Big Bang Theory

[Confused]

Although the big bang theory is famous, it's also widely misunderstood. A common misperception about the theory is that it describes the origin of the universe. That's not quite right. The big bang is an attempt to explain how the universe developed from a very tiny, dense state into what it is today. It doesn't attempt to explain what initiated the creation of the universe, or what came before the big bang or even what lies outside the universe. Did some intentional action lead to the creation?
Another misconception is that the big bang was a kind of explosion. That's not accurate either. The big bang describes the expansion of the universe. While some versions of the theory refer to an incredibly rapid expansion (possibly faster than the speed of light), it's still not an explosion in the classic sense.
Summing up the big bang theory is a challenge. It involves concepts that contradict the way we perceive the world. The earliest stages of the big bang focus on a moment in which all the separate forces of the universe were part of a unified force. The laws of science begin to break down the further back you look. Eventually, you can't make any scientific theories about what is happening, because science itself doesn't apply.
At the earliest moments of the big bang, all of the matter, energy and space we could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume and infinite density. Cosmologists call this a singularity.

This is the point where things seem to get sticky for me. What caused the Singularity to expand into the Big Bang Theory? And what was the origin of the Singularity? Because of the limitations of the laws of science, we can't make any guesses about the instant the universe came into being. Instead, we can look at the period immediately following the creation of the universe. Right now, the earliest moment scientists talk about occurs at t = 1 x 10-43 seconds (the "t" stands for the time after the creation of the universe). In other words, take the number 1.0 and move the decimal place to the left 43 times.

So up for debate, is there any way we can actually study the Singularity and the cause of said Singularity leading to the "Big Bang"? Do we need to insert a God into the process to justify the statement "The universe was created" or is there a competing natural process that can explain it. While I realize that most can say that just because the universe came into existence doesn't mean we need insert a creator to make it happen, take note, I am aware of this. However, this being a religious debating forum, I am looking for any competing religious justification as well and any competing scientific justification. Hence, placing this thread in the "Science and Religion" forum.

So to clarify: For debate:
1) What methodology could we use to study the actual Singularity?
2) Is there any methodology we can use to determine the cause of the Singularity progressing to the "Big Bang"?
3) What does religion hypothesize as being the Singularity? Please note, if you insert God here, you must justify His being the Singularity.
4) What does science have to show in the form of evidence that would negate the insertion of a creator setting off the Singularity to initiate the Big Bang leading to the future universe we now reside it. What does religion have in the form of evidence that a creator was needed to bring the Singularity into existence and is there any evidence that said creator actually initiated the Big Bang?

(Please note, a heavily relied on source for information from this thread came from:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictio ... heory1.htm )

[fredonly]

A singularity is not possible. The "infinite density" that is computed from the General Relativity equations implies that the theory breaks down. It's generally believed that General Relativity breaks down at Planck time, (10 ^-43 seconds after t=0). The expectation is that a quantum theory of gravity is needed to explain what occurred during times earlier than that.

[McCulloch]

A couple of nit picks on the OP:

• The word creation implies that there was a time when the thing said to have been created did not exist. Since time is contained in the universe, rather than being external to the universe, it could not have been created.

  It doesn't attempt to explain what initiated the creation of the universe, or

• Modern cosmology renders the concept of before the universe as either meaningless or unknowable. Time is an integral part of the universe. Before is a temporal concept, referring to a location in space-time. Since time itself is contained in the universe, there is no before.

  what came before the big bang or

• Modern cosmology renders the concept of outside the universe as either meaningless or unknowable. Space is an integral part of the universe. Outside is a spacial concept, referring to a location in space. Since space itself is contained in the universe, there is no outside.

  even what lies outside the universe.

• According to the standard theory, there was no matter, only energy and space-time and it was an area of almost zero volume. The theoretical models break down at an actual zero.

  At the earliest moments of the big bang, all of the matter, energy and space we could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume and infinite density.

