The Big Bang

So, are you saying that if we had a super-microscopic pin, and we push a few atoms around, that this atom cannot move anything less than the Planck length? No matter how fine a psuh we do, there is a certain length of distance we must move? It's impossible to move half a Planck length?

I find this concept most unnatural, but that doesn't stop it from being true.

How does something move across a distance of Planck? If it cannot occupy distance inbetween, does this mean that for that distance the object doesn't exist? If the object does exist during the brief amount of time it takes to go across this Planck distnace (which must be more than 1 unit of Planch time, since only light can travel the Planck distance in 1 Planck of time), then doesn't that mean that you can go half a Planck in length, and doesn't the Tragedy of the Infinitely Small (the continuum) continue again?

Stranger still would be things that travel faster than light (the tachyon, which goes faster and faster as it has less and less energy), must therefore traverse the Planck distance in LESS than Planck time - which is supposed to be impossible since Planck time is the minimum time unit.


In the end, I believe the Planck distance doesn't make sense because the universe is relative. Everything happens relative to something else. One unit of Planck length in one part of the universe will be shorter (due to gravitational distortion on space-time) than a unit of Planck length elsewhere in the universe. Same would occur for time. Although relative to everything around them it is the same, the difference between these two isolated distances of Planck is real.

So in my mind, this Planck distance and time doesn't make sense to me...

However, God never said the world had to work in a way I would understand. Perhaps there's something more to this theory that explains these problems that I have cited. Perhaps we simply haven't discovered those answers yet. Or perhaps the problems don't exist because the theory doesn't work.

What a remarkable universe we live in... just consistent enough that we can plan and solve things, and just chaotic enough that we have not clue what happens when we get down to the fundamentals of "what stuff makes stuff?"

Originally posted by MrChipps
I myself don't believe in the Big Bang theory. But I have a question for those who do. Ok...so to put this in understandable terms I'll use a hand grenade as my example. The grenade represents the point of origin for the known universe. Some people believe (including scientists) that there was a great explosion before there was ANYTHING, and the resulting debris has become our universe. Picture a hand grenade going off, and all the resulting shrapnal would represent all the galaxies and planets. Now, that shrapnal is only going to spread so far here on earth, but in space where there is no gravity and less friction it could spread out and expand (it would seem) forever. My question is this: If you could start at the point of origin of the Big Bang and travel out to where the debris HASN'T expanded to yet, what would you find? Would anything at all be in existance there? Time? Matter? Anti-matter? Evil Clowns?

A question like this could make your brain fart.

The big bang IS NOT AN EXPLOSION, this is a very common misconception and leads people to tend to think that there was a single point which everything came. The fact is that way back when the universe was so small it was almost a singularity and the big bang began the very rapid expansion of the universe. Think of a deflated balloon that is super small you cant even see it, then you blow it up very rapidly, the surface area represents the universe, all points move away from each other everywhere.

the hardest part of this analogy to grasp is what is the universe expanding into? a bunch of aether like space??? The answer is no, the universe itself is expanding and is expanding into nothing. In other words you dont need three dimensional space around the universe for it to expand into. Your asking what would you see if you could travel outside of the universe the answer is first you cant and second nothing.

That makes sence to me. But there HAS to be an end to the universe. A boundary of some sorts. Even if it curves back on and into itself, there has to be an edge somewhere. What is the universe floating in? More space? What if our universe is just a spec of dust in someone elses reality?

Well, there wouldn't be an edge - just as there's no 2-dimensional edge to the outside of a basketball. You could draw a line around a basketball an infinite number of times in all 2 dimensions without ever reaching an edge.

However, what is the universe expanding into? This, once again, has to do with the limitations of language.

Every inch of space in the universe is expanding (pockets where there is little mass should, theoretically, be expanding faster than pockets where there is space) within the universe itself.

Outside the universe, if we could imagine such a thing to exist, when we look back at the universe now it would look just as it did at the dawn of existance - an infinitely small speck... a singularity.

Since a singularity has dimensions of zero, it does not expand in any dimension when percieved from the outside. Within the singularity, if such a thing could be said to exist, something very different could happen - since no information is gained or lost from the outside. The universe is a closed system. Its mass, its energy, everything will always total out to be the same within it.

It's not something humans are wired to be able to understand. For us a balloon implies that there's air - air to fill the balloon, and air coming from somewhere else to expand the balloon. The universe is a mystery to us in a most fundamental way - in every given respect it shouldn't even be here. For the most part, it isn't.

Look at matter... you think you're solid! "Ha!" I say - you are mostly made out of nothingness. The space between the molecules is empty, the space between the atoms in those molecules is empty, the space between the electrons and the insurmountably tiny nucleus is empty(imagine an atom as a football field, the nucleus is about the size of a baseball... maybe smaller - an electron is a speck of dust up in the highest point of the blechers).

Now we're starting to see that electrons themselves seem to also exhibit wave-particle duality (just like photons), and that the same can also apply for protons and neutrons. We're starting to discover and wonder what the real difference between matter and energy is. Between real objects, and the illusion that objects are real.

