If the big bang took place then where did all the matter come from?
If the universe is continually expanding what made the matter form into spheres?
And, how did the first single celled amoeba come into being?
And how could one single cell form into all that we see today?
It already existed; it was just compressed into an extremely dense …ball? Whatever shape it was, it was all there, just with a lot less space in between.
A sphere is the shape with the least amount of surface area relative to the volume of material it contains. It is the most efficient use of space.
Um… magic? Jesus? No one really knows. Here’s some light reading that gives an overview of the prevailing theories.
Gravity! I gather you are picturing the big bang being a uniform expansion with all particles being equal distance from each other? And you’ve drawn the conclusion that gravity can’t affect this matter because all particles are equal distance and therefore gravity is meaningless? But the uncertainty principle dictates that there will be fluctuations in this uniform universe. As particles pop in and out of existence they cause disturbances. This allows particles to be thrown off course and not be uniform. This allows matter to come together.
This sounds like something more for Great Debates. The universe is expanding. The farther away you go, the faster the expansion. At the outer distance we can see and observe (called the Hubble sphere iirc), this is the point at which the expansion reaches the speed of light and we cannot see past this. BUT, the universe indeed does go on. Matter goes on. Galaxies go on. Given infinite matter, and infinite space, how would life not form? Whatever the odds for life forming are * infinity still equals infinity.
An amoeba is an enormously complicated organism. So the answer of how a single-celled amoeba arose is that it developed from a long line of other, simpler organism. But I suspect that that’s not what you’re asking.
I suspect that what you’re really asking is how the first archa appeared. That’s a more difficult question, and we don’t know most of the details. But in broad outline, it seems to be something like this:
1: The pre-biotic Earth had a variety of simple chemicals on it, such as water, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. These chemicals are the most common form for elements such as carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen (which happen to be the primary elements which make up living things).
2: The action of lightning, ultraviolet light, heat, and other energy sources on these simple chemicals caused them to form into more complicated (though still fairly simple, in the grand scheme of things) chemicals such as amino acids and ribonucleides. This step has been replicated in laboratories.
3: By random chance, some of those ribonucleides happened to connect together with other ribonucleides into chains of ribonucleic acid, or RNA. Ribonucleic acid has a structure such that it can cause loose ribonucleides to come together into another, complementary strand of RNA (which can in turn cause the production of its own complementary strand, which would be a copy of the original), though on its own, this process is slow.
4: Strands of RNA also tend to get tangled into interesting shapes. Some of these interesting shapes would have the effect of speeding up the process of RNA duplication. Any strand of RNA which happened to come together in a way that would lead to those interesting shapes would tend to form copies more readily than other RNA sequences. Over a very long time, this will lead to those RNA sequences becoming more common in the chemical soup than others. This is the beginning of natural selection.
5: Once you have a variety of different RNA sequences which give themselves an advantage, sometimes you’ll have two shorter strands with different advantages come together to form a single longer strand, that gets both those advantages. These new strands are even better at competing against other strands, so over time, the RNA strands come to be dominated by things that have more and more advantages at replicating themselves.
6: Some of the advantages that these strands will develop include forming shapes that cause the amino acids around them to come together in interesting ways, too, including (among other things) ways that will make the RNA strand yet more efficient at replicating (these combinations of amino acids are proteins, including enzymes). Other advantages will involve some of the RNA strands being modified into strands of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA. Yet other advantages will involve the formation of a protective membrane to surround the other materials, so all of the interesting chemicals will stay in one vicinity.
7: Once you have all of these advantages (DNA, proteins, protective membrane), you have a living cell. This is such an effective combination for making a self-replicating thing, that soon, they outcompeted almost all of the non-cell replicating things, so almost all of the replicators were cells.
8: Natural selection didn’t stop once it had cells. There was still some variation between different cells, and whichever variants were more successful became more common. Sometimes a new variation would arise, and sometimes, that new variation would be more successful than its predecessors, and so that new variation would become common, too.
9: Ultimately, all of those random variations, some of which were more successful than others, led eventually (after billions of years) to all of the living things we have today.
