I don't really get Big Bang

Penfold101 said:
This guy gets it.

The other guy hasn't actually read up on anything even vaguely related to it.
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no it only proves a suggestion of a reality. the end result is you know there is radiation. thats it. as said people just swallow teachings as gospel. what if that very formula is floored ? it meanly its all bs.
 
Penfold101 said:
This part technically questons the big bang theory, becuase it doesn't describe it correctly. The theory simply states that the universe was incredibly dense and hot, possibly to the point of being a singularity, before undergoing cosmic inflation and expansion which is ongoing today. It doesn't say there was nothing, because we simply can't know that. As you say, we don't know what came before that point, or if 'before' is even a term that can be used if time came into existence as a dimension at the point of initial expansion.

There is no contradiciton between thermodynamics and the big bang theory - all the energy was there at the initial point, and it's still all here now in one form or another.

We agree that beyond that initial point, we can't know anything, and it may well stay that way for a long time, unless we can build some seriously large particle accelerators...
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I wasn’t making a fact/statement that questions it, I put towards a question of an idea which contradicts the laws of thermodynamics. If that is wrong then I accept that.
 
What I don’t understand is how can you on one hand say “nobody knows, it’s all a guess”

and then immediately turns around and say “you are wrong, it is not that, here is a video, it must be this”.

so I guess we’ve figured it all out?

No? It’s still all a guess? I mean an educated guess, very well educated guess.
 
Mr Jack said:
No. I'm saying evidence of failure of a mode of explanation is evidence that it is a bad mode of explanation. That's not the same thing at all.
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That's not what you're saying at all, there is no evidence "of failure of a mode of explanation" because no one knows what existed before the big bang, when time as we understand it even existed.

What you're trying to argue is that because there's never been evidence of something that not only does that thing not exist but that it's never existed in any know and/or unknown existence, time, place, or any conceivable reality.
Mr Jack said:
And?
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Was what i said not self explanatory? What part of not knowing what existed before time, as we understand it in our universe, even started.

Put it this way, what do you think existed before the big bang?
Angilion said:
There are two major differences:

1) Words mean things. "God" is not a meaningless noise or collection of letters that can be freely substituted for anything else. Labels matter. They matter a lot. Since the idea that every word is freely interchangeable with any other word is the core of your argument, the argument you're using to support your initial claim fails.
2) Thinking that the known evidence indicates that the universe was once far smaller than it is now and expanded over time (which it does) is not the same as having faith in the existence of a supernatural hyper-powerful being who plays some hugely important role in humanity. So your initial argument fails too.

Imagine someone accused you of abusing children. What you were actually doing was drinking a cup of tea, but that person decided to call "drinking a cup of tea" "abusing children". It's the same thing given a different name, right? Doesn't matter at all. No word means anything and all words can be freely substituted for any other words.

Labels.
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It's hypothesised that before the big bang time didn't exist within our universe, if it had it wouldn't be before the big bang it would be after as time is nothing more than a measurement that we use to mark one event from another event, the moment anything, literally anything from an atom moving to a quark coming into existence happens the big bang has started and time starts to exist, it sets off a chain reaction that leads to the hypothesised singularity becoming the universe.

Now if you allow me, a thought experiment: What existed before the big bang and what triggered it if not some outside influence?
Penfold101 said:
I don't think I've read the 'God of the Gaps' argument so many times in one thread, along with someone using the word 'god' describing it exactly as common parlance and the religious community use it, but denying it means that...:cry:
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It's not a 'God of the Gaps' argument to say something existed before the big bang and that we'll likely never know what that is, be it an advanced alien race making a big bang pie and pushing the start button, for want of a better word what most people would consider a 'god', or some other wild speculative theory like string theory, multiverse, or the big bounce.
 
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Murphy said:
Now if you allow me, a thought experiment: What existed before the big bang and what triggered it if not some outside influnence
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There are some theories like M-theory, higher dimensional space that bumped into each other. This 'before' place would have no spatial dimension and no time. OR is has loads, but the point is we're not in Kansas anymore! That might have issues with cause and effect as we understand them. It all sounds a bit Star Trek TNG! I can not imagine such a place, probably because my brain evolved in 4 dimensional space-time :) Science just goes back as far as the universe being really small and really hot. But its not nothing, that's the important part. The difference between nothing and something turns out is pretty big :)
 
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Reality|Bites said:
So the Fragels from Fragel rock could exist it's just we haven't found them yet?
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As facetious as your post is the answer would be yes, it's why the burden of proof is on the person making a positive claim. If i had made such a claim i could simply say, without proof, that Fragels are living happily in another galaxy.
keyser said:
There are some theories like M-theory, higher dimensional space that bumped into each other. This 'before' place would have no spatial dimension and no time. OR is has loads, but the point is we're not in Kansas anymore! That might have issues with cause and effect as we understand them. It all sounds a bit Star Trek TNG! I can not imagine such a place, probably because my brain evolved in 4 dimensional space-time :) Science just goes back as far as the universe being really small and really hot. But its not nothing, that's the important part. The difference between nothing and something turns out is pretty big :)
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That's my point, AFAIK the theories of what happened before the big bang have about as much evidence in support of them as Bert the interdimensional space tomato having farted in the wrong direction.

