The Big Bang and the Origin of EVERYTHING!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I was watching a show about the history of Appalachia the other day, and one thing mentioned was the age of the mountains there. I don’t remember the exact age, but let’s just say they are 100 million years old. Yes, those mountains are made up of a lot of very old rock, and some of those rocks were probably used to build gravel driveways in my hometown (I’m from southwest Virginia, in the heart of Appalachia). Driveways in my hometown are made up of 100 million year old rocks!

An amazing idea, one that never occurred to me when I was young. Anyway, this got me to thinking, so I looked around my apartment and saw some cotton sheets I had just folded. Not only are they not 100 million years old, but probably only 1 or two years old. I guesstimated that it took a year to grow the cotton from which they were made, and maybe another year for the cotton to be refined and in the end formed into sheets. So, my sheets are only a few years old.

But, are they? You know the saying, “nothing comes from nothing?” If I am not forgetting my science classes on the Big Bang, this theory pretty much states that there was nothing, and then in a single, solitary instance, there was everything. And, hey, I can accept that. But if that is true, that means everything that you now see before you, even including the pixels that are on you computer screen, has existed FOREVER, insomuch as we can define forever.

Yes, the atoms in my cotton sheets are in a different form than they were 5 years ago, 2000 years ago, 20 billion years ago, an untold number of years ago. But, post Big-Bang, they have always been there. Is this not correct? If it is not correct, that means that “stuff” has spontaneously appeared over the course of history. But of course, that idea is just plain silly. Nothing just comes from nothing.

Or does it? Isn’t that what the Big Bang is all about?

2

All we are is dust in the wind.

Pffftttt. 'ere, 'ere!

3

Well, no the atoms that make up your sheets were not there at the Big Bang. Things were mostly hydrogen after things cooled from a quantum state of energy. After the formation of stars hydrogen got converted to helium. Stellar explosions produced and continue to produce heavier elments like carbon, iron, etc. New stars like our sun condensed out of interstellar clouds containing these heavier elements formed in dead, exploded stars.

Now if you are talking about energy, then yes the entire amount of energy in universe was created at that time. Energy can be changed into matter and matter can become energy but cannot be either created or destroyed, only moved from one form to another. Which is basically what this says: E=mC2

These are vary general statements.

4

Okay, the energy part, I completely understand.

As for the atoms, I knew even as I typed my post, that I would get that wrong, or in any case, not express my thoughts clearly. The atoms weren’t there from the beginning, but the stuff that makes up the atoms were there from the beginning, right? If this is indeed correct, that means that everything before us has been here forever, defining “forever” as everything since the Big Bang.