big bang and thermodynamic laws

Could you open another thread (perhaps, "unfair creationist bashing" ) and give some examples of this? I don't remember anything that I would choose to call "bashing". I do seem to recall places where dishonesty or incompetance has been pointed out. I wouldn't use the word "bashing" for that.Thanks.

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Common sense isn't

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well, of course when you want something to exist you can make it exist in your model of the Big Bang.

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You're ignoring the fact that huge amounts of evidence - every piece of evidence being processed by every scientist on the planet - tests every theory that is involved in the observation of it.Please explain the following phenomina, with a theory of your own (instead of "their theory just sounds like speculation!" arguments)1) No comet has been observed with an orbit that indicates that it came from interstellar space,
2) There is a strong tendency for aphelia of long period comet orbits to lie at a distance of about 50,000 AU, and
3) There is no preferential direction from which comets come.What is your theory? I'm waiting.... Oort looked at these three phenomina. We've observed many comets, and they're consistant on these things. That means that we need a theory to explain them, and that's just what he did. He proposed a theory to explain the comets. That is the Oort cloud. Every bit of data that we've seen about comets thusfar, from their chemical compositions to precise measurements of their orbits, matches it. More still, we've seen what appear to be extrasolar Oort clouds (we can't yet visually image them, but we can infer them from the filtering of gamma radiation bursts from stars). Finally, the Oort cloud just happens to match up with our best models of the solar system. And it's not our best models of the solar system because of the Oort cloud - the models were designed, by and large, to account for the *planets*. Finally, we have not encountered any evidence that *contradicts* the theory.Are all of these things to you just coincidences (including Oort's initial observations)?The kupier belt, by the way, is not nearly as involved in the activity of comets - that's why it's not relevant here.

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That still does not prove it is there.

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Your alternative theory for the data is?In my opinion, we're too kind to creationists in general, letting them argue from ignorance and not requiring that they come up with their own theory that matches the data.

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How do you come up with a model like that anyway? It is probably really long and complicated, but what do you look at to try to determine how something blew up 16 billion years ago? Where do you get the facts for such theories? How can you test something like that?

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Again, arguing from ignorance. There's a reason why degrees in professional scientific fields take a long time, and making a name for yourself even longer: there is a huge amount of observations that have to be reconciled into theories that don't have explainable exceptions (the exceptions needing their own consistant theories), and thus, there is a huge amount of learning required. Just because you haven't taken the time to learn it doesn't qualify you to be an expert on the subject.That criticism stated, I'll cover a bit of the basics. First off, are you familar with how to measure the distances to stars? Here's 26 ways. Are you familiar with how relative motions are measured? Read up about red shift (of which there are several types). If you're not familiar with spectra, you should read up on it too. Note that if you're not willing to take the time to learn about the results of the accumulated knowledge from hundreds of millions of experiments conducted throughout history being condensed into a few pages on the net, you have no right to argue about the subject, because then you're being willfully ignorant. Again, my apologies if I sound harsh.Given this, what methods do we have to measure the age of the universe? There are several, and dispite being one of the more discordinant numbers in science, they all hover roughly around 14-15 billion years old. You can look at the ages of the oldest stars; we can tell the ages of the oldest main sequence stars quite well, because main sequence stars are well understood (you should start off by reading about the H-R diagram to get an introduction to star types, and go from there).There is the cosmic microwave background radiation. Before the background radiation was discovered, George Gamow had predicted that it *should* exist were the big bang model correct. Sure enough, it was found, at 2.7K - and with an incredible degree of accuracy, even surpassing that which we can reproduce in a lab. The time for it to cool indicates an approximately 14 billion year old universe. The polarization of the CMB is just as expected as well. Note that these calculations are done independently of other methods to calculate the age.Hubble's observations of other galaxies also found an interesting thing: all galaxies are receeding from us at a speed proportional to their distance from us. This needs a theory to explain it The big bang matches that, and again predicts a similarly old universe.I can go into more evidences if you would like

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I am not asking these questions to be smart, I am asking them because I am interested in how you can determine what happened that long ago by observations made in the present.

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Do you believe in forensics? If you think forensics has any credibility at all, then you realize that even when people are *deliberately* trying to not leave evidence, there is still plenty of evidence out there. All sorts of processes on Earth - biological and non - leave *huge* amounts of evidence behind. And this evidence can be studied by many different methods. The key in studying it is that there can't be unexplained contradictions between methods. If there aren't any - every time that you do it - then you have a solid theory on your hands.

