The problems of big bang theory. What are they?

Just back from hols and time is at a premium...So for your two major objections I will just use the usually infallible Reductio ad Idiot method:Both Why the Big Bang is Wrong and Cosmology: The Big Bang Theory: Famous Dissident Scientists on Problems of the Big Bang. Arp, Lerner, Mitchell, Haselhurst cite Bill Mitchell as one of their big "names" who rejects the Big Bang. From Bill Mitchell's "The Big Bang Theory Under Fire" to be found in your second reference, we have the following gem in his very first chapter "1. IS A SINGULARITY ACCEPTABLE?"

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If there were a Big Bang, it would seem that events during the first instant of time would involve the instantaneous acceleration of the enormous number of particles (the entire mass) of the universe to relativistic velocity; and some variations of Big Bang Theory postulate velocities well above the speed of light. Because the acceleration of even a minute particle to the speed of light requires an infinite amount of energy, the Big Bang might have required on the order of an infinity times and infinity of ergs; not to mention the additional energy that would be required to overcome the gravitational attraction of the entire mass of the universe.

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This more than adequately identifies Bill Mitchell as having, in astrophysical terminology, no f'ing clue what the hell he is talking about, and thus we have found our Idiot. Consequently we can safely dismiss both of your objections via Reductio ad Idiot.Next?

Yes, started by Halton Arp and cronies. Halton has invested pretty much his whole life in his own theories of cosmology and just cannot bear to let go - despite being in a desperate minority and despite having each bit of "evidence" he brings forth refuted and explained (though to be fair sometimes these refutations and explanations take a little time to come forth)The signatories are those few astrophysicists in Halton's extended group plus a few hangers on. The rest of the list is made up of "independent researchers" - i.e. wishful thinkers who would like to think they can do science, and engineers who don't have a clue.The simple fact is to understand and thus critically examine big bang cosmology, you need to fully understand General Relativity, alternate theories of gravitation, and relevant parts of cosmology and astrophysics. If you satisfy these requirements, you are by definition a physicist and not an engineer. And 99.9% of physicists do not satisfy these criteria either...Take Bill Mitchell's essay reproduced in the references - this guy reveals his utter ignorance of General Relativity in his first few lines but this does not stop him from making a total idiot of himself by writing that entire "critique".This is the most specialist of fields and just because it is popularised out of all proportion because it is "interesting" does not mean that anyone with a technical degree has a valid comment... this IS rocket science.

Fortunately this is unnecessary - large scale big bang cosmology is pretty-much independent of quantum gravity corrections in the first few 10^-30 seconds. Unless, that is, you are looking for answers to whether the universe really did have a minimum time at T=0, or is part of a larger extended universe/multiverse, etc. Big bang cosmology depends upon General Relativity and GR does not fall apart just because it has singularities in its solutions. Our lack of a complete quantum gravity is not a "problem" for big bang cosmology.Inflation is a fairly natural process and would have been suggested eventually even if we didn't need it to solve some earlier major issues - at the end of the day it is simply de Sitter cosmology and nothing bizarre in the slightest (if you are in the field of course )Likewise, "dark energy" had always been conspicuous by its absence - it's no surprise now we have seen evidence for it. As with inflation, the only mystery is the precise field responsible for the behaviour. The Standard Model of particle physics is such a total mess of fields that the idea that there aren't a few more is a little crazy, especially as every hypothesis of unification of the existing fields involves extra fields.Personally, my only slight concern is dark matter - it's a matter field that we haven't tied down yet. Could it signal that there is no dark matter and there are some corrections required to GR, as many suggest???Good question, but sadly reveals to some extent the ignorance of the questioner - adding a dark matter field to GR IS a correction to GR - it's changing the Lagrangian of space-time physics. How you split up the Lagrangian into different terms is more a matter of our convenience. When we look at what corrections to GR would create the observed effect, we see that adding a matter field is what works best, better than adding extra bosonic fields (forces) and/or changing the type of gravitation (higher order gravity, supersymmetric fields - gravitino, etc).[ABE: To the layman, cosmologists saying there is some mysterious particle out there making up this dark matter sounds much less elegant than saying that a simple change to gravity could explain the discrepency. To the physicist, it is simply a question of whether we are adding a fermionic or bosonic field - equally (in)elegant, and the winner is the one that fits observation...]The simple fact is that of all the conceivable changes we could make, dark matter makes the best fit with observation. Could it signal that we have the whole big bang cosmology wrong? - possibly, in the same way that not having a clear picture of abiogenesis could signal that naturalistic non-life to life is wrong...Edited by cavediver, : some clarification

