Big Bang - Big Dud

You are lagging a bit behind the times there, friend.DNA is a chemical. You can produce it from other chemicals.DNA synthesis is now a perfectly standard practice. There are companies which will make DNA for you. You tell them the sequence you want, and you can get it at prices of around $1.00 a base pair or thereabouts.There are many companies competing in this market. Here is one picked out pretty much at random: Beckman Coulter.Cheers -- Sylas

Yes, you can. I have no idea where they get the base nucleic acids. They may well be from living things; it just depends which is more cost effective, I guess.But we have long since known that the chemistry of living things (organic chemistry) is still chemistry; albeit with larger and more complex molecules. If there was some reason anyone really needed to synthesize DNA from elements, I can't see anything to prevent it.This reminds me of the old joke: The old view of the vitalists is that living (organic) chemicals were completely different from non-living, and worked by different laws, and one could not be made into the other. They were wrong.Traditional Christianity regards God as creator of all the natural world; complex, simple, living things, inanimate things, weather, crystals, everything. That humans can also make this or that is not a refutation of God as creator, because anything humans might make is still using the same natural world and relying upon the same natural laws of the world. If God is creator; then God is creator of all of it, and we can only do anything within that created world.It may be, perchance, that humans one day will be able to make some simple life forms in a lab. There is nothing in the bible to suggest that this is impossible in principle. I was reading a paper the other day about a laboratory synthesis of a new form of DNA, not seen in nature (as far as we know). This DNA had the ability to duplicate itself without using other molecules. See Evolved DNA stitches itself up. Note that in this case, the researchers used a kind of artificial chemical evolution method. Basically, design is not as good as evolution for making really complicated things. If you can use evolution; it generally does a better job than design.In my opinion (albeit as a non-Christian myself) the creationists and the intelligent design advocates are selling God short. They somehow consider if that something is made by natural processes, or can be made by humans; this somehow undermines the notion of God as creator. It is as if their God is some kind of super-being within the universe, who designs and manipulates and constructs some things; but not others, and we can point to some things as being made by God and others which are not.In this, they are a lot like the more strident atheists, who consider finding natural causes for a thing is a disproof of God's involvement. Strange bed fellows indeed!Cheers -- Sylas[This message has been edited by Sylas, 04-06-2004]

Thanks for that.My answer was in two parts. The first was a straight answer on synthesis of DNA, which as you note is a very complex molecule indeed; though still a natural phenomenon that can be synthesized and manipulated in a lab. That part was an answer to your question.The second part was more philosophical/theological; chasing one of my own hobby horses in this whole area. I was more thinking of SoulFire than you as I wrote it.The claim that scientists are unable to know this or that, or do this or that, is sometimes raised by creationists who set apart some aspect of the natural world as being "created" and qualitatively different from what is "natural". SoulFire had appeared to do that in his sig line. I think that is both scientifically and theologically nave. But nothing in your post gave any hint of such philosophical baggage; you just asked a straight clear question.I would have guessed you not to be a creationist; given the constructive and open phrasing of your question. Sorry if the latter half of my post appeared to be aimed at you. It was a general but peripheral philosophical matter that I consider relevant to the creationism/evolution debate; but not a response to anything you had written.Cheers -- Sylas

No; don't know anything about him. I quick scout around indicates that he used to be at the Australian Museum in Sydney, and that he proposes the Cambrian explosion was a response to the evolution of vision.Dr Parker is currently at Oxford.He certaintly appears to be someone to take seriously; but what little I can see of his ideas relating to the Cambrian explosion seem a bit ad hoc; an interesting speculation.Cheers -- Sylas

The Big Bang did not "happen in a vacuum".^* We don't know how the Big Bang happened; but we have a solid empirical basis for confidence that it did happen.Cheers -- Sylas

