Problems with the Big Bang theory

What about Message 76 that says that the big bang doesn't seek to explain the origin of 'matter' (where matter I presume means stuff). Message 72 says the same thing. My Message 59 explains that the big bang doesn't explain this, only that things were once hotter and denser, but we don't know where the hotness and denseness came from - as does my Message 50. The possibility of God won't go away, of course, if we ever explain the origin of 'stuff'. It's just odd that DB (perhaps yourself as well?) seemed blind to the answers that didn't mention God, but did mention that we don't know the answer. A slight confusion here, let me clarify. No explanation can logically exclude God. I don't include God in my explanation as to why my pipes get blocked up, and I don't think you have a problem with that. Neglecting to mention that God could possibly have been involved is not the same as excluding him as a possibility. The 'god' explanation is a possibility for EVERYTHING. Thus, it is redundant to keep bringing it up. That is why I don't think we should stop with 'God Did It', otherwise I won't call a plumber to clear the grease/fat/dead animal/whatever. As such - if you explicitly excluded god as a possibility I would question your logic skills. Anyway, rather than drifting off topic, I'll think about posting a topic on this subject for further discussion. It might be quite interesting. In case I forget, or to whet your appetite, here is a strongly worded commentary on one aspect of the debate currently going on. I'll bring a more rounded treatment of it and PNT it - I'm a little busy for the rest of today so I'll try get it up sometime tomorrow.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

Yup. And on cosmic scales it doesn't apply, and in quantum fluctuations it doesn't apply. Actually, it does; you don't understand what a quantum fluctuation is. See Quantum FLuctuation. The possibility being considered is that of a large and long-lasting quantum fluctuation generating the universe from nothing. Certainly theoretically possible. Common sense may or may not be the best way to provoke good debates; that's not the subject. But it's definitely not a good way to theorize about things way outside our range of experience; we know that things come from nothing, we've seen it in many differnt ways, and we are pretty sure that conservation of energy doesn't apply to the entire universe.From another message: Actually, we see it every day; if things weren't continually materializing from complete nothingness (and almost always almost immmediately dematerializong back into complete nothingness) the world wouldn't work the way it does. But you might want to look at the Casimir effect.

The equvalence of mass and energy is not the phenomenon we're discussing. We are talking about virtual particles that do indeed just pop out of nowhere.

Not that you are doing this or anything, you seem pretty level headed. But a lot of people are misunderstanding my question. I undestand that the Big Bang Theory doesn't say that matter arose from nothing. This is elementary. What I wanted to know was the matter that is involved in the Big Bang, the gases, the substances, whatever it was that was hotter and denser, where and when did it originate. In other words I was trying to say that the Big Bang Theory really doesn't describe the origin of the universe or the life in it because it doesn't offer a solution to where the matter originated. The problems that arise are simple: If the matter was always in existence, then the universe is infinite with respect to time...right? Because it didn't have a beginning. If this is the case, then the people that say that there is a beginning, and hence a originating "date" or "time" when the universe began, are wrong. If the matter somehow just happened, this violates the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. Does any of this make sense? My faith in God is pretty strong. But I can leave my faith completely out of the equation and common sense tells me that since no one has been able to duplicate matter materializing out of thin air, and I mean out or complete nothingness, not even energy, which has mass too, then matter had to have either been created, or always in existence. I am not a scientist, so it's a little difficult to put into words...am I making sense at all?

Throwing in a bunch of big words like "quantum fluctuation" and "Casimir effect", does absolutely nothing to prove that matter can come from nothing. Quantums are hardly mass enough to produce life right? Something being "theoretically possible" is certainly not proof. You say that we see many examples...please describe a concrete example or don't respond please. Your just wasting my time!

Hello, DB.

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whatever it was that was hotter and denser, where and when did it originate.

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No one knows. Right now it is beyond the scope of science to answer that question since we do not now have a complete enough set of scientific principles to understand the exact beginning of the universe -- going back in time, when the universe gets hot enough and dense enough our scientific laws do not work any more.Furthermore, even if we do get a more complete understanding of the laws of nature, then they may not help us in understanding the origin of the universe. The laws of science describe what happens in the universe -- they may forever be unable to answer questions like how did the universe begin.-

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If the matter was always in existence, then the universe is infinite with respect to time...right?

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That is a possibility. Since our laws only work back so far in time, they can't really explain what the universe was like before that time. It is possible that, with a complete understanding of the laws of nature, we will find that time can be extended infinitely far into the past.Another problem is that if there is a t=0 that marks the beginning of time and the universe, then there was nothing, absolutely nothing, before that -- not time, not space, nothing. At the very beginning of the universe, there was no "previous time". So, in a sense, even if time is finite we can still say that the universe has always existed. There was never a time when the universe didn't exist.-

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If the matter somehow just happened, this violates the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy.

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First, the Law of Conservation of Energy is simply a description of what we observe in the universe. We just haven't observed a violation of this law. We may not have observed the correct phenomena. Perhaps the law is occassionally violated, but we haven't discovered it yet.More importantly, this law simply describes what we observe within the universe. It may not apply to the "creation" of the universe (if such a concept has any meaning) itself. The creation of the universe (whatever that may mean) is such an extraordinary event, certainly far different from anything else with which we are familiar, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to me that our familiar physical laws do not apply.-

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Does any of this make sense?

