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Big Bang
My college education focused mainly on language, form, politics, and economics, with quite a bit of law thrown in there too. Physics was never my strong point. So I'm hoping that all the science geeks out there will be able to tell me:
I'm not going to debate whether the Big Bang occurred. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it is 100 percent accurate. Now that Steve is gone (lolz just raggin' on you, Steve), what I have always wondered is where did the mass for the Big Bang come from? We tend to mark that event as the "beginning of the universe," but clearly the matter and energy were already there, highly compressed, waiting to be 'sploded. So where did that matter come from? How long was it there?
My problem with Big Bang is that you could similarly say that cars come from dealerships. That glosses over assembley, manufacturing, and harvesting of raw materials. So what came before the Big Bang? There certainly must be origins. And how far back can you go before running into a blank wall?
P.S. I am bored at work. Answer quickly so I have something to do.
I'm not going to debate whether the Big Bang occurred. Let's assume for the sake of argument that it is 100 percent accurate. Now that Steve is gone (lolz just raggin' on you, Steve), what I have always wondered is where did the mass for the Big Bang come from? We tend to mark that event as the "beginning of the universe," but clearly the matter and energy were already there, highly compressed, waiting to be 'sploded. So where did that matter come from? How long was it there?
My problem with Big Bang is that you could similarly say that cars come from dealerships. That glosses over assembley, manufacturing, and harvesting of raw materials. So what came before the Big Bang? There certainly must be origins. And how far back can you go before running into a blank wall?
P.S. I am bored at work. Answer quickly so I have something to do.
Comments
That's what I'd like to think. The correct answer is "I have no clue". Also, I don't care, because it doesn't have any effect on my life.
No scientist seriously proposes that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything. What they do propose is that it is the first observable action that took place in our universe.
Our best bet to understand what occurred before the Big Bag would be to somehow observe the state of existence beyond the borders of our universe. This is currently very difficult. ^_~
And what happened to Steve? Did they need him at the Pentagon?
Without a great increase in technological ability, yes, it's very difficult to make scientific observations or deduct an answer from facts, Rym. I guess that makes this discussion fairly existential. I'm pretty good at THAT, even if I'm a bit weak on the actual physics end.
A hard-core neocon relative of mine says that the logical outcome of this mental game is that god created the Big Bang. I can hardly believe that, but it's certainly a step away from standard creationism. My reply is that if god created the Big Bang, then who created god? And we're back to Scott's argument that something is permanent.
Bottom line: There has to be a cause and effect that resulted in reality. And logically from there, there had to be a cause and effect that created that cause and effect... in an infinite (?) chain backward. So, from a strictly hypothetical, philosophical, we're-good-at-bullshitting-and-Jason's-bored-at-work way, let's throw out some theories, people.
I guess we'll even let Steve talk, if he's good. X-D
Here is a pretty amazing article that talks about time and the big bang. I have to admit that it's pretty hard to wrap your head around this stuff.
As for the big bang being a "black box" in that we cannot see back further than it, you're correct. We don't even know if all the laws of physics in our universe existed then, or if there were others that are no longer observable. The very nature of time, as kilarney pointed out, may very well have been radically different or non-existent.
The big bang is a huge mystery, it's very interesting scientifically, and it creates opportunities for pondering the very nature of knowledge, the universe, and our ability to determine information. None of this comes even close to adding up to the existence of any sort of god. A god could certainly have caused the big bang, just as one could be running the entire universe in a spore-like environment on his pocket calculator on his way to work. The fact of the matter is, knowing that information was destroyed by the events preceding the big bang, and knowing that the laws of physics could have been vastly different during & before it (insofar as those concepts exist; time as we know it was created then, too), means that determining a cause is unlikely at best. There may not have even been one. Causation may not have existed (that's unlikely, though...i think). We have no idea.
In short, your relative is wrong, but don't let that dissuade you from reading up on the big bang; it's pretty freakin' fascinating.
Now it seems that's not really part of the theory. I don't know where I got the idea. But it does have some merit, doesn't it? It doesn't require an initial condition of a tightly compacted universe that is less likely through random fluctuation than the spontaneous generation of the universe itself. (refer to article posted earlier in thread)
Now, we do not know that the process of matter-antimatter annihilation is reversible. It's quite a thing to propose that one can make something from nothing, so long as you create its opposite as well, and hopefully send it away so they never touch. But why not? If it were like chemistry, the production of energy in a matter-antimatter collision producing energy would imply that the splitting of nothingness into matter and antimatter would require an influx of energy. But it isn't like chemistry; it's like weird physics we don't understand yet. Kind of like black holes, dark matter, dark energy, the zero-point field, and the nature of time.
We must remember how the Big Bang theory began; we observed that all galaxies had red shift, and thus are moving away from each other, implying that the universe is expanding, which would in turn imply that the universe began as a point and exploded. Or perhaps, in a bout of incredible unlikeliness, a bunch of masses careened into each other, nearly missed about some center point, then careened away from each other, like an Indian traffic intersection. Stranger things have happened--like the initial condition of the Big Bang itself (maybe).
This all obeys the laws of conservation. An antiparticle does not possess negative mass or negative energy, but rather positive. The only thing different about it is its electrical charge. Therefore, where once you had two particles of positive mass and energy, you now have zero...all the energy they once represented must go somewhere.