Big Bang Question

by chappy 25 Replies latest jw friends

• 

  circe

  So many points, so little time!

  Pre big bang theory belief held that matter and the universe has always existed. What you're saying is that matter either always existed in a finite point, then becoming the universe as we know it or that matter always is/has been oscillating between the two states.
  Isn't this just a variation of the old belief, leaving us with the same basic question?

  It used to be believed that the universe was infinitely old. Common sense and a few scientific studies have seemingly proven that wrong. Could we be in a cyclic universe? Maybe. The singularity was not matter, it was not space, it was not time (at least that's what I've understood). What scientist do know is that our universe had a beginning. How did something like the singularity come about? They dunno.

  The big bang singularity included everything that later became matter *and* spacetime. At the singularity space and time were meaningless.
  You can't really speculate about where it came "from" because we have no information about anything outside of our universe. Nor can you wonder what came 'before' it, as from our standpoint there was no before.

  This is not a case of a universe of empty space with a tiny point of infinite energy in the center waiting to explode. The big bang was an expansion of space and time and matter. You can wonder if something outside of the universe created the singularity, although 'outside' is not really a meaningful concept here, the universe doesn't have inside and outside.

  EXACTLY!

  I think about these things a lot...
  too much.
  I dont know if people realised my previous post had a treble meaning and was not a frivilous joke.
  I think I want to be a monk, seriously.
  I cant see any way I can ponder these things without interruption.
  If any one knows how I can be an ex-jw monk, please let me know.

  Look into the Buddhist monk variety.

  True indeed, true indeed. Is our universe based on cause and effect?

  I think I know where you're going with this. I'll answer! Yup, our universe is contingent.

  circe
• 

  ballistic

  At what level are we talking here?
  Do you think we are in God's image?
  Or are we in HIS image?
  This question is important.
  Especially considering you last post.
• 

  julien

  As far as I know, nothing just happens!

  Well you would be wrong then. Quantum events 'just happen' all the time. An atomic nucleus can sit there for 100 million years and suddenly just emit an alpha particle out of the blue. More importantly, even in a perfect vacuum, particles (subatomic that is) can spontaneously appear. In fact this is happening continuously. These particles also rapidly disappear. The length of time they stick around is related to the amount of energy they 'borrow' from the void.
• 

  Moxy

  besides seeming absurd to the layperson, the infinities of the big bang singularity have always made physicists and cosmologists a bit uncomfortable. infinities in physical calculations have always tended to be indications that we've been doing something wrong.

  string theorists explain that we can avoid the infinities using superstring theory which posits than nothing can be smaller than the planck length, or more correctly, if anything WERE smaller than the planck length in the familiar visible dimensions, it would stretch out in all those other invisible dimensions they love to talk about, such that the physical properties of the pre-planck universe would kind of flip over such that you couldnt tell them apart from the universe we have now.

  classical physicists think string theorists have just been playing too much Quake but this is kind of a compelling idea because it eliminates the infinities, the infinitely small, infinitely hot. kind of the way special relativity eliminated the infinity of speed. not by putting a speed limit at light exactly, but rather showing that anything that WAS going faster than light would really be going slower than light, but backwards in time. its the same kind of cyclical pattern

  anyways string theory is all a bit esoterical. if you want to take a crack at trying to understand this better than myself, try brian greene's The Elegant Universe.

  Personally i think all such beginning of the universe discussions are so theoretical and speculative that, while fascinating, they are not really useful for questions of philosophy or theology.

  mox
• 

  sleepy

  Although its been mentioned in brief before I just wanted to make the point that the concept phyisicists hold of the BIGBANG is that it is not an explosion but an expansion.
  The two are very different.
  There is evidence that the matter and energy that make up our visible universe were in a low entropy state ie highly ordered state when it was small and densely packed and that the big bang is the decay of that state into a high entropy ,more disordered state . (I hope I got the entropys the right way round)That this happens to highly ordered stuctures is obserevered all the time when things decay they become less ordered due to other real laws of nature.
  So some phyisicsts feal that the universe is more often in an high entropy state and the low one it got into at the beginning of the present universe was due to random fluctuations in the quantum world (sub-atomic)resulting in the highly ordered structure of a singularity.
  I dont know if I belive the above it just represents the view i've seen in some physics books.
• 

  julien

  Although its been mentioned in brief before I just wanted to make the point that the concept phyisicists hold of the BIGBANG is that it is not an explosion but an expansion.

  Thanks for pointing that out. One of the things that really got my attention in the "Creation" book was the (unbelievably bad) argument that the big bang is not logical because explosions (eg bombs) destroy things, not create! Of course you can't just raise your hand and point out how stupid this argument is at the book study.