NationStates Jolt Archive

I've noticed many people here don't like the idea of the Big Bang. So, I'm going to lay out the actual theory behind it (as opposed to the things creationists hand you on sidewalks that "prove" it's impossible), then we can debate it.


1: Matter, when sufficiently compressed, loses its identity. Elements cease to exist, as do protons, neutrons, and electrons, as do the subcomponents of those--quarks and gluons. Things of this sort occur in many situations: at or aproaching 0Kelvins (no heat whatsoever--heat being described as vibrations in particles) (I think, though I'm not sure in this particular case); in black holes; in the origins of the universe.

1a: Matter is almost entirely empty space, and is composed of the identity-less basics described above. If one eliminates nuclear fields (the things that give atoms their shape), there is almost no limit to how much you can compress matter.

2: The universe has a finite size that is increasing at an increasing rate.

3: The universe is increasing in size according to the following principal:

Say you are Mr. Flat. You live in a universe described by an expanding baloon. You live on the surface of the baloon. Looking out into the distance, you see that a dot on the baloon is moving away from you. You look the other way, and see the same thing. You see that things that are futher away are getting further away even faster than the closer things. Yet, looking down, you can tell that you aren't moving.

That 2-dimensional surface of the balloon represents our 3-dimensional universe. The universe itsself is getting bigger. It isn't expanding into anywhere, because where is only defined inside the universe.

The universe is getting bigger everywhere, all the time. So if you have something twice as far away as something closer, the distance between you will be increasing twice as fast.

3a: Clusters of galaxies occur where the mutual attractive forces (gravity) are great enough to overcome the expansion rate of the universe.

4: If the universe is increasing in size as described above, then going the other way in time, it must have been decreasing in size in the opposite way from the one described above.

5: [This has been revised. Original text at the end of the post]
A black hole is defined as being an object so dense that, at its surface, the gravitational force field is so strong light cannot escape. Wikipedia on black holes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole . Black holes have something called an event horizon, which is a sphere around the center of the black hole within which light cannot escape.

As one nears the event horizon of a black hole, time dilation occurs. This is the process in which a hypothetical "inside" observer, who is approaching the black hole, experiences time much more slowly than an "outside" observer watching the event. At or inside the event horizon, time dilation has made so much of a difference that the inside observer could experience a second in the time it took for the universe to come to end.

5a: The universe at the time of the Big Bang was incredibly dense. It would be impossible to be in the universe and not be inside its event horizon. For the universe at the time of the Big Bang, time is 0.

6: So, what does this all mean? The universe has been demonstrated to be expanding from a central point. At that central point, it is likely that time did not exist in a measurable form. Before and after have no meaning. The matter was always there, because there was no time before it wasn't there. The moment time began is when BANG! the universe itsself began to expand at an incredible rate.

From the rate at which the rate of the universe's increase is increasing (f''(x), for those who understand differentiation...) we can calculate when that time was, and have approximated it around 13.5 billion years, give or take.
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If anybody has any questions, feel free to ask. If anybody notes something in this I screwed up, or should adress that I didn't, please point it out. If you actually read and understand the above essay, and still don't think it's possible, say why.

-Feil

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EDIT: The following section 5 I have realised is incorrect. I will be updating section 5 as time and research allows. The reason why it is incorrect is described in my second post on this page.

Please note again that although all the parts of section 5 are correct in themselves, in 5d I make the mistake of assuming temperature up means heat up, and draw a conclusion from that. Temperature can increase without increasing internal energy (heat), so the conclusion is false even though all the steps are correct.

5: As something with a certain amount of energy is decreased in volume, the amount of energy remains the same, and volume decreases. Temperature is energy (heat) over volume. So as the volume decreases, heat increases. (This principle is used by your refrigerator. A large volume of air is compressed, then passed through a radiator, where it radiates heat until temperature iniside the radiator equals temperature outside the radiator. The air thus loses heat. When it is increased in volume again, the temperature decreases, making it possible for you to keep ice cream frozen when it is 90 degrees outside. This is also why if you feel near the bottom of the refrigerator (usually), it feels hot not cold.)

5a: Heat is internal vibrational energy. Vibration occurs when molecules are excited by energy and bounce against other molecules in a substance. Movement is present.

5b: As heat increases, speed movement increases proportionately.

5c: As speed approaches the speed of light, passage of time from the frame of reference of the object increasing in speed approaches zero.

5d: Therefore, if you compress enough matter with enough energy into a small enough space, it will heat up tremendously, eventually causing the matter inside to approach the speed of light. Time from the frame of reference of an observer inside the space approaches zero.

EDIT2: I have now placed the correct section 5 in.

Nobody's biting. I think you made a bullet-proof post, Feil! B-) Congrats!

But...but...


the BIBLE, man!

Think of the Children!


THEY'RE LIVING IN SIN!!!!!!!1111oneoneoneoenoe!!!


All in all, a very good, well-thought out post, though maybe a bit over the heads of the avarage person?

All in all, a very good, well-thought out post, though maybe a bit over the heads of the avarage person?

