The Problem With The Big Bang.

Originally posted by Astyanax
First of all, the damn’ thing was only infinitely massive because it had zero volume. Since anything divided by zero is infinite, its density (mass per unit volume) was infinite. As soon as it expanded to any size at all, its mass ceased to be infinite. Its energy, by the way, was zero. And remains zero.

Great posts in this thread as usual Astyanax!

Obviously you're 100% correct about ANY mass resulting in infinite density when the volume is zero.

So we agree completely on the infinite density math.

The same could be said of a black hole singularity, black holes have various finite masses, the ones we know of are roughly 3 solar masses and up. But the math results in a singularity due to the zero volume saying they have infinite density at the singularity.

I thought the big bang theory worked somewhat the same way, in that there was a singularity with infinite density, but I'm not so sure about the infinite mass.

There also seems to be some debate about whether the universe is infinite or not. I don't see how that's possible for the observable universe, though for all I know there could have been other big bangs that each happened over 100 billion light years away and each has its own observable universe, though this falls into the category of currently unknown and for at least the immediately foreseeable future, unknowable. We're having a hard enough time explaining the observable universe without speculating too much about what's beyond that so I'd just as soon skip that kind of speculation for now.

The other thing that occurs to me is that we don't exactly have a great handle on what is in the universe right now, with our claims that 95% of the universe is "missing" or unaccounted for, so when you add to that uncertainty, the uncertainty of turning the clock back 14 billion years, It seems like a lot of things are not that well known.

But we certainly do have lots of observations so whatever model we want to use has to fit those observations. The big bang seems to be the best fit of any model we have, though the "95% of the universe unaccounted for" glitch is a little annoying, though I don't think it means the big bang is wrong.

If you have a minute can you take a look at this:

How can the Universe be infinite if it was all concentrated into a point at the Big Bang? Apparently that's written by some guy named Professor Wright at UCLA. It looks to me like the guy is making some assumptions about what's outside the observable universe. Do you know of any evidence to support his model of what's outside the observable universe? I don't. My understanding is a lot different than his. I can't prove he's wrong and I also can't prove you don't have invisible gnomes running around your back yard. I have no problem with his expanding green circle, that part I get, it's all the galaxies outside the green circle in the left hand view that I don't get.

If I drew that figure, the best I could draw is question marks outside the green circle instead of galaxies. I don't know what's outside the green circle. He might be right about the galaxies outside the green circle but how could he know about those? Any thoughts on that?

If the big bang started from a point with no volume, and expanded from there, wouldn't there be some detectable void somewhere? BTW, infinite mass with no volume doesn't make sense, even the mass we can detect to some calculable figure with no volume still doesn't make sense.

I don't think the big bang really means a point in space, I'm much more comfortable with it meaning a point in time.

When it all comes down to it there are impossibilities at the very core of every genesis, that the postulation builds from. I really don't think that kind of imagination of efforts in real science benefits anything, its a total waste of time, unless you get a nice TV gig like Michio has. Science should not be confused with philosophy.

reply to post by TheWalkingFox


I agree dude, and I hope you didn't confuse my post with me thinking that God is responsible for the creation of the universe, because that is not how I think at all. I am one of the most anti-theistic people out there, don't get me mixed up with religious people.

reply to post by smithjustinb


I was thinking about this black hole theory some more today, but I'll probably end up repeating myself from earlier posts. What if since black holes suck up all matter and gas nearby, that if this mass does get taken to some no-mans-land where this matter gathers, when the universe is basically devoid of any light because all the galaxies have expanded away from each other and used up their gas to create stars, the black holes have sucked up enough mass to explode, triggering a new Big Bang, making time cyclic. If somehow the material from all the black holes was taken to one common point where they all meet, then maybe near the end of the universe after they've sucked up tons of mass, when space begins expanding to the point that it reaches the speed of light, maybe this somehow alters the laws of physics or triggers the black hole matter to explode, creating a Big Bang, re-setting the universe or creating a new universe with that matter to form the universes.

beginning and end are a concept made up by biological beings

Since this time concept cannot be applied to anything outside our environment we cannot argue there ever was a beginning

Originally posted by Illustronic
If the big bang started from a point with no volume, and expanded from there, wouldn't there be some detectable void somewhere? BTW, infinite mass with no volume doesn't make sense, even the mass we can detect to some calculable figure with no volume still doesn't make sense.

