Big Bang - Big Dud

This is false. The only people so involved are fundamentalist Christians.--Percy

You send me to an audio/visual presentation? Can I suggest that you make your point in your message, as suggested in #5 of the Forum Guidelines? It's a huge world, and I'm sure one can find examples of almost anything, but you've drifted off the original point. If you follow the thread back a few posts you'll see this discussion began when JonF pointed out that people of all religions are involved in evolution's construction. He was speaking of scientists, of course. You turned this around and said people of all religious affiliations are involved in it's destruction. This is, of course untrue, since scientists who oppose evolution are almost exclusively fundamentalist Christian. If you want to quibble that a few are Moslem or Hindu or Jewish or whatever else I wouldn't argue the point and don't see its significance anyway.I'm not sure I understand why you would want to mischaracterize where opposiition to evolution stems from. Trying to make it seem that scientific opposition is far more widely diverse religiously than it actually is can only hurt you.--Percy

All you need to remember is E=mc². In a nuclear reactor, matter is converted to energy. Saying that the matter is destroyed isn't really wrong, but it isn't really accurate, either. Again, all you need to know is E=mc². Matter can be converted to energy, so naturally energy can be converted to matter. On a pragmatic level it is far easier to convert matter to energy than the reverse, and until recently it was only a theoretical possibility, but a few years ago it was experimentally verified. It's very difficult to make photons collide in just the right way to produce matter. What came before the Big Bang is a matter of speculation at this time. Many scientists believe that the laws of physics as we know them did not hold under the conditions before the Big Bang. This is pretty much the case, but what actually happens depends upon the particular circumstances. Heating one end of a metal bar causes the heat to flow down the bar, but the metal itself doesn't change shape unless you heat it to the melting point. But heat a gas and unless it's confined it will expand. These are examples of thermal energy, which is just molecules in motion. The faster the molecules are moving, the higher the temperature. Molecules in a fixed lattice like metal express their heat by vibrating in place, while molecules in a gas move in a straight line until they strike another molecule. Yes. All matter in the universe attracts all other matter in the universe. I think you're wondering if the Second Law of Thermodynamics and gravity are contradictory. The answer is no. When matter is brought together by gravity, heat increases, which increases entropy. The entropy of the system will still not decrease. Sylas already responded to this, but I wanted to respond, too, because this comment kind of startled me. Life is just very complicated chemistry, but you make it sound like you believe something almost uncomprehensibly magical is taking place. We *can* produce made-to-order DNA sequences. But your comment is not exactly incorrect in a more general sense because there *are* complex organic chemicals and processes which we don't know how to synthesize or duplicate at this time.--Percy

You can harvest it from living tissue or synthesize it in the lab. Google "nucleotide synthesis" for more info. I didn't check any of the links myself, but there seems to be lots of information out there.--Percy

Just curious, since you're both from Australia and interested in some of the same things and are in roughly the same age range, if you know Andrew Parker. He has a recent book out about the Cambrian explosion.--Percy

I'm not sure why you say this, but in case this is in the context of E=mc², if you double the mass you quadruple the energy. Neither matter nor energy can be created or destroyed. You can only convert back and forth between the two.On a quantum level, mass *can* be created as virtual particles flit in and out of existence. The net energy is 0, and the matter is balanced in terms of matter and antimatter, but the net mass is not 0, and the Casamir effect demonstrates this. Perhaps this is what you mean when you say it is important to distinguish between matter and mass?--Percy

God, what was I thinking? I'll plead stress and overwork. That has got to be the most cockeyed thing I've ever said here. Thank goodness I wrote this on Friday night, one of our least active times.You are, of course, completely correct. Energy is proportional to mass, not the square of the mass. Let me see if I can back up and make some rational point here.I guess except for the part affected by my equational dyslexia that my post was okay. You cannot create or destroy matter or energy, only convert back and forth between the two following the equation E=mc². But there is an interesting situation at the quantum level where virtual particles flit in and out of existence. They are balanced in terms of energy (net of 0) and in terms of matter and anti-matter, but they do have non-zero mass, as demonstrated by the Casimir effect. And I was asking if this was why you thought it so important to distinguish between matter and mass.--Percy

Uh, why not? Consider these scenarios:

• If matter of mass m is converted completely to 100 photons with energy equal to mc², then you can convert 100 photons of energy mc² to matter of mass m.
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• This means that you can convert 200 photons of energy 2mc² to matter of mass 2m.

