confirmed. The Big Bang era has seen the discovery of quasars, which have a fantastic release of energy. Unpredicted and explainable only by a precarious mechanism. X-ray astronomy and gamma-ray astronomy have introduced a new era with discoveries of incredibly rapid enormous energy explosions (time constant of a fraction of a second!). Unpredicted again and even post facto difficult to reconcile in the Big Bang cosmology.

The Big Bang is indeed a cosmology of the same character as the Ptolemaic: absolutely sterile. Will it have the same life expectancy?

Long but interesting from Cal Tech

I haven't been researching recently and haven't heard about this...computer problems. I'll have to check it out!