Where does all the matter in the universe come from?

Factual Questions
41

This is why current theories of physics are considered to be incomplete and more complete theories - string theories or loop quantum gravity or whatever the flavor of the week is - are going to take over one day.

In the meantime, physics says nothing about what happened at time zero. It picks up later when the equations no longer go to zero or infinity. However, that is mostly irrelevant to this discussion. The Big Bang, or better, inflation, took place after the zero point and can be described by current physics. This is also where Small Clanger and Lib get it wrong. Everything in this thread is related to descriptions of physical processes of energy and matter and need no philosophy to explain why we’re dealing with something rather than nothing. We’re dealing with something by definition. Their concerns are for a different question not stated by the OP, who specifically referenced the Big Bang, or the responders.

42

Yeah, I suppose the actual instant of creation is not actually part of the Big Bang. You do understand that that is not readily apparent to a non mathematical frame of reference?

Tris

43

Tris, I just have to say that your post #40 is beautifully written. It really gets to the way that physics just totally fails when you run it backwards far enough, while accepting that it works very well at all points after that (to the best of our current understanding).

44

Thanks. Evidently my real skill in science is how well I don’t understand it.

Who’d uh thunk it?

Tris

45

Hi, fascinating to hear you guys wrestle with this stuff (I assume you’re all guys as you seem to be astrophysicists… :slight_smile: ).

I thought this subject might be beyond the comprehension of the human mind, but it seems it’s even bigger than that! I mean if you want to know about the nature of God you’re better off reading a book on astrophysics than the Bible or other holy tome (no offence intended to the faithful). So anyway, I’ll get a book…

Are you guys in general agreement that the whole Universe was originally an unfathomably dense “smidgen” of energy smaller than an atom? I mean, that’s like totally OMG!

46

Well, I change diapers for a living.

Try this one: Big Bang by Simon Singh. It’s a history of cosmology, not a physics textbook. It gives a nice overview of how some very smart people came to think some very different things about the absolute unassailable truth of cosmological physics.

We seem to be in relative concordance about smaller than an atom. It’s smaller than a Planck unit we start having troubles with.

Tris

47

Might one ask a question? Where was it before it began? Philosophers say there’s always a beginning. So what was before the beginning?

As a religious, I’ve an answer. My answer also is to this question. God.

48

The physics question has a different answer than the religious question.

What is north of the north pole?

Religious answers belong in a different thread. Never try to prove the existence of God. It’s disrespectful.

Tris

49

Talk to enough philosophers and you will find every possible answer to every question. Therefore, it’s not true that all philosophers say there’s always a beginning.

There are also numerous physical ways to answer the question of what came before the big bang. We don’t know which, if any, are right, but none of them require a god.

If that’s your answer, fine. You don’t seem to want to debate it or look for a physical answer, though. Even so, there are always physical answers and many of the books that talk about the big bang will also give current hypotheses about what happened before the “beginning.”

50

Which one? There are so many … .

51

I sometimes think that the universe is just one big accident. We have to live with it, but you also have to admit that it’s kind of fun.

52

From my pinworm’s pint of view, The big bang occurred everywhere isn’t all that difficult to understand.

Maybe, perhaps, mayhap. :smiley: :smiley: :smiley:

Before the Big Bang, the Singularity, as I understand it, was the entire universe. This teeny tiny speck was there and there was nowhere else.

So when it blew, the event had to have occurred throughout the Universe.

Richtig?

53

Funnily enough, there was an article covering a lot of this ground in my national newspaper yesterday by one of their more philosophical feature-writers - must be some sort of cosmic coincidence…

I’d cut and paste the whole thing here but it is fairly long and I’m not sure what the copyright rules are, but you can read it online here:

54

Was my post about the Big Bang ineluctably occurring everywhere too stupid for a comment from you cosmologically knowledgeable folks?

It seemed logical to me but your thundering silence makes me wonder.

55

It’s not wrong, per se, but it doesn’t truly get at the issue that confuses people.

Say that a star explodes. The whole star erupts, so you can say that the explosion happened everywhere that the star was. But you can also point to a center from which all the material will be moving away from.

The Big Bang was an inflation of space-time itself. The fabric of space-time expanded everywhere - and did so faster than the speed of light. That’s why we say that there is no center to it, and why stuff that was so close together can now be so far apart.

The point is necessary to distinguish something that happens inside space and something that happens to space-time itself. You can’t picture the latter; there’s no analogy we can make. Blowing up a balloon and imagining yourself on the surface, except that it’s a four-dimensional surface instead of a two-dimensional surface just doesn’t cut it. The Big Bang is different than anything we can point to.

56

Thanks, EM.