• As far as I can tell, none of the world's religions have not made any authoritative declaration with regard to singularities.

What does science have to show in the form of evidence that would negate the insertion of a creator setting off the Singularity to initiate the Big Bang leading to the future universe we now reside it.

Absolutely nothing. For the God hypothesis to be true, there would have to be an undetectable realm, with at least one time-like dimension and presumably one or more space-like dimensions.

[Confused]

A singularity is not possible. The "infinite density" that is computed from the General Relativity equations implies that the theory breaks down. It's generally believed that General Relativity breaks down at Planck time, (10 ^-43 seconds after t=0). The expectation is that a quantum theory of gravity is needed to explain what occurred during times earlier than that.

I am not sure what you mean when you say a singularity is not possible? Do you mean that quantum physics cannot understand it as of yet or do you mean that a Singularity is not possible to exist? I realize where standard physics breaks down at the "Singularity". Our current science can't yet explain what happened in those fractions of a second before our universe came into existence. But quantum mechanics is making a lot of progress (granted, we find at least 7 more questions for every one we find an answer to, but it's still something).

[fredonly]

A singularity is not possible. The "infinite density" that is computed from the General Relativity equations implies that the theory breaks down. It's generally believed that General Relativity breaks down at Planck time, (10 ^-43 seconds after t=0). The expectation is that a quantum theory of gravity is needed to explain what occurred during times earlier than that.

I am not sure what you mean when you say a singularity is not possible? Do you mean that quantum physics cannot understand it as of yet or do you mean that a Singularity is not possible to exist? I realize where standard physics breaks down at the "Singularity". Our current science can't yet explain what happened in those fractions of a second before our universe came into existence. But quantum mechanics is making a lot of progress (granted, we find at least 7 more questions for every one we find an answer to, but it's still something).

The term "singularity," simply means that the General Relativity equations result in zero in the denominator, which isn't possible (you can't divide by zero). If you've had calculus, or pre-calculus, think of this is the limit as the denominator approaches zero. Although you can compute the limit as the denominator approaches zero, you cannot actually reach zero. Physicists realize this means there's a point at which General Relativity breaks down (before the denominator reaches zero) - this is the era known as "Planck Time." What occurred during this era is unknown. The expectation is that a theory of Quantum Gravity is needed to figure this out. There are hypotheses about this, including multiverse hypotheses in which our universe is but one of a great many - but ours popped out of a "multiverse landscape."

[SomePunk]

So up for debate, is there any way we can actually study the Singularity and the cause of said Singularity leading to the "Big Bang"? Do we need to insert a God into the process to justify the statement "The universe was created" or is there a competing natural process that can explain it. While I realize that most can say that just because the universe came into existence doesn't mean we need insert a creator to make it happen, take note, I am aware of this. However, this being a religious debating forum, I am looking for any competing religious justification as well and any competing scientific justification. Hence, placing this thread in the "Science and Religion" forum.

So to clarify: For debate:
1) What methodology could we use to study the actual Singularity?
2) Is there any methodology we can use to determine the cause of the Singularity progressing to the "Big Bang"?
3) What does religion hypothesize as being the Singularity? Please note, if you insert God here, you must justify His being the Singularity.
4) What does science have to show in the form of evidence that would negate the insertion of a creator setting off the Singularity to initiate the Big Bang leading to the future universe we now reside it. What does religion have in the form of evidence that a creator was needed to bring the Singularity into existence and is there any evidence that said creator actually initiated the Big Bang?

(Please note, a heavily relied on source for information from this thread came from:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictio ... heory1.htm )

It depends on what you are looking for when it comes to religion, but imo all religion evolved from the same type of beliefs.

Chaos cosmogony;

Chaos (Greek khaos) refers to the formless or void state preceding the creation of the universe or cosmos in the Greek creation myths, more specifically the initial "gap" created by the original separation of heaven and earth.

Even if science were to provide an explanation as to what happen before everything came to be, it seems like it would kind of pointless.

