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Author Topic:   A Big Bang Misconception
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 44 of 83 (343021)
08-24-2006 3:38 PM
Reply to: Message 40 by Eledhan
08-24-2006 2:31 PM


Re: This is pointless...
Hi Eledhan,
Everything you say is true. There's really no point in studying anything from long ago. Even 10 years ago is too much, so 20 billion years ago is really ridiculous!
You're absolutely right that we have no idea about any of the physics of the Big Bang. The necessary forces are obviously too unimaginably large, and as you say, so much matter could never explode anyway.
And you're right on about something coming from nothing, clearly a very logically ignorant idea. Casimir, schmasimir, it's all hooey. The physicists who think they're observing those virtual particles probably banged their heads on a virtual mass spectrometer or something, that's how you explain that. They were seeing stars and they thought they were particles!
It was a brilliant stroke to ask for the scientific evidence for the Big Bang, because obviously it doesn't exist. If there was really any such evidence you would already know about it, because someone like you would never make bold assertions out of ignorance. Just who do these physicists think they're trying to fool anyway. You weren't born yesterday!
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 40 by Eledhan, posted 08-24-2006 2:31 PM Eledhan has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 60 of 83 (343372)
08-25-2006 3:08 PM
Reply to: Message 58 by Joman
08-25-2006 2:14 PM


Joman writes:
How is it the expansion force was able to expand the densest clump of matter initially but, not the extremely less dense ones now?
Ooh, good question. Let me rephrase this for the benefit of those trying to answer it.
In today's universe we say that expanding space doesn't cause matter to expand with it because matter is strongly bound together. In the early universe during inflation my understanding of the model is that matter expanded with space. How so? Was it because matter was still so hot that no bonds had yet formed, and that the symmetries that became broken later were still in place?
How can it move a whole galaxy and yet it can't expand the galaxy itself? (consider how small the gravity effect between our sun and others is)
This one's much easier. It isn't that it moves a whole galaxy. It's that the amount of space between it and adjacent galaxies is increasing.
--Percy

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 Message 58 by Joman, posted 08-25-2006 2:14 PM Joman has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 65 of 83 (344653)
08-29-2006 9:10 AM
Reply to: Message 63 by Eledhan
08-29-2006 8:44 AM


Re: This is pointless...
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.
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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 63 by Eledhan, posted 08-29-2006 8:44 AM Eledhan has not replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 71 of 83 (345390)
08-31-2006 9:57 AM
Reply to: Message 67 by Eledhan
08-31-2006 8:39 AM


Re: This is pointless...
Eledhan writes:
But see, these are only evidence for the Big Bang if you assume that the universe is "billions of years old."
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
And what about our own solar system? What is causing three of the planets to spin the opposite way?
Interesting question, but it has nothing to do with the Big Bang.
Here’s a suggestion . God made it that way.
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.
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.
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

This message is a reply to:
 Message 67 by Eledhan, posted 08-31-2006 8:39 AM Eledhan has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 72 by GDR, posted 08-31-2006 10:45 AM Percy has not replied
 Message 78 by cavediver, posted 09-06-2006 6:10 PM Percy has replied

  
Percy
Member
Posts: 22391
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 79 of 83 (347075)
09-06-2006 6:39 PM
Reply to: Message 78 by cavediver
09-06-2006 6:10 PM


Re: This is pointless...
cavediver writes:
Sometimes, not always. To get a black hole you need to have sufficient matter concentrated within a volume, surrounded by space of much lower density, usually vacuum. Even then, there are several requirements. This is not the situation with the early universe. There you have uniform density of matter throughout space. These two situations give rise to wholly different space-time solutions.
Ooh! Ooh! Yes, of course! Thank you for this explanation!
There was no solid matter to spin at the time of the big bang
Just as an aside, you don't need solid matter to have angular momentum. Space-time itself can posses ang mom. The Kerr solution is an entire universe that spins, but has no mass. Very non-Machian.
And a spinning singularity is a possibility, too, I assume?
My mention of the absence of solid matter at the time of the Big Bang was addressing where Eledhan said, "...objects that break off of the original object all spin the same direction."
--Percy

This message is a reply to:
 Message 78 by cavediver, posted 09-06-2006 6:10 PM cavediver has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 80 by cavediver, posted 09-06-2006 7:23 PM Percy has not replied

  
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