Anyone who knows even the basics of atomic science (atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are held together by the nuclear force, etc) will be able to understand this.

Anyone who knows even the basics of atomic science (atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which are held together by the nuclear force, etc) will be able to understand this.

What I meant was, while I managed to grasp it, my eyes glazed over a tad, and I wouldn't know how to begin to refute this, as I'm not well-versed in the theories behind which these observations are based.

Then again, I'm in physics this semester. I took chem last year, but that was a long time ago, and Bio even further, so if you want to discuss light and sound and the wave natures of each......

an attempt at an informed and rational discussion

On NS General?

"Science and religion [are] no longer seen as incompatible."— The Daily Telegraph, London, May 26, 1999.

BOTH science and religion, in their noblest forms, involve the search for truth. Science discovers a world of magnificent order, a universe that contains distinctive marks of intelligent design. True religion makes these discoveries meaningful by teaching that the mind of the Creator lies behind the design manifest in the physical world.

What the Big Bang Explains—
What It Doesn't
EVERY morning is a miracle. Deep inside the morning sun, hydrogen is being fused into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees. X rays and gamma rays of incredible violence are pouring out of the core into the surrounding layers of the sun. If the sun were transparent, these rays would blast their way to the surface in a few searing seconds. Instead, they begin to bounce from tightly packed atom to atom of solar "insulation," gradually losing energy. Days, weeks, centuries, pass. Thousands of years later, that once deadly radiation finally emerges from the sun's surface as a gentle shower of yellow light—no longer a menace but just right for bathing earth with its warmth.

Every night is a miracle too. Other suns twinkle at us across the vast expanse of our galaxy. They are a riot of colors, sizes, temperatures, and densities. Some are supergiants so large that if one were centered in the position of our sun, what remained of our planet would be inside the surface of that superstar. Other suns are tiny, white dwarfs—smaller than our earth, yet as heavy as our sun. Some will peacefully drone along for billions of years. Others are poised on the brink of supernova explosions that will obliterate them, briefly outshining entire galaxies.

Primitive peoples spoke of sea monsters and battling gods, of dragons and turtles and elephants, of lotus flowers and dreaming gods. Later, during the so-called Age of Reason, the gods were swept aside by the newfound "magic" of calculus and Newton's laws. Now we live in an age bereft of the old poetry and legend. The children of today's atomic age have chosen as their paradigm for creation, not the ancient sea monster, not Newton's "machine," but that overarching symbol of the 20th century—the bomb. Their "creator" is an explosion. They call their cosmic fireball the big bang.


What the Big Bang "Explains"
The most popular version of this generation's view of creation states that some 15 to 20 billion years ago, the universe did not exist, nor did empty space. There was no time, no matter—nothing except an infinitely dense, infinitely small point called a singularity, which exploded into the present universe. That explosion included a brief period during the first tiny fraction of a second when the infant universe inflated, or expanded, much faster than the speed of light.

During the first few minutes of the big bang, nuclear fusion took place on a universal scale, giving rise to the currently measured concentrations of hydrogen and helium and at least part of the lithium in interstellar space. After perhaps 300,000 years, the universewide fireball dropped to a little below the temperature of the surface of the sun, allowing electrons to settle into orbits around atoms and releasing a flash of photons, or light. That primordial flash can be measured today, although greatly cooled off, as universal background radiation at microwave frequencies corresponding to a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin.* In fact, it was the discovery of this background radiation in 1964-65 that convinced most scientists that there was something to the big bang theory. The theory also claims to explain why the universe appears to be expanding in all directions, with distant galaxies apparently racing away from us and from each other at high speed.

Since the big bang theory appears to explain so much, why doubt it? Because there is also much that it does not explain. To illustrate: The ancient astronomer Ptolemy had a theory that the sun and planets went around the earth in large circles, making small circles, called epicycles, at the same time. The theory appeared to explain the motion of the planets. For centuries as astronomers gathered more data, the Ptolemaic cosmologists could always add extra epicycles onto their other epicycles and "explain" the new data. But that did not mean the theory was correct. Ultimately there was just too much data to account for, and other theories, such as Copernicus' idea that the earth went around the sun, explained things better and more simply. Today it is hard to find a Ptolemaic astronomer!

Professor Fred Hoyle likened the efforts of the Ptolemaic cosmologists at patching up their failing theory in the face of new discoveries to the endeavors of big bang believers today to keep their theory afloat. He wrote in his book The Intelligent Universe: "The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome." After referring to Ptolemy's futile use of epicycles to rescue his theory, Hoyle continued: "I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers."—Page 186.

The New Scientist magazine of December 22/29, 1990, echoed similar thoughts: "The Ptolemaic method has been lavishly applied to . . . the big bang cosmological model." It then asks: "How can we achieve real progress in particle physics and cosmology? . . . We must be more honest and forthright about the purely speculative nature of some of our most cherished assumptions." New observations are now pouring in.

