Before the Big Bang

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It is perfectly clear that there has not been anywhere near enough time on Earth for these complex life forms to evolve through random events.

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This is indisputably true. Fortuanately, Darwin suggested a mechanism that we term "natural selection" which is very much non-random.

I am afraid that this may be continuing off topic for this thread, but no, I am not mistaken -- evolution is what produces species.If you mean the first indisputably living cell, the "first species", then that most likely was produced by natural selection as well. The first replicators were probably very simple -- very likely to form spontaneously (from "chance") in the environment that existed on the prebiotic earth, and then natural selection produced more, and more efficient self-replicators culminating in the what we would call a definite cell.Edited to add:I have just noticed that evolution and natural selection is off-topic here. If you want to continue this discussion, then I invite you to either join an existing thread on this topic or start a new thread.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 02-15-2005 11:23 AM

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...instantaneous emergence of an extremely complicated life form the moment water existed....

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I have commented on this in the other thread in which you made this statement. It is so misleading that, if deliberate, could be seen as dishonest.--

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I for one will not argue with these giants of science.

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Considering that other giants of science have no problems with abiogenesis or evolution, you are being pretty selective about which giants of science you will argue with.--

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The funny thing is that having made the admission, science proceeds as though nothing had been discovered.

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This is false. As usual whenever scientists have a question that they cannot answer, they are actively working to find the answers. There is a lot of research going on right now in the field of abiogenesis. Although by no means complete, there have been a lot of discoveries, and we are gaining more and more insight into the possible processes. It seems that either you or your sources are the one who are proceeding as if nothing is being discovered.Let me point out that these "discoveries" that you mention consist of two scientists who, while undoubtably giants in their own fields, made statements based on their ignorance of the work being done in other fields. A person, however a giant he may be, merely expressing his skepticism hardly constitutes a "discovery".

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There was nothing to select from for the simple reason that as the first life form emerged there were by definition no previous life forms to select from.

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This is off-topic in a cosmology thread. See my reply entitled There was no "first" life form in a more appropriate thread.

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Did they all miss what is so obvious to you now?

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Evidently they did. That happens sometimes when one delves into a field in which one does not have the appropriate training or experience.Tell us, how have the hundreds of researchers that work in these fields miss something that seems to have been obvious to these very few individuals?

Hi, num. Welcome to EvC. Well, if by "Big Bang" you mean the singularity that marks the beginning of the universe (and time itself), then there was no "before". Time itself begins at this point. Since "before" and "after" can only be assigned to events in time, if there is not time then there is no "before" or "after".Weird, huh?- I have no idea what this means. Where did you hear this?- Kant claims that neither time nor space exist in the real, external world, that these concepts are created in our minds to make sense of our sensory data. I have no idea how to even prove or disprove this. Certain our mathematical models that make use of "time" and "space" are useful, so it's hard to imagine that these concepts are just artificial constructions, but what do I know?- I don't know what you mean by "disprove", but if you mean to be shown to be very unlikely based on the available data, why would God be different from any other thing that may or may not exist?

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

This isn't the way I like to look at it. To me, theories are either useful, or they are not useful. If the predictions of a theory continue to be observed in the real world within an accepted degree of accuracy, especially of the theory predicts new, previously unobserved phenomena, then the theory is useful. If observations in the real world are different from the predictions of the theory, then the theory is not useful.This means that a single theory, like Newton's Laws of Motion and his Law of Gravity, can be useful in one context (like sending probes to Saturn) but not very useful in another (like in studying the expansion of the universe).

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

Hi, num.These questions are better left for our resident cosmologists, but I'll give them a shot.- I'm not sure what you're asking here. The laws of physics as we know them don't work earlier than about 10^-40 sec after the singularity. The density and energies of the particles becomes too high. This isn't the laws of physics or space-time "breaking down" -- what is happening is that the laws of physics as we know them are really an approximation of how the universe actually behaves, and at the density and energies before 10^-40 sec the errors in this approximation are too large to give any meaningful description of the early universe.- First, let me point out that Big Bang is not an event. It is a description of the conditions during early universe, of the processes that operated during the early history of the universe, and of how those conditions and processes gave rise to the universe we see today around us.The singularity is the beginning point of time, before which there is nothing, not even time. A good analogy is the north pole. In the latitude/longitude coordinate system that we use to locate points on the surface of the earth, the north pole is a troublesome spot. Furthermore, notice that there is no "north" of the north pole. Asking what was there before the singularity postulated by the Big Bang model is like asking what is north of the north pole. Also, the question you are asking is like asking as one goes further north, at what point does the earth's surface exist as we know it?Now, at what point does space-time exist? Interesting question. It depends on what new understanding of the laws of physics we come to that will allow us to investigate the universe before 10^-40 sec. If those models make use of space-time as it is generally understood in General Relativity, then one can say that space-time existed up to that singularity. If, on the other hand, the mathematical models don't have anything very much like the concept of space-time as it is understood in General Relativity, then one could say that "space-time" doesn't make sense as a concept until the densities and temperatures become low enough for "classical" General Relativity to be a sufficiently accurate theory.Our local cosmologists are going to have to be the ones to describe the contenders for Quantum Gravity, the proposed theories that might be the correct one to use for the first fraction of a second after the singularity.- I think kind of, but the cosmologists will have to weigh in to tell us how accurate this comparison is.

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Actually, if their god makes better pancakes, I'm totally switching sides. -- Charley the Australopithecine

The problem, ICANT, is that the singularity is being discussed as if it were a physical object. It wasn't. The "singularity" comes about because out physical laws (at least as we understand them) are inadequate to deal with the situation that exists when we extrapolate the expansion of the universe backwards to the so-called "time = 0" point. There wasn't a thing called a singularity -- there was a situation that we cannot deal with with our current physical models.The singularity comes about solely from applying our understanding of the physical processes to a situation with which the equations cannot be used.

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders

Um, no, those aren't other words for what I said at all.What I said is that a singularity arises because of the inadequacies of the mathematical model being used.

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders

That is very true. In fact, it is already known that General Relativity by itself is inadequate to deal with the very first tiny-fraction-of-a-second moments of the universe. This is not in dispute. The question is, when an adequate theory is developed, what will be found?

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders

What facts are you talking about, and how can they be known? We cannot directly observe the earliest history of the universe. We can only observe it indirectly, by observing how the universe is structured today -- well, taking into account the fact that the speed of light is finite, by observing the farthest reaches of the universe we are observing an ealier stage of its history, but even here we can only observe directly nothing earlier than several hundred thousand years after the singularity (if there was indeed a singularity).The only thing we are capable of is to devise a theoretical framework as complete as possible from which we can predict how the universe should look today, and then to compare these predictions with what we actually do see today.I'm not sure what "facts" we can know about the early universe, and how we can really be sure whether we really "know" them. But this is the usually problem of epitstemology.

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders

Um, okay. Thanks.Edited by Chiroptera, : No changes made: ICANT's correction doesn't change my response.

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders

Yes, I especially notice this among those posters who tend toward monotheistic religious views in the the Abrahamic tradition.Some of the rest of us actually have training in the physical sciences and know what the word "singularity" means.

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I've done everything the Bible says, even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff! -- Ned Flanders