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I have seen those models that have it broken down into nano-seconds. How is that possible? How do you determine what has stayed the same or at a constant for billions of years and what has changed?

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Because changes in the past, if not accounted for, lead to contradictions with other measurements that utilize different phenomina, unless *everything* has changed at exactly the same rate, which is effectively no change.

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shrinking sun

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False.

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geologic column

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What about it?

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and earth's magnetic field?

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Stable as ever, and going through its regular reversal cycle that we can see going back for millions of years.

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Then how do you tell that those facts are true, or reliable?

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By multiple methods returning the exact same result, across different fields. Let me give you a story: Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, science had a big problem on its hands. Geologists were confident that the earth was ancient - in their view, possibly even billions of years old. Astronomers were just as confident that it was *not* as ancient - their models put the earth at millions of years old. This was a contradiction - and it was a *huge* problem for both of them. Did one side just "hide the data under the rug", so to speak? No, they duked it out, and debated extensively, and no good result was reached.What was wrong? Well, the astronomers' model for the sun was incorrect. The only method that they had to explain the energy that the sun was releasing was through gravitational collapse - nuclear fission and fusion chain reactions were not yet understood. That was soon to change. With the realization that the sun's energy could, in fact, be coming from nuclear reactions, they went back and redid the numbers, and... wait for it... they matched up! Two completely different fields suddenly were reconciled.So, they went back, and started taking more observations of the sun; every observation that they made of the sun (on pieces of data that before were viewed to be not nearly as relevant, such as the spectral content); everything matched the new model, except for *one* thing: the neutrino problem. Some of the neutrinos were missing. Naturally, creationists jumped on this to say that the sun was young and wasn't undergoing fission/fusion; however, since every last detail but this one had matched this new model, and it reconciled all models, scientists were confident that they would be found. After studying neutrinos in more detail, they theorized that the neutrinos likely were changing their "flavor" to a harder to detect kind, and they built a detector. Sure enough, the precise number of neutrinos that were missing were detected.

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Also one more thing, is there somewhere I can find the CORRECT ToE, or Theory of the Big Bang. Everytime I think I have it down I get accused of a strawman. I think it has alot to do with who you are talking to, everyone seems to have their own theory.

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Name one detail that you've been accused of having a strawman on, and where you got that detail from.

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"Illuminant light,
illuminate me."< !--UE-->P.S. - I'm noticing some bugs here... did they change EvC over the holidays?[This message has been edited by Rei, 01-02-2004]

Thanks Rei for the links. I of course was asking those questions out of curiosity. I was not questioning the theory. Sorry if I was unclear. I bookmarked all your links and will get to them some time. Right now I am reading about the 2004 Audi S4 and the Mercedes C32 AMG, If only the C32 came with a 6 speed. Anyway, thanks again to you all for the links. It will take me some time to read through them all. It is so hard starting out to find good resources on the internet with Google returning millions of pages.Iowa City Rei, maybe we should hook up some weekend, HAHA.Thanks again

At a first glance there is reason to agree with you that it is a bit unfair to ask for disproof of something like the hypothosized Oort cloud. If there is no evidence for it at all then ask someone to prove a negative is a bit unfair. So if the cloud is, like God for example, completly without evidence I would agree with you.Separately from that I agree that before someone makes a big deal out of the Oort cloud as an explanation for new comets they should have some reasonable evidence for it. Obviously, at 50,000 AU it's going to be hard to have snapshots of the could so the evidence will be a bit indirect.However, your "sorry fellas" quote didn't cover this line. It seems there is at least some work that makes the existance of the cloud not an unreasonable hypothosis.

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Various computer studies of cometary orbital data in conjunction with other evidence strongly supports the existence of the Oort Cloud

