So I’ve been mildly interested in the big bang theory for awhile now. (The actual theory not the stupid show) a lot of what the cosmology establishment say these days about other dimensions and dark matter and finite time just seems absurd to me. I can’t say I know as much as I would like to to hold that view but from the dithering about I’ve done on it it does just seem super suspect. What do you think and know about it?
As a non-expert non-scientist my understanding is that the BBT is a working model which, as a whole, continues to be consistent with new information being discovered about the early moments of the universe. It is entirely possible that there is a difference model which would also be consistent with the data, and indeed there is a huge amount we do not yet know and can only guess at, but thus far it seems to hold up despite details being updated and tweaked and argued over.
I’ll wait for an expert to address the points on that webpage but note that it relies heavily on the work of Thomas Van Flandern who seems to have preferred non-mainstream approaches to cosmology (which is not to say that he is wrong, only that many of his views are not generally accepted by the scientific community).
Untoward_Parable, my suspicion is that you lean more toward a theory of beginning that’s some flavor of “god did it”, is that right? Do you have any particulars of the BBT that you can specifically point to that seem “super suspect”, or do you just kinda feel that it’s not so?
Are you a physicist? Quantum mechanics also seems absurd to me, but my computer relies on it in order to work. Just because something seems absurd to a non-expert does not make it untrue.
Not sure where you go that from lol. It doesn’t have to be Jesus or BBT lol. Actually the problems I have with the theory tend to be the parts that make it consistent with religious concepts about the beginning of the universe. You know that there was nothing and then God made everything. The big bang theory people essentially say that there was a beginning to the universe. That before that there was no time or matter or anything. Then suddenly time begins and there is a super concentration of energy that explodes and becomes everything in the universe.
As I said I’m not deeply into this stuff but the points on the website I linked seemed pretty damning. In science a theory should be able to predict things, otherwise it’s not true.
The BBT also seems to be saying that once you get 15 billion years of travel away from us that there is nothingness beyond that. That the universe is a bubble within nothingness. Call me strange if I call shenanigans lol.
If you think the BBT is correct than please explain it.
I just wanted to add that I note that MetaResearch was founded by Van Flandern. So it’s essentially a guy’s website citing himself. Not very scientifically rigorous.
Often people who feel that a scientific theory of some sort is being “shoved down their throat”, as you say in the thread referencing the the tv show, have a strongly competing view, usually religious, that they don’t care to have challenged in any way. Plus, also in that other thread, you made that weird reference to a “gay sex analogy”. However, you say I assumed wrong, so I apologize.
I, personally, am not familiar enough with the BBT to intelligently debate about it. I’m not sure you can be familiar enough with it to intelligently debate without a pretty strong physics background, which I also do not possess. However, I also don’t think I can get informed about it by reading the site you mentioned.
I was trying to explain by analogy why “this seems absurd” is not an actual argument against the Big Bang theory.
(As an aside, you don’t find quantum physics exceedingly strange? To quote Richard Feynman - “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”)
These kinds of things often seem convincing until you read the counter arguments.
The Big Bang Theory says nothing about what happened before the creation of the universe and actually says very little about it prior to 10[sup]-37[/sup] seconds. It does however say that given the universality of physical laws (if it happens here, it happens the same way anywhere else in the universe) and assumption that the earth is not in any special place in the universe the universe started out smaller, denser and hotter and became bigger, thinner and cooler.
The BBT predicts that the universe having expanded also cooled in a particular way. That prediction was confirmed with the COBE probe. Here’s a link to the experimental results. There are error bars in the graph, they just happen to be so small that they get swamped out by the theoretical curve.
It also predicts that on large scale distant objects should be receding from us and we find that they do.
It works and it works better than any other model - your personal discomfort with the theory notwithstanding.
I forget who said it first, but I quite like the quote “science is the fight against common sense”. The farther I progress along my education toward becoming a professional scientists, the more true that becomes. It’s not that a result has to be weird or bizarre to be true, but that the whole structure of scientific research is designed to remove our innate biases as much as possible. 5% of research is finding new things. 95% is trying to make sure that we really did discover what we think we discovered.