Perhaps things do "just come about". Why not?There are certainly causes and effects for things. A new island rises in the ocean; we can explain its origin in terms of volcanic actions. We can explain volcanic action in terms of physical processes in the mantle. We can explain physical processes in the mantle in terms of forces known to work in the world.You can assert that there has to be some ultimate cause behind the fact that anything exists at all, and you can assert that this cause has attributes of personality and will and intent... that your God is the cause, in fact. But that claim is an assertion, not evidence. There is no basis at all for a general rule that "things don't just happen spontaneously". As far as we can tell, perhaps they do just happen spontaneously.The word "law" in science is not the same as in jurisprudence. There is no written copy of natural law. Natural laws are things we invent to describe the way the world works. Usually they are incomplete or inaccurate in some details. So no, there is no "law" that one can place in evidence to show a "law giver". There are just our incomplete attempts to describe the natural world.A painting needs a painter. But a sunset needs a Sun.Cheers -- Sylas

Of course not; the processes by which Mt Rushmore faces were formed plainly show an intelligent input, by contrast to processes involved in formation of the other sides of the mountain, or indeed the mountain itself.Oops. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!Think about it. You are refuting your own case. Mt Rushmore stands out as different from other mountains. The design of Mt Rushmore shows up as a contrast to the lack of design in other mountains.Cheers -- Sylas

Not evolutionists, but physicists and astronomers. The Big Bang has nothing to do with biology or evolution.There are plenty of unanswered questions; but I am not aware of "problems" in the sense of conflicting with the basic idea of general relativity and expanding spacetime that is the heart of Big bang cosmology.Cosmology is one of the most exciting and vibrant fields of science at present; and new discoveries seems to be turning up almost month by month. This is allowing us to nail down more and more details, and sometimes it reveals details that are surprising and unexpected.Big Bang cosmology is not just one fully worked out model. It is a whole class of models, all sharing the underlying fundamentals of spacetime expansion. This fundamental has been solidly confirmed by all modern observations; even as the details turn up all kinds of surprises.I'm on the edge of my seat; truly. I expect big changes and huge surprises, and I regularly scan the latest research to see what's going on and what may turn up.The position of modern cosmology is a bit like explorers making the first land falls on a new continent. New surprises and new discoveries come at a tremendous rate. The people who miss out on the excitement are those who reject the whole notion of a continent at all, or who confuse the fact that so much remains unmapped with uncertainty of its very existence.The Big Bang is the continent; and scientists are the explorers, and those missing out are those who insist that the Big Bang is a dud when they don't even know the first thing about the model. Actually, this is one of the outstanding successes and confirmations of Big Bang cosmology; at least as far as the matter of which we are made is concerned.No other model except the Big Bang has an answer to this question, and the Big Bang model makes some quite specific predictions about the distributions of matter that should be expected. These predictions are so successful that the distributions of light elements (matter made in the Big Bang) is now considered one of the primary lines of evidence for modern Big Bang cosmology.There are some outstanding glitches (the Lithium problem) which indicate the story is not fully complete, and until this is resolved there is a bit of a question mark over the origins of matter. But to a first approximation the origins of normal (baryonic) matter are very well explained indeed.The real unanswered question is not the origin of matter; but the origin of energy from which matter was formed. And basically, we don't know where that came from at all.In fact, it's worse than this. We don't even know what all the energy and matter actually is! Although we now have a pretty good handle on "baryonic" matter, which is the matter we are made of, it seems that most of the matter in the universe is a non-baryonic "dark matter" that does not shine like stars; so we can't see it. It can only be detected (so far) by its gravity. Another dramatic discovery is that most of the energy of the universe is a "dark energy" or "vacuum energy". We don't know what it is or how it works. This is a very new discovery and the race is on to find out more.None of these discoveries are "problems" in the sense of indicating a difficulty with the theory; but a case of questions so far in the unsolved basket. Science is like that. We don't pretend to know all the answers; and pointing out the bits that are still a mystery is worthless as a criticism of models that are able to answer other questions.You sometimes get people who say that "dark matter" or "dark energy" is some kind of problem for Big Bang cosmology; and who propose other models that don't invoke such things. These people have failed to grasp a very simple point... Big bang cosmology itself does not require these things. You could have a big bang model with no dark energy and no dark matter just fine; the thing is that it would not be a model for our universeWe have observations indicating that dark matter and dark energy do exist. Any credible model must deal with those observations. Models that fail to take these observations into account are not serious about studying the world we actually live in. That's not accurate. No part of Big Bang cosmology involves a big squeeze in which things are compressed. There is no evidence at all of prior states in which a squeeze took place. Traditional Big Bang cosmology is expansion all the way, starting out from a singularity in which physics breaks down. So sure; we don't know how it all got started; but there is no squeeze involved as far as we can tell, and it is certainly not a part of the model. This is the only part of the "Big Bang" cosmology. No initial squeeze; just the expansion. It's not really an explosion in way we normally think. That's just an easy word picture to help people get a bit of a feel for the model without learning general relativity, but unfortunately it leads to a lot of confusions when people take the analogy too far without knowing the maths of the real theory. The real theory is spacetime expansion, not explosions. And part of what that means is that in fact no; gravity does not hold everything together in quite the way you might think.In short, this is a complete non-problem. In fact, when modern gravitational theory was worked out by Einstein early in the twentieth century, it was a consequence of gravity that spacetime should be either expanding or contracting. This was unexpected, and Einstein tried to tweak his theory to avoid this feature. But a few decades later it was discovered that spacetime was actually expanding; just as Einstein's theory of gravity had predicted.There's a lot more to that story. But the main thing to appreciate is that no, the physics of gravity does not predict that the Big Bang would have been halted. It would be more correct to say that modern gravitational theory predicted the expansion of spacetime in advance, and that subsequent observational evidence for expansion was a dramatic confirmation of Einstein's model for how gravity works.Cheers -- SylasPS. And yes... welcome to EvCforum! I don't expect you to accept everything I say off the bat; but since this is a subject in which I am particularly interested, I'm happy to answer questions without insisting you immediately agree. You will find (I hope!) that what I say is pretty close to what a real physicist might tell you. I'm just an interested amateur.By far the best thing would be if you were to catch just a bit of the excitement that is in the air for modern cosmology, and check it out in more detail for yourself. You'll really be missing out if you only read critics and never read anything from those who understand and use the model. There is a good book come out just recently, aimed for a popular audience, called Big Bang by Simon Singh. Singh is not a scientist himself, but he writes about science very well indeed. If you get the chance, check it out.This message has been edited by Sylas, 06-11-2005 06:11 AM