But, without getting to philosophical I will just elaborate and give an example.
You have bricks and mortar. Well it takes brick and mortar to create a wall or structure. You can break down those materials to find out what they consist or are made of, but you cant get those materials back once the wall or structure has been created, hence creating a gap, chaos, a void, the abyss.

[Confused]

A couple of nit picks on the OP:

• The word creation implies that there was a time when the thing said to have been created did not exist. Since time is contained in the universe, rather than being external to the universe, it could not have been created.

  It doesn't attempt to explain what initiated the creation of the universe, or

• Modern cosmology renders the concept of before the universe as either meaningless or unknowable. Time is an integral part of the universe. Before is a temporal concept, referring to a location in space-time. Since time itself is contained in the universe, there is no before.

  what came before the big bang or

• Modern cosmology renders the concept of outside the universe as either meaningless or unknowable. Space is an integral part of the universe. Outside is a spacial concept, referring to a location in space. Since space itself is contained in the universe, there is no outside.

  even what lies outside the universe.

• According to the standard theory, there was no matter, only energy and space-time and it was an area of almost zero volume. The theoretical models break down at an actual zero.

  At the earliest moments of the big bang, all of the matter, energy and space we could observe was compressed to an area of zero volume and infinite density.

• As far as I can tell, none of the world's religions have not made any authoritative declaration with regard to singularities.

What does science have to show in the form of evidence that would negate the insertion of a creator setting off the Singularity to initiate the Big Bang leading to the future universe we now reside it.

Absolutely nothing. For the God hypothesis to be true, there would have to be an undetectable realm, with at least one time-like dimension and presumably one or more space-like dimensions.

LOL, by your own post McCulloch, you have more than just a couple nitpicks!!!

The word creation implies that there was a time when the thing said to have been created did not exist. Since time is contained in the universe, rather than being external to the universe, it could not have been created. Modern cosmology renders the concept of before the universe as either meaningless or unknowable. Time is an integral part of the universe. Before is a temporal concept, referring to a location in space-time. Since time itself is contained in the universe, there is no before.

I would agree that in the relationship of time being integral to our universe therefore "before" time is a concept we can't comprehend. But I think that makes time more limited in terms of human comprehension, not so much in terms of the universe. In physics, classical at least, time is multidirectional. It isn't limited by the human constraints of its concept. Only our ability to perceive it limits us to it. So I think a more accurate constraint is that time is contained in the human conceptual understanding of the universe, not that time is contained in the universe itself.
For your reference McCulloch: http://www.goertzel.org/papers/timepap.html

When we move beyond classical thermodynamics to the world of quantum physics, we find things get strange. The equations of quantum physics, like those of classical physics, are fundamentally reversible: they do not give a particular direction to the arrow of time. But here one finds that, in fact, the assumption of a particular direction for time confuses and complicates things . The interpretation of quantum physics becomes much simpler if one assumes that time goes both forwards and backwards!

Cramer (1988) has proposed that every entity in the universe (every particle) sends out waves both forwards and backwards in time. Observed events occur when a forward wave collides with an appropriate backward wave. This may seem peculiar, but in fact it is completely consistent with everything that is known about the physical universe. The numerous paradoxes of quantum reality all disappear when one drops the assumption that events occur at particular points in time

Just as in thermodynamics, however, the symmetry of past and future is ruined by the introduction of an observer. In quantum physics, it is the observation of a phenomenon that makes the phenomenon definite rather than merely probabilistic. Observing a phenomenon makes it "collapse" from an array of equally real possibilities to one real event and an array of other "didn't-happens." This is not changed by Cramer's timeless interpretation of the theory: the only difference in his theory is that the collapse from uncertainty to certainty is something that comes about, at a particular moment, as a consequence of the microscopic state of the universe at all past and future times.