Common sense says we live on a flat, immobile surface and the sun and stars spin around overhead. Common sense would scoff at the idea that we’re made up of zillions of little bags of goo, each smaller than we can see, and each stuffed with thousands upon thousands of interconnecting parts working together in a system so complex that it’s taken decades of study to even scratch the surface of its workings. If the universe was comprehensible by common sense, we wouldn’t NEED science. We could just look around and instantly understand everything.
So, “it seems absurd” will never carry any weight with me as an argument against a theory.
A simple bit of logic will show that the universe is not infinite and static - if it were, in any point we look we would eventually see a star. It may be a long long way away, but still a star. In a statci universe, therefore, the sky would be bright white in every direction.
So the universe had a beginning. Dozens of observations - the backgrund radiation residual; the hubble constant that speed of receding galaxies is roughly proportional to distance; the measured effects of the speed of light; phenomenon like quasars and black holes - all point to a relatively consistent comsological model. Either a new theory is a refinement of the old one (like Einstein - who said Newton’s mass-distance-time model is a simplification that breaks down at extreme velocity) or you have to explain why a huge body or existing scientific theory and it’s backing observations are wrong.
In case anyone’s wondering about the site posted in the OP, it’s the result of the work of Tom van Flandern, a somewhat eccentric astronomer, who advocated odd ideas such as the Cydonia region of Mars contains an artificially-created face, existence of which is covered up by the scientific establishment, and that the asteroid belt was the remains of an exploded planet.
This entire portion of the site is devoted to explaining how a number of things van Flandern wished to be true, but could not prove, result in ruling out the Big Bang and other aspects of modern cosmology.
I think dark energy is an incompatibility with our current theories, rather than actual energy that makes up 70% of our universe. Dark matter may be similar.
I think the CMB and other cosmological observations shows that the universe was denser and hotter in the past, but not necessarily smaller. Something could be infinitely dense and still finite or infinite in size. So I’m not convinced it was all condensed into a point at t=0.
Also, t=0? Maybe it never went back that far. Does current evidence rule out a situation where regular matter suddenly became very dense and exploded without ever passing through an infinitely dense moment? Scientific American used to write about “brane theory”, which said two branes may have collided ~300,000 years after the supposed big bang, which caused matter to explode, creating the expansion we see, along with the background radiation. I don’t know how much traction brane theory has today, but my point is that there seems to be room for non-big-bang theories to reside within our current understanding of the evidence.
What, besides cosmic expansion and background radiation, does a contender to the BBT have to explain? I guess what I’m saying is the Big Bang theory doesn’t seem all that bullet proof. I believe it contingently for now, but is there any reason for me to make a stronger assessment?
Nobody every said it was bullet proof, but it is currently the best model we have.
It predicts and explains the the CMB
It predicts and explains expansion
It predicts and explains the ratios of early elements like H, D, He and Li.
Now it relies on cosmological inflation which a number of people like Paul J. Steinhardt have objections to. I think you’re thinking of Steinhardt’s cyclic cosmology model where branes collide and the most recent results are the current universe. Roger Penrose also has a cyclic model where he claims we should be seeing after images of previous universe’s blackholes on the CMB, but I have no idea how that’s worked out.
Steinhardt’s objections are to the degree of fine tuning inflation requires but I don’t actually know what predictive outcomes the cyclic cosmology model has that the BB model doesn’t. Chronos is a GR guy (I think) and might be able to fill us in.
That’s not what the BBT theory says, although its a common misconception. Despite how it’s often depicted in the mass media, the Big Bang was NOT an explosion out from a single point.
When the universe came into existence it was very large (perhaps even infinite). It was also very dense. It immediately began to expand and become less dense. From our location inside the universe this expansion looks like everything is moving away from us, but its really not “moving” in the normal sense.
Because the universe was very large when it came into existence there are parts of it (probably most of it) that are so far away that light hasn’t had a chance to reach us yet. So we often refer to the “observable universe” – the sphere centered on the Earth that contains all we can see. The farther something is within that sphere, the older it looks. The cosmic background radiation comes from the clouds of hot gas that make up the walls of the sphere – the farthest back in time we can “see” before the universe become so dense that light can’t shine through.
But outside the sphere of the observable universe there’s not nothingness. It almost certainly is filled with galaxies just like the part of the universe we can see.