When you say "it doesn't make sense" what you really mean is that our human brains which evolved to help us gather food as hunter-gatherers do little to help us conceive of time and dimension scales outside our human experience.

All our experience is with something called "space" and that which fills it, and what we found is that even when space appears empty, there's still something in it. So I'm not sure what you mean by "void", I've heard that term used to describe the empty space between stars but it's not really empty.

Regarding infinite density, while our math might show that for, say, a black hole, we don't know of any way to get measurements of what's going in inside the black hole, outside the black hole, so I don't know of any way to test if that model is correct or not. Since the nature of what's inside a black hole apparently can't be tested through observation with any method we know of yet, I tend to be agnostic about the infinite density question. Yes the math shows a singularity, but I don't know if the math is right or if it's just very dense when some physics kicks in that we can't experience because we can't measure things inside a black hole. For what it's worth, here's NASA's explanation:

imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov...

Q:.. how is it possible for something to have zero volume and infinite density?

A: This is indeed difficult to grasp. Actually at the center of a black hole spacetime has infinite curvature and matter is crushed to infinite density under the pull of infinite gravity. At a singularity, space and time cease to exist as we know them. The laws of physics as we know them break down at a singularity, so it's not really possible to envision something with infinite density and zero volume.

The big bang singularity is even more difficult to grasp because to work backward in time to get to it you have to go through something called "inflation" which also apparently violates the laws of physics, or at least the ones we know of, meaning maybe it involves some kid of physics we don't understand that only kicks in at high temperatures and pressures (if the inflation theory is correct). I suppose this is part of what what supercollider research is trying to unravel, though even the LHC falls far short of duplicating big bang conditions, despite all the media reports saying they've created "mini big bangs".

reply to post by TupacShakur


Without using scientific 'jibber-jabber' terms, I was a staunch proponent of perpetual existence, lending from the idea that matter cannot be created or destroyed and that gravity is the strongest force in the macro. It was my belief that gravity created everything we can observe, through fusion, and ejection. I'm putting this is very layman terms because if the scientist cannot put things in simple layman terms, their hole in their theory is their vocabulary.

If I understand you correctly, gravity is the driving force of the belief you have with the black hole theory of gartering so much energy that expulsion is evident, but when mass gets so far away from the initial expulsion, gravity takes over because of the imbalance of perfectly dispersed particle mass, and begins to coalescence again, leading to another 'super black hole/big bang/singularity of physical mass in hypothetical volume.

This is not the belief of many big bang proponents though, they much prefer the Big Freeze, because I think they discard gravity as the dominant force of nature, the genesis of creation in time scales, brief or vast, large or small. Perpetual motion is never explained by such proponents of the Big Freeze to me. Why things always move does not make sense that there was a single singularity to me.

If it happened once....................? Why not again?

reply to post by Illustronic


My idea was just pure speculation based off of my imagination of the interior of a black hole. The Big Freeze is just plain scary in my book, the idea of all stars burning up their fuel and there not being any gas to create new stars is frightening. What happens then, blackness for eternity? Or does space just continue expanding forever? Won't the expansion speed eventually hit light speed? I can't even begin to imagine what happens then, if I remember correctly one theory is that there will be a "Big Rip" where everything rips apart at the atomic level. This stuff is way over my head though, I only became interested in Astronomy and Physics in the past year, so the only scientific qualification I have under my belt right now is 'The Universe' on Netflix which I watch quite often.

If the best science can come up with to rival creationism is "the big bang theory" then its a massive fail.

We have the ability to exist because we are the perfect distance from the sun, coincidence?