In the end, all the questions we seek to answer, will bring us to one place - we don't know. We don't know what the universe is expanding into - or how it's possible that it could be expanding without taking up room elsewhere. We can't wrap our minds, yet, around the concept that the universe doesn't seem to exist, when our ability to question it proves that it does.

As said by Carl Sagan, "These are the things hydrogen atoms do, given 15 billion years..."

You really touched base on some interesting things, like matter, and does it exist? We only experience our reality through 5 sences, so we are limited in that reguard. And who really knows if we're experiencing the true reality of it, because our brains are wired a certain way.

I want you to watch this short video. It's only 24 minutes long, but it blew my mind. I swear after watching it, if there were circuits in my brain, they'd be fried. If you really listen to what the guy says and think about it, it will almost scare you and make you wonder what is really surrounding us in our day to day lives. Please watch it and let me know what you think, because it really sounds like what you're trying to get across to me.

video.google.com...

Have any of you read about the recent experiments at Penn St. where they have gotten light to reverse and in doing so speed up? If you have not, here is a link to the story:

www.physorg.com...

BTW, I watched that video and all I can say is what a load of horse puckey. What we sense can be proven by experiment to be real. We can measure its physical size, its mass, its density, its charge, etc.--it is by no means simply a perception of the soul.

[edit on 18-5-2006 by Astronomer70]

It's NOT a perception of the soul. It's how our brain decodes electrical signals. Meaning anything could really be faked. I may THINK I see a bird, but it's just because my brain interprets the elecrtic signals as such. Anything composed of an electrical signal (which is EVERYTHING our brain precives) can be manipulated, altered, and in a sence, changed to represent anything else. If I could put an elecrtical signal into your brain of light bouncing off of a bird, you would THINK that you were seeing a bird, when in fact there is no bird to be seen. That's what the video talks about.

Originally posted by MrChipps
That makes sence to me. But there HAS to be an end to the universe. A boundary of some sorts. Even if it curves back on and into itself, there has to be an edge somewhere. What is the universe floating in? More space? What if our universe is just a spec of dust in someone elses reality?

We dont yet know the shape of the universe, but there are three main candidates.

The first being spherical like the surface of the balloon, the universe is FINITE but without borders.

Another candidate is something like a TV screen, where the universe is INFINITE if you reach one edge you come back in the other side, like a video game.

The third is something like an inverse sphere which has the shape of a saddle.

The universe isn't floating in more space, the universe itself is the space. you dont need 3D space around for the universe to expand. If there is some sort of reality outside the universe then it is nothing that exists inside the universe.

For the spec of dust thing I dont know maybe. Its probable that universes create more universes infinitely.

Also dont forget that the universe is less than 5% matter. Most of it is Dark Energy, we dont even know what that stuff is yet!!

[edit on 19-5-2006 by Distortion]

I'm thinking of the Modest Mouse lyric:

"well the universe is shaped exactly like the earth, if you go straight long enough you end up where you were."

That's how I feel about it too.

Originally posted by Yarium
Well, there wouldn't be an edge - just as there's no 2-dimensional edge to the outside of a basketball. You could draw a line around a basketball an infinite number of times in all 2 dimensions without ever reaching an edge.

Sure you could keep on going around in a straight line, always ending up where you started, but that is only if you turn left and right.. what happens when you decide to go 'up' off of the ball?

If that's possible, then there might be an edge in the 4-th dimension.

However, I'm pretty sure that you'll find you go all the way around again...

In the end, I think we'll find that all the dimensions in the universe wrap back around into itself - creating a fully closed circle. Since the universe shouldn't exist (from nothing came everything), then perhaps - in a way - it doesn't yet does at the same time. A closed circle of infinite.

Originally posted by Yarium
So, are you saying that if we had a super-microscopic pin, and we push a few atoms around, that this atom cannot move anything less than the Planck length? No matter how fine a psuh we do, there is a certain length of distance we must move? It's impossible to move half a Planck length?

I find this concept most unnatural, but that doesn't stop it from being true.

Yarium,
Yeah, once you get down past the molecular level, pretty much everything becomes "most unnatural."

Anyway, I suspect if you look at the diameter of a small atom, like maybe hydrogen, then compare that size to the Planck length, you'll probably see that the Planck length is sooooo much smaller that your example of pushing an atom around with a pin really makes no sense.

Originally posted by YariumHow does something move across a distance of Planck? If it cannot occupy distance inbetween, does this mean that for that distance the object doesn't exist? If the object does exist during the brief amount of time it takes to go across this Planck distnace (which must be more than 1 unit of Planch time, since only light can travel the Planck distance in 1 Planck of time), then doesn't that mean that you can go half a Planck in length, and doesn't the Tragedy of the Infinitely Small (the continuum) continue again?