As evidenced by the fact that we can see NGC 7319 It's a cosmological Gish Gallop. The real problem is that so many of these "problems" are trivially explained in terms of astrophysics/cosmology/relativity but having to provide the astrophysical/cosmological/relativistic education in each single instance to make the explanation understandable is immensely wearing...To outsiders it sounds as if we are truly stumped but the fact is we are just truly bored

Maybe not, but surely you can pick up the gist???"Look, look isn't this strange if the QSO is not associated with the galaxy? Oh, the referee says to point out that this isn't so strange... but imagine if it was strange!!! Then we'd have the proof we want..."Repeat the above about four times through the paper, then conclude with your forgone conclusion anyway.This is pretty poor stuff... I'm quite taken aback myself. Then there is his comment near the end on X-ray QSOs being abnormally associated with galactic nuclei - does not mention selection effects of observation. How were these X-ray QSOs detected? - if only several of them were because of galactic X-ray observations that then discovered an X-ray source in the QSOs themselves, then the correlation is immediately explained.

Short answer: noLong answer: hmmm, not really, no

amatuers have all the fun What does that mean? You've observed the entire Messier catalogue? Nice one. So how far off are you from your NGC Club certificate

Thought I'd copy and modify my old post from the closed Before the Big Bang thread, as it seems rather relevant...There is a great deal of misunderstanding surrounding the nature of mass/matter. If the Universe has an earliest time, it does not need an injection of mass/energy at this point. Mass and matter are aspects of the Universe itself - ripples in its struture. One cannot insert pre-existing rippples into the Universe - this is nonsense.Ok, there seems to be lots of confusion with the various T=0 (big bang) scenarios so I thought some pictures were in order... Here we have ths standard big bang scenario. The black dot is the singularity and the universe expands away from this point through time (vertical) and space (horizontal) This is essentailly the south pole region of our old globe analogy. I have left the top of the universe off as we don't know yet whether it will close back up or spread apart for ever. The globe analogy assumes it closes back up but this is far from certain and probably unlikely given current evidence. I should also stress that the Universe is the surface of this cup/cone shape. Inside/outside/above/below (the white region) is non-existence. You cannot say any point outside the Universe is 'before' or 'after' the Universe because these points simply do not exist. They are simply there for us to be able to take a God's-eye view on the Universe.Now, the first major attempt to get a quantum correction to the big bang picture was with the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal. It makes a huge difference to the above picture... see: Spot the difference What Hawking and Hartle managed to do was remove the annoying singularity, and replace that region with a nice bit of Euclidean space where 'time' is simply a spatial dimension. It is only as you move upwards does time smoothly become its familiar self with causal and temporal properties. There was no 'before' in the first picture, but now there is DEFINITELY NO BEFORE!!! as there is simply no time-like dimension in the vicinity of the point of interest!That's the 'Universe with an earliest time' dealt with. Now we come to: Here the quantum corrections have revealed that the Universe did not begin at T=0 of the big bang, but emerged from an earlier time. This enlarged Universe may well have been eternal, stretching back infinitely into the past... or it may well have an earliest time, just not at T=0, but at T=-?? somewhere to south of our diagram.Finally, the Universe may well be embedded within a larger space-time - larger in physical size, number of dimensions, or it may have a very different nature altogether - and multiple universes may well be springing into existence with their own big bangs: This picture represents a whole range of possibilities: chaotic inflation, ekpyrotic universe, the 'Landscape' of string theory, etc. Of course, the question is then where did this larger Universe come from? Any of the possibilities we have considered so far could equally apply to this larger space...Ok, so how does God possibly fit into any of these pictures? The most common idea, espoused here by many theists, the Vatican, etc, etc is also the most incorrect from a relativists point of view:.
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. Here we see God magicking the Universe into existence at T=0, and the Universe evolving on from here. The problem is this presupposes 'time' as continuing outside the Universe, 'before' its existence. The more 'logical' view is: This retains time and space as integral parts of the Universe. And if the Universe is eternal and has no beginning... does this preclude creation? Of course not... Hope this clears the muddy water a little... Edited by Admin, : Redcue image width.

I would say independent of 'existence'. 'Outside' specifies an unnecessary constraint. Quoting Paul is no proof of anything - what he is saying is far from clear-cut, and many would disagree. It is not the 'beginning' that is problematic for explanations. The 'beginning' is just one part of the Universe, and no more or less intriguing than any other part. The real question is 'why existence?'. This has little to do with beginnings and is certainly not explained by them.

