Simple question really:
Why did Big Bang happened in the first place?
I asked this question to my lecturer who has Ph.D in physics
but he didn’t know the answer.
Anyone knows?
I ate too many beans.
Nope, and unless we’re missing out on something pretty fundamental, no one can know. Physics began at the big bang, so it can’t be used to explain anything about what things were like before that moment.
My understanding is that, at the quantum level, some particles can “appear” out of nowhere, exist for a miniscule fraction of a second, then disappear. It is all part of the probabilistic nature of these particles - you know, how an electron is a more of a probability field than it is a particle and all that. (I think)
Anyway, before the Big Bang, there was supposedly the Big Nothing. There might’ve been virtual particles probabilistically lurching into being and poofing back off to nowhereland. But at some point, a virtual particle blipped into being that was much bigger and so unstable that before it could blip back into nothingness, exploded - the Big Bang…
I am nowhere close to being a physicist, and I can’t remember where I read this, but that is how I recall it…I am sure someone more qualified will pipe up and let me know just how wrong I am, and the world will be less ignorant for it…
If by “physics” you mean “that which is currently explained by physics,” then yes, but I don’t think anyone would argue that pre-Big Bang times are inherently off limits to physics.
There is the problem of the “why” question in physics. The word “why” can carry different connotations. You can ask why things fall, looking for a one-layer-deep underlying mechanism, in which case I can tell you about gravity and you are satisfied. But you can ask the same question, looking for an “ultimate” reason, which usually means you want me to say “God set it up that way.” Physics can usually deal with the first kind of why question, but you have to ask the theologians the second kind of “why” question, and up to now they haven’t been able to agree on an answer, except perhaps for Buddhists, who might say that the question is not well posed.
Another problem is that as soon as there is a physical explanation for an event leading to the Big Bang, call it Event Z, anyone can come up and say, why did Event Z happen? And so on.
Panic attack, the universe got clautrophobia being overly crowded. :smack:
I said… let there be light.
Oh, God…
This quote(surprisingly) brings me to my main question. Where did the “big bang” come from and how can physics start after it? I mean, the entire creation theory has as its basis that God is eternal and outside time, but does the big bang theory hold the same concept for the “big bang stuff”? Was all of it eternal and outside time?
I’m curious how many “bangists”(just made that term up) believe in a higher power creating the “big bang stuff”, even if they have a more Deist view(that God or gods created it and are now non-involved).
Outside of our current conception of time, yes. There might have been physical rules governing the “universe” as it existed before the big bang, but we’ll never know how different they were from current rules. There might have been such a thing as “time,” but we can’t measure or have any knowledge of anything that happens before our universe’s genesis. Our measurements and knowledge don’t start until the universe starts. (And those first few seconds are a little hazy; we don’t and probably can’t know what triggered the big bang.)
There was no such thing as “psychology” until the first self-aware beings evolved. Why should there be? There was no concept of self, so there was no need to examine the self. It’s the same with physics. Until the big bang, there were no concepts of time and space (as we understand them), so we can’t know what happened pre-universe, just like we don’t know what an insect “thinks.” It’s a totally alien concept to us.
That’s how I remember it. But it doesn’t have to only be a fraction of a second (that’s just what it usually is), what matters is that the energy balances out in a certain way. I learned about this in an astronomy course in college and was riveted, I wish I remembered it better.
I’d suspect the answer is:
(1) some don’t, just because Ph.D.'s and allied types may skew more agnostic/atheist than the public at large; but
(2) some do, because once you get away from the literal-belief-in-Genesis view (as plenty of religious Jews and Christians have), the “symbolic” meaning can still be met by any number of cosmological hypotheses. You had the kernel that led to the Big Bang? Fine, God made it. It was pre-existing? Then that was Him too. It was brought into being at an instant in time? Okay, well, He could do that also.
Why? Because this was how He knew human history would best unfold (prove me wrong!).
Or because it was just about the right time.
Or because “time” was different before the kernel existed (possible on a physical basis, too).
I’d know plenty of Christians who (if they understood the above propositions) would say . . . okay. Yeah. The Big Bang happened, and it happened right about when He wanted it to.
There’s also one theory that says the universe is constantly expanding and shrinking. That is, it expands to a certain point, then it reverses and shrinks back into one size, and then the big bang happens all over again. And so on and so on for all eternity.
Not sure how well accepted this theory is anymore, though.
Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang. Perhaps that can be said with the caveat “not as we understand it in this universe,” but since space and time are the same thing and all, there was no time before the universe existed.
At the moment, it’s not. It appears the density of the universe is much too low. The most accepted theory is that the universe will go on expanding forever. I don’t think the rate of expansion will continue to increase forever (as it’s increasing now), but I’m not sure.
Just another point about what happened before the big bang and why we cannot know it as I understand it.
(This is assuming that the Big Bang Theory is correct of course) . At the start, right after the Big Bang, the density was so thick that paritcles of light, or anything else, would only be able to travel a short distance before encountering another particle and being absorbed or annihlated. As things expanded it gave particles room to exist without running into each other. During the first period, when the desnity was high, no information could get out. This limits how far back we can gather information about the big bang. Before things thinned out the universe was truly black and there is no way to gather any direct evidence of what happened. Since there is no way to see what happened speculating about what happened before the Big Bang is eactly that, speculation.
There are some other issues involved but that is what I remember.
Then again I could be totally wrong as IANAP.
Slee
It is worth a moment’s philosophical contemplation to consider that every event that has ever taken place is a subset of the Event known as the Big Bang, which had no prior cause.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find one that was just about the big bang, but space.com has a lot of interesting articles about the subject. Unfortunately, everytime I do a search, I find all the articles interesting and read everything else!
The finite mind of man can not comprehend the iinfinite incomprehensible!
Insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
Investigation of quantum gravity has led some to contemplate pre-Big Bang physics. In M-Theory, if I understand its basics correctly, there are dualities of size and “tension” (related to how many times strings and branes are wrapped around compactified dimensions, basically), such that when you shrink space down to around the Plank scale, it doesn’t continue to collapse to an infinitesmial point; rather, it blows up again. Then there’s this “Brane World” version of the universe, where we exist on one brane, and a parallel universe exists on another. The two branes periodically smash together, pumping them up with energy, and causing them to expand. There may be other pre-Big Bang models.
The point is, if the String/M Theorists prove to be right, it’s not entirely correct to say that physics starts at the Big Bang. Actually, the Bang could be just one epoch of the history of the Universe, and our wonderful Theory of Everything could describe everything “before” that epoch (I use quotes because time as we know it may not be recognizable in other epochs) just as well as after.
My only major beef with these ideas is I can’t imagine how you could possibly test them.