Is eeryone happy with the Big Bang? I'm not.

Discussion in 'Pseudoscience Archive' started by astrocat, Nov 19, 2010.

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  1. astrocat Registered Senior Member

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    How do you know the Universe is Expanding, Moose? Someone told you, right? But no one has ever seen the Universe... So how can they know?
     
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  3. Boris2 Valued Senior Member

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    not really, not if you wish to be clear in your thinking. i am talking physics here you understand.
     
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  5. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    microwave ovens..
     
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  7. birch Valued Senior Member

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    why would a simultaneous big bang not be consistent with a singularity?
     
  8. astrocat Registered Senior Member

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    You certainly dont need math to make important discoveries in science. Gallilleo discovered Jupiter's moons without math. The fact that the expansion is speeding up... you don't need math to understand that!
     
  9. astrocat Registered Senior Member

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    Ah, someone with a sense of humour. Thank goodness. Great, Squirrel.
     
  10. astrocat Registered Senior Member

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    Not really sure I understand the question... What I can't understand is how someone who knows the Observable Universe is expanding, can make the stretch that therefore the whole Universe must be expanding. Nobody can know this!
     
  11. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    Actually, yes, you do. How do you know that the expansion is speeding up?
     
  12. AlphaNumeric Fully ionized Registered Senior Member

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    Discoveries, at their most basic, are simply observations of things in the universe. However, most of the things in the universe (or at least our little corner of it) which can be observed without any equipment have already been observed. That's why so much science is done in labs, because you need equipment to look at things no one else has before, be it the very small or the very distant or the very cold or the very hot etc.

    Galileo made use of a basic telescope. To build such a thing you need a basic understanding of optics, to grasp how varying lens shape and the gaps between lenses varies the image you see. While you can do it with trial and error without writing any maths down you're still understanding it on a quantitative level. Another example is Faraday. He was a brilliant experimentalist but he was still forming a quantitative understanding of electromagnetism such as if you move a wire in a magnetic field twice as fast you generate twice the current. Even a "If I do this more then more of that happens" is mathematical in nature.

    All technology is based on such quantitative understandings. We know if we arrange silicon in a particular way it makes a programmable microchip. We know if we cycle certain gases through pressurised systems we get cooling systems found in fridges. We know if we heat certain chemicals over certain metals we can make compounds like ammonia (for fertiliser and bombs) or fuels like methane (through cracking). Its all based on the quantitative knowledge of how certain things behave and without that quantitative knowledge you can't do all the things technology does.

    Suppose you wanted to built a car engine and you know that if you burn petrol it gives off hot gases. Given only that information can you build a combustion engine? Nope. You need to know how hot, how mch gas, if the cylinder is a given size how much pressure is caused, how strong is the metal you make the engine from.

    The short version of all this I like to use is that notion that science isn't just being able to say "If you throw a ball in the air it will come down" but also being able to say when it comes down, where it comes down and how fast it moves when it lands.

    You need mathematics to understand general relativity, which describes varying space-time configurations. You need mathematics to understand doppler shift effects on the light seen by telescopes. You need mathematics to understand the light emissions from supernova, which involves everything from fluid mechanics through to nuclear physics (all of which you need mathematics to understand). You need mathematics to then do a statistical analysis on the observations to demonstrate that the doppler effects are time varying in a specific way which implies, via general relativity, an expanding universe.

    There's a difference between someone telling you a conclusion of science and you being able to do that science yourself. I know aspirin takes away a headache but that doesn't make me a doctor.
     
  13. astrocat Registered Senior Member

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    Hi, Alpha Numeric. So nice of you to respond to my post the way you did. Are you a Mathematician?

    Of course, Math is handy, in Science. But I happen to know you can do anything with Math and that Math, however much you may not like this, is not a Science. I'm not even sure Math is the language of Science - what about Research?

    I prefer to go by comparisons, and the laws of Physics. For example, there is no such thing as an outward expansion that accelerates, certainly not one that accelerates ad infinitum.

    Nobody can see the Universe. How, therefore, do they know it's expanding? It's the Observable Universe that's expanding, which is exactly what one would expect if we were falling into a Black Hole.

    In addition, in 1998, it was discovered that the expansion was speeding up. Again, just what you'd expect if we were F. I a B. H.

    There is only Gravity. All the rest was made up - in my opinion, by Religious Fundamentalists, who believe every word in the Bible is God's word. They seek to have a Cosmology that agrees with the Bible.

    We have all been 'juiced' in this Big Bang that never happened. The Big Bang can be explained by very complex Math, but Science prefers the simpler explaination, I'm sure you will agree. Lex Parsimoniae, the law of Succinctness, is on my side.