The questions in the OP are the bases of strawman arguments that YECs make against evolution and cosmology. So most likely NNN99 is a YEC and is trolling. I suggest that everyone ignore this thread and let it die. Or report it if you really want to.
Most of these are very fundamental questions philosophy has been asking for ages and science has been seeking the best it can. If you are truly interested, I’d suggest reading about these topics more.
Read up on cosmology, quantum mechanics, physics, and astronomy.
Again, more cosmology, gravity, relativity, atomic theory, chemistry and astronomy.
I think you’re asking about abiogenesis here.
Evolution and natural selection.
[Moderator Note]
dtilque, you’ve been around long enough to know that accusations of trolling are not permitted outside the Pit. If you suspect someone of trolling, report the post and let the moderators deal with it. Since this is your first offense that I am aware of, I am making this a moderator note instead of a warning. But don’t do this again.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Oh, I should also mention that I’m not a biologist, and I might have made some mistakes in my description of the origin of life. And even the biologists might have made mistakes, too: Science isn’t magic. If anyone has corrections on any of the points I made, I preemptively stand corrected.
I’m sorry. I apologize for doing it.
Could I piggyback on that to ask my own Big Bang questions, because it’s just something I don’t understand, and maybe it’s my fault for having a degree in the social sciences.
1 All this matter that was really, really compressed, how did it get there? Was it just always there?
What does my first question even mean? I’ve heard some people, maybe it was even here, I don’t remember, say that time started with the big bang. . .that talking about before the big bang is nonsensical. But that doesn’t make sense to me. How can time start?
If you’ve got the really really compressed matter, and that’s the Universe, then what’s outside it? If the Universe is expanding, it has to be expanding into something, right? There has to be a border to the Universe, where’s it’s like, on this side there’s the Universe, and on that side, there’s “?”, right? What’s “?”? Another universe? Nothing at all?
I’m sure these are pretty stupid questions, but I’m just wondering.
Not my field but …
The nature of the Big Bang event is such that we can’t know what happened prior. That is, all evidence indicates a timeline to that event and no prior information survived the event. Time doesn’t really “start” with the big bang. Time deals with the relative occurrence of events and we have no known events before then. Measurable time within our current understanding started with the big bang.
Basically, the answer to all your questions, Captain Amazing, is that we don’t know, given the present structure of physical law. All we can say is the following:
Assume the standard model of physics as known just before the Big Bang model was proposed, including relativity and quantum physics.
Assume that at some point about 13.7 million years ago a highly compressed mass was in existence.
Assume some new forces, proposed since the Big Bang model was proposed, which have to be added to the model of physics to make the Big Bang and other phenomena work right. These forces include dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation.
Look at how the universe would evolve using all these assumptions.
If we make these assumptions, we can show that the universe would look, 13.7 million years later, pretty much like it does now.
And that’s all it says. It says nothing about what the universe was like before the time of the Big Bang or even whether the question of whether time existed before the Big Bang makes sense. It says nothing about whether there is anything outside the universe or even whether it makes any sense to talk about anything outside the universe.
It says nothing about deep philosophical questions at all. That’s how science works. Science makes some basic assumptions about physical laws. It shows that these physical laws explain some phenomenon. It doesn’t claim to show why these physical laws exist. There’s no answer to any larger questions from within science itself.
If sir you have no answer for the question then please refrain form commenting. Just because you never thought of the question do not be so quick to condemn. Good day to you sir.
Other, sir, than this one comment, you have received many helpful and concise answers, sir, to the issues in your OP. Are you indeed just asking questions or “just asking questions”, sir?
I said nothing about whether I personally have any answers to the deeper questions. Those answers would be philosophical or religious in nature, and in the General Questions forum we don’t do philosophy or religion. If you want philosophical or religious discussion of your questions, go to the Great Debates forum and ask them there. We’ve given some scientific answers to your questions in this forum. The philosophical and religious explanations for why the Big Bang happened would be matter for the Great Debates forum. You can ask the question there. I won’t be participating in the discussion there because I don’t like the snide nature of the debates there.
Don’t know - maybe it was already there.
This makes no sense. Please explain.