Questions the Big Bang Does Not Answer
A major challenge to the big bang has come from observers using the corrected optics of the Hubble Space Telescope to measure distances to other galaxies. The new data is giving the theorists fits!

Astronomer Wendy Freedman and others recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance to a galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, and her measurement suggests that the universe is expanding faster, and therefore is younger, than previously thought. In fact, it "implies a cosmic age as little as eight billion years," reported Scientific American magazine just last June. While eight billion years sounds like a very long time, it is only about half the currently estimated age of the universe. This creates a special problem, since, as the report goes on to note, "other data indicate that certain stars are at least 14 billion years old." If Freedman's numbers hold up, those elderly stars would turn out to be older than the big bang itself!

Still another problem for the big bang has come from steadily mounting evidence of "bubbles" in the universe that are 100 million light-years in size, with galaxies on the outside and voids inside. Margaret Geller, John Huchra, and others at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found what they call a great wall of galaxies some 500 million light-years in length across the northern sky. Another group of astronomers, who became known as the Seven Samurai, have found evidence of a different cosmic conglomeration, which they call the Great Attractor, located near the southern constellations of Hydra and Centaurus. Astronomers Marc Postman and Tod Lauer believe something even bigger must lie beyond the constellation Orion, causing hundreds of galaxies, including ours, to stream in that direction like rafts on a sort of "river in space."

All this structure is baffling. Cosmologists say the blast from the big bang was extremely smooth and uniform, according to the background radiation it allegedly left behind. How could such a smooth start have led to such massive and complex structures? "The latest crop of walls and attractors intensifies the mystery of how so much structure could have formed within the 15-billion-year age of the universe," admits Scientific American—a problem that only gets worse as Freedman and others roll back the estimated age of the cosmos still more.

The Light-Year—A Cosmic Yardstick
The universe is so big that measuring it in miles or kilometers is like measuring the distance from London to Tokyo with a micrometer. A more convenient unit of measurement is the light-year, the distance that light travels in a year, or about 5,880,000,000,000 miles [9,460,000,000,000 km]. Since light is the fastest thing in the universe and requires only 1.3 seconds to travel to the moon and about 8 minutes to the sun, a light-year would seem to be truly enormous!


"We Are Missing Some Fundamental Element"
Geller's three-dimensional maps of thousands of clumped, tangled, and bubbled galactic agglomerations have transformed the way scientists picture the universe. She does not pretend to understand what she sees. Gravity alone appears unable to account for her great wall. "I often feel we are missing some fundamental element in our attempts to understand this structure," she admits.

Geller enlarged on her misgivings: "We clearly do not know how to make large structure in the context of the Big Bang." Interpretations of cosmic structure on the basis of current mapping of the heavens are far from definitive—more like trying to picture the whole world from a survey of Rhode Island, U.S.A. Geller continued: "Someday we may find that we haven't been putting the pieces together in the right way, and when we do, it will seem so obvious that we'll wonder why we hadn't thought of it much sooner."

That leads to the biggest question of all: What is supposed to have caused the big bang itself? No less an authority than Andrei Linde, one of the originators of the very popular inflationary version of the big bang theory, frankly admits that the standard theory does not address this fundamental question. "The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang," he says. "One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? . . . Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology."

An article in Discover magazine recently concluded that "no reasonable cosmologist would claim that the Big Bang is the ultimate theory."



http://watchtower.org/library/g/2002/6/8/article_01.htm, http://www.watchtower.org/library/g/1996/1/22/awesome_universe.htm

OK... I was out shopping a few minutes ago when I had an oh sh*t moment...

I'm pretty sure the slowing of time can't be due (only) to an increase in temperature, because that varies with volume. Heat remains constant, assuming there's not sufficient background radiation to make a difference, so vibration shouldn't increase that much unless I'm forgetting something.

On the other hand I'm pretty sure that time slows and stops in black holes, so this might be something similar. I'll do some reasearch.

Unfortunately, dinner is burning. So I'll do research later.

-Feil

OK... I was out shopping a few minutes ago when I had an oh sh*t moment...

I'm pretty sure the slowing of time can't be due (only) to an increase in temperature, because that varies with volume. Heat remains constant, assuming there's not sufficient background radiation to make a difference, so vibration shouldn't increase that much unless I'm forgetting something.

On the other hand I'm pretty sure that time slows and stops in black holes, so this might be something similar. I'll do some reasearch.

Unfortunately, dinner is burning. So I'll do research later.

-Feil

hmm... supposedly, a black hole infinitely stretches your mass... or, in otherwords, makes your mass infinite. This is a symptom of light-speed travel, which leads to the slowing of time. So i believe as long as it becomes EXTREMELY dense, time should slow down and come to a halt at that point.

Another way of explaining it is via Einstein's Theorem's:

Gravity is Mass's method of WARPING the time-space continuum (aka, space and time grid). The more mass/volume (aka, density), the more of a warp occurs. Therefore, an infinite density (such as a black hole or "big bang"-like point of infinite mass) should warp the space-time continuum enough to cause time to stop.