    Gravity brought together a cloud of hydrogen that was the Universe. At the center, pressures and temperatures caused this part to evolve fastest, and here Black Holes first appeared.

    The outside of the cloud we call the 'Isometric Background Radiation,' - warm protons (not photons) which made up the early Hydrogen atoms, and which still seems not to have noticed the evolution at the center.

    With your Big Bang, Dark Energy and Gravity as well, you have too many entities. In order to make your big bang work, you have to make Gravity into some annoying embarrassment - when Gravity is as Newton told us - is Universal.

    Gravity causes the moon to orbit Earth, for the Earth to orbit the Sun etc. etc. Where does Gravity run out? It doesn't. Gravity causes the Universe to unfold - not anti-gravity. I'm surprised you need me to tell you this. Gravity is all there ever was - all there ever will be.

    Gallileo was arrested by the Inquisition. Darwin, who said humans evolved only slowly, was derided by Religious Fundamentalists, and because I say the Universe was not created instantly, but evolved over trillions of years these same Religious Fundamentalists block me.

    Look, planets come from the exploded cores of ancient dying stars. Earth, they say is five billion years old - in a Universe that is ony 13 Billion years old. My Math tells me 13 minus 5 equals 8.

    In a mere 8 billion years, a star was born, grew old, died and exploded. And you expect me to believe this?

    No thanks. The Universe is truly ancient, several trillion years old. It wasn't created instantly, it evolved.

    Nice talking to you, Alpha Numeric. Hope you can seee my point of view.
     
  14. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    Mathematics is far more than "handy", mathematics is what collates theory to fact. Yes, numbers can be juggled around to "fit", however Mathematicians and Scientists alike do not stop at fitting a number, they need to know WHY it fits not just how it fits.

    In understanding cosmology, Scientists create models with mathematics in an attempt to replicate various effects, these have then led on to greater more physical projects like for instance the LHC at CERN. Without mathematics, such projects wouldn't be possible for many reasons, from the absence of a team being able to identify an objective, to actual apparatus not being considered.

    The most interesting thing that I find however is the fact that these "virtual models" (which are mathematical or computational) are created to try and understand the universe, but it's neglected that the models themselves are as much a part of the universes make up as what is being studied.

    This is one of the main reasons my attention has been shifting more towards the universe being one giant composite emulation. (In fact I have a whole model that applies super-symmetry, relatively and multiworld's just on the face of it, where a universe could be born from a "finite" resource. )

    The problem is that it's not the easiest thing to document, mainly for the absence of open discussion on the subject with people from the fields of inquiry that "know more than myself" on their various specialised subjects.
     
  15. Dr Mabuse Percipient Thaumaturgist Registered Senior Member

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    While I don't agree with most of your points, you raise a valid point here.

    It is a problem when you turn people loose with math, virtually anything can be made of it.

    I always think of Tesla's words on the subject when a point like this comes up:

    "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. " - Nikola Tesla

    This is, what, the 10,000th 'Big Bang' thread here? We don't know nearly as much as many try to pretend we do about the universe. But we form a theory and proceed on that until we know more.

    As incorrect as it was, without Ptolemy putting so much thought into his model, Copernicus would not have made his discovery, and so on. So even an incorrect theory can lead to a better understanding given time, and one or two thinkers who are able to see past socially/scientifically conditioned dogma.

    As to 'Big Bang' stuff, this is a quote I often recall when considering this subject:

    "I personally feel it is presumptuous to believe that man can determine the whole temporal structure of the universe, its evolution, development and ultimate fate from the first nanosecond of creation to the last 10^10 years, on the basis of three or four facts which are not very accurately known and are disputed among the experts." - J. Bahcall, senior astrophysicist, Institute for Advanced Study
     
  16. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    There is just so much here which is totally unreal.

    'Your're not right, you're not even wrong'
     
  17. CHRISCUNNINGHAM The Ethereal Paradigm Registered Senior Member

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    Astrocat and others, while I appreciate your interest in questioning the world around you, I have to warn you, it's best to do it on solid, sustainable, verifiable arguments.

    Many times, it is the death of would be scientists when they doubt the system so much that they use "uninformed assumption-based" logic. Using what they do know to draw a picture about something that far outstreches their already attained knowledge. This was something done primarily by the ancients, Plato, Aristotle, and the rest. Their ideas always had a hint of truth in them, but a truth, neverthless, where it's boundaries were streched far beyond any useful applications. Just having a confidence in your own assumptions, using them against the "assumptions" of others does not make something true. It has to be proven through experiments, and results by independent observers and systems.

