The Big-Bang, Creationism for nerds?

Great Debates
1

In ye olden days, if they didn’t understand it, they gave God credit (or blame,) as the case may be.

Though nowadays it’s provably false, for thousands of years Creationism did a perfectly acceptable job of explaining why things were the way they were, and how they got that way.

“God did it. Now shut up and eat your spinach!”

“God made the world?”

“Yes.”

“Well then who made God?”

“Nobody made God. He made himself, or he was always there. I forget which.”

“If God made himself wouldn’t he have to be always there? If he was always there why would he have to make himself? That’s both the same, right?”

“Yes. God was always there. The question has no meaning.”

“well then…?”

Smack!!! "I said shut up and eat your spinach.

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAH!"
Let’s take a three asterisk break.

Fortunately we’re much more enlightened now. Hundreds of years of study by the most meticulous of minds have given us deep insight into the origins of the universe.

-The earth is condensed from a cloud of matter that originated in a supernova.

-It’s about 4.5 billion years old.

-The universe is somewhere between 9 and 15 billion years old. (What’s a few billion among friends?)

-All the matter in the universe originated in an event called The Big Bang.

-Science can get very close to the Big Bang and explain what was happening

-As of now they cannot explain the event itself. There are guesses, but only that. In fact, the question “Where did the Big Bang come from?” is fundamentally unknowable.

-This infinite expansion and contraction garbage i.e. Big Bang, Big Crush repeat, seems to be a load as well. Evidence points towards a steady state universe. This is it, a one shot deal.

SO where did the Big Bang come from?

Let’s ask a scientist.

“It just happened.”

“Well, what came before the big bang?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. There was nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then BANG! the universe came into being.”

“Where did the stuff come from that made up the Big Bang?”

“Nowhere. It just always existed, or it made itself. I forget which.”

“Well isn’t that the same thing?”

“There was nothing befrore the Big-Bang. That started everything. The question is by definition meaningless. The Big Bang made itself. Don’t you understand? It makes perfect sense. It’s logicaL ::MAD CACKLING::”

“Well then…?”

SMACK “SHUT UP!”

I’m glad we live in such an enlightened age.

2

They are both just creation myths. Biblical creation leans more to the metaphysical. Big-bang creation leans more to the observable.

3

SMACK “SHUT UP!”

Haven’t you been around long enough not to flaunt your ignorance.
The more appropriate response to give to dificult questions is not" SMACK “SHUT UP!” ", but "I don’t know the answer, I will try to find the answer, You should try to find an answer.

Never should anyone be chided for asking difficult questions, as this is the way to continued ignorance.

Or is this thread just another attempt at more “scientists aren’t sure so God must have done it” nonsense.

4

Myths? I woulden’t say either of them are myths, unlike the mythos of evolution:)

5

sigh

Is it that time of month already? Oh well, here we go again.

6

IMHO – I’m not a physicist, but I play one on TV.

Natural laws were defined at time=0, at the point of the Big Bang. Science is based on natural laws. Since natural laws didn’t exist before time=0 (just like time didn’t exist before then either), the question of “What came before Big Bang” or “Where did Big Bang come from” or anything like that is basically moot.

A good scientist knows the limits of science and does not try state what happens outside those limits.

OTOH, we can observe certain things about this universe that we live in and hypothesize about what is conceptually possible before Big Bang. We can envision repeated expansions and contractions when conditions were not exactly right. I think (and I plead ignorance here), that these do not hold any more water than saying that In the Beginning, God lit up the Celestial Barbecue. This is because we cannot define natural laws before t=0.

I’ll gladly be educated, though.

7

Adamd Yax:

No, to be more accurate, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest that the Big Bang occured. There’s none to suggest that Creationists have it right. We know the creationists are wrong. We don’t know why the big-bangers are correct.

Palm Cove:
There’ll be none of that “Scientist don’t know so God must have done it” crap from me.

JDMobray:

Time of the month? I’m male.

edwino:

my point exactly. We can go a lot further back with accuracy, but we still don’t even have a reasonable theory as to how the Big-Bang itself occured.

The best I read (and I’ve been reading on it for a year,) is something along the lines of a truly massive virtual pair actualizing, and mostly self-anhiliating. The disproving of parity says that we can have a little left over. That’s the universe.

The problem is that’s not even a theory. It’s a weak as shit hypothesis.

8

It’s not so much that, as the conditions that led up to the Big-Bang (all matter sucked into a single point) would have erased any evidence of what came before. Apparently, creating an explosion the size of the universe does a bang-up job (no pun intended) of cleaning the slate.

