A Big Bang Misconception

I’d like to read your explanation of the disconnect, please. Perhaps we could learn a lot from each other. I don’t think the lack of hindrance demands equal expansion. What if the singularity was not homogeneous? Well, the singularity was not just densely packed matter . it was all of space-time.And, therefore, nothing within the boundary of the space at that time was able to prevent it either. So, I think, yes. It’s not that the dots don’t move, its that the dots, themselves, don’t get bigger, only the space between them exands while they, themselves, do not expand. So your motive is to find a boon to science?I think if you are using the entire universe as your reference, then any point can be chosen to be at absolute rest, while observing the rest of the universe moving relative to that point. Still though, this will not allow us to determine the absolute motion of anything. The space between the clumps of matter could expand without expanding the clumps themselves. I think scientists are quite comfortable in answering “We don’t know.” The universe was quite difference at times close to the singularity so it is hard to speculate just what the hell was going on.Perhaps the singularity was never static. Maybe the universe was collapsing up to the singularity, which existed only for an infinitely small amount of time, and then immediately began expanding. We have no information about what happened before the singularity so who knows.You can also use Earth as a model for the Big Bang where you start at singularity at the north pole and moving south is forward in time and the widening of the planet represents the expansion of space-time with a Big Crunch at the south pole. Then when people ask what happened before the singularity, you respond with what is north of the north pole, which is a nonsense question to ask, just like what is before the singularity.Check out Message 6 where I presented another analogy. Actually, go through the thread, you might learn a lot. I don’t know what “the power of space expansion” is. I can guess at what you mean though, that the cause of the expansion must be stronger than the resistance to expansion or nothing would expand and if it is stronger then how can matter remain together? Is that about what you’re asking? Well, I don’t really know the answer except I could oint out that the expansion is not just of matter, but of all of space-time, so you can really say that the “force” is the same on space and matter. But the space between the locals could expand. Like I said typed, the expansion is happening in between the galaxies, they could be moving farther apart from each other, while not moving farther apart as themselves, yeah? Let’s not get into dark stuff yet. I don’t really think there is an expansion force, so to speak type, that must be overcome to prevent matter from ripping apart. There’s something else going on that I don’t really understand well enough, or remember enough about, to explain properly right now. Fundamental Force . ..Relative Strength
Gravity . . . . . . . . . . . ........... . . .1
Weak Interaction . . . . . ... . . . . . 10^25
Electromagnetic . . . . . ... . . . . . 10^36
Strong Interaction . . . . . .. . . . . . 10^38 sourceSo yeah, gravity is really really not-strong. You’re welcome Well that theory certainly isn’t going to help the confusion.So, you’re trying to find a boon to science because you think the devil is tricking them? You think that there is evidence contrary to the biblical creation story because we are being tricked and not because it isn’t true? If that was true, then doesn’t that turn god into Loki, the trickster god? I mean, why would he make something apparent that isn’t true?, or even allow the devil to do it (which is the same as doing it)? . ..Actually, all these questions are off topic so keep the replies them short and sweet, if at all, and focus on the rest of the message instead.

Exactly my point. Why is one theory any better than the next? They both take faith to believe, because the evidence could support either idea. So, it is quite useless debating whether I'm right or you're right if we disagree on something that we have no empirical proof on. Your idea is just as good as mine, so why don't we just leave it at that?Oh, and by the way, the only reason I even discuss this, is because I feel that some ideas, although just as scientific, may not be very logical (obviously, this is just my oppinion. By all means, feel free to disagree).So, my whole point? We all need to grow up and quit using scientific arguments, because in all reality they can be used for either theory. The same could be said about any source of information. For example, if you told me that my brother had murdered someone, I would disagree with you. And if you told me that he was found in our neighbor's house, with a knife in his hand dripping with blood with a dead person lying on the floor next to him, I still would not believe you. What would your response be? Well, I guess you would say that you have all the evidence you need. But you have forgotten one thing...I have a different kind of evidence, the evidence of a RELATIONSHIP with my brother, and through that relationship, I know that he could never murder someone. Here we have a situation in which the scientific information doesn't really matter, at least in my eyes, becuase I know that my brother couldn't have done it. The problem is, my evidence is of a different kind.

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There is no such force. The universe used to be in a very hot, very dense state. Space expanded. It was the way things were.

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Okay then. If there is no such force, and if something didn't come from nothing, and if "it was the way things were" then I don't accept that as a scientific theory or viewpoint. That is completely unscientific and is not science. If you cannot explain how it happened, then I suggest that it is not scientifically provable and is just as valid as the next theory. That is my whole point: one theory is just as good as the next when it comes to cosmology, because we don't have enough evidence or first-hand experience.

This isn't really about the Big Bang. I can see you have a different topic that you'd like to discuss. This thread is focused on the Big Bang. If you'd like to discuss the nature of science then please propose a new thread.

