The Big Bang

Do you believe in this theory? If not, then do you have an alternate explanation?

Yes, I believe it to be true as it explains quite a bit. I also have not read another explanation yet that is more feasible.

Myrthos said:

Yes, I believe it to be true as it explains quite a bit. I also have not read another explanation yet that is more feasible.

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Interesting. Personally, I really don't know what to think.

But, then, I'm a sceptic in all ways.

First of all, I'm sceptical that human capacity is sufficient to grasp the nature of the universe - and, as such, any and all theories will be subject to such a potential limitation.

Beyond that, my problem with Big Bang is that it's simply "the best" explanation we have - and there are so many unknowns.

Even worse, it doesn't explain how the dense "whatever" that's supposed to have expanded came to be, in the first place.

So, really, even if it's all true - it doesn't answer the important question, regardless.

Well the Christian theory is god said let their be light.


Then Boom everyone was unhappy.

Yep - though I should point out that it's much more freaky than most people think. With everything packed in like that, time stops. With no time, how is "cause and effect" supposed to work?

Darth Tagnan said:

Even worse, it doesn't explain how the dense "whatever" that's supposed to have expanded came to be, in the first place.

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Yep, there's the freaky bit. Time isn't ticking, so what do you mean by "the first place?"

Zloth said:

Yep, there's the freaky bit. Time isn't ticking, so what do you mean by "the first place?"

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Before the concept of time was there to not tick

Couchpotato said:

Well the Christian theory is god said let their be light.

Then Boom everyone was unhappy.

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Yes, well - my problem as a "true" agnostic, is that I honestly don't have the first clue.

To me, there's really no more merit in inventing a theory that fits our current capacity for observation and agreed-upon rules of physical laws - and then some sort of greater power descending from the heavens to teach us the error of our ways.

Both are equally plausible and implausible - as far as I'm concerned, because I don't trust any frame of reference inherently.

Absolutely not believing in big bang theory as it doesn't offer any answer what led to assumed explosion in the first place. And I don't have any alternative explanation. Nor care to be honest. My life is too short to care about history that won't repeat before I die.

I do not understand it well enough to believe it or to not believe it.
from what I understand, it had something that exploded. That something, where did it come from ? I do not think anyone has the answer to that, so for me it's not the beginning of the universe, just one step further back in time than now.

I have little desire in delving further into it.

I'm always curious at what the math says from the Catholic Priest who wrote it. Einstein himself wasn't a believer till he saw the math. And was his math still accurate: I mean, didn't he write it a time when separate galaxies were unheard of - so the universe turned out to be A LOT bigger than anyway realized.

But yeah, its well know that physics in that state is a lot different that what we take for granted.

The big question though, is what happened to all the universes' Anti-matter? There should have been an amount equal to matter when the universe was created.

Honestly I think it takes more faith to believe in the big bang theory and the conventional evolution theory than it does to believe in most religions.

Belief just means introducing a personal bias, so it would be unfortunate to speak of "believing in the Big Bang". There are theories that fit the observations, and there are theories that do not. Both the Big Bang as well as Divine Intervention fit the bill, any ranking between the two comes down to your interpretation of Occam's Razor.

However, if we take "Big Bang" to mean the entire concept of an expanding space-time, that is indeed one of the possible solutions to the equations of General Relativity, which is our best bet at a theory of gravity at the moment and has been tested quite thoroughly. An expanding universe is not a pretty solution, as a few parameters apparently have to be set to non-zero values that, out of aesthetic preferences, we would rather have had set to zero, but it is a solution.

Incidentally, it was Einstein who did the math, but at first rejected it out of, again, aesthetic considerations, because he had expected his equations to permit for a stable, non-expanding space-time and didn't realize at the time that the most straightforward mathematical solution - an instable universe, i.e., one that is either collapsing or expanding - was actually consistent with observations.

Of course, we have no real way to test GR over larger distances, so who knows whether other terms might not have to be added on extragalactic scales? And as for the beginning of the expansion itself, we are currently still lacking a theory of quantum gravity that is capable of describing that. However, as time, just as space, is indeed a property of our space-time itself and does not exist outside of our universe, it would indeed be non-sensical to expect any sort of "cause-effect" coupling between an event within our universe and an event "outside" - as there is no "outside".

Maybe something like this?

I take the line somewhere in between. I believe in divine design but with existing "laws" of the universe(s). In other words, God is God not because he created the universe magically out of nothing, but because he understands the laws of all universes, and knows how to work anything within the confines of that sandbox. The laws of thermodynamics still apply to "Him", etc. This comes dangerously close to the theory that we're in a simulation, but I think it goes beyond that.

There is hints of patterns and that elude to intelligent creation. Such as DNA being almost identical in structure from the first single cell organism until now, complete with a "binary" language, parity bits and error correction code (if you're into programming, this can be quite fascinating).

Electrons circle a nucleus, while planets circle a sun, and solar systems circle galaxies, yet at the heart of galaxies and atoms we still have relatively little information. Are there items smaller than quarks, and what's beyond the Higgs Bosom? Similarly, at the heart of galaxies, what's beyond the event horizon of black hole singularities? Do black holes begin another big bang in a newly created dimension?