Have you ever looked into what happens when an electron assumes a more energetic position in an electron shell surrounding some atom? You know, an electron reaches a new energy level, thus occupying a different electron shell. Then the electron gives this energy up by emitting a photon, and it "falls" back to it's original, "usual" position in a lower electron shell. The trip from an inner shell to a higher energy shell, further out from the atom, is not traversed by the electron at all. That is, since an electron associated with an atom cannot exist except within certain well-defined areas surrounding that atom, the electron that makes the "trip" to the higher energy level does so instantaneously and without actually moving through the space between the two shells! It simply "disappears" from one level, and "re-appears" in the other. This is, in fact, the very essence of the Theory of Quantum Mechanics.

And the distance we're talking about here is far, far, far larger than the Planck length.

So, the idea that a particle might cease to exist in areas between a certain point and another point that is one Planck length away, would not be completely unheard of. But it is easier to consider two geometric points that are separated by the Planck length to be, in essence, one and the same.

It's really a whole lot more complicated than what I've laid out here. You should do a little googling around to see what I mean.

Harte

Yes, it's apparently pops out of the universe (so to say) and jumps back in at the higher/lower orbit. It's likely doing some kind of 4-dimensional hyper-billiards, disappearing from our 3-dimensional state, and travelling 4-dimensionally to the other orbit.

Even still, it doesn't mean that minimum distance does exist. Everything is relative to each other, and so you can't have a single unit of distance that is always the same, because that defies relativity - it means that everything in the universe is in a fixed location from everything else - which isn't true because we've observed galaxies flying away from us at an apparent speed of faster than light. If a Planck Length existed, then every distance would be absolute and finite - which counters observable evidence.

Like I said, truth may be stranger than fiction, but the evidence for one can - at least for the moment - prove to be more strongely in favour of one than the other.

The Big Bang I believe very strongly in; when you look at how the universe formed, how galaxies and all that formed, the Big Bang makes absolutely perfect sense. What is debated is who/what put the matter there in the first place so it could expand outwards. Who wrote the laws of physics? If it was space and time expanding into nothingness, our brain's concept of "nothingness" really is a something, and true "nothingness" is beyond our comprehension.

Personally I think we just need more highly evolved brains. I told that to a physics student once, he told me he thinks that is a "cop-out," that people say that because they comfort themselves with it since they aren't smart enough to understand. I told him I thought he was full of it, because no human out there can literally think in more than 3 dimensions, or really truly understand most of the concepts of the universe (which is true).

A rodent doesn't have a brain that can compute the nature of its universe the way a human can, and simultaneously, the human brain isn't developed enough to compute the full extent of the universe it is in. The next level of human brain will probably have more understanding of this, IMO.

Originally posted by xxblackoctoberxx

Originally posted by Yarium
Well, there wouldn't be an edge - just as there's no 2-dimensional edge to the outside of a basketball. You could draw a line around a basketball an infinite number of times in all 2 dimensions without ever reaching an edge.

Sure you could keep on going around in a straight line, always ending up where you started, but that is only if you turn left and right.. what happens when you decide to go 'up' off of the ball?

thats moving in a dimension that doesnt exist.

That's the main problem. Whenever it tries to deal with it, paradoxes start showing up, and reason can go no further. They think they've solved the problem by explaining that in the beginning there was a singularity, a point of infinite density occupying no space, and time and space were nonexistent. Then, mysteriously, there was an expansion (not an explosion, as some of you point out), which was the beginning of space and time. There was no "before" since the singularity is timeless as well as spaceless, so it is senseless to ask what came before that. All of this makes sense only if you want it to. You can just as well say that, since timelessness is somehow involved, this expansion has been going on always, and will go on forever, but that ultimately it is merely an illusion if you happen to be immersed in a universe where time and space, and consequently matter, are conceivable, and that in a timeless existence only consciousness has real existence.

Originally posted by Macrento
That's the main problem. Whenever it tries to deal with it, paradoxes start showing up, and reason can go no further. They think they've solved the problem by explaining that in the beginning there was a singularity, a point of infinite density occupying no space, and time and space were nonexistent. Then, mysteriously, there was an expansion (not an explosion, as some of you point out), which was the beginning of space and time. There was no "before" since the singularity is timeless as well as spaceless, so it is senseless to ask what came before that. All of this makes sense only if you want it to. You can just as well say that, since timelessness is somehow involved, this expansion has been going on always, and will go on forever, but that ultimately it is merely an illusion if you happen to be immersed in a universe where time and space, and consequently matter, are conceivable, and that in a timeless existence only consciousness has real existence.

Yeah I think you're venturing into the philosophical areas now. Planck time is as far back as we can "go" in our understanding of the Big Bang at this point in time.

in all fairness, science has to break down and philosophy has to take over in our understanding of the universe. we don't have the mental capability to know our universe scientifically.

Originally posted by 25cents
in all fairness, science has to break down and philosophy has to take over in our understanding of the universe. we don't have the mental capability to know our universe scientifically.

I disagree, its just a matter of time, we've done big things with quantum mechanics and particle physics in the past decades. Areas not even feasible in the early 20th century.

Originally posted by 25cents
in all fairness, science has to break down and philosophy has to take over in our understanding of the universe. we don't have the mental capability to know our universe scientifically.

Philosophy doesn't explain the Universe.