11 replies to this topic

[willkani]

just caught a great program on bbc 1(cant find it on iplayer) would love to hear other peoples thoughts on what happened before the big bang

[rdt123]

i go for the typical scientists cop out, time was created in the big bang so you cant even ask the question

[stewfox]

willkani, on 18 December 2010 - 03:21 , said:

just caught a great program on bbc 1(cant find it on iplayer) would love to hear other peoples thoughts on what happened before the big bang

Stick to steady state theory anything else does your head in.

[Red Raven]

Hasn't the microwave background survey recently been used to suggest that there are traces of events prior to the big bang. I cant find the article but the suggestion has the potential to bring some very big changes to the both the big bang and inflation theories.

edit - found an article

http://www.bbc.co.uk...onment-11837869

Edited by Red Raven, 18 December 2010 - 11:58 .

[Stu_London]

Loved the theories knocking about in Horizon

Never been a fan of the big bang. You cant have effect with no cause

[davehsug]

I've always been fond of "potentiality". There was nothing & suddenly there was the potential for there to be "something" & so the big bang happened. I think it's all to do with quantum theory, which I love hearing about but can't pretend to understand.

[stewfox]

Stu_London, on 18 December 2010 - 20:23 , said:

Loved the theories knocking about in Horizon

Never been a fan of the big bang. You cant have effect with no cause

This is the problem and the limitation re thought.

ie there has to be something outside the universe

something must have created the big bang etc etc

this effect - cause debate

I love the analogies but at the end of then day we cant 'visual' something outside our remit, no more then we could come up with a totally new colour.

[ajpoolshark]

What Happened Before The Big Bang......

Hmm, good question.......20 minutes of fumbling foreplay?

[NorthNorfolkWeather]

Stu_London, on 18 December 2010 - 20:23 , said:

Loved the theories knocking about in Horizon

Never been a fan of the big bang. You cant have effect with no cause

Ahh, but that's where quantum theory and the Vacuum state comes in, energy CAN materialise out of nowhere and then, shazzam, there is a different path for the destruction of anti matter than for matter, anti matter is potentially quicker, so a proportion of matter actually gets left,

That's why we can discuss this, I think it's one atom in 10^-30, the rest gets converted into light

So we are all creatures of the (failure of ) light.

Mind you, the Lithium in your body ( and there are a few million atoms) are the result of the big bang, there's no other way to get Lithium, so we are all children of the stars.

Whoops, getting metaphysical.....

Edited by NorthNorfolkWeather, 20 December 2010 - 22:24 .

[Glenn W]

The traditional view, i.e. from a couple of years ago, was that the universe came into being, time, space, causality, energy, and all, at the BB, and the BB was a singularity, a point where the laws of physics don't work (there are also singularities inside black holes). So it doesn't make sense (they say) to talk about conservation of energy through the BB, any more than it makes sense to talk about traction in outer space.

Some physicists weren't satisfied with this, and they argued as follows. It is accepted in physics that gravitational potential energy is taken to be negative and kinetic energy (of motion) is taken as positive (this is true, but I don't want to get into explaining it here). So if the amount of potential energy, on the whole, balances the amount of kinetic energy, the total energy of the universe could be close to zero. And then you could invoke the uncertainty principle and say that you couldn't have exactly zero energy, so the universe could arise as a quantum fluctuation and expand due to quantum vacuum reactions. This was described as "The Ultimate Free Lunch".

In the last couple of years astrophysicists and cosmologists have discovered new things:

- Study of distant burnt-out supernovas has shown the universe is not only expanding, but the expansion is accelerating. This would require a positive energy pressure throughout the vacuum of space, and we have had to get used to the idea that over 80% of the energy in the universe is this, which has been given the name "dark energy".

-The new data from the WMAP satellite has given us a complex look at conditions in the very early universe.

-Cosmologists have introduced candidate theories that don't have singularities at t=0, and give us some hope of finding out what may have gone before the BB.

