"Where does all this rocky material come from in the first place is what I always ask." - Rufus
The abandoned - tentatively returning - Steady State theory proffers the same question, Rufus. It seems that the human mind demands a beginning and ending to everything and imposes that demand on the existential universe. Hence, the 'big bang' and 'big rip' suppositions.
The Steady State maintains there's no beginning or end, and that all the rocky material didn't come out of nowhere, but has always been here... ('The center is everywhere'; no common center, no 'big bang beginning'. Keeping in mind that the Standard Theory 'big bang' has been 'revised' a lot since it's outset; now incorporating *LCDM - Einstein's 'abandoned' Cosmological Constant' - '*Lambda Cold Dark Matter', and dismissing a common center, which it originally adovcated, under Lemaitre's first introduction.)
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SteadyState: no 'bang', no 'crunch', no 'rip'. 'Center point mass'.
4-D accelerating expansion to macrocosmic infinity.
The same quantity of energy, distributed over an ever increasing space, squared.
(Without infringement on the law of conservation of mass-energy.)
This perspective anticipates a return of the abandoned Steady State universe.
Discarding any need for the 'spontanous creation of Hydrogen' to compensate for what would otherwise be the decreased density of the overall expanding universe.
Whereas, 'cosmic background radiation' is the signature of any expanding universe scenario, where earlier eras of the expanding universe were inevitably more dense.
In the proposed interpretation of matter as a continuously expanding field, there is no 'big bang', 'big crunch', or 'big rip'. The materially and spatially expanding universe maintains the same relative density, from the infinite past to the infinite future, ergo: 'Steady State'.
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The Standard Theory status is aversive to the concept of 'always been here'.
Meanwhile, the
alternative to the infinite residency of matter is that it
emerged out of 'nothing'. Contradicting the philosophical axiom by Hume and Locke, that, 'Nothing begets nothing'.
Best regards,
- RP