A slightly different way of phrasing this is given by the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics, according to which an observation represents, not a collapse of uncertainty to certainty, but rather a partitioning of the space of possible universes: into some universes where the measurement came out this way, some universes where the measurement came out that way, some universe where the measurement came out yet another way, etc.... In this interpretation, one says that the dynamics of the multiverse are perfectly well reversible -- it is only by trying to partition the multiverse up into pieces that we create irreversibility. The flow of time is created by an arbitrary partitioning of the multiverse/universe into pieces.

The upshot is that, on the microscopic level, there just plain is no direction to time -- and this is even more spectacularly true in quantum physics than in classical physics. In the microscopic domain, everything just exists in a kind of nebulous, atemporal continuum. Then, every once in a while, something becomes observable, and enters the one-dimensional time continuum. The arrow of time does not exist in the universe as a whole. It only exists in individual subjective views of the universe!

Finally, when one moves beyond fundamental physics to the domain of cosmology -- the question of the birth of the universe -- things become even slipperier. For a while cosmologists thought about the Big Bang as the moment at which time began. There was no time, and then -- BANG! -- time came into existence. But now a subtly different interpretation has emerged (Hawking, 1993; Smith, 1997). Perhaps there was no time, not only at the moment of the Big Bang, but in the very early universe, for a "little while" after the Big Bang (it is not clear what a "while" means in this context!). Perhaps time came to emerge only gradually, as the universe got larger and larger, and cooler and cooler. After all, at the microscopic level, time still doesn't exist! An elementary particle today is still "at one" with the particles that existed at the very beginning of the universe, bound together by quantum nonlocality.

The details of temporal structure vary from one branch of physics to another. The key point I want to make, however, holds true whether one is talking quantum theory, thermodynamics or cosmology: it is the extent to which the model of time as an arrow pointing in one direction has been abandoned by modern physical theory. The one direction of time is now viewed as an approximation to the true nature of the universe -- an approximation induced by the perceptual limitations of particular observers like us. If we could see the way things really are, says modern physics, we would see time running two directions at once!

According to the standard theory, there was no matter, only energy and space-time and it was an area of almost zero volume. The theoretical models break down at an actual zero.

While true at this time, more research is leading to more theories here. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmi ... rse-start/

As far as I can tell, none of the world's religions have not made any authoritative declaration with regard to singularities.

How very true. Some research is discounting the need for a Singularity at all actually.

[Confused]

A singularity is not possible. The "infinite density" that is computed from the General Relativity equations implies that the theory breaks down. It's generally believed that General Relativity breaks down at Planck time, (10 ^-43 seconds after t=0). The expectation is that a quantum theory of gravity is needed to explain what occurred during times earlier than that.

I am not sure what you mean when you say a singularity is not possible? Do you mean that quantum physics cannot understand it as of yet or do you mean that a Singularity is not possible to exist? I realize where standard physics breaks down at the "Singularity". Our current science can't yet explain what happened in those fractions of a second before our universe came into existence. But quantum mechanics is making a lot of progress (granted, we find at least 7 more questions for every one we find an answer to, but it's still something).

The term "singularity," simply means that the General Relativity equations result in zero in the denominator, which isn't possible (you can't divide by zero). If you've had calculus, or pre-calculus, think of this is the limit as the denominator approaches zero. Although you can compute the limit as the denominator approaches zero, you cannot actually reach zero. Physicists realize this means there's a point at which General Relativity breaks down (before the denominator reaches zero) - this is the era known as "Planck Time." What occurred during this era is unknown. The expectation is that a theory of Quantum Gravity is needed to figure this out. There are hypotheses about this, including multiverse hypotheses in which our universe is but one of a great many - but ours popped out of a "multiverse landscape."

I understand what you are trying to get across now. I am familiar with the multiverse theory. Personally, I think Susskind did a heck of a job putting it in laymens terms. I think some important details get lost that way however. If we are an ever expanding cycle of "Baby Verses", it makes a beginning moot.
The expansion of Quantum Gravity does negate the need for a Singularity.