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Now, let's back up a step though. So what is there is no evidence for the Oort cloud? So what if there isn't even an explanation for the short period comets? Isn't the point of your sources that this somehow proves that the universe can't be old?Well, it doesn't do that. It simply leaves the comets as a bit of a mystery.Separately from the comets there is lots and lots of solid evidence that the earth can not be only a few thousand years old. So that is the position that has to be first understood. With that solid understanding the comets then may be considered to be a mystery to explain as we learn more. But it is still very firm that they are something that has to be explained in a very old solar system because a mystery does NOT overturn the very sold evidence that is available.The tactic of hopping around to pick up on things that are not as solidly explained as some others while ignoring the really, really solid evidence is a tactic of desparation. It is intended to distract from the real situation.In any case, sorry but there is still need to explain the calculations which show that there are explanations for comets in an old solar system AND to explain ALL the other evidence disproving the YEC idea. (well, ok, almost all would be good enough to be interesting).Now, separately, you idea that science "proves" things but doesn't "disprove" is a bit off as well. Sometimes when trying to solve a mystery we get a list of possible explanations. If we disprove (falsify) all but one it becomes the "current best conclusion" and that will have to do. Then we start trying very hard to disprove that hypothosis as well as searching for positive support for it. So asking for disproof is not unreasonable. Without that disproof the Oort cloud hypothosis stands as at least a possible explanation. But there is solid, real world, observable evidence that the flood did not and could not happen. Therefore a collection of writings from millenia ago when the physics and geology of this world was unknown must be wrong on this point.

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Common sense isn't

"So the existence of the Oort cloud is not in doubt: our current theories indicate that it should exist, and its existence explains phenomena that are observed. This is the way science is done."It should only exist if you're trying to defend the old-earth hypothesis. From my point of view (the universe is 'only' a few thousand years old) there's no need for such a theory like the Oort cloud. Have you read the piece by R.A. Lyttleton: "THE NON-EXISTENCE OF THE OORT COMETARY SHELL"? I recommend you read it, Chiroptera.I agree with Wizend that disproving something that hasn't been proven is not necessary. The Oort cloud is definitely not science, just like evolution is not science.Infinity[This message has been edited by Infinity, 01-15-2004]

"But there is solid, real world, observable evidence that the flood did not and could not happen. Therefore a collection of writings from millenia ago when the physics and geology of this world was unknown must be wrong on this point."I don't believe anything in the bible is as you claim a myth, nor is the genesis flood. If we just for the moment take it as a fact that there was this flood in Noah's time, we'd finally have an explanation for things like this:Legends and records likewise speak of the fact that, before the Arabs removed the Pyramid’s outer casing stones, one could see water marks on the stones halfway up the Pyramid’s height, in about the 240-foot level, which would be 400 feet above the present Nile level. The medieval Arab historian Al Biruni, writing in his treatise The Chronology of Ancient Nations, noted: "The Persians and the great mass of Magians relate that the inhabitants of the west, when they were warned by their sages, constructed buildings of the King and the Giza Pyramids. The traces of the water of the Deluge and the effects of the waves are still visible on these pyramids halfway up, above which the water did not rise." Add to this the observation made when the Pyramid was first opened, that incrustations of salt an inch thick were found inside. Most of this salt is natural exudation from the chambered rock wall, but chemical analysis also shows some of the salt has a mineral content consistent with salt from the sea. Thus, during the prehistoric Flood, when waters surrounded the Great Pyramid, the known and unknown entrances leaked, allowing seawater into the interior, which later evaporated and left the salts behind. The locations where the salts are found are consistent with the monument having been submerged half-way up its height.Nosyned, why is it that you won't believe in the flood? Is it because it doesn't happen these days anymore? Maybe that's because God made a promise to all mankind he wouldn't flood the world again?Of course you're free to comment on this, I'm here to debate.Infinity

I can't speak for him, but I'll tell you why I don't believe the flood happened: it's totally falsified by paleobotany. There's no way the flood can explain the well-sorted fossil plant record.