On Einstein's Theories:

Einstein had his own theory about the Big Bang. He stated that the universe is created because of the warping of space-time around bodies of mass, and that it will all come back around and the warping will work (instead of to expand) to crush space back into the infinite point. (I'm not sure of the exact science behind Einstein's theory, but it's similar to the dark-matter theory, that states the Big Crunch)

It's not the Big Bang that I reject, I think it was fully possible and I think it's one of the better theories out there - my inquiries stem from the question: What was there *before* the Big Bang? ???

It's not the Big Bang that I reject, I think it was fully possible and I think it's one of the better theories out there - my inquiries stem from the question: What was there *before* the Big Bang? ???

Some say the big bang is a recurring, infinite cycle... so before the big bang, there was a universe that had gone through the "Big Crunch"

Some say the big bang is a recurring, infinite cycle... so before the big bang, there was a universe that had gone through the "Big Crunch"

There is no before before the big bang. :D

Some say the big bang is a recurring, infinite cycle... so before the big bang, there was a universe that had gone through the "Big Crunch"
Oh yea, the Big Crunch - I almost forgot about this. But then if it's that infinite cycle, how did it get started? A paradox, this conundrum is - infinity makes my head spin...

It's not the Big Bang that I reject, I think it was fully possible and I think it's one of the better theories out there - my inquiries stem from the question: What was there *before* the Big Bang? ???

You assume that the big bang did not occur at the beginning of time, or that time must extend infinitely (backwards at least).

"The Big Bang: an attempt at an informed and rational discussion"

[NS]Oxymoron

But then if it's that infinite cycle, how did it get started?

If it's an infinite cycle it wasn't started, it always has been and always will be.

hmm... supposedly, a black hole infinitely stretches your mass... or, in otherwords, makes your mass infinite. This is a symptom of light-speed travel, which leads to the slowing of time. So i believe as long as it becomes EXTREMELY dense, time should slow down and come to a halt at that point.

Another way of explaining it is via Einstein's Theorem's:

Gravity is Mass's method of WARPING the time-space continuum (aka, space and time grid). The more mass/volume (aka, density), the more of a warp occurs. Therefore, an infinite density (such as a black hole or "big bang"-like point of infinite mass) should warp the space-time continuum enough to cause time to stop.


On Einstein's Theories:

Einstein had his own theory about the Big Bang. He stated that the universe is created because of the warping of space-time around bodies of mass, and that it will all come back around and the warping will work (instead of to expand) to crush space back into the infinite point. (I'm not sure of the exact science behind Einstein's theory, but it's similar to the dark-matter theory, that states the Big Crunch)

As to the first paragraph...You make a couple errors... mass doesn't change, just density. Otherwise there would be violation of conservation of mass and energy, which gets very messy very fast.

The second bit, though, is right on. I'm pretty sure you're right, and it'll make my searching a good bit more easy. Thanks.

I will be editing the original post as I find out what the truth is, correcting my error. Unfortunately, it'll take it a little farther from the easy-to-understand, but meh.
---

As to the last paragraph... the universe is increasing in size at an increasing rate. (This caused quite a stir in the cosmology community in the late '90s, prompted the speculation about dark energy, made the age of the universe be revised down about 1.5 billion years, and generally made everybody very confused.)

I would guess that Einstein's idea about the big crunch was a product of knowing that the universe had originated in a big bang, and speculating on what could have come before. It doesn't seem to work with modern knowledge, though.
---

As to what came "before" the Big Bang.

First, get it through your head that time=space=time.
Next, that time is not constant from an interior frame of reference.

Precisely speaking, as one approaches the speed of light (~3.00(10)^8m/s), or a black hole (object so dense that at the surface the force of gravity is sufficient to keep light from escaping), time, for an observer at the speed/in the black hole does not pass. Things can happen, but the time they are percieved to happen at has absolutely no relation to an "outside" world.

Since everything at the time of the Big Bang would be subjected to the same gravitational speed and be at the same temperature, time for anything in the universe at that time would be nonexistant.

Before, then, is meaningless. The universe existed because it existed. There was no "before" the Big Bang because before the Big Bang, there was no time. Conversely, you can say the universe before the Big Bang existed for a eternity that was precisely 0 seconds long.

Or you could say God caused it, or that it was sneezed out of the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure.


EDIT: To those saying that it's impossible to have a rational discussion here...
Strange. I seem to note that everything posted here, with the exception of your posts, has been level, rational, and reasonably intelligent.

EDIT 2: Before the "science doesn't neccessarily contradict religion" crowd attacks me. I didn't say that. It's possible to believe in religion quite validly from observed evidence, shored up by a hefty boost of faith. People who think the Big Bang theory is false, and the Big Bang theory, however, are very much at odds. Hence the purpose of this thread.

There is no before before the big bang. :D

I have some sympathy with that view. Just ask yourself what it was like before you were born.

It's impossible for human beings to conceive of the infinite, as our brains are conditioned only to understand things which operate within the boundries of time. If we get to a point where time itself doesn't exist, then we can't handle it.

