New study rejects Big Bang theory, says universe grew via cosmic energy bursts

Forget one Big Bang — try many. A bold new theory pokes holes in the popular origin story, suggesting the universe evolves through a series of lightning-fast bursts, rewriting what we know about cosmic expansion.

Rather than a one-time, universe-making explosion, this model envisions the cosmos growing through countless rapid-fire events called temporal singularities.

Each of these brief, invisible bursts injects fresh energy and matter into space, gradually shaping the galaxies, stars, and structures we see today — no dark matter or dark energy required.

This alternative framework, published by Dr. Richard Lieu, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, challenges long-held assumptions in cosmology.

In his new paper, Lieu argues that these singularities, though unobservable, could be the true engines of cosmic evolution, offering a radically different explanation for how the universe expands and organizes itself.

The paper builds on Lieu’s 2024 model, which controversially proposed that gravity might exist without mass — a theory that sparked intense debate and drew over 41,000 reads.

The latest version refines that idea, introducing temporal singularities as a more complete alternative to the Big Bang, and dropping the need for invisible cosmic ingredients that have long puzzled scientists.

Revised model for cosmic expansion

“The new model can account for both structure formation and stability, and the key observational properties of the expansion of the universe at large, by enlisting density singularities in time that uniformly affect all space to replace conventional dark matter and dark energy,” Lieu said.

According to Lieu, this series of step-like bursts happens so rapidly that they are difficult to observe as these singularities wink in and out of existence.

Lieu also references Sir Fred Hoyle’s opposition to the Big Bang, noting that Hoyle’s steady-state model proposed constant creation of matter and energy, which conflicted with mass-energy conservation laws.

“But that hypothesis violates the law of mass-energy conservation. In the current theory, the conjecture is for matter and energy to appear and disappear in sudden bursts and, interestingly enough, there is no violation of conservation laws,” he said.

“These singularities are unobservable because they occur rarely in time and are unresolvedly fast, and that could be the reason why dark matter and dark energy have not been found. The origin of these temporal singularities is unknown – safe to say that the same is true of the moment of the Big Bang itself.”

Space-wide singularities and negative pressure

These space-wide singularities, acting as stand-ins for dark matter, also produce what’s known as negative pressure — a form of energy density similar to dark energy. This repulsive force pushes against gravity, driving the universe to expand at an accelerating rate.

“Einstein also postulated negative pressure in his 1917 paper on the Cosmological Constant. When positive mass-energy density is combined with negative pressure, there are some restrictions which ensure the mass-energy density remains positive with respect to any uniformly moving observer, so the negative density assumption is avoided in the new model,” Lieu said.

Fleeting forces and cosmic expansion

The new theory argues that dark matter and dark energy are not omnipresent, but appear only during brief instances when matter and energy fill the universe uniformly, aside from small spatial fluctuations that eventually grow into galaxies and other structures. Outside of these fleeting moments, the forces are entirely absent.

A key difference between this model and the standard one is its treatment of temporal singularities. While the standard cosmological model assumes a single event — the Big Bang — this framework proposes that such bursts occur multiple times across the universe’s history.

Future efforts to validate the theory could rely on data from Earth-bound instruments, rather than space telescopes like the James Webb.

The paper has been published in Classical and Quantum Gravity.