Cause of the Big Bang

Reiku said:
Big bang is clearly wrong because it suggests something from nothing. If it doesn't, its not a big bang, as clearly stated in the Ekpyrotic Theory, Ophilite.

So Kenada is right. This is something the big bang advocates. If it doesn't, it doesn't derive from a bang at all, but rather prior from a frozen state.

Saying that, big bang wasn't even a bang at all.
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It is true that big bang advocates seem to imply that something came from nothing. BBT does not go that far but the implication is clear.

That means that the phrase "clearly wrong" is inappropriate. The correct phrase might be, "BBT does not describe precondtions to the observed expansion and so it is not a complete cosmology". Even if BBT is not right as far as it goes, it is not "clearly wrong" as it would be, for example, if it relied on supernatural causes for the Big Bang.

Supernatural causes are not science. Natural: A natural cause (mechanism) must be used to explain why or how the naturally occurring event happens. Scientists may not use supernatural explanations as to why or how naturally occurring events happen because reference to the supernatural is outside of the realm of science. Scientists cannot conduct controlled experiments in which they have designed the intervention of a supreme being into the test.

Tentativeness: Scientific theories are subject to revision and correction, even to the point of the theory being proven wrong. Scientific theories have been modified and will continue to be modified to consistently explain observations of naturally occurring events.

If BB advocates apply the "tentativeness" concept of scientific theories in the future by adding language about preconditions that would not be currently testable, but that could conceivable lend themselves to future testing, you can bet that BBT will be modified to include protoscience aspects.

"Emerging Science Defined: Emerging science (or "protoscience") may be defined as a "near science". A protoscience tends to conform to most of the criteria to qualify as science but typically falls short in one or more of the criteria. A protoscience differs from a science in that consistent observations and predictions may be limited by knowledge and/or technology.
For example, let's look at parapsychology. This includes such phenomena as clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Scientists generally consider parapsychology a pseudoscience because its phenomena conflict with known physical laws. However, at least one member of the parapsychology family, mental telepathy (thought transmission directly from one brain to another), might be worthy of scientific consideration. Mental telepathy, then, could be considered as a "protoscience"."

This link presents one method of determining science vs. non-science which it refers to as pseudiscience.
 
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quantum_wave said:
It is true that big bang advocates seem to imply that something came from nothing. BBT does not go that far but the implication is clear.

That means that the phrase "clearly wrong" is inappropriate. The correct phrase might be, "BBT does not describe precondtions to the observed expansion and so it is not a complete cosmology". Even if BBT is not right as far as it goes, it is not "clearly wrong" as it would be, for example, if it relied on supernatural causes for the Big Bang.

Supernatural causes are not science. Natural: A natural cause (mechanism) must be used to explain why or how the naturally occurring event happens. Scientists may not use supernatural explanations as to why or how naturally occurring events happen because reference to the supernatural is outside of the realm of science. Scientists cannot conduct controlled experiments in which they have designed the intervention of a supreme being into the test.

Tentativeness: Scientific theories are subject to revision and correction, even to the point of the theory being proven wrong. Scientific theories have been modified and will continue to be modified to consistently explain observations of naturally occurring events.

If BB advocates apply the "tentativeness" concept of scientific theories in the future by adding language about preconditions that would not be currently testable, but that could conceivable lend themselves to future testing, you can bet that BBT will be modified to include protoscience aspects.

"Emerging Science Defined: Emerging science (or "protoscience") may be defined as a "near science". A protoscience tends to conform to most of the criteria to qualify as science but typically falls short in one or more of the criteria. A protoscience differs from a science in that consistent observations and predictions may be limited by knowledge and/or technology.
For example, let's look at parapsychology. This includes such phenomena as clairvoyance, precognition, and psychokinesis. Scientists generally consider parapsychology a pseudoscience because its phenomena conflict with known physical laws. However, at least one member of the parapsychology family, mental telepathy (thought transmission directly from one brain to another), might be worthy of scientific consideration. Mental telepathy, then, could be considered as a "protoscience"."