What I mean is, certainly we can theorise and say that there is no time in cetain places, or that the infinite does exist, but it's beyond our capabilities to imagine it.

It's impossible for human beings to conceive of the infinite, as our brains are conditioned only to understand things which operate within the boundries of time. If we get to a point where time itself doesn't exist, then we can't handle it.

What I mean is, certainly we can theorise and say that there is no time in cetain places, or that the infinite does exist, but it's beyond our capabilities to imagine it.

Physicists make a decent try at it. Here's a way for us plebs to at least get near the idea, sloppy though it is:
Imagine a golden beach that stretches as far as the horizon on each side and is half a mile wide. Now imagine a seagull dropping down from the clouds once a year to collect one single grain of sand. When that (very old) gull has emptied the beach, you're just beginning the infinite journey.

It's impossible for human beings to conceive of the infinite, as our brains are conditioned only to understand things which operate within the boundries of time. If we get to a point where time itself doesn't exist, then we can't handle it.

What I mean is, certainly we can theorise and say that there is no time in cetain places, or that the infinite does exist, but it's beyond our capabilities to imagine it.

One can actually get around the mental barier something like this:

Say you're on a spaceship. You have a watch and a speedometer that measures your velocity relative to the sun (nevermind how it works). Your friend on earth has a watch.

The speedometer reads 150,000 km/s (roughly half the speed of light). Your watch reads 12:00pm. Your friend's watch reads 12:00pm

Zip around the solar system for a while, then call your friend when your watch reads 1:00pm.

He tells you that his watch reads 1:15pm.

You hit the gas. Your speedometer now reads 299,760km/s (roughly 99.99% the speed of light).

Fly around until your watch reads 2:00pm. Remember, an hour (to you) ago, your friend's watch read 1:15.

Call your friend. He tells you that his watch reads 3:15pm. Two hours have passed for him in the time you experienced as a single hour.

Hit the gas again. Your speedometer now reads 299,789 km/s (About 3.5km/s slower than light).

Fly around until your watch reads 3:00pm. Remeber, an hour (to you) ago, your friend's watch read 3:15pm.

Call your friend. He tells you that it's been two weeks since you last called.

Hit the gas again. Your speedometer now reads 299,792.4579 km/hr (the speed of light in a vacuum minus 0.1 m/s). Drive around for an hour.

Don't bother calling your friend. He's been dead for a billion years.
---

That's time dilation. The same thing happens when you are in a huge gravitational field, as was described by Neo Nuria.

Erm...Since when are creationists opposed to the idea of a Big Bang? Personally, I find it the ultimate proof of the Lord's power and wisdom. It's an event that is so enormous, yet so intricately detailed. It happened on a massive scale, but for it to occur an incredible array of precise activities had to occcur.

Erm...Since when are creationists opposed to the idea of a Big Bang? Personally, I find it the ultimate proof of the Lord's power and wisdom. It's an event that is so enormous, yet so intricately detailed. It happened on a massive scale, but for it to occur an incredible array of precise activities had to occcur.

Scientifically enlightened Christians such as yourself are what makes me not give up and die.

Unfortunately, there are many, many people who hate the very idea of it, because if they accept it, that means accepting a universe that is billions of years old.

For as many as hate it, there are a thousand that don't understand it. Since it's a tough consept to understand, many people accept pseudoscience that they have been told by people trying to convince them, and many more just never get tought the theory behind it at all. I'd guess maybe one in a hundred high school science teachers (at least in the US) actually understand the Big Bang theory.

Since they don't understand it, they think its idiocy and often argue against it.


EDIT:
Nobody's biting. I think you made a bullet-proof post, Feil! B-) Congrats!

Thanks.

One can actually get around the mental barier something like this:

Say you're on a spaceship. You have a watch and a speedometer that measures your velocity relative to the sun (nevermind how it works). Your friend on earth has a watch.

The speedometer reads 150,000 km/s (roughly half the speed of light). Your watch reads 12:00pm. Your friend's watch reads 12:00pm

Zip around the solar system for a while, then call your friend when your watch reads 1:00pm.

He tells you that his watch reads 1:15pm.

You hit the gas. Your speedometer now reads 299,760km/s (roughly 99.99% the speed of light).

Fly around until your watch reads 2:00pm. Remember, an hour (to you) ago, your friend's watch read 1:15.

Call your friend. He tells you that his watch reads 3:15pm. Two hours have passed for him in the time you experienced as a single hour.

Hit the gas again. Your speedometer now reads 299,789 km/s (About 3.5km/s slower than light).

Fly around until your watch reads 3:00pm. Remeber, an hour (to you) ago, your friend's watch read 3:15pm.

Call your friend. He tells you that it's been two weeks since you last called.

Hit the gas again. Your speedometer now reads 299,792.4579 km/hr (the speed of light in a vacuum minus 0.1 m/s). Drive around for an hour.

Don't bother calling your friend. He's been dead for a billion years.
*Head Explodes*

*Head Explodes*


Relatively?