    The math isn't super complex, but it is something that requires a broader education than basic algebra, basic algebra didn't exist in the times of the Greeks and the pythagoreans. 2X+10=20 would have absolutely no meaning to them. The fact that a triangle with two sides having each a value of 1 created something wholly foriegn, and perhaps threatening to them- the square root of 2. They knew and in fact informed the world that side one times itself, plus side two times itself equaled side three times itself. But when using 1 for side one and two the number is an irrational, neverending sequence of decimals.

    Is it safe to say that because they didn't understand the meaning of such a number that COULD NOT exist in their current mathematics, that the number didn't exist? That it was IMPOSSIBLE then, for a triangle to have two sides with a measurement of one?

    That's like saying because you haven't learned what the word average means, that averages don't exist and cannot be applied to the universe and its workings.

    The math we know and use today was developed through a series of unexplained phenomena much like the square root of 2. It isn't necessarily "complicated" in the sense that there's too much "work" involved for the universe to follow it, it's more that the information required to explain these phenomena are far more advanced than something a person, living on earth, for only 20 years, could dedude from what he or she has learned in that 20 years without prior exposure to the questions being asked, like "how does the moon rotate about the sun" it's taken thousands of years to truly understand. Just as it took hundreds of years to understand what is meant by the square root of two.

    When you ask, how was the "trillion" year universe created, you have to use more information than is given through basic teachings in high school and elementary school, because the mere age of the universe itself should be an indication of how many factors are involved in the determination of its origins, you'd have trillions of years of information to pile through, and yet you've only had how many?? We've only had how many as human beings??

    Think a bit about what you're saying astrocat.
     
  18. Red Devil Born Again Athiest Registered Senior Member

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    Visit space.com or the hubble site - the truth is out there.

    Einstein’s general theory of relativity says that the universe began with the big bang singularity, a moment when all the matter we see was concentrated at a single point of infinite density. But the theory does not capture the fine, quantum structure of spacetime, which limits how tightly matter can be concentrated and how strong gravity can become. To figure out what really happened, physicists need a quantum theory of gravity.

    According to one candidate for such a theory, loop quantum gravity, space is subdivided into “atoms” of volume and has a finite capacity to store matter and energy, thereby preventing true singularities from existing.

    If so, time may have extended before the bang. The prebang universe may have undergone a catastrophic implosion that reached a point of maximum density and then reversed. In short, a big crunch may have led to a big bounce and then to the big bang.

    String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.

    In their view of the universe the complexities of an inflating universe after a Big Bang are replaced by a universe that was already large. flat, and uniform with dark energy as the effect of the other universe constantly leaking gravity into our own and driving its acceleration. According to this theory, the Big Bang was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution, each accompanied by the creation of new matter and the formation of new galaxies, stars, and planets.

    Turok and Steinhardt were inspired by a lecture given by Burt Ovrut who imagined two branes, universes like ours, separated by a tiny gap as tiny as 10-32 meters. There would be no communictaion between the two universes except for our parallel sister universe's gravitational pull, which could cross the tiny gap.

    Orvut's theory could explain the effect of dark matter where areas of the universe are heavier than they should be given everything that's present. With their theory, the nagging problems surrounding the Big Bang (beginning from what, and caused how?) are replaced by an eternal cosmic cycle where dark energy is no longer a mysterious unknown quantity, but rather the very extra gravitational force that drives the universe to universe (brane-brane) interaction.

    http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ngt1000/

    http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/ngt1000/branes_max.gif
     
    Last edited: Dec 9, 2010
  19. NMSquirrel OCD ADHD THC IMO UR12 Valued Senior Member

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    math is a tool,
    what units you assign to the numbers is what makes it science

    Chris;

    great post..
     
  20. AlexG Like nailing Jello to a tree Valued Senior Member

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    Yes.

    No.
     
  21. CHRISCUNNINGHAM The Ethereal Paradigm Registered Senior Member

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    Ha Alex, what units you assign to it DO make it science...otherwise it would still be math...give me a scientific equation that does not have any units, at all...and is used to predict something else scientifically?
     
  22. Red Devil Born Again Athiest Registered Senior Member

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    Maths to me is another planet, especially higher maths - when peoples answers are full of equations, my eyes glaze over!!
     
  23. Stryder Keeper of "good" ideas. Valued Senior Member

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    I'm pretty sure you could probably get your head around it if you wanted to. It's just you are at the very bottom of the learning curve and if you don't attempt to learn, then your eyes will glaze over.
     
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