Welcome back to no. The lithium problem didn't just kill the big bang or liar liar big bang denier. Part two. Today's target, the inconvenient truth that breaks the leading big bang model. A supposed devastating takedown of the Big Bang model courtesy of the enormous channel Astrum. Now, I like Astrum. It's a great channel. They have some great content on that channel.

I was really quite surprised by this so called takedown of the entire Big Bang framework, which he claims is occurring because of the so called lithium problem. Now spoiler alert, I already took down Eric Lerner, who does much more divisive and intrusive work on his channel where he hawks his fusion research and appeals to you to support it. Today's video is slightly different because the content is much richer, it's much more well done, and it's much more persuasive, which also leads it to being much more problematic in some sense. And I'm hoping Astra will see this video and maybe take the time to react to it from a working professional and consult with working professionals. Not just me, but my colleagues who work on the lithium problem and the CMB, both of which are in consonance with the leading big bang model. And there's a sleight of hand that Astra uses at the end that I'll be talking about where he brings in the work of Stephen Hawking in a way that's completely irrelevant to the point that he's trying to make. So today's supposed theory wrecking inconvenient truth is, you guessed it, lithium. Because nothing says universe shattering discovery like the metal that they won't let you bring on airplanes.

According to Astrum, the Big Bang model is in serious trouble. It's like a giant cosmic jigsaw puzzle. And guess what? We found a piece that doesn't fit in. Well, that would be bad if it's one of my kids 10 piece puzzles, but in this case it's one piece out of literally tens of thousands. Tens of thousands that fit perfectly. The translation is we found a minor inconsistency and let's pretend that the whole thing is under question and crumbling down. That's more of what Lerner does in the video that I did previously. This one's more subtle.

First of all, where's all the lithium? Great question. And actually, Ashram does a wonderful job illustrating, animating, and displaying what lithium is and how it's predicted to be formed in trace amounts after the Big Bang. Now trace amounts is much much smaller than you could even imagine because the abundance relative to hydrogen and helium, which make up over 99% of what's produced in the Big Bang process and their isotopes, lithium is fractions of parts parts per million, even less parts per billion. And clearly modern cosmology, just by fact that it can make predictions of an abundance at the parts per billion level, is a spectacular success and not the fraud that Eric Lerner and others make it out to be. But there might be more to the story, and I think it warrants further exploration. Let's do a quick chemistry lesson as Astrid does very well in his channel, and I want to recommend his channel overall except for this one problematic video, which you should watch in in order to see how the science communication can sometimes be used to slip in some pieces of disinformation or doubt rather. And stay tuned for later when I'm going to explore where he actually tries to bring in and evoke past guest Roger Penrose in front of the show to substantiate that this is actually a big problem. It's not.

So lithium is formed in tiny amounts during big bang nucleosynthesis right along hydrogen and helium and their isotopes. There's three isotopes of hydrogen, so called protium with one proton, no neutrons, Deuterium with one neutron and tritium with three neutrons. And then there's helium three and helium four with either one or two neutrons respectively. Now, we don't find one of the isotopes of lithium, the two isotopes lithium seven, lithium six. We don't find them in the exact right amount. So not only is the big bang under attack, but because the big bang is one of the most spectacularly tested theories in all of science, all of science could be under attack. Let's rewind a bit and go back. The big bang model is based on physics.

I'm an astrophysicist. My degree is in physics, experimental physics to be exact. Astrophysics is the application of the laws of physics which cover everything from quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, thermodynamics, solid state physics, condensed matter physics, and many many other subtopics. The only part of physics that's not contained within cosmology, as I joke with my students, is biophysics. And even if we search for aliens and alien life potential, maybe I'll throw in some biophysics as well. But the Big Bang model predicts the abundance of hydrogen and helium at just a fraction of a second. Some one millionth to one hundred millionth of a second after the big bang. Now the foreshadowing to Stephen Hawking is when there's a question of whether or not the big bang was a singularity.