It's why places like the LHC are so important IMO as we can at least try to answer some of these sorts of question.
 
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Murphy said:
That's my point, AFAIK the theories of what happened before the big bang have about as much evidence in support of them as Bert the interdimensional space tomato having farted in the wrong direction.

It's why places like the LHC are so important IMO as we can at least try to answer some of these sorts of question.
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Yeah and the James Webb Telescope might be able to see an 'imprint' of the cosmic microwave background radiation in distance light from the early galaxies. Fingers crossed on it just working ok anyway, looking forward to seeing what it finds.
 
Raymond Lin said:
What I don’t understand is how can you on one hand say “nobody knows, it’s all a guess”

and then immediately turns around and say “you are wrong, it is not that, here is a video, it must be this”.

so I guess we’ve figured it all out?

No? It’s still all a guess? I mean an educated guess, very well educated guess.
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Prior to the plank time, it is all hypothesis and speculation based on our current understanding, but there's a good chance we'll never know. That doesn't make it 'guesswork' as you've described it. It could literally be a god farting the universe into existance as depicted in Family Guy, but we have no way of knowing.

AFTER that time, however, is the basis of much investigation and experiment at places like the LHC, where you can combine observational evidence with experimental and come up with answers as to what happened at the various points in our universe's history. Those parts we can investigate - parts prior to the plank time we can't. I know you haven't watched it, but that Veritasium video I posted described how scientists were able to predict a supernova appearing in a galaxy a year in advance to within an accuracy of a few months, because they'd seen it several times before with the original source being gravitationally lensed and the light taking several different paths, giving multiple images of the same galaxy but with varying times for the light to travel those paths, resulting in the image being delayed. The predicted it, and were proven correct. That is how we know the theories are correct, because evidence proves it.

Do we know everything? Of course not, but no-one is saying we do. I follow the scientific consensus because it is self-correcting, and if anything IS proven wrong then my position on it alters accordingly.
 
Penfold101 said:
Prior to the plank time, it is all hypothesis and speculation based on our current understanding, but there's a good chance we'll never know. That doesn't make it 'guesswork' as you've described it. It could literally be a god farting the universe into existance as depicted in Family Guy, but we have no way of knowing.

AFTER that time, however, is the basis of much investigation and experiment at places like the LHC, where you can combine observational evidence with experimental and come up with answers as to what happened at the various points in our universe's history. Those parts we can investigate - parts prior to the plank time we can't. I know you haven't watched it, but that Veritasium video I posted described how scientists were able to predict a supernova appearing in a galaxy a year in advance to within an accuracy of a few months, because they'd seen it several times before with the original source being gravitationally lensed and the light taking several different paths, giving multiple images of the same galaxy but with varying times for the light to travel those paths, resulting in the image being delayed. The predicted it, and were proven correct. That is how we know the theories are correct, because evidence proves it.

Do we know everything? Of course not, but no-one is saying we do. I follow the scientific consensus because it is self-correcting, and if anything IS proven wrong then my position on it alters accordingly.
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Before we move on, would you like to pick a word?

You have corrected me on the word "guess", even though you have stated "simply we don't know", you have corrected me on the use of the word "theory". Would you like to pick a word before this happens for the 3rd time? Assumptions? No? Hypothesis? You seem to like that word, you've used it a few times, lets go with that. Unless you like to do this conversation in Chinese before another person accuse me of bad at communication?

Now that's over...if you state that "we don't know", and anyone who pretends to know is being "dishonest".

Can we then just leave it at that then because we are just hypothesising.

At best, it is that based on the current evidence, this is the best hypothesis you can put forward. Yet, it is still "we don't know" for sure, as you said.
 
Murphy said:
That's not what you're saying at all, there is no evidence "of failure of a mode of explanation" because no one knows what existed before the big bang, when time as we understand it even existed.
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No-one knows lots of things. To try and understand those things we adopt methods we have shown work in the past, there's nothing that makes this particular question special in that regard.

What you're trying to argue is that because there's never been evidence of something that not only does that thing not exist but that it's never existed in any know and/or unknown existence, time, place, or any conceivable reality.
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No, I'm not. I haven't argued that at all.