9

I’m kind of speaking out of my ass now, but I’ll give it a try.

See I have a problem with this statement that you read – it isn’t a hypothesis. A hypothesis is a conjecture which is amenable to confirmation or refutation (Stedman’s medical dictionary, I’m too lazy to dig anything else up right now).

Since natural laws were conceived at Big Bang, you may as well replace the words “virtual pair” with “two giant Sea Bass.” Disproving parity (I’m stretching for 3 years of total physics instruction, really) may just be an artifact of our natural laws, not some remnant of Big Bang.

The hypothesis cannot be confirmed or refuted because we cannot make predictions when our system for making predictions does not exist.

You are right – it is weak as shit. IMHO, it is as strong as “The IPU made it that way” or “That’s just the way it happened.”

10

Scylla,

I really, really don’t get your logic here. If you are trying to claim that science does not (at least yet…and likely never) have all the answers, you will get no argument here! But, geez, what do you want?!? Look at the progress that has been made just in the last half century! Before then, we didn’t even know about the Big Bang; now, not only do we have copious amounts of evidence for it, we can trace the universe back to the first tiny fraction of a second (I think that’s the number).

Geez, some people will never be satisfied! [Not that I think we should be satisfied…We should keep searching to learn more and more…But let us not fail to take pride in what we have accomplished so far!]

11

Spoofe:

Recent evidence suggests we are in a steady state universe. That means no Big Bang followed by expansion until gravity slows it down, pulls it back together into a single point sometimes known as the Big Crush.

Instead the universe just keeps slowly expanding until it’s precariously balanced between it’s expansion and the pull of gravity. Then of course all the heat spreads out, and we’re stuck with entropy.

The Big bang/Big Crush cycle as a theory is looking pretty weak right now.

Evidence suggests one big explosion, but nothing before that.

edwino:

Thanks for the correction. It’s not a hypothesis. I was looking for something better than guess, but weaker than theory, and wasn’t entirely correct.

Hmmm. Mutually anhiliating sea-bass you say? You may be on to something.

jshore:

The logic is that it took several thousand years of scientific effort and genius to get uss away from the “God did it,” or “It’s always been that way,” kinda non-answer.

After all this effort and striving and knowledge, what do we end up with?

“It just happened.”

“It’s always been that way.”

If there is a God, I’d subscribe to the Deus ex Commedius (I just made that up,) theory of his nature.

Isn’t it ironic?

Don’t you think?

12

Okay, sure, I’ll grant you the irony. My own take on God is that God is what project our ignorance onto. When we didn’t understand how the sun and the moon moved across the sky, we had Sun and Moon Gods. [And now we think those Greeks were so quaint!] Once we understood that, we had a God that created the heavens, Earth, animals, and humans. Now that we understand that, we invoke God to explain how the first life began and how the universe came into being in the first split second. Do you see a pattern here?

But, will we ever be able to rid ourselves conclusively of the hypothesis of God? Probably not, 'cause we will always be ignorant about something!

13

I understand what you’re trying to get at here, but…trust me on this. You really don’t want to use the phrase “steady state” to describe it. The steady state theory was that matter keeps coming into existance because of the expansion of the universe. SF writer Fred Hoyle was a big proponent of this (now discredited) theory. The phrase you’re looking for is “Open” (for just going on until everything cools down) or “Closed” universe (for the big bang/big crunch cycle)

Anyway

Sez who? I’ve read a number of great books on the pre- and just-during-the-Big Bang books. The Five Ages of the Universe and The First Three Minutes to name two.

Best theory, as far as I understand it:

In the beginning, there was nothing. No time, no space, nothing. There were only virtual particles. Virtual particles have always existed. (Yes there’s an explaination for why virtual particles flicker into and out of existence, even before the big bang…I don’t understand it though. Sorry) Anyway, we know virtual particles exist because of Hawking radiation (they’re the reason that black holes radiate energy). Virtual Particles appear and disappear before they can interact with the universe so they don’t violate conservation of energy. For some reason one lasted just long enough to trigger the big-bang.

This isn’t the best or most coherent explaination possible, but I haven’t had a physics course since highschool, I just think this stuff is cool. And no one’s ever smacked me for asking about it.

Fenris

14

Scylla, you been reading too much creationist literature recently?