"Science and religion [are] no longer seen as incompatible."— The Daily Telegraph, London, May 26, 1999.

BOTH science and religion, in their noblest forms, involve the search for truth. Science discovers a world of magnificent order, a universe that contains distinctive marks of intelligent design. True religion makes these discoveries meaningful by teaching that the mind of the Creator lies behind the design manifest in the physical world.

What the Big Bang Explains—
What It Doesn't
EVERY morning is a miracle. Deep inside the morning sun, hydrogen is being fused into helium at temperatures of millions of degrees. X rays and gamma rays of incredible violence are pouring out of the core into the surrounding layers of the sun. If the sun were transparent, these rays would blast their way to the surface in a few searing seconds. Instead, they begin to bounce from tightly packed atom to atom of solar "insulation," gradually losing energy. Days, weeks, centuries, pass. Thousands of years later, that once deadly radiation finally emerges from the sun's surface as a gentle shower of yellow light—no longer a menace but just right for bathing earth with its warmth.

Every night is a miracle too. Other suns twinkle at us across the vast expanse of our galaxy. They are a riot of colors, sizes, temperatures, and densities. Some are supergiants so large that if one were centered in the position of our sun, what remained of our planet would be inside the surface of that superstar. Other suns are tiny, white dwarfs—smaller than our earth, yet as heavy as our sun. Some will peacefully drone along for billions of years. Others are poised on the brink of supernova explosions that will obliterate them, briefly outshining entire galaxies.

Primitive peoples spoke of sea monsters and battling gods, of dragons and turtles and elephants, of lotus flowers and dreaming gods. Later, during the so-called Age of Reason, the gods were swept aside by the newfound "magic" of calculus and Newton's laws. Now we live in an age bereft of the old poetry and legend. The children of today's atomic age have chosen as their paradigm for creation, not the ancient sea monster, not Newton's "machine," but that overarching symbol of the 20th century—the bomb. Their "creator" is an explosion. They call their cosmic fireball the big bang.


What the Big Bang "Explains"
The most popular version of this generation's view of creation states that some 15 to 20 billion years ago, the universe did not exist, nor did empty space. There was no time, no matter—nothing except an infinitely dense, infinitely small point called a singularity, which exploded into the present universe. That explosion included a brief period during the first tiny fraction of a second when the infant universe inflated, or expanded, much faster than the speed of light.

During the first few minutes of the big bang, nuclear fusion took place on a universal scale, giving rise to the currently measured concentrations of hydrogen and helium and at least part of the lithium in interstellar space. After perhaps 300,000 years, the universewide fireball dropped to a little below the temperature of the surface of the sun, allowing electrons to settle into orbits around atoms and releasing a flash of photons, or light. That primordial flash can be measured today, although greatly cooled off, as universal background radiation at microwave frequencies corresponding to a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin.* In fact, it was the discovery of this background radiation in 1964-65 that convinced most scientists that there was something to the big bang theory. The theory also claims to explain why the universe appears to be expanding in all directions, with distant galaxies apparently racing away from us and from each other at high speed.

Since the big bang theory appears to explain so much, why doubt it? Because there is also much that it does not explain. To illustrate: The ancient astronomer Ptolemy had a theory that the sun and planets went around the earth in large circles, making small circles, called epicycles, at the same time. The theory appeared to explain the motion of the planets. For centuries as astronomers gathered more data, the Ptolemaic cosmologists could always add extra epicycles onto their other epicycles and "explain" the new data. But that did not mean the theory was correct. Ultimately there was just too much data to account for, and other theories, such as Copernicus' idea that the earth went around the sun, explained things better and more simply. Today it is hard to find a Ptolemaic astronomer!

Professor Fred Hoyle likened the efforts of the Ptolemaic cosmologists at patching up their failing theory in the face of new discoveries to the endeavors of big bang believers today to keep their theory afloat. He wrote in his book The Intelligent Universe: "The main efforts of investigators have been in papering over contradictions in the big bang theory, to build up an idea which has become ever more complex and cumbersome." After referring to Ptolemy's futile use of epicycles to rescue his theory, Hoyle continued: "I have little hesitation in saying that as a result a sickly pall now hangs over the big bang theory. As I have mentioned earlier, when a pattern of facts becomes set against a theory, experience shows that it rarely recovers."—Page 186.

The New Scientist magazine of December 22/29, 1990, echoed similar thoughts: "The Ptolemaic method has been lavishly applied to . . . the big bang cosmological model." It then asks: "How can we achieve real progress in particle physics and cosmology? . . . We must be more honest and forthright about the purely speculative nature of some of our most cherished assumptions." New observations are now pouring in.

Questions the Big Bang Does Not Answer
A major challenge to the big bang has come from observers using the corrected optics of the Hubble Space Telescope to measure distances to other galaxies. The new data is giving the theorists fits!