What leads you to believe you have a valid beef with E=mc²? This one has kind of been verified up the kazoo. As I told you in an earlier post, while the reverse transformation of energy to matter hadn't been verified in the laboratory for a long time, this was only because of technological constraints (you can imagine the difficulty of getting photons to collide), and it was never doubted to hold because it is so fundamental. It was finally verified experimentally a few years ago.If you still doubt the validity of the equation, consider its similarity to the equation for kinetic energy, E=mv²/2. In the limit as v approaches c and relativistic effects take over, the factor of 1/2 goes to 1 and you're left with E=mc².--Percy

This is not an example of energy/mass conversion, and so is not covered by E=mc². When an electron drops energy levels, it emits a photon of energy equal to the energy it lost. When an electron absorbs a photon, it rises in energy level by an amount equal to the energy of the photon. This is the law of conservation of energy. No energy/mass conversion is involved.That being said, I have heard recently that energy might bend space just like mass. I don't know if this is a recent speculation, or has been around a while and I just never noticed, but it makes a lot of sense since matter and energy convert back and forth.--Percy

What little I've read about this says that at the quantum scale the law of conservation of energy can be violated, but only for very short periods of time.--Percy

Hi Sog345,Reading your last couple posts, I think your main question is about where the matter in the universe came from. The answer is that we don't know for sure. Quantum fluctuations is one possibility. The Casamir effect is an experimental verification that quantum fluctuations, the flitting in and out of existence of virtual particles, are real.The evidence for the Big Bang is the current expansion of the universe. When we peer deeply out into space we find that in general all galaxies are retreating from each other. There are definite local differences. For example the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies and close enough to gravitationally attact one another, and they'll collide in another couple billion years. But for the most part galaxies are all retreating from one another.If you project the current motions of the galaxies back in time by about 14 billion years, you find they would have all been in the same place. This tells us that the universe began with all matter and energy contained in a very tiny space. What was before that and where the matter and energy came from we cannot be certain. But that the Big Bang happened is not in doubt. Keep in mind it wasn't really a Big Bang, by the way, just a very rapid expansion of space. And that expansion continues today. The universe is still growing, and the growth rate is increasing.It wouldn't be accurate to say that we came from the Big Bang. That would be like saying that your oak furniture came from an acorn. It isn't exactly false, but it leaves out an awful lot of detail.Within a few hundred million years after the Big Bang the first stars began to form from the remants, which consisted mostly of hydrogen, but also of some helium and even lesser amounts of lithium. The first stars were mammoth. The bigger the star the shorter its lifetime and the bigger the explosion when it dies (goes supernova).The fusion engine in the interior of stars is where the higher elements are constructed, and the stars' explosions spread these elements throughout space. Huge collections of stars called galaxies began to form around the same time. As time went on the huge stars continued to cook the higher elements, and about 5 billion years ago a cloud of gas in the Milky Way galaxy containing mostly hydrogen but also many higher elements began to coalesce into our sun and its surrounding planets.Our earth was one of those planets, forming around 4.56 billion years ago. By about 3.8 billion years ago the first life appeared. Around 600 million years ago the first multicellular life began appearing. The first land animals were maybe 250 million years ago (I'm going from memory on everything in this post), the first mammals maybe 150 million years ago, the first primates maybe 60 million years ago, the first apes maybe 30 million years ago, the first hominids maybe 3 million years ago, the first humans maybe 100,000 years ago, and your parents less than a hundred years ago. It took a long time from the Big Bang to you.--Percy

Is it actually shaky? Let's think about it.I know the Declaration of Independence was signed in Philadelphia in 1776. I know the first signatory was John Hancock. I know Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington also signed it. I know that it begins with, "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have have connected them with another..." I remember the part about all men being created equal and being endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights. I remember there's a long portion listing the injustices of King George III. And that pretty much exhausts my knowledge on the subject. I can't remember most of the rest of the text, though some of it would definitely sound familiar if it were read to me. I can't remember the other signatories. I can't remember if it was actually signed on July 4th, or whether that just somehow became the day we celebrated it.As is clearly evident, there's a lot I don't know about the Declaration of Independence. Does that make what I do know shaky? Does it cast doubt on the fact that it was signed in 1776? That it was signed in Philadelphia? That John Hancock was the first signatory?Of course not.Or how about this. Let's say someone throws a small rock through my living room window. I can tell by the hole in the window and the place where it hit the floor that the trajectory means it came from out near the sidewalk or street. Did someone throw it? Was it kicked up by a passing vehicle? Was it thrown from a vehicle? I don't know. Does that mean I don't really know the trajectory either?Of course not.Or look at it another way. You bake a cake for me and give it to me. I ask you where the cake came from. You tell me you baked it yourself. I asked where the ingredients came from. You tell me from the store. I ask where they came from before that, and you tell me warehouses and factories. I ask where they came from before that, and you tell me mines and farms. And before that, and before that and before that, until finally we're back to the Big Bang and I ask where did the matter for the Big Bang come from, and you say you don't know. And so, I say, you're knowledge about your cake is pretty shaky, isn't it.And that's ridiculous, isn't it.In the same way, we know that all matter in the universe once existed in a very small volume by extrapolating backwards from the current motions of galaxies. That they are currently receding from one another, with recession speed increasing with increasing distance, means they were once all in the same place about 14 billion years ago. Though we don't know where the matter and energy came from just before the Big Bang, we know precisely where it was just after.There's another part of your question that hints at the belief that if we don't know everything then we can't know anything, and this belief is false. The universe is billions of light years across and billions of years old, and it isn't possible for science to know everything. It isn't even possible for science to know 1% of everything. What we know is dwarfed by what we don't know, and that will be always so. But just because there is much we'll never know does not mean there is nothing we can know. I know you know this, and I don't mean to speak down to you, but I don't think you're considering the implications of your argument.--Percy