This link presents one method of determining science vs. non-science which it refers to as pseudiscience.
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Then perhaps it is clearer to some than others.

The big bang is a theory that has been shaped more to hypothesis than what any theory in history has ever been, with no possibility of making measurements to confirm the beginning of time. We can only look back on the universes cone for so much time, and for so much more, we don't really know anything.
 
Reiku said:
Then perhaps it is clearer to some than others.

The big bang is a theory that has been shaped more to hypothesis than what any theory in history has ever been, with no possibility of making measurements to confirm the beginning of time. We can only look back on the universes cone for so much time, and for so much more, we don't really know anything.
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That is true, clearly wrong is subjective :).

But the "universe's cone of time" is theory that is part of the larger theory set. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is stated as theory and the ultimate test is the LHC search for the Higgs mechanism or evidence of the decay of the Higgs boson. It is stated as theory, was thought to be testable, and qualifies as science, even though it is "prescience" until the test is carried out. Prescience qualifies as science according to the approach in the link I attached in the previous post.
 
quantum_wave said:
Scientists may not use supernatural explanations as to why or how naturally occurring events happen because reference to the supernatural is outside of the realm of science.
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But note that this is a methodological prohibition, rather than an intrinsic, fundamental one.
Scientists cannot conduct controlled experiments in which they have designed the intervention of a supreme being into the test.
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Perhaps not quite in the way you mean but researchers have investigated the power of prayer to heal the sick. If I recall accurately those who were prayed for did less well than who were not. (If the figures were statistically significant it would seem to argue for a Devil, but not a God.)
 
Ophiolite said:
But note that this is a methodological prohibition, rather than an intrinsic, fundamental one.
Perhaps not quite in the way you mean but researchers have investigated the power of prayer to heal the sick. If I recall accurately those who were prayed for did less well than who were not. (If the figures were statistically significant it would seem to argue for a Devil, but not a God.)
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That is irony, isn't it? :)

I would add that if there was any repeatable, consistent result from prayer, whether positive of negative, the cause of the result would be moved into the realm of nature or natural mechanisms and would be investigated as science.
 
But this could lead to an abandonment of methodological naturalism if it were shown by experiment that there was a supernatural power that occasionally intervened and overturned the natural laws.
 
Ophiolite said:
But this could lead to an abandonment of methodological naturalism if it were shown by experiment that there was a supernatural power that occasionally intervened and overturned the natural laws.
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It could, however if it was shown that there was a natural mechanism at work then the supernatural cause is eliminated. For example, the act of prayer may tap into protoscience mechanisms. The mechanisms are not yet understood, but being natural and consistent they are subject to hypothesis, predictability, testability, and tentativeness. The supernatural cause is not natural, or necessarily predictable and repeatable, and not tentative for that matter :).

It could turn out that the protoscience mechanism, say telepathy, might not be proved to be science, but until that is determined it would remain in protoscience as opposed to False Science (pseudoscience) as long as non supernatural causes are being investigated.
 
Crunchy Cat said:
In this particular case we're talking about 'what is' instead of 'what might be'. There isn't a single instance of "nothing" that anyone can point to.
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Fair enough.
But don't particles "pop" in and out of existence. Why must that only happen on a small scale?
 
Tht1Gy! said:
Fair enough.
But don't particles "pop" in and out of existence. Why must that only happen on a small scale?
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Virtual particles Do they violate energy conservation?
From that link: We are really using the quantum-mechanical approximation method known as perturbation theory. In perturbation theory, systems can go through intermediate "virtual states" that normally have energies different from that of the initial and final states. This is because of another uncertainty principle, which relates time and energy.