Put it this way, what do you think existed before the big bang?
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I have no idea, as I said I have upthread I don't even know whether there IS a before the Big Bang since it may well be the origin point of time.

What I do say is that is irrational to consider a method of explanation with a 100% track record of failure as "equally likely" as the method of explanation that got us to the point of understanding the origin of the universe down to those first microseconds.
 
What you forgot is that it is 100% track record of failure in THIS universe. Since we are talking about before the big event, plank time, or whatever word you or anyone else want to nitpick, our laws of physics don't apply (we agree?), or that we don't know it applies 100%, then the 3 letter God word is back in the game.

If the experiments we do can only do in our universe, how do we prove something that happened or happens in another universe where other sets of natural laws or laws of physics applies.

Or may be perhaps we, this universe is inside another LHC from an alien species and we are the creation of it is another being doing the same experiement.
 
I liked these fresh words on
physics recently(from the BBC)

"Prof Carlos Frenk, of Durham University, who was one of the scientists that built on the work of Albert Einstein and others to develop the current cosmological theory, said he had mixed emotions on hearing the news.

"I spent my life working on this theory and my heart tells me I don't want to see it collapse. But my brain tells me that the measurements were correct, and we have to look at the possibility of new physics," said Prof Frenk.

"Then my stomach cringes, because we have no solid grounds to explore because we have no theory of physics to guide us. It makes me very nervous and fearful, because we are entering a completely unknown domain and who knows what we are going to find.""

Src:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-57244708
 
Raymond Lin said:
What you forgot is that it is 100% track record of failure in THIS universe. Since we are talking about before the big event, plank time, or whatever word you or anyone else want to nitpick, our laws of physics don't apply (we agree?), or that we don't know it applies 100%, then the 3 letter God word is back in the game.
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It's a fair point, but if we can't reason from what we find in this universe then we simply won't get an answer. Adding Bugs Bunny farting, god, and the accidental creation of the universe at a high society séance in 1876 "theories" to the mix brings us no nearer to finding out, and in fact still doesn't make god anymore likely since there are literally infinite number of possibilities out there just as silly.
 
Mr Jack said:
No-one knows lots of things. To try and understand those things we adopt methods we have shown work in the past, there's nothing that makes this particular question special in that regard.
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Yes, but what you're doing is ruling out the possibility that an all powerful being may have created the conditions for the big bang simply because there's currently no evidence of said all powerful being.
Mr Jack said:
No, I'm not. I haven't argued that at all.
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Well when you said "it's one with a 100% failure record whenever it's been put to the test. Not only that, but it's a truly extraordinarily complicated explanation without any justification" and "But there's no reason to consider this outlandish form of explanation with a 100% track record of failure as an option" it sure seemed like you were saying because we currently don't have evidence for something it means it never existed.
Mr Jack said:
I have no idea, as I said I have upthread I don't even know whether there IS a before the Big Bang since it may well be the origin point of time.

What I do say is that is irrational to consider a method of explanation with a 100% track record of failure as "equally likely" as the method of explanation that got us to the point of understanding the origin of the universe down to those first microseconds.
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You even seem to be doing it in the above quote. You say you have no idea but then go onto say that it's irrational to consider something with 100% track record of no evidence on an equal footing as something with equally no evidence. We're not talking about a method of explaining something here, we're not talking about explaining a known unknown, we're talking about an unknown unknown, something we may never understand simply by extension of 'before' being outside the known universe.
 
Mr Jack said:
It's a fair point, but if we can't reason from what we find in this universe then we simply won't get an answer. Adding Bugs Bunny farting, god, and the accidental creation of the universe at a high society séance in 1876 "theories" to the mix brings us no nearer to finding out, and in fact still doesn't make god anymore likely since there are literally infinite number of possibilities out there just as silly.
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Ruling avenues out also don't bring us closer to finding out. My point is being open-minded above all. My point isn't solely that God is the reason. My point is that all hypotheses are equal as each other. My point is that I am open-minded.

If you want to be critical of my open-mindedness on the subject, that is your criticism, I will take it, but I am not going to change it. Unless you can factually prove that some of them are incorrect, which we know no one can do, then I will stay open-minded about it.

History has taught us that science is a moving subject, in our short history, we have changed our science or our understanding of it many times over. At best is that we can say, at our current understanding, it is this, nothing more. Which is fine, but don't tell me that it is all of it.

Tell that to the guy who split the atom.
 
Murphy said:
Yes, but what you're doing is ruling out the possibility that an all powerful being may have created the conditions for the big bang simply because there's currently no evidence of said all powerful being.
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Again you put words in my mouth. It's not about the existence of god, it's about the failure of god as an explanation.

I'm not going to reply to you again to repeat this simple point.
 
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