Order cannot come from chaos!

reply to post by lestweforget


Let me put things in perspective for you. There are over a hundred billion starts in our Milky Way Galaxy alone. There are also hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe, each containins hundreds of billions of stars. The thought that a planet cannot happen to be the right distance from a star to keep it the right temperature, ensuring that the oceans don't freeze or boil, in our unfathomably large universe, is absurd.

reply to post by TupacShakur


Yes the Big Rip and Big Freeze are similar. They both though, discredit gravity in the macro because it does not behave consistent in the micro. Or does it?

reply to post by lestweforget


When one considers the vast expanse, in terms of numbers or something that means something to you, why couldn't order form from chaos? It only has to happen once in a billion trillion times to be common. That is the very definition of chaos isn't it?

If the Universe was perfectly evenly spaced particle mass there would be no imbalance, no coalescing, everything would be at a perfect equilibrium, and not move from that point in space or time.

Our Universe is a product of imperfection, its why we're here... Why there is no perfect explanation of what it is.

Perfection is the point of time, space, or volume, where things just don't exist anymore. Its where things stop.

That is impossible.

reply to post by Arbitrageur

Thank you very kindly, Arbitrageur. A compliment from someone with your reputation for cool-headed accuracy is a compliment indeed. All the same, I did make a mistake in my post – a real schoolboy howler. See my reply to Illustronic below.

How can the Universe be infinite if it was all concentrated into a point at the Big Bang? ...It looks to me like the guy is making some assumptions about what's outside the observable universe. Do you know of any evidence to support his model of what's outside the observable universe? I don't. My understanding is a lot different than his. I can't prove he's wrong and I also can't prove you don't have invisible gnomes running around your back yard. I have no problem with his expanding green circle, that part I get, it's all the galaxies outside the green circle in the left hand view that I don't get.

I agree with you; I think Prof. Wright is making a big, unwarranted assumption. I mean, of course there are galaxies beyond the 13.9 billion light-year radius of the observable universe. The metric expansion of space, which causes very distant galaxies to move away from each other at greater than the speed of light, would see to that. But unless our current cosmological ideas are to be abandoned altogether, it’s hard to see how the universe could possibly be infinite. To be that, it would have to have expanded from the original singularity at infinite radial velocity. That doesn’t make sense, unless, as you say, there were several big bangs in different locations. But that implies a pre-existing ‘metaspace’ in which they could happen. There is no evidence, as far as I know, for anything of that kind. Mind you, the gnomes at the bottom of my garden are pretty good at covering their tracks, too.

*

reply to post by Illustronic

If the big bang started from a point with no volume, and expanded from there, wouldn't there be some detectable void somewhere?

I don’t understand why you think this should be so. Could you explain?

BTW, infinite mass with no volume doesn't make sense, even the mass we can detect to some calculable figure with no volume still doesn't make sense.

You are correct. My thanks to Arbitrageur for his compliment, but I foolishly confused mass and density in that post. In defence of myself, I was merely adopting somebody else’s formulation. But it was a wrong formulation. The universe is not, and never was, infinitely massive, any more than it is or was infinite in extent. The mass of the universe is currently estimated at about 3x10^54kg.

I don't think the big bang really means a point in space, I'm much more comfortable with it meaning a point in time.

It was neither; or, to be more accurate, space and time both came into being with the Big Bang. Neither existed before it.

I really don't think that kind of imagination of efforts in real science benefits anything, its a total waste of time, unless you get a nice TV gig like Michio has. Science should not be confused with philosophy.

If I were to wager that you have an engineering or IT background, would I lose?

*

reply to post by TupacShakur

What if since black holes suck up all matter and gas nearby, that if this mass does get taken to some no-mans-land where this matter gathers, when the universe is basically devoid of any light because all the galaxies have expanded away from each other and used up their gas to create stars, the black holes have sucked up enough mass to explode, triggering a new Big Bang, making time cyclic. If somehow the material from all the black holes was taken to one common point where they all meet, then maybe near the end of the universe after they've sucked up tons of mass, when space begins expanding to the point that it reaches the speed of light, maybe this somehow alters the laws of physics or triggers the black hole matter to explode, creating a Big Bang, re-setting the universe or creating a new universe with that matter to form the universes.