Astronomer Wendy Freedman and others recently used the Hubble Space Telescope to measure the distance to a galaxy in the constellation of Virgo, and her measurement suggests that the universe is expanding faster, and therefore is younger, than previously thought. In fact, it "implies a cosmic age as little as eight billion years," reported Scientific American magazine just last June. While eight billion years sounds like a very long time, it is only about half the currently estimated age of the universe. This creates a special problem, since, as the report goes on to note, "other data indicate that certain stars are at least 14 billion years old." If Freedman's numbers hold up, those elderly stars would turn out to be older than the big bang itself!

Still another problem for the big bang has come from steadily mounting evidence of "bubbles" in the universe that are 100 million light-years in size, with galaxies on the outside and voids inside. Margaret Geller, John Huchra, and others at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have found what they call a great wall of galaxies some 500 million light-years in length across the northern sky. Another group of astronomers, who became known as the Seven Samurai, have found evidence of a different cosmic conglomeration, which they call the Great Attractor, located near the southern constellations of Hydra and Centaurus. Astronomers Marc Postman and Tod Lauer believe something even bigger must lie beyond the constellation Orion, causing hundreds of galaxies, including ours, to stream in that direction like rafts on a sort of "river in space."

All this structure is baffling. Cosmologists say the blast from the big bang was extremely smooth and uniform, according to the background radiation it allegedly left behind. How could such a smooth start have led to such massive and complex structures? "The latest crop of walls and attractors intensifies the mystery of how so much structure could have formed within the 15-billion-year age of the universe," admits Scientific American—a problem that only gets worse as Freedman and others roll back the estimated age of the cosmos still more.

The Light-Year—A Cosmic Yardstick
The universe is so big that measuring it in miles or kilometers is like measuring the distance from London to Tokyo with a micrometer. A more convenient unit of measurement is the light-year, the distance that light travels in a year, or about 5,880,000,000,000 miles [9,460,000,000,000 km]. Since light is the fastest thing in the universe and requires only 1.3 seconds to travel to the moon and about 8 minutes to the sun, a light-year would seem to be truly enormous!


"We Are Missing Some Fundamental Element"
Geller's three-dimensional maps of thousands of clumped, tangled, and bubbled galactic agglomerations have transformed the way scientists picture the universe. She does not pretend to understand what she sees. Gravity alone appears unable to account for her great wall. "I often feel we are missing some fundamental element in our attempts to understand this structure," she admits.

Geller enlarged on her misgivings: "We clearly do not know how to make large structure in the context of the Big Bang." Interpretations of cosmic structure on the basis of current mapping of the heavens are far from definitive—more like trying to picture the whole world from a survey of Rhode Island, U.S.A. Geller continued: "Someday we may find that we haven't been putting the pieces together in the right way, and when we do, it will seem so obvious that we'll wonder why we hadn't thought of it much sooner."

That leads to the biggest question of all: What is supposed to have caused the big bang itself? No less an authority than Andrei Linde, one of the originators of the very popular inflationary version of the big bang theory, frankly admits that the standard theory does not address this fundamental question. "The first, and main, problem is the very existence of the big bang," he says. "One may wonder, What came before? If space-time did not exist then, how could everything appear from nothing? . . . Explaining this initial singularity—where and when it all began—still remains the most intractable problem of modern cosmology."

An article in Discover magazine recently concluded that "no reasonable cosmologist would claim that the Big Bang is the ultimate theory."



http://watchtower.org/library/g/2002/6/8/article_01.htm, http://www.watchtower.org/library/g/1996/1/22/awesome_universe.htm

Very interesting. Incidentally, I'd suggest you summarise the arguements in articles when posting. I ignored this for quite some time because the title seemed so generic.

The article, however, is very much inacurate/out of date from what I can see. Modern estimates, such as those presented by nasa.gov: http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/mysteries_l1/age.html
Make it fairly clear that, although there is much that we do not know yet, and there exists the possibility that we may find something that conclusively disproves the Big Bang theory, the currently-known data are within an acceptible range of error for the age of the universe.

Well, if you ever get into Theoritical physics, it turns out there is alot more than just one universe, there probably infinite amounts of them; all with varying nuclear, gravitational and electromagnetic forces.

Multiple theories have been presented to explain how this happens, some say universes "sprout off" of each other in accordance to the Everrete's Many Worlds Interpretation.

Two good books on the subject would be "Hyperspace" and "Paralell Worlds".

It might sound like a joke; but Quantum Mechanics has turned the whole phyisics community upside down.

I created this universe, damnit! One of MY quantum events caused this one to sprout off of the old one. This is my universe! MINE! My own... Myyyy presssssiousssss!

Now! Out! Everybody out! Get your own! You frigging hippies, get off my universe! You don't like it? Shove it up your white hole! (http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/schww.html)

Ahem.

Read a couple articles about it. Seemed kinda pointless to me. Other than supposing we are the lucky number out of an insanely difficult lottery, but one where there were an infinite numbber of numbers drawn, I don't see how it makes any difference. It's not like we can test it...yet. Until then, it'll remain just a thought experiment.

One can actually get around the mental barier something like this:

Say you're on a spaceship. You have a watch and a speedometer that measures your velocity relative to the sun (nevermind how it works). Your friend on earth has a watch.