[Azores Hi]

I'm gonna jump in here, not because I at all understand all this new physics (I can barely grasp the old newtonian stuff). But I do find it really interesting that we still know so little about how the universe works.
I heard somewhere that of all the universal basic forces (electromagnetism, strong and weak force and Gravity) Gravity is by far an away much much weaker than all the others. The analogy that is often used is that we need huge amounts of energy to smash apart Atoms but it requires only the strength of my arm to rip the pen away from the surface of the entire planet!
So I decided to look on wiki to see what the great internet mind had to say about it all and I was shocked to find a list of gravitational anomalies near the bottom of the article which have yet to be explained

Quote

Extra fast stars: Stars in galaxies follow a distribution of velocities where stars on the outskirts are moving faster than they should according to the observed distributions of normal matter. Galaxies within galaxy clusters show a similar pattern. Dark matter, which would interact gravitationally but not electromagnetically, would account for the discrepancy. Various modifications to Newtonian dynamics have also been proposed.

Pioneer anomaly: The two Pioneer spacecraft seem to be slowing down in a way which has yet to be explained.[20]

Flyby anomaly: Various spacecraft have experienced greater accelerations during slingshot maneuvers than expected.

Accelerating expansion: The metric expansion of space seems to be speeding up. Dark energy has been proposed to explain this. A recent alternative explanation is that the geometry of space is not homogeneous (due to clusters of galaxies) and that when the data are reinterpreted to take this into account, the expansion is not speeding up after all,[21] however this conclusion is disputed.[22]

Anomalous increase of the astronomical unit: Recent measurements indicate that planetary orbits are widening faster than if this was solely through the sun losing mass by radiating energy.

Extra energetic photons: Photons travelling through galaxy clusters should gain energy and then lose it again on the way out. The accelerating expansion of the universe should stop the photons returning all the energy, but even taking this into account photons from the cosmic microwave background radiation gain twice as much energy as expected. This may indicate that gravity falls off faster than inverse-squared at certain distance scales.[23]

Dark flow: Surveys of galaxy motions have detected a mystery dark flow towards an unseen mass. Such a large mass is too large to have accumulated since the Big Bang using current models and may indicate that gravity falls off slower than inverse-squared at certain distance scales.[23]

Extra massive hydrogen clouds: The spectral lines of the Lyman-alpha forest suggest that hydrogen clouds are more clumped together at certain scales than expected and, like dark flow, may indicate that gravity falls off slower than inverse-squared at certain distance scales.[23]

http://en.wikipedia....iki/Gravitation

Makes interesting reading and just goes to show that there are potentially huge advances in our knowledge just around the corner and it's possible that our understanding of the universe is very crude indeed.

Isn't the Large Hadron collider supposed to answering some of these questions? Any news on progress?

[coldfingers]

NorthNorfolkWeather, on 20 December 2010 - 22:12 , said:

Mind you, the Lithium in your body ( and there are a few million atoms) are the result of the big bang, there's no other way to get Lithium, so we are all children of the stars.

Whoops, getting metaphysical.....

Must be other ways to get Lithium, Chemists shops spring to mind.
OK, I will go away and hang my head in shame now.

Azores Hi, on 23 December 2010 - 13:40 , said:

Makes interesting reading and just goes to show that there are potentially huge advances in our knowledge just around the corner and it's possible that our understanding of the universe is very crude indeed.

Isn't the Large Hadron collider supposed to answering some of these questions? Any news on progress?

Our knowledge of the universe has to be very crude indeed. We can't get out there to know about it for starters, also look back at the scientific knowledge in the middle ages and we look down on their knowledge. Look back at the scientific knowledge when my mother was born in 1920 and again we look down on their knowledge. It has to be that each generation builds on the knowledge gained from their forebears I think it will take many generations indeed before we even begin to have an understanding of the universe, even after the Big Bang (if there was one) and many gerenrations before before we can ever get our heads round infinity, if we ever do.

Edited by coldfingers, 03 January 2011 - 17:01 .