Full marks, Ned.Once again, the key is to remember that the Big Bang is not an explosion. In the early universe all of space is filled with hot dense gas. As space expands, the density and the temperature of material in the universe drops. Not because it is moving, but because it has more room (space) to move.A cloud of gas above a certain size will spontaneously collapse and compress into localized clumps under its own gravity. The amount of gas required is given by the Jeans mass, and this mass increases with temperature and decreases with density. If you have more than this amount of gas, that even a perfectly uniform gas will collapse, since the tiniest thermal motions give rise to positive feedback and magnify into collapse.The collapse takes time also, and so large scale structure formation may involve more than just gravity, with shock waves or other forces speeding up localized concentrations as well. But gravity is the major contributor.For more discussion, see First Stars at solstation.com. Note that large scale structure formation in the early universe is one of the major unsolved problems in cosmology. Dark matter is expected to have an important role, but we don't know enough about dark matter to have a clear picture of the whole process.Cheers -- Sylas

No... "It all came from nothing" is rather a misunderstanding used almost exclusively by folks who don't know anything about the actual proposals used in science.This has been explained in many posts of the thread. Let's try not to go over old ground; and if there are any actual meaningful comments to be made with respect to the Big Bang, let's base them what is actually used by cosmologists; not private misconceptions like "something from nothing".Modern physics is simply not able to go back to the very earliest origins of the universe.

Yes, we do observe this occuring right now, in some of the large gas clouds in space.That sufficiently large regions of gas must compress under gravity is a simple consequence of the virial theorem. There are some good photographs of gas clouds in the process of gravitational collapse and star formation, from the Hubble space telescope.For example, The Cygnus Wall of Star Formation, Starbirth in the Lagoon Nebula, New Stars In 30 Doradus, and M16: Infrared Star Hunt.