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--	Percy
	EvC Forum Director

You're replying to Chiroptera's Message 42 in which he mentioned the red shift, the cosmic background radiation, and the ratio of hydrogen to helium to lithium. There is other evidence, too, but this is some of the most obvious and easy to discuss evidence. It might be less "logically ignorant", to use a phrase you yourself coined, to examine and discuss this evidence before concluding that "we don't have enough evidence or first-hand experience."Would you like to examine and discuss this evidence?--Percy

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If you cannot explain how it happened, then I suggest that it is not scientifically provable and is just as valid as the next theory.

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This is not completely true. As Percy noted, I gave three pieces of evidence for the standard Big Bang model. The red shifts -- this is consistent with an expanding universe, and, if one "runs the clock backwards", one sees that in the past the universe must have been hot, dense, and expanding.Another evidence I mentioned is the Cosmic Microwave Background. If the universe was hot and dense, there must have been blackbody radiation. If the universe has expanded, this radiation must have "cooled" or "red-shifted" into the microwave region. This is what we see -- microwave radiation with the characteristics of black body radiation.Finally, I mentioned the ratio of helium to hydrogen we observe in the universe today. If the universe was hot and dense, it would have been to hot for atomic nuclei to exist. As the universe expanded, it would have cooled enough for nuclei to form. What nuclei and in what proportions will depend on the density and the rate of expansion when the temperature finally reaches the correct point. We see a ratio that is consistent with the standard Big Bang model.Note that these are not ad hoc explanations of these phenomena. These phenomena occur as a direct consequence of the fact that the universe was hot, dense, and expanding. There is a multitude of other cosmological evidence for this as well, but these are the ones I know a little bit about. When all the evidence is examined, it is a natural conclusion that the universe was hot, dense, and expanding.There might be other theories about what the universe was like in its early stages, but I don't know of them. Do those theories explain the red shift, the CMB, and the cosmological ratio of the abundances of helium to hydrogen? Do these phenomena come out directly from these alternative theories, or must one add ad hoc explanations to the theory to account for these? As far as I know, there is no alternative cosmological model that is consistent with the data that we observe, or that can account for these phenomena without ad hoc explanations.Edited by Chiroptera, : Clarify the topic of the last paragraph.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

But see, these are only evidence for the Big Bang if you assume that the universe is "billions of years old."Okay, let's assume that everything is expanding, and that the universe IS billions of years old. If that's true, then that means that billions of years ago, everything was much closer together. Proponents of the Big Bang (really, I could care less what you call it, it's a naturalistic cosmological theory) will say that this means the universe must have been much smaller. If that's true, then my question would be this: what force was powerful to overtake all that gravity in order to get the universe to spread out? Because if one ascribes to the oscillating universe theory, then gravity will eventually take over and pull everything back together. My question is what force is this that causes the universe to break back apart? Surely there must be some very powerful force to overtake gravity.What about the Law of Angular Momentum? If everything was at once a dot, and that dot spun really, really, really, really fast, then why are things spinning opposite directions? The Law of Angular Momentum says that objects that break off of the original object all spin the same direction. So why are there entire galaxies spinning the wrong direction? And what about our own solar system? What is causing three of the planets to spin the opposite way? Here’s a suggestion . God made it that way.How about the first law of thermodynamics? You cannot get rid of both matter and energy, but you can switch between the two. How does that fit with the Big Bang theory? First there was nothing? Then something? Huh? This makes absolutely no logical sense. I really wish someone would explain this to me please, because if there is no answer for this, then there is no point in saying that the universe must have been smaller in the past. Who cares? That doesn’t prove that it started 24.6 billion years ago and came from nothing! God could have made our universe with a blue shift, and if it was only 6,000 years ago, it wouldn’t have mattered.

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But see, these are only evidence for the Big Bang if you assume that the universe is "billions of years old."

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Well, that's how science works. All science. You have a theory or a hypothesis. Then you ask, "If this theory is true, what would we see? We should see X." Then you check to see if you can see X. If you do, that counts as a confirmation. Then you ask, "If this theory is true, what would we see? We should see Y." Then you check to see if you can see Y. If you do, that counts as a confirmation. Then you ask, "If this theory is true, what would we see? We should not see Z." Then you check to see if you can see Z. If you don't, that counts as a confirmation. Do you see how this works? That is why the three observations that I mention count as confirmation of the Big Bang model.-

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what force was powerful to overtake all that gravity in order to get the universe to spread out?

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That comes out of General Relativity. I'm not an expert on it; maybe cavediver or Son Goku will see this and give more details.-

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If everything was at once a dot, and that dot spun really, really, really, really fast, then why are things spinning opposite directions?

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The universe may not have been a "dot". It probably wasn't spinning. As far as is known, the total angular momentum of the universe is zero.-

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First there was nothing? Then something?

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Who knows? So far, our current understanding of the laws of physics only allow us to know what was going on when the universe was very, very, very small and very, very, very hot. We do not have the tools, yet, to understand what happened at the very beginning.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

The "spinning dot" is a Kent Hovind argument. I've never seen any such suggestion in any respectable source and I'm pretty sure that Hovind made it up.

Yeah, I forgot to change the subtitle -- I was going to subtitle the post "Back to the same old PRATTs".