First you said:

Maybe, maybe not. All we can say right now is that we don’t know at this time. We have some ideas. Maybe sometime in the future somebody will prove it one way or the other. But to declare it as “fundamentally unknowable” makes you sound a lot more sure than science actually is.

Then you said:

You have contradicted yourself here – possibly because you are using the wrong terminology. First you say recent evidence suggests a steady state universe (I’d like to know what this evidence is). Then you say evidence suggests one big explosion. These are mutually contradicting statements. If there was one big explosion, that’s the Big Bang, not a steady state universe.

So, please explain what you actually meant by these statements, and then, while you’re at it, back 'em up, please.

15

How can you talk of pre-Big Bang when there was no time before the Big Bang? As Hawking put it “What is north of the north pole?”

You have this backwards. We have not observed a black hole at all, let alone one small enough to have measurable Hawking radiation. We know black holes emit radiation because of virtual particles and entropy.

16

Talk about your Strawman Arguments! Funny perhaps, but false.

Anyway, your point seems to be that the Big Bang Theory does not explain everything about the creation of the universe. So what? It explains a LOT of cosmology very well with verifiable evidence (as you noted). The missing piece does not invalidate the rest of it. BB Theory is based on current understanding of physics. New physics may need to be understood in order to further understand Time = 0. Research continues.

Amen to that.
Scientists may speculate about the source of the Big Bang (ideas which probably make it into the media) but they should also say it is not known (yet).

17

Here is where Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have a pretty hard time getting along. Using Quantum theory, the big bang never occurred. Using relativaty, nothing existed before the big bang…including time itself. You might see how its hard to reconcile the two. Perhaps if there was a quantum theory of gravity…

Uhh, the size of the black hole doesn’t matter. And virtual particle pairs exist regardless of black holes. All that matters for black holes to radiate energy is that they have an event horizon…which they do by definition. All that is required for virtual particles is quantum theory.

In closing, I find that (from John Gribbin’s "In Search of the Big Bang and previously mentioned resources) that from our current theories’ standpoint, it is almost impossible to know more that we already do. For relativity, nothing existed before the big bang, the end. For QP, we don’t have all the forces covered.

So it goes…but its a hell of a lot better than seven days and all of that. At least we get microwave ovens from science, even if we do have to listen to their mumo-jumbo.

There is only One God, He is the Sun God
RA
RA
RA

18

Three cheers for the Sun God. He really is the fun God.
Ra
Ra
Ra

:slight_smile:
Ok, got it off of some discordian quotes list.
Like this one.
http://www.kbuxton.com/discordia/discordianquotes.html

19

Hmm isin’t this board supposed to be fighting ignorance? Not perpetuating it. I don’t mind people dissin on religion as long as they have at least anything worth saying rather than setting up a strawman built by asking other athiests what religion is.

Ok heres my take on this thread. Science is starting to split apart enough to where it can dissagree with itself and not be wrong. Thats where the big bang comes in. One question though how could you possibly measure the start of the universe down to a fraction of a second? I doubt you could measure down to a fraction of a second when you woke up today.

And Scylla im pretty sure time of the month was referred to me (note: if you see a smileyface next to it its probably a joke) I don’t think any more arguements about evolution will occur though I haven’t seen a decent arguement about it in months other than im right and your wrong and see all these people agree with me. I wont argue about it.

20

I don’t mean that you can measure the start of the universe down to a fraction of a second in the sense of “the universe is 10,256,542,345 years, 23 days, 3 hours, 42 minutes, 332.172 sec old.” What you can do, however, is to use our knowledge of the physical laws to figure out what must have been happening in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang occurred.

Imagine, for analogy, simulating a nuclear explosion…starting with the time of ignition, our understanding of the laws of physics can give us a pretty good idea of what is happening at each point in time. (This is why scientists at the weapons labs are pretty confident that we can continue building and maintaining our nuclear weapons without having to actually test them…hence the test ban treaty.)

For the Big Bang, this is true until we get back to a time when the energy density of the Universe is so large that we are unable to attain such energies even in massive experiments [e.g., smashing elementary particles together in a huge collider at CERN, SLAC, or Fermilab] and thus don’t know what the hell was going on. I don’t know exactly what time this corresponds to, but believe it is only a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. So, before that time, we would have to appeal to new physics that we don’t understand yet, but after that time, the physical laws we know and love apply.

A high-energy or astrophysicist could probably give you a more coherent explanation. I am a condensed matter physicist, which means I study the more mundane solid and liquid materials one actually meets in everyday existence (rather than spending billions of dollars to create)!