Big Bang

[lucas123]

Any scientific theories on what existed before the Big Bang?

[behaviour???]

vacuum...............no theories as far as i am concerned(my knowledge dont no whether i will remeber one later...........if so i will post .....)

Thanks

Universal Legend

[AlexG]

Any scientific theories on what existed before the Big Bang?

Not really. The laws of physics which govern our universe apply only to the universe. We have only speculation about what existed 'before'.

[ravergirl]

I only have 2 theories.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

and

Nothing happened before the big bang because the big bang never occurred.

[AlexG]

I only have 2 theories.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

and

Nothing happened before the big bang because the big bang never occurred.

0 for 2.

[ravergirl]

0 for 2.

you don't have any evidence that shows im not 1 for 1

[Ignus Fatuus]

The big loading

[Harte]

The big loading

The Big Lighting of the Fuse?

H.

[AlexG]

you don't have any evidence that shows im not 1 for 1

True, no evidence one way or another on number one.

You did miss number 2 though.

[ravergirl]

True, no evidence one way or another on number one.

You did miss number 2 though.

nope. but number 2 is a theory not a fact and therefore could still be wrong.

[AlexG]

nope. but number 2 is a theory not a fact and therefore could still be wrong.

That's 'theory' as in scientific theory, not as in wild a$$ guess.

It's well supported by observation, calculation and predictive ability back to 3 seconds after the event.

[Ignus Fatuus]

The Big Lighting of the Fuse?

H.

Yup ... in my opinion at least.

[ravergirl]

That's 'theory' as in scientific theory, not as in wild a$$ guess.

It's well supported by observation, calculation and predictive ability back to 3 seconds after the event.

whats your point? It doesn't make it true, and since I don't worship science, i am not bound to HAVE to believe things because science tells me to.

[AlexG]

It doesn't make it true, and since I don't worship science, i am not bound to HAVE to believe things because science tells me to.

You don't have to believe that if you step in front of a bus you get flattened either.

Your belief is irrelevant to reality.

By 'don't worship science', you mean 'don't know science'.

[ravergirl]

You don't have to believe that if you step in front of a bus you get flattened either.

Your belief is irrelevant to reality.

By 'don't worship science', you mean 'don't know science'.

Know I never met science, is he cute?

[AlexG]

Know I never met science, is he cute?

Sort of nerdy, with glasses and a pocket protector.

[Torgo]

I hereby copy and paste my explanation of finding the age of the universe and the evidence for the big bang from a previous thread:

firstly, we can tell the distances to relatively nearby stars directly, from parallax (the stars moving against the background of much more distant stars over the course of the year as we move in our orbit). In addition, just about all stars of a given color will put out a very similar amount of light, so we can look at the spectrum of a star and compare its brightness and see how far away it must be in order to appear that dim. In addition, there are certain star types that A) vary their brightness with a regular period and B ) have a very precise average brightness proportional to that period. All of these things let us tell the distances to a huge number of RELATIVELY nearby galaxies - and the distances we get are in the hundreds of millions to billions of lightyears. We also notice something - with pretty good regularity, the further away a galaxy is from us, the faster it is receding from us and the more redshifted its light is. This indicates that everything is moving away from everything else, and it also lets us use the redshift of light from far away galaxies to tell their distance and thus, since light has a constant speed, how long ago the light was emitted.

We notice that the further away we look and thus the further back we look in time the denser things are. We see galaxy types long ago and far away that simply don't exist now. The furthest galaxies we can't discern individual stars in, but we can look at their degree of redshift and tell how far away and long ago they are. This combined with the fact that the universe appears to be expanding suggests that long ago it was denser and hotter (since when you squeeze a gas it heats up).

Behind all these galaxies, coming pretty darn uniformly from all directions in the sky, is a background glow of radiation (mostly in the microwaves). This radiation is special - its spectrum is SHAPED like the spectrum given off by a very hot gas, but it is not high enough frequency for that - instead of ultraviolet, it is microwaves. If you look at the redshift required to take the radiation emitted from a hot gas and make it into what we see, and correlate that redshift to the time the light has been traveling, you get a value of 13.7 billion years. If you run the models of universe expansion backwards, at that point things get so hot the gas turns to plasma and light can't travel through it. You keep running them back, the universe reaches zero size 300,000 years before this moment. So we can say with pretty good certainty that the universe as we know it is about 13.7 billion years old.