In one part of Zero-Point physics, the question is posited: There are conceptual puzzles: at what point does spacetime make the transition from quantum to classical? I wonder when we will find this transition of if it may be discovered that we need not make it at all. Rather, quantum will suffice from the beginning (at least the concept of a beginning).

[Kathie Bondar]

So to clarify: For debate:
1) What methodology could we use to study the actual Singularity?
2) Is there any methodology we can use to determine the cause of the Singularity progressing to the "Big Bang"?
3) What does religion hypothesize as being the Singularity? Please note, if you insert God here, you must justify His being the Singularity.
4) What does science have to show in the form of evidence that would negate the insertion of a creator setting off the Singularity to initiate the Big Bang leading to the future universe we now reside it. What does religion have in the form of evidence that a creator was needed to bring the Singularity into existence and is there any evidence that said creator actually initiated the Big Bang?

(Please note, a heavily relied on source for information from this thread came from:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictio ... heory1.htm )

The fact is we are here, so how did that happen? We can go back to the singularity and then what? Give up? Perhaps some other method of inquery will get us over the hump?

For me it is telepathy. I have defined telepathy as the universal means of communication. It is like another language that we need to learn. I worked out the interpretation of telepathy and I got answers.
Indeed, there is a Creator, he did create our universe, although not from nothing. He brought it over from another form or dimension, or whatever we might want to call it. And yes, it came over like a compressed file on your computer, and began to scatter, and is still in the process of scattering, what we perceive as the expanding universe.
In fact our known universe is but a very small part of the total. What is the rest like? I don't know, but if you want to investigate further, you need to learn telepathy, then ask the Creator yourself, he is accesible. If you were hoping for shortcuts, sorry, I don't have any.

[brotherhoodofmen]

So to clarify: For debate:
1) What methodology could we use to study the actual Singularity?
2) Is there any methodology we can use to determine the cause of the Singularity progressing to the "Big Bang"?
3) What does religion hypothesize as being the Singularity? Please note, if you insert God here, you must justify His being the Singularity.
4) What does science have to show in the form of evidence that would negate the insertion of a creator setting off the Singularity to initiate the Big Bang leading to the future universe we now reside it. What does religion have in the form of evidence that a creator was needed to bring the Singularity into existence and is there any evidence that said creator actually initiated the Big Bang?

(Please note, a heavily relied on source for information from this thread came from:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictio ... heory1.htm )

There is a part of the universe that has beginning but there is also a part that did not have a beginning. There is no Big Bang. The Big Bang is just a deduction from the observation that the known universe is expanding. If it is expanding then it must have started infinitesimally small. Because our mind is time- and space-conditioned, we can only think in terms of origin.

The universe is eternal. The universe has an eternal core " it is called the Isle of Paradise. It is the biggest and only stationary matter in the whole universe. It is timeless and spaceless in our own sense of these words. It is the nucleus of the biggest and pattern atom of all. This grand atomic nucleus is surrounded by a billion perfect and divine planets encircling it. This whole system is called the eternal and divine universe. Encircling this divine universe is an enormous wall of dark gravity bodies that augments the Isle of Paradise in its gravity grasp of the whole universe. Outside of this system is the beginning of the evolutionary time and space universe " the universe that we can observe.

But the totality of the universe is like one living organism. It is breathing " exhaling and inhaling or in other word expanding and contracting with one breathing cycle measured in approximately 2 billion earth years " 1 billion expanding and another billion year contracting. At this time, the universe is exhaling " expanding and it is approximately halfway through its expanding period. So, yes the universe is expanding but it has been like that for half a billion years and it will begin to contract after another half a billion years. There was no Big Bang and there will be no Big Crunch either because it is an eternal cycle.

From the smallest or basic unit of matter " the atom, we observe of a proton nucleus being encircled by electrons. From microscopic this is duplicated many times to macroscopic until we reached the biggest atom of all " the whole universe itself with the Isle of Paradise as its nucleus " the center of infinity " the personal residence of God.

This is the actual structure of the universe as revealed in the Urantia Book.


FOGBOM