Hi Wizend,It seems that you're dealing with the big questions here. I would like to try and answer your questions as well as I can. Of course I don't know everything about it, but I've been interested in the field for a long time now and I'm currently studying Astronomy. It's really great to be so actively involved and I'm learning more about it every day.I read you're a YEC. I'm a christian (so a creationist as it is called on this forum), but I don't know whether the earth is young or old. Both viewpoints can in principle be well defendable, scientifically and biblically. I think I tend to the old-earth-view, however I do agree that some "YEC-proofs" are still not answered to me properly (example decaying magnetic field: growing magnetic field in contradiction with energy conservation / vague energy source postulates / energy transfer from higher poles to dipole in contradiction with maximum entropy law, example Oort cloud: origin? / spherical shape in contradiction with conservation of angular momentum / how do these rocks come into highly eccentric orbit?). If anyone has the answers, I'd be interested in some references!But, to stay on topic and fulfill my promise, I will answer your question about how people came up with the model of the Big Bang. Chiroptera already tried to, but not so accurate (sorry, no offense). The point is that because it would be to great a coincidence that all galaxies move away from us, people came to the conclusion that the redshift (Doppler-effect of a source moving away) is not due to motions of galaxies, but that SPACE between galaxies has gotten larger. Subtle difference: If the expansion speed, characterized by the Hubble constant, would be constant over time (not true!!), an easy calculation gives an age of the universe of 10 - 20 billion years.To investigate what really happened, we would have to solve the Einstein equations of General Relativity. These are 16 coupled, non-linear, partial differential equations: very hard to solve!
So people came up with the cosmological principle: the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, equal in all places and all directions. This is only a reasonable assumption on scales 10^24 to 10^27 meters, based on observational evidence. It reduces the Einstein equations to the first Friedmann equation: where H is the Hubble constant, rho the density of the universe, a the scale factor (current value defined as 1, scale factor a=2 means space is stretched out to twice the current length), G the gravitational constant, cc the cosmological constant. The Hubble constant is defined as the time derivative of the scale factor divided by the scale factor, rho is proportional with 1/a^3 for matter and with 1/a^4 for radiation. So we have one differential equation for the variable a, and with some estimates of the densities of matter and radiation we can solve this to find the scale of the universe as a function of time. If the scale factor becomes zero somewhere, this means all space is mapped to one point: a spacetime singularity. All the matter and energy it contains is also compactified into this point. However, we can be certain that these results are more or less wrong, because if we extrapolate back that far, the universe must at some point be smaller than its Compton wavelength, and many laws of physics, most importantly the theory of gravitation, break down at this point and need to be replaced by new theories. You often see ages of the universe published, but if they are accurate they should note that this age is calculated back to the first "10^(-whatever) seconds". According to their model this interval takes only 10^(-whatever) seconds, but if they would use the (yet unknown) "Theory of Everything" this interval might have taken much (infinite?) longer or shorter. In conclusion, we do not even know for sure that there has ever been a Big Bang, but that's not really what the theory is about. The theory is about what happened from just after it till now and we think we understand well what happened during this epoch, because of the agreement between the theory and the observations of the CMB, products of nucleosynthesis etc. Chiroptera explains short and very clear how this is done.I'm afraid it has become a pretty long post, but I wanted to give you a good overview of the theory. Sorry for that. If you still have questions or want me to elaborate some things, just ask.By the way, you're absolutely right that the Casimir-effect has nothing to do with the origin of the universe. The casimir effect is just energy transformed from one form into another, where at the origin of the universe ENERGY (including mass), SPACE and TIME came into being! The argument of JonF about gravitational energy being negative and the total being zero doesn't make much sense either, because we DEFINED gravitational energy to be negative to get it zero at infinity, but it's totally arbitrary and the argument still does not explain the origin of spacetime.Greets Stellatic

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"What interests me is whether God had a choice when he created the world.". --Albert Einstein

Thank you, Stellatic. If my posts on Big Bang has any errors, it is because not only am I not an expert in the field (I only have an MS in physics, and no formal training in General Relativity or advanced quantum field theory), but I was trying to keep my posts short and simple.

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According to their model this interval takes only 10^(-whatever) seconds, but if they would use the (yet unknown) "Theory of Everything" this interval might have taken much (infinite?) longer or shorter. In conclusion, we do not even know for sure that there has ever been a Big Bang,...

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I was going to make this very comment in my next post to kendemyer. You beat me to it!

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If we just for the moment take it as a fact that there was this flood in Noah's time, we'd finally have an explanation for things like this:

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If we assume that there was a flood, it is falsified by an enormous mountain of data that shows sediments being formed slowly over time and the mounds of data that show the earth to be billions of years old. If this global flood did occur, it left no evidence whatsoever, as compared to local floods which leave ample evidence. It just doesn't make sense. This is why Creationists before Darwin concluded that the Noachian flood as ahistorical, and ascribed it to myth. It was not evolutionists who did this, but rather christian geologists who were actually looking for the evidence of the Noachian flood.

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Legends and records likewise speak of the fact that, before the Arabs removed the Pyramid’s outer casing stones, one could see water marks on the stones halfway up the Pyramid’s height, in about the 240-foot level, which would be 400 feet above the present Nile level.