The speedometer reads 150,000 km/s (roughly half the speed of light). Your watch reads 12:00pm. Your friend's watch reads 12:00pm

Zip around the solar system for a while, then call your friend when your watch reads 1:00pm.

He tells you that his watch reads 1:15pm.

You hit the gas. Your speedometer now reads 299,760km/s (roughly 99.99% the speed of light).

Fly around until your watch reads 2:00pm. Remember, an hour (to you) ago, your friend's watch read 1:15.

Call your friend. He tells you that his watch reads 3:15pm. Two hours have passed for him in the time you experienced as a single hour.

Hit the gas again. Your speedometer now reads 299,789 km/s (About 3.5km/s slower than light).

Fly around until your watch reads 3:00pm. Remeber, an hour (to you) ago, your friend's watch read 3:15pm.

Call your friend. He tells you that it's been two weeks since you last called.

Hit the gas again. Your speedometer now reads 299,792.4579 km/hr (the speed of light in a vacuum minus 0.1 m/s). Drive around for an hour.

Don't bother calling your friend. He's been dead for a billion years.
---

That's time dilation. The same thing happens when you are in a huge gravitational field, as was described by Neo Nuria.



do you really have to be going near the speed of light to view that much of a time dilation? so there is only a pronounced effect at very very fast speeds, as opposed to slower speeds (1/2 spped of light)?

do you really have to be going near the speed of light to view that much of a time dilation? so there is only a pronounced effect at very very fast speeds, as opposed to slower speeds (1/2 spped of light)?
If memory serves, NASA did an experiment with this in mind using a fast moving sat with an atomic clock and a ground based one. The aim was to prove that time differences would exsist. It did, the clock on the sat was off against the ground based one by a few fractions of a second. I remember reading this in a newspaper a while back, anyone have the paper for it?

do you really have to be going near the speed of light to view that much of a time dilation? so there is only a pronounced effect at very very fast speeds, as opposed to slower speeds (1/2 spped of light)?

Yes. t' = t*sqrt(1-v2/c2)
Where t' is relative time, t is time for an outside observer, v is velocity, and c is the speed of light in a vacuum.
at v=c/2, that looks like this:

t'=t*sqrt(1-c2/4/c2)=t*sqrt(1-1/4)=~t*0.866


If memory serves, NASA did an experiment with this in mind using a fast moving sat with an atomic clock and a ground based one. The aim was to prove that time differences would exsist. It did, the clock on the sat was off against the ground based one by a few fractions of a second. I remember reading this in a newspaper a while back, anyone have the paper for it?

That and similar experiments have been used to prove both gravitational and kinematic (movement) time dilation.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/airtim.html for more information.

It's not the Big Bang that I reject, I think it was fully possible and I think it's one of the better theories out there - my inquiries stem from the question: What was there *before* the Big Bang? ???

From a physical point of view it is irrelevant. Physicists take everything and view it as a sort of closed box. Since before that single particle collsion nothing else existed. The universe was those particles... Those two particles made up everything and there is nothing else outside it. That's when religion comes in...

However, I hardly believe that a guy with a beard up there decided to create the big bang. Although science has proven to us, that logic simply does not work in subatomic levels, and there can be no "logical" explanation for the events preceding the big bang, I believe that a deeper spirituality than the western god is needed to understand the depth of the universe, and its birth.

That and similar experiments have been used to prove both gravitational and kinematic (movement) time dilation.

http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/relativ/airtim.html for more information.
Thank you, I knew the experiments had been done, but it has been a long time since I read the results and particulars.

I have some sympathy with that view. Just ask yourself what it was like before you were born.
That's not exactly a good comparison.

If something was created from nothing [Which basically had to happen at some point] then nothing would exist.

Before your birth you were genees in a sperm and an egg. Before that you were the parts that make up the genes in the sperm and the egg, before that you were where the body got the parts that make up the sperm and the egg...this goes on until you reach the big bang before which these parts did not exist.

Even as a Christian I don't deny the big bang I just want to know what came before. I was always told that no thing can come from nothing.

People have tried to explain what was there before to me, but in the end this just shows that something existed before what people believed caused what exists.

That's not exactly a good comparison.

If something was created from nothing [Which basically had to happen at some point] then nothing would exist.

Before your birth you were genees in a sperm and an egg. Before that you were the parts that make up the genes in the sperm and the egg, before that you were where the body got the parts that make up the sperm and the egg...this goes on until you reach the big bang before which these parts did not exist.

Even as a Christian I don't deny the big bang I just want to know what came before. I was always told that no thing can come from nothing.

People have tried to explain what was there before to me, but in the end this just shows that something existed before what people believed caused what exists.

Before and existence didn't exist until some time after. :)

[Which basically had to happen at some point]

snip...
Why? Who's to say that the universe didn't just always exist?

More to the point, why is it any less foolish to claim that God always existed than it is to claim that the universe always existed? As a theist, infinity is one thing you have absolutely no justification to not understand.