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Actually, the whole notion of a "cause" for the universe doesn't really make sense. For A to be a cause for B we mean that every time we see A at some instant in time, we see B shortly afterwards. But what does this mean for the universe? For the universe to have a "cause", then this cause must precede the universe in time. But if there is a first instant in time, then there is no preceding instant of time -- therefore the universe cannot have a cause.Of course, as cavediver pointed out, we can speak of "how the universe exist" or "why the universe exists." Kind of. At this point, our physics formulations simply will not work. All of our physics and our intuitions are meant to work within the universe. They are inadequate to begin to speak of anything that is "outside of the universe", whatever that may mean.This whole concept is pretty fuzzy. It is really hard to find language to describe it adequately, and therefore really hard to describe the conceptual difficulties this whole subject entails.-Personally, I find the whole concept so fuzzy that I find it preferrable to just assume that the universe exists. Perhaps for no reason, it just is.-

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am I making sense at all?

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No less than I am, heh.

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Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793. But regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle, of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty forever. -- Albert Camus

Chiroptera writes: Almost as bad as trying to find the forwarding address of God's parents.

The Casimir effect is a concrete example of matter coming from nothing. It's also the easiest esample to demonstrate and understand. There are plenty more, but they require a good deal more background knowledge than you have."Quantum fluctuation" isn't a particularly "big word", and if you don't understand what it means you don't belong in a discussion of cosmology.

Avoiding the fine tuning problem and the anthropic princible for now , this is my view on things at the moment, ive been reading about physics and the evolution of the universe since i got my computer, its always fancinated me why theres something rather than nothing ecti find that people come on here and ask questions about simple things that if they
were really interested in they would of looked it up already using google,,thats how i started 2 years ago , at first i asked simple things like where did the universe come from , then from there you say ok what about galaxys then whats gravity etc..if you were Genuinly interested you would try and self educate yourself and ask questions
in google rather then just come here and rant about things you dont know about and hav'nt spent anytime reading and learning , people need to open there eyes and look alot
closer at science rather than just saying " something can not come out of nothing" etcdo a little research and look around the internet and if you are interested in these subjects
you can teach yourself a hell of a lot, not the underlying mathmatics but the theorys and the basics of these ideas ,ive eventually stumbled into reading about the quantum world and how "things" can and
do come into existence from nothingthe answer to my own question that ive been asking myself since i got my computer and been reading all sorts is this .. The quantum world is based on probabilities and so there has always been a probabilty that there could be a universe, the universe came from a quantum vaccum 14 billions years ago... what state was before that is imposible to tellBasically from a science point of view there is a universe because there was always a probabilty that there could be one...Also what i am saying is that im 25 years old, i did'nt finish school & had no idea what so ever about physics untill i brought my computer, so instead of coming here and writting
stupid coments why dont you put some time and effort into reading about these subjects
first and educate yourselfThis is aimed at the OP , grrrr !Rant overEdited by Fabric, : minor spelling

I have way more knowledge than you realize. All I was saying is that you fill your answers with terms rather than answering the question. If you can't answer the question, then you don't deserve to be in this thread!!

Hi Divine,You asked for a concrete example of something coming from nothing, and the Casimir Effect is a concrete example of something coming from nothing. If you're looking for more than just the term "Casimir Effect", if you're looking for a detailed description of it, then I think that was the point of Fabric's response: why don't you look it up? Wikipedia covers it pretty well: Casimir effect - Wikipedia. And JonF in his Message 91 provided links as well.For most of the people on this thread, terms like "quantum fluctuation" and "Casimir Effect" are very familiar. We're not using the terms because they're "high-falutin' words showin' we's a bunch of rite book-lerned peeple". We're using them because they are necessary to providing the answers to the questions you asked.--Percy

Perhaps so. All I have to go on is your posts in this thread, and they strongly suggest a lack of relevant knowledge. The terms are the answers. I'm not going to compose or cut-and-past pages of technical explanations; I'm going to link to good explanations. If you don't understand the terms, follow the links and learn. You're not going to get answers without them.

Perhaps so. All I have to go on is your posts in this thread, and they strongly suggest a lack of relevant knowledge. The terms are the answers. I'm not going to compose or cut-and-past pages of technical explanations; I'm going to link to good explanations. If you don't understand the terms, follow the links and learn. You're not going to get answers without them.

This has now cropped up a critical number of times in this thread and I must step in. The Casimir Effect, virtual particles, vacuum/quantum fluctuations... none of these are an example of something from nothing, despite what popular science may say.All are "simple" features of the underlying quantum fields. In fact, the Casimir Effect precisely proves that even in its vacuum state, a quantum field cannot possibly be regarded as "nothing".If the universe is a zero-point quantum fluctuation, then it is a fluctutaion of something... and this simply pushes back our definition of the universe to the covering physics of which our universe is just a fluctuation. The question remains: where does the physics come from?Nothing is something of which we have no knowledge and no experience... the universe is a self-contained whole, how ever far out we have to stretch the definiton of universe.The first scientist to mention this is the context of answering "why is the universe here?" should have been shot. It merely ducks the question.