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

Before the discovery of the red shift, prevailing thought was that the universe was ageless, timeless, and that it had always existed. Hubble analyzed the red shift of many distant galaxies and compared it with their distance, and he found that the further away a galaxy was the faster it was receding from us. This meant that with the exception of nearby galaxies (which are close enough for gravity to overcome expansion), all galaxies are receding from all other galaxies. Hubble's derivation of what is now known as Hubble's Law revealed that instead of being static and timeless the universe is expanding with a definite beginning.The reason Hubble's Law leads directly to the conclusion that the universe had a beginning comes from thinking about where the receding galaxies used to be. Anything that is receding must have been closer in the past, and projecting the motions of the galaxies back in time means that at some time in the past all the matter of all the galaxies in the universe was in the same place. As the recession rates of the galaxies have been more accurately measured, and as we've discovered more about our universe, such as the recently discovered acceleration of the expansion, we've been able to estimate the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years. That's the time it took for all the matter we see in the observable universe to expand from a point in space to its current scattered configuration of stars and galaxies and nebula.There are no assumptions involved in this estimate of the age of the universe, beyond the basic one of all science that scientific laws are the same through all space and time. This is an excellent question, and I've often wondered about this myself. Maybe one of the cosmologists will check in and answer this one. I think I see the same problem you do. When too much matter is gathered in too small a space, then you get a black hole. Clearly all the matter of the universe gathered at a single point is sufficiently dense to form a black hole. Given that nothing ever leaves a black hole, except extremely slowly via Hawking radiation, how did the universe ever grow to it's current size?I have a feeling the explanation is going to involve inflation (extremely rapidly expanding space), but I have an objection to this, too. Expanding space is not able to overcome atomic or gravitational forces in today's universe, which is why objects like atoms, ourselves and our solar system remain the same size, so how could it overcome the much greater gravitational force in the early universe shortly after time 0. There was no solid matter to spin at the time of the big bang - it was just a very dense and very hot plasma, which means the atomic particles existed separately and had not yet combined into atoms. Since there was no solid matter at the time, it wasn't possible for there to be objects that broke off while conserving angular momentum. Your envisioning a situation that never existed.It was only much later, hundreds of millions of years later, that the universe cooled sufficiently for atoms to form (mostly hydrogen, helium and lithium), and more time after that for slight variations in the density of this nebulous gas to act as seeds for aggregation into stars and galaxies.So the galaxies, stars and planets condensed from gaseous matter so long after the Big Bang that there's really no causal relationship regarding anything like angular momentum. There's really no way for any angular momentum that might have been present in the Big Bang (a possibility for which we have no firm conclusions yet, I don't believe) to have transmitted itself through gas clouds into the stars and galaxies that came later. Interesting question, but it has nothing to do with the Big Bang. EvC Forum exists to examine creationism's assertion that it is legitimate science. Were it not for the efforts of creationists to force creationism into public school science classrooms, the debate wouldn't even exist. Once you've made the assertion that "God did it," you've lost the debate concerning whether creationism is legitimate science.This forum, the [forum=-2] forum, is one of the science forums. "God did it" style answers cannot be part of the discussion in the science forums, though it is certainly a legitimate topic of discussion that God should be part of science in the [forum=-11] forum. I think you've asked a number of good questions. There is still lots of debate within science about conditions in the early universe at and very near time 0. But we know because of a great deal of credible evidence that all the matter of the observable universe existed in a very tiny volume just after time 0, and that it expanded (extremely rapidly at first) to become the universe we see today.--Percy

In Brian Greene's book "The Fabric of the Cosmos" he says that gravity can be negative under certain conditions. He theorizes that gravity was negative at T=0 at that this caused the virtually instant expansion of our universe.This he says,(at least as I understand it which is highly suspect), is because the Higgs field existed at T=0 in a high energy, negative pressure state. Under those circumstances gravity was repulsive or negative and caused a monumemntal amount of expansion until about T=10-35 secs.If you have Greene's book it is in Chap 10.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

negative gravity? wierd. so that would be like the earth pushing me away?magnetism does the same thing, and is stronger than gravity, I've heard.was the early universe (sigularity) without charge?am I just espousing bullshit?
i don't know.

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All a man's knowledge comes from his experiences

Try thinking of it in a different way.At the point of the big bang (time = 0) all of space existed in an infinitely small point which then began to expand.
To say that there must still be a point which can be determined to be the center is a meaningless concept. The fact is that every point in the universe is the center since it is the point itself that expanded and not the stuff that we see today.
I am sitting at the center right now.
So are you (unless you are standing up that is)
So is everybody else who is reading this thread (and all the ones who aren't too)

I don't know either.
Sometimes when I think about it (which as it happens is a lot more often than is healthy for me) I come up with the weirdest notions.Things like this.Maybe there literally was nothing at the start.
People often say that it is ridiculous to say that something came out of nothing.
Well what if there is still nothing?
That isn't as daft as it might sound on the face of it. I'm not suggesting that nothing we see and feel is real. Just that the sum total of mass + anti-mass + matter + anti-matter is equal to zero.
If the two types of matter exploded into alternate realities that parallel each other to this day then it would be quite accurate to say that there is still a grand total of nothing.
No physical laws have been broken.I have no idea how people who have studied cosmology feel about this. It's just my own little pet idea