As far as I understand it, there are a number of hypothesis put forward by various cosmologists as to "before" the big bang ranging from "that's like asking what's north of the north pole" to perpetual inflation of tiny patches of a perpetual universe to "our physics is insufficient to the task".

[ravergirl]

Sort of nerdy, with glasses and a pocket protector.

Kind of looks down his nose at everything that he doesn't have a backload of insufficient data for, yeah I think I met him once. No fun, and kind of a jerk.

[Lord Of The Dragons]

I only have 2 theories.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.

and

Nothing happened before the big bang because the big bang never occurred.

Oh please.

[lucas123]

I have one theory - Working on the supposition that their are multiple universes, I submit that two or more universes collided to form our universe.

By the way this is a recognized theory by some theoretical physicists

Are there any theoretical physicists out there that could expound on this theory?

Edited November 20, 2008 by lucas123

[midnight rider]

I find it very hard to believe that all of the matter in the universe actually compressed to the size of a pin head to begin with.

no matter what science says i aint buying it.

Edited November 20, 2008 by midnight rider

[Lord Of The Dragons]

I find it very hard to believe that all of the matter in the universe actually compressed to the size of a pin head to begin with.

no matter what science says i aint buying it.

Why? True, it does seem fantastical at face value. But do you believe in Black Holes? How about recycling? How about yourself?

I'll explain what I mean. You can take a piece of A4 paper and write on it. If you make a mistake, you screw it up into a small ball and throw it away. It's the same principal on a much much smaller scale.

1.5 million aluminium cans, whether they be pop (soda) cans or beer cans, takes up an awful lot of surface area. yet they can be melted down and shaped into a block that can fit on the back of a truck. Again, same pricipal, smaller scale.

A Black Hole is a star, usually a Red Giant such as Betelguese in Orion, that has collapsed under gravity and has been compressed into a White Dwarf, sometimes barely hundreds of miles across. The matter in a White Dwarf is compressed so much that a single teaspoon of matter would weigh hundreds, if not thousands, of tons.

The above are examples, both natural and man-made, of mass and surface area being made much smaller and compressed. The greatest minds of our time, such as Einstein, Hawkins etc, all agree that the principles of Physics all break down and become meaningless when dealing with Singularities, which is what the Universe was just before the Big Bang. I mean, you could be right. Maybe it was bigger than a pin-head. Maybe it was the size of a White Dwarf. Maybe there was more than one Singularity, and the Big Bang event was caused by two Singularities colliding. Maybe there were a number of Singularities and, as one exploded, the concussion set off the rest similar to a mine in a minefield, that could explain why all the Galaxies are all moving away from each other, although this flies in the face of modern Astrophysics. And maybe we were right all along, and the entire Universe was contained within one Singularity, which erupted into everything we know of today and more. This is the beauty of science. We take the unknown and we learn about it, work it out until it becomes 'known'. Science is like the Universe. It started out small and it builds on itself into something much much bigger. 200 years ago, we thought we would suffocate if we travelled above 20 or 30 miles per hour. We dreamed of flying and seeing the world as a bird sees it, of travelling to the Moon and seeing our world as it has never been seen before. And look at us now. We take the fantastic and make it real. With that in mind, is anything 'really' so unbelievable?

[AlexG]

I find it very hard to believe that all of the matter in the universe actually compressed to the size of a pin head to begin with.

It wasn't matter. It was energy, which would later (10^-23 seconds later) become matter.

no matter what science says i aint buying it.

Then why bother to think about it?

Edited November 20, 2008 by AlexG

[ravergirl]

I find it very hard to believe that all of the matter in the universe actually compressed to the size of a pin head to begin with.

no matter what science says i aint buying it.

Plus there is the problem that Energ doesn't spontaneously manifest and there isn't even a working hypothisis about what started the 'bang' part other that "zero"

[AlexG]

Plus there is the problem that Energ doesn't spontaneously manifest

Sure it can. We've gone over that elsewhere.