The other day I overheard one of my students tell another that the Big Bang is “mathematically impossible.” While I have gotten to the point in my life where I would rather chew broken glass than have that conversation with her, I am nevertheless curious what she could have meant. Unless we let a = 6000, where a is the age of the universe, I don’t see any impossible math in Big Bang theory. I wonder what insight this high school senior has that has eluded astronomers for so many years. She must be pretty confident to bring it up in front of me, her math teacher.
I forgot to include a question.
Does anyone have the “impossible” equation handy?
Here is one treatment of what your student might be talking about. Another interesting view (from Marxists!) can be found here. One thing it says is:
You can find others from Google.
A more mainstream atheist side of this is dealt with in an article by Quentin Smith, in which he uses perceived implications from a particular quantum uncertainty inequality — (delta p)(delta q) >= h/(4pi) — to attempt to prove that God does not exist.
[heavy sigh…]
(We will graciously concede to Smith that quantum physics might apply to singularities despite that we cannot define many of their properties.)
The crux of it is this:
Interesting read. Smith goes on to deal with several objections that he thinks might be raised, but he neglected one. Namely, that there is no reason God couldn’t have created 10[sup]100[/sup] singularities until one produced what He wanted. As a nontemporal Being, how long it takes is irrelevant.
Lots of interesting stuff in all this. Like one Doper said recently, whenever you talk cosmology, you are talking philosophy. I’m afraid you’ve gotten waaaaaaay past mere creationism versus evolution here.
I suspect that Lib’s post above – while interesting – goes way beyond what the girl in question here was talking about.
My guess would be that she was talking about something coming from nothing. That’s the argument I’ve heard in relation to the Big Bang being impossible.
Of course, when you turn around and ask them where God came from, well, that’s different, ya know.
Yes, it is quite different. Why must a nontemporal Being “come from” anywhere? Time is merely a function of rate and distance, a dimension of the physical universe, a description of entropy’s direction, or any number of other interpretations. Eternity is conceptually qualified as exempt from origin. If physicists determine that the universe is eternal, as some hypotheses suggest, then all burden of origin is removed from them as well.
As to something coming from nothing, that is exactly the topic of a question I asked in General Questions. How can something come from nothing since nothingness implies the absence of any mechanism by which something can arise. One poster said that physicists don’t really mean “nothing” when they use the term. They really mean “vaccum”, a continuum out of which particles arise. Chronos’ final answer was “we don’t know”.
Regarding the girl, I suspect that she is talking about issues concerning Hubble’s constant and recent fears, lately at least partially allayed, that some objects were determined to be older than the universe that contained them. The Marxist site says that physicists have simply “moved the goalpost”.
Quoting one of my favourite joke riddles:
… to which I must reply:
Q. How much time passed before the Big Bang?
A. No time at all.
One of the tenets of modern Big Bang cosmology is that not only was all the matter and energy we now see around us created in the Big Bang, but so were space and time themselves. If you were able to look back in time closer and closer to the beginning of the universe, you’d notice the universe getting very very dense. So dense that, according to general relativity, its own gravitation would slow time down. (General relativity predicts that time dilation occurs in a very strong gravitational field, just like special relativity predicts that time dilation occurs at relative speeds very close to the speed of light.)
At infinite density, you’d have infinite gravity, so time would stand still – or to put it another way, time would be meaningless.
This ignored the possibility that God guided the universe to be conducive to life. After all, we say that God couldn’t do this, it would be contrary to the “God-is-omnipotent” maxim. Also, God would almost HAVE to create life after the big-bang, because He is all good, and animation is more perfect than non-animation.
-Soup
That would depend on the particular definition of deity one’s using, wouldn’t it? After all, there are extant religions which do not define deity as being all good.
**aubries wrote:
The other day I overheard one of my students tell another that the Big Bang is “mathematically impossible.” While I have gotten to the point in my life where I would rather chew broken glass than have that conversation with her, I am nevertheless curious what she could have meant.**
I’m curious, too, as to this mathematical impossibility of the Big Bang. Next time she makes such statements, have her write out the theorms and mathematical equations that demostrate this.
That would also depend on the idea that animation is more perfect than non animation. Which could also be produced by making rocks bounce against each other.
Tracer:
I think time is pretty meaningless anyway. As you say, it is merely an attribute of space-time, the so-called chronosynclasticinfundibulum. It is meaningful only as a matter of perception. Perception is a manifestation of our primative senses. Meaning is one of the things we must derive from philosophy.
Lib said:
Why must the universe “come from” anywhere?
But we’re getting a bit off the subject, probably.