Don’t know. My guess is that the amoeba evolved from something else. I believe that Syndey Fox did a lot of work with protocells, so, and again, I’m just spit-balling, my guess would be that the first cells developed prior to the amoeba.
It didn’t.
Obviously some cell division occurred.
It’s actually not that hard to come up with at least plausible answers as to ‘where it all came from’. Obviously, whether any of those answers match with reality is still far from settled – but it’s not as if nobody’s got any idea.
The most popular and easy to explain idea is probably the one also championed by Hawking in his recent book, The Grand Design. First, realize that since mass and energy are interchangeable, the question’s really: where did all the energy come from? Apparently, if we start from nothing, we start with a total energy of zero. But, now, since there clearly is something, the energy must be greater than zero! This appears profoundly mysterious, not to mention in violation of energy conservation.
But consider the following analogy (with the usual caveats regarding the imperfectness of all analogies): you’re standing still, on a frictionless surface. Nothing you are going to do will ever change your state of motionlessness – that’s just another way of saying that momentum is always conserved. Then, somebody zips past you on this plain, going at enough of a clip that you have scarcely enough time to exchange pleasantries. In particular, you don’t have time to ask how he ever got to move at such a speed, which you, being quite bored with your motionlessness, very much would like to do, as well! However, a short period of reflection later, the answer seems obvious – since momentum is always conserved, he must have always gone at the same speed he’s going now. It’s impossible for motion to be created out of no motion.
The argument seems compelling – but nevertheless, it is wrong. It’s entirely possible for the person zipping you by having been at rest at some prior time – for instance, if he wasn’t alone. Perhaps once, he spent a time of perfect motionlessness, united with another person – maybe his lover. But then, as such things sometimes regrettably unfold, tragedy struck, and the lovers grew weary of one another, up to a point where they could not stand each other’s company any more – and thus, each gave the other a sad, but decisive, push. And lo, out of nothing – well, nothing and star-crossed love – motion is born. Though, how does this square with momentum being always conserved? Easily: before their love broke up, total momentum was zero; but afterwards, it still is! The two ex-lover’s momenta are of equal magnitude, but opposite direction – and hence, sum to zero.
A similar – at least, in concept – though in my opinion far more poetic thing might have happened in the creation of the universe, of all the energy (and thus, mass) we see around us. In total, the energy might still be zero – if in order to balance out all the positive (in a non-wooy sense of just being ‘greater than zero’) energy around us, we can find negative energy of equal magnitude somewhere. And actually, we can – it’s the energy of the gravitational field. (For another take on this, see here.) This is the origin of the Hawking quote:
Now, that’s not quite all there’s to this – dark energy throws a bit of a spanner in the works here, and in general relativity, global energy conservation is not really well defined. But this is perhaps good enough as a suggestion, a hint that an answer may be possible – we can already go quite a way beyond just shrugging and going ‘nobody knows’. More refined proposals take the predictions of quantum mechanics into account – in the 1980s, Alexander Vilenkin suggested a mechanism through which a universe could ‘tunnel’ into existence, and other proposals working for different ‘kinds’ of universes have since been discussed (here’s a non-technical introduction to the subject).
[Moderating]
NNN99, it’s not clear which post you are referring to here, but most of the responses have been helpful. “We don’t know yet” is a perfectly reasonable response. I see no indication that the posters who have responded to you “never thought of the question.” As has been pointed out to you, if your questions are intended as a basis for a religious or philosophical discussion, that is better suited to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
One of your questions has a painfully easy answer (the answer to question 2 is “gravity” - a well-known force that attracts masses together into the shape that minimizes the distance from the center of mass - a sphere)
Two of your questions have nothing to do with “the big bang” - they are questions about biology.
Come to think of it, your first question doesn’t have much to do with the big bang either - all cosmological theories have answer the question of where the matter and energy of the universe come from, not just the big bang theory. It’s not my field, so I’ll let others answer.
I would also note that questions are a good thing, not a bad thing. The phrasing of the OP seems to indicate some kind of issue or problem with the big bang theory, in that science is producing questions without answers. But you can never have an answer without a question, so posing a question is an obvious first step in the advancement of knowledge and questions without answers should be seen as opportunities, not cause for complaint. All questions once had no answer.