Maybe the idea of universes and multiverses is not so different than a garden. God plants a "seed"(big bang), and nurtures the garden (universe). The plants grow and produce seeds(black holes) for other gardens(other universes). Perhaps Big Bangs really are some sort of seeds, and have their own DNA?

Interestingly, when reading through Genesis about the creation, the pattern of God's creation isn't too much different than how the order of the universe would have been created by the big bang. However, you communicate in the language of your audience. 6000 (or much more, most likely) years ago, you're not going to throw scientific terms that even make people's heads from today's internet age spin. So instead of saying "7 long incomprehensible periods of evolution, complete with complex scientific explanations, eventually we came to today's version of earth" instead we hear "God made the earth in 7 days, but the details aren't quite important to your survival at this time. You'll start to figure that out in a few thousand years once you start getting the hang of this humanity thing". Of course, i'm taking this from a Judeo-Christian perspective, but this idea still isn't so different when coming from other religious perspectives.

I'm sure there's a lot of holes in my constantly shifting theory, but I believe the underlying idea is worth thinking about.

TLDR: I think there was some sort of a "big bang" (or creation event) that may or may not have taken the form of the Big Bang that we theorize today. However, I don't think it's completely random (at least to begin with), and that there is some level of intelligent guidance to it.

I always wonder : "Why should there be a Big Bang in the first place ?" I mean, before it, virtually nothing exists, right ?
Why should it "bang", then, in the first place ?
That's what my logic isn't able to explain, because my logic system is a system like "cause -> result", so to say.
The "Big Bang", then, is a "result" without a "cause", as far as I've understood it.

Wisdom said:

Honestly I think it takes more faith to believe in the big bang theory and the conventional evolution theory than it does to believe in most religions.

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Why is that?

I don't really understand Big bang but the theory at least predict somethings which you go out and measure hence you can at least disprove it. This is something you can't do with any religions. Maybe I don't understand religion well

Alrik Fassbauer said:

I always wonder : "Why should there be a Big Bang in the first place ?" I mean, before it, virtually nothing exists, right ?
Why should it "bang", then, in the first place ?
That's what my logic isn't able to explain, because my logic system is a system like "cause -> result", so to say.
The "Big Bang", then, is a "result" without a "cause", as far as I've understood it.

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Well, that is the very point. Time is a property of our universe just as space is. There was no "Before" any more than there is an "Outside". There was no period of time during which Nothingness was idling around until, suddenly, the universe popped into existence, thus there isn't really any need for a Cause to call the universe into existence. There was never any time when there was no universe.

We are very used to imagining time as something that flows, a sequence of fleeting, passing moments. But this is actually inconsistent with our modern scientific view of time as expressed in General Relativity, which regards time and space simply as categories of "space-time" that even change according to your own perspective. To give you an analogy, the distinction between time and space is not like the distinction between the north-south and east-west directions to an oceangoing vessel, but more like the distinction between fore-aft and port-starboard.

Given this, it might be more helpful to simply regard our space-time not as a bubble of space expanding on some external timescale, but as a four-dimensional entity with a rather pointy end. Imagine a four-dimensional sausage, the Big Bang being one of the tips (and if current models hold, there is no tip on the other side, but the sausage just gets bigger and bigger…). Most of us perceive the direction running along the length of the sausage as time.

To be sure, there are theories that circumvent the issue entirely by, for example, assuming that the universe we are currently able to observe is just an inflated bubble within a much larger space-time continuum.

P.S. If some concepts of modern cosmology seem mind-boggling to you, read some of Greg Egan's novels. The "Orthogonal" series, for example, is a crash course in relativity with a twist (that consists of basically just flipping a sign in the space-time metric tensor…).

Caddy said:

Maybe the idea of universes and multiverses is not so different than a garden. God plants a "seed"(big bang), and nurtures the garden (universe). The plants grow and produce seeds(black holes) for other gardens(other universes). Perhaps Big Bangs really are some sort of seeds, and have their own DNA?

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This idea - of a creator god having set the universe in motion, but left it to evolve according to the predefined rules - was indeed popular during the Age of Enlightenment and known as "Deism".

I don't know - given that sentience and intelligence seem something so specifically human in this grand and amazing universe, known to exist only on this tiny speck of dust dancing in the light of a tiny star among hundreds of billions, would it be more hubristic to try and explain the universe without a Creator god, or to involve something so typically human in the explanation?

I believe in the principal but it leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The fundamental issue is where did the substance originate that allowed for the big bang. We believe that energy can create matter and matter can create energy but yet we do not understand where the initial energy or matter originated. If we accept that it always existed in some form then it begs the question of what else did or did not exist.
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What I do not believe is that some all powerful being, call it God or Allah or whatever would care about a pathetic self centered entity such as ourselves. That does not mean that something of essence set things in motion; but it still begs the question of where or how did it originate. Again we could accept that it always existed but that opens a lot of new unanswered questions of else could have always existed.
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Sadly I doubt we will ever know or (being self centered) know in my life time.