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This is far short of the height needed to cover every mountain on earth. Also, I really don't see how the pyriamids could have survived being covered in thousands of feet of water (notice how they erode even with little rainfall) and the violent earthquakes hypothesized by Noachian flood proponents. You also must reconcile the history written in the rock, including a very well sorted fossil record. Also, we do have complete the complete geologic column (closest one can be found in N Dakota, US) and these show no signs of a world wide flood. The only evidence of this flood is in the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, which the Bible story seems to be a retelling.We are getting off topic, so you should start a separate thread if you want to discuss this further. Cheers.

Infinity, when you copy text from somewhere, please attribute it instead of presenting it as if it were your own words. If you don't realize that you should atribute you can get away without doing it once, maybe twice, but no more than that.Your paragraph on the Pyramids comes from HOW OLD ARE THE PYRAMIDS? at Atlantis Rising Online, which does not at first blush appear to be a reliable source. Why do you believe this source? What reasons do you have to accept their allegations as true? What have you done to verify the allegations before rushing off to present them here?It is indeed difficult to "just for the moment take it as a fact that there was this flood in Noah's time", because all the physical and essentially all the historical evidence indicates that there was no flood in Noah's time. There are several other hypotheses that explain your pyramid story and, unlike your version, are consistent with the physical evidence. Perhaps the story of water marks and salt deposits is made up, or exaggerated or distorted from the original. Perhaps the "water marks" and "salt deposits" were there but were not water marks or salt deposits; they may have been misinterpreted. Perhaps all sorts of other things.We do not consider whether or not it has happened again when we evaluate the possibility of a global flood.

WAY OFF TOPIC!Adminnnemooseus

really.

I think I might be able to clear up your questions.I have done some reading in the past about the big bang, and your question of how the whole universe gets it's energy is a good one, and thelogens believe the answer lies in anti-matter. As anti-matter and matter come into contact with one another, they annialate one another and produce huge amounts of energy. Because there is essentially no mass. So what is this relavence? Thelogens believe during the Big Bang both matter and anti-matter was created, however a little more matter. And the little extra matter is the matter we experience in our universe. And the annialation of the matter and anti-matter produced the energy that the universe uses in its chemical reactions.Now your speech on how entropy is going to the whole maximum thing, there is one basic thing you should know. That entropy isn't the only driving force of chemical reactions. Whether it is redox, organic or inorganic. This applies to ANY chemical system. What drives a chemical reaction is not only entropy, but also enthalpy. Enthalpy is the potential energy in the bonds. There are crystals that are formed naturally. And don't say they are formed because of heat and pressure, because there isn't enough. It is because the lattice energy (enthalpy) "overpowers" entropy so to speak. There are plenty of natural reactions, inorganic as well that go against the trend of entropy. Just thought I would let you know.Fusion reactions is how the stars produce their energy. It would be easy to find out how these reactions work using google or something. Hoped that helped.

Hi Stipes,Your post raised some questions to me. I hope you can help me out and explain what you mean in some more detail. What are thelogens? Do you mean theologians? I'm a christian, but I wouldn't go to a theologian to get answers about anti-matter. I'd rather read a good book or ask one of my professors in elementary particle physics. I already knew about the annihilation of anti-matter with matter and Wizend too: The fact is that matter is just one form of energy. The question was where the energy of the universe came from, which includes mass-energy. So you did not answer the question, unless you specify where this matter and anti-matter came from. I prefer to use 'thermodynamic systems' instead of 'chemical reactions', since we're doing cosmology here and not chemistry. Do you know what enthalpy really is? It is defined as the Legendre transformation of the internal energy with respect to the volume of the system. It is particularly convenient to use enthalpy instead of energy if the pressure of a system is constant or controllable. This is not the case for our universe, so I wonder why you want to replace energy by enthalpy. The minimum enthalpy principle is equivalent to the minimum energy principle.
The minimum energy principle is equivalent to the maximum entropy principle.
I don't know how one mathematical form can overpower another equivalent mathematical form. If the enthalpy is at a minimum, then the entropy is at a maximum, both for the given constraints of the internal parameters. In other words, if forming crystals minimizes the enthalpy, it maximizes the entropy. Only if you add to the thermodynamic system other thermodynamic systems with a low entropy (in most cases on earth these are low entropy photons coming from the sun). Finally (it will probably take quite a while) these low entropy systems will run out too or become high entropy systems themselves and the entropy of the universe will get to a maximum.Please refine and explain your statements and answer the remaining questions where possible. If anything is unclear, just ask and I will elaborate on it.Greets Stellatic

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"What interests me is whether God had a choice when he created the world.". --Albert Einstein