Well, as I explained in some detail, if physicists discover that the universe is eternal, then all burden of origin is removed from them as well. God is eternal by definition. The universe is not yet defined.
Again, that depends on the deity one is defining. Some extant religions postulate gods which are not all eternal.
Again, that depends on the definition one chooses to use.
The Big Bang is in fact impossible in that it is a singularity of infinite density, temperature, and curvature. That does not mean that the Big Bang Theory is impossible; the Big Bang Theory treats the Big Bang as a limit, not as an event that actually happened.
You still haven’t explained how God is different. The issue is not why God need not come from anywhere, but why there is any less such need than for the universe. Basically the conversation come down to this:
Christian: The Big Bang is impossible, because everything has to come from something else.
Atheist: If that is true, then God is impossible, because God did not come from anything else.
Christian: That’s ridiculous. There is no need for God to come from anywhere.
Atheist: ???
Arguments like these make me wonder whether Christians are themselves idiots, or simply expect everyone else to be idiots.
Libertarian wrote:
Um, a chronosynclastic infindibulum (a term coined, I believe, by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five) refers to a “miniature infinity” (infindibulum), a place or person or some other locality where time (chrono) is bent equally in all directions (synclastic) along an infinite span accessible only to that one locality (infindibulum). Sorta like your favorite phrase, “Before Abraham was, I am,” meaning that God/Jesus exists at all points in time simultaneously and thus has knowledge of all events that will happen either in the future or in the past as though they are all happening in the present – a property also shared by the wormhole aliens in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
I should also mention that in my teen-aged youth, an acquaintance of mine named James usurped the term “chronosynclastic infindibulum” to refer to a Zen-like superintelligent state of mind he claimed to have discovered and offered to “bring me to.” This state of mind had nothing to do with time, or with being bent equally in all directions, but the character who exhibited the “chronosynclastic infindibulum” in Slaughterhouse Five (and in The Sirens of Titan, another Vonnegut work) kinda-sorta had that ring of omniscience or deep comprehension or I-know-more-than-you-do-ha-ha that James was trying to get across.
Descriptions of an origin point for space and time, inferred by the details of the observable states of matter and energy in the relationships we describe as the dimensions space, and time in that locus of space time events observable here, and now have been collectively named “The Big Bang.” The name is unfortunate. Those who chose it did not believe it was a creditable theory or description.
It wasn’t big, nor did it go bang. Neither was it small. It had no characteristics of size. Size (not to mention such things as location, distance, speed, and such) was what was created. It did not have a beginning. It was not temporal, except that the phenomena that we now experience have a temporal relationship of “later” with respect to it. We suppose that all other phenomena also relate to it in the same way. This gives us an observational artifact which we name “The Beginning” of time. That is an observer-oriented definition, and its accuracy cannot be evaluated.
The mathematical language of modern quantum mechanics can at least describe the events after the duration of one Planck interval. There are probably people who actually understand some portion of those descriptions. There are certainly a lot of people trying to do so. That portion of history that occurred before Planck Time requires a new paradigm to be evaluated, described, or even coherently imagined. Every trained professional (in the fields of physics, and mathematics) who has ever tried to describe the problem to me seems to think it involves at least as much mathematical description for the first “Half” of existence, before Planck Time, as for everything that has happened since.
Shortly after the beginning, God . . . was very busy.
Tris
“It should be possible to explain the laws of physics to a barmaid.” Albert Einstein
“Man, you should have seen the place Einstein used to go to drink!” Triskadecamus
Tracer
I acquiesce to your knowledge of science fiction. (I seldom read fiction novels. The last one I read was Atlas Shrugged.) I did not get the term from Vonnegut, but from a head-shop in Charlotte in the 1970s. It had a sign that it place perpendicular to its storefront. The sign was so long that it extended out over the road.
I spoke to the shop’s owner, who at least claimed to be a physicist, and he explained it to me this way. A chronosynclasticinfundibulum is a space-time cone. (Note that the spelling is “…infun…”, not “infin…” from the Latin word for funnel, which is derived from “infundere”, to pour in, i.e., a cone. See infundibulum) He said that the chronosynclasticinfundibulum is the definitive boundary of an observer’s reference frame. He chose the name because of its humorous implications about his clientele.
This statement cannot be made (well, intelligently) simply because we cannot run the math for the big bang. There is no understanding of the physics of the “Big Bang seed” (for example, no understanding of quantum gravity)…therefore, how can you mathematically model it?
This same argument is made against abiogenesis. By the same token, it is not known how abiogenesis happened on Earth, therefore, you cannot apply a mathematical model to it.
As you say, THAT fails the math test (starting with the fact that we see objects that are more than 6000 light years away).