Well, I have certainly heard the claim many times but it is utter tripe of course, promoted by those with no clue of physics.If someone is trying to tell you that everything in the Universe should be spinning the same way if the Big Bang is true, then they are either utterly ignorant/confused of what they are saying or they are deliberately lying. Neither is a particularly good reflection upon themselves...We do not check for conservation of angular momentum by ensuring everything is "spinning the same way" (sorry, I'm a physicist and I just have to ) Simplistically, what we do is ADD UP the rotation of every single object in the region of concern, and compare the SUM to what we had before. Let's say we start with a spacecraft sat in space with no rotation. An explosion rips the spacecraft into two identical halves. As long as these two halves have equal and opposite spins, then angular momentum has been conserved. There was zero before, and now there is J + (-J) which equals zero. If the spacecraft explodes into ten thousand fragments, each randomly spinning wildly, then you can be confident that if you actually added up the individual angular momenta of each individual piece, you would end up with a total ang mom of zero - because this is what you started with.So, if you think ang mom is an issue for the Big Bang, all you have to do is go measure the spin (ang mom) of each individual object in the entire Universe, and add them all up. And if you don't get zero, THEN FINALLY, you will have simply measured the original ang mom of the Big Bang, and there is actually nothing to say that it should be zero anyway!!!As you can now tell, whoever thought up this "problem" really had no clue as to physics whatsoever. Sad isn't it?Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

Just like Buzzsaw and so many others, you do not understand what is meant by "law". A law is simply a recognition of how things appear to behave. It is the last thing in physics that can be used dogmatically to state what can and what cannot occur, especially when one is totally ignorant of the domain of applicability of said law. Unless one is fully conversant in the mathematics and physics that underlie any particular law, one would do well to avoid making pronouncements such as yours.That said, if you actually do want to discuss the meaningfulness of energy as a global concept in topologically non-trivial spacetimes, then I will be only to happy to join in. But if the BBT does appear to "break" naive interpretations of the laws of thermodynamics, then so much for naive interpretations...Edited by cavediver, : No reason given.

And that is the problem: it doesn't. Laws are simply our, often misguided, attempts to describe what is happening. They have nothing to do with the Universe itself. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is not some prescribed rule written down by a law-giver - it is just a short hand way of describing the behaviour of large numbers of things. This is the behaviour of mathematics. And mathematics is constrained by consistency. There is no "choice" in these behaviours - that is simply the way things are. Or do you think your god can make 1+1=3 if he so chooses? How bizarre. What exactly would be a "pristine one"? Energy is a universal concept in that just about anywhere you go in the Universe, you can apply the concept of energy *locally*. It is not a global concept, because you cannot apply the concept of energy across an entire cross-section of the Universe - at least not consistently. And around the Big Bang, you have the entire cross-section of the Universe. And so your concept of energy breaks down. No, energy is not reliant on any laws. It is simply a method of counting. And it some circumstances, such as around the Big Bang, that particular method of counting breaks down.

Irrespective, laws do not "exist" and do not "turn" the Universe. But you are free to believe that they do. No, this is just mumbo-jumbo. It certainly wasn't at the Big Bang. It didn't even exist yet no, I can assure you, I am far from confused when it comes to this subject. Except that there are no "laws"

As AZPaul3 has already mentioned, this is not a contradiction of the classical Big Bang, but a possible "quantum gravity" explanation of it. It is highly theoretical and is based on the far from understood M-Theory. There are other speculative "quantum gravity" possibilities, such as eternal inflation and the Hartle Hawking No-Boundary Proposal.The classical Big Bang is extremely well evidenced, so any deeper theory must mimic the Big Bang to a very close degree, only diverging fron the classical picture very close to the singularity.The acceleration of the expansion rate is not an anomaly - it is perfectly well explained within the context of Big Bang cosmology. We just had not observed any acceleration prior to the late '90s, so naturally set the relevant parameter that drives the acceleration (or deceleration) to zero. Of course, there is the big question of what type of field is driving the acceleration (the so-called dark energy) , but that is not a mystery for Big Bang physics - it is simply a question regarding the precise field content of the Universe.

No, we don't know that. Most attempts at formulating "quantum gravity" corrections to the Big Bang, reveal that it wasn't "a beginning". So the question is open. Obviously this makes no sense as there is no "before" if there is no time.More later...