In the pictured example, we consider an intermediate state with a virtual photon in it. It isn't classically possible for a charged particle to just emit a photon and remain unchanged (except for recoil) itself. The state with the photon in it has too much energy, assuming conservation of momentum. However, since the intermediate state lasts only a short time, the state's energy becomes uncertain, and it can actually have the same energy as the initial and final states. This allows the system to pass through this state with some probability without violating energy conservation.

Some descriptions of this phenomenon instead say that the energy of the system becomes uncertain for a short period of time, that energy is somehow "borrowed" for a brief interval. This is just another way of talking about the same mathematics. However, it obscures the fact that all this talk of virtual states is just an approximation to quantum mechanics, in which energy is conserved at all times. The way I've described it also corresponds to the usual way of talking about Feynman diagrams, in which energy is conserved, but virtual particles can carry amounts of energy not normally allowed by the laws of motion.

(General relativity creates a different set of problems for energy conservation; that's described elsewhere in the sci.physics FAQ.)(end of quote)

I posted this in my Pseudoscience thread named "Mass has gravity" recently. That thread introduces a cosmology (Quantum Wave Cosmology) where the aether is an energy background to the universe. Energy quanta "pop" out of the energy background in QWC under the right energy density conditions.
 
Crunchy Cat said:
They certainly appear to.



Those poppin' particles occur within the confines of space-time. In other words the universe is a dependency and has to be present for particle poppin' to occur.
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And no vacuum can even exist, without some ''poppin''. This vacuum stuff, is the vacuum, and niether can exist without the other, according to relativity.
 
If particles literally popped in and out of existence at random, then we would detect them with electron microscopes, in colliders, etc. The only time we get this effect is under very specific conditions.

I would think we have fundamental particles we cannot detect which form unstable particles we can detect. It takes a lot of energy to make certain particles and it is possible that it is missing in these cases, so they do not last long. Or less likely, we see 4D particles which momentarily become 3D.
 
kaneda said:
If particles literally popped in and out of existence at random, then we would detect them with electron microscopes, in colliders, etc. The only time we get this effect is under very specific conditions.
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Are you just makign this up as you go along? Virtual particles have been DEMONSTRATED to be real via experiments showing the Casimir Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
 
Crunchy Cat said:
Hence, it's a feature of the structure of space-time.
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I'm glad you realize that, as most do not. I remember getting into a few heated arguments around here concerning a vacuum without matter, when people would reply, ''its just a vacuum.''

A vacuum is more than that. It's like a physical and yet, uniform distribution of virtual particles, that when a scrunch comes alone, real particles seems to pop out of no where.

It's like with bubble wrap. Each time you hear a sound pop, is each time you manipulate the fabric of polymer to resist against the force of something. Only a crunch in the fabric, ''or a knot,'' as Dr Wolf puts it, does one of these spacetime fluctuations appear.
 
kaneda said:
If particles literally popped in and out of existence at random, then we would detect them with electron microscopes, in colliders, etc. The only time we get this effect is under very specific conditions.

I would think we have fundamental particles we cannot detect which form unstable particles we can detect. It takes a lot of energy to make certain particles and it is possible that it is missing in these cases, so they do not last long. Or less likely, we see 4D particles which momentarily become 3D.
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Hi, how are you?

Anyway i think that things must come from nothing in the end, when dealing with oscillators. An oscillation has no real zero-state, but some kind of infinite ground state.
 
Crunchy Cat said:
Show me any outside-the-universe or "before"-the-universe observable or theory that includes an absence of everything / anything.
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EMR and gravity are waves in what we refer to as space. No space, no energy or matter. Or do you believe that space has always existed and that the BB (or whatever) just occupied existing space?
 
Crunchy Cat said:
Are you just makign this up as you go along? Virtual particles have been DEMONSTRATED to be real via experiments showing the Casimir Effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_effect
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Makign? Is that anything like : I admire your theories?

The Casimir effect needs definite circumstances to make it work. There is not the slightest evidence it happens without those set circumstances. I am not questioning the reality of virtual particles as you would know if you had sufficient reading skills but suggesting a possibility as to how they come about.
 
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