It’s simpler than that. Gravity could do it.

When the universe finally gutters and burns out, it is probable that there will still be some clumpiness in the distribution of matter in it. Under certain conditions, this would be enough, over aeons, to bring all the matter together again in one Big Crunch. Whether the result would be a singularity that would then inflate in another Big Bang, becoming a new universe, is unknown and probably depends on conditions obtaining around the time of the Crunch. If the conditions were right, we would end up with a cyclic universe of the kind you propose.

But this is only one possibility for the fate of the universe. The one best supported by current data is that the universe will go on expanding indefinitely. Depending on the balance of gravity with whatever agency is causing the expansion (dark energy or whatever you want to call it), the rate of expansion would either go on increasing, theoretically without limit*, or slowly decline – though it would never quite reach zero. This is according to Friedmann’s expanding-universe model.

*Because it is space itself and not matter or energy that is expanding, the speed-of-light limit does not apply. This also explains, incidentally, how stuff can exist beyond the limits of the observable universe – see my reply to Arbitrageur above.

Another problem is that no one can actually point in the direction that the Big Bang originated from.

Did it come from the West or East?
Maybe North or just slightly South?
The jury is still out, kinda like the Global Warming bunch that tell us the world will be X degrees hotter 10/20 years from now yet can't predict what the weather will be like tomorrow.

Originally posted by Astyanax
I agree with you; I think Prof. Wright is making a big, unwarranted assumption. I mean, of course there are galaxies beyond the 13.9 billion light-year radius of the observable universe. The metric expansion of space, which causes very distant galaxies to move away from each other at greater than the speed of light, would see to that.

Actually it looks like he's showing the diameter of the observable universe as 78 billion light years, and Wikipedia says it's 93 billion light years. I wouldn't quibble with either of those numbers nor the difference between them, but if we assume either number could be right and the observable universe is 75-100 billion light years in diameter, I just don't see how he can show what's outside of THAT! (which is what he seems to be showing with galaxies outside of that diameter). As soon as I figure out how to disprove the invisible gnomes on your back yard, maybe I can prove him wrong, or at least show that he's making assumptions he can't prove.

But unless our current cosmological ideas are to be abandoned altogether, it’s hard to see how the universe could possibly be infinite.

That's pretty much how I see it. What surprises me is how many supposedly credible sources seem to say it could be infinite. I tend to think as you do that if it is infinite, our model may be wrong. Then again, I'm not sure our model is completely right, it's just the best model we have at the moment. I tend to think that our model may be right in saying the universe isn't infinite, but I admit that may only be because comprehending infinity is not something I'm comfortable with. You said infinity is a concept of the human mind, though it may be slightly beyond the grasp of mine. I can write the symbol infinity, but envisioning something that truly is infinite is beyond my grasp.

Originally posted by Alxandro
Another problem is that no one can actually point in the direction that the Big Bang originated from.

Did it come from the West or East?
Maybe North or just slightly South?

That question is a bit like standing on the surface of Mars, and asking "where is the center of the surface of Mars"?

The answer it has no center. Mars has a center, but there's no center on the surface, as long as you stay on the surface. Similarly, the popular belief among scientists is that the geometry of the universe may be analogous to that example, in that it has no "center" or point of origin.

Here are three possible shapes of the universe:
en.wikipedia.org...
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/c3f7a006afba.jpg[/atsimg]

Michio Kaku believes that even though measurements show the universe to be close to perfectly "flat" (the bottom figure), that it's actually not perfectly flat and may be shaped something like the top illustration. And he may be right.

Okay, this is a bit far fetched, and unlikely, but lets say there's a universe, its 100 billion years old, the only thing left are super uber massive black holes, after the last of these have exploded, there's just particles traveling at incredibly fast speeds, colliding in to each other. So image it as a card deal, lets say after a year straight, there would have been every single possible sequences layed out, now imagine this on a bigger scale, that eventually after millions of years, the right particles would have collided, possibly creating another universe, inside that one, and it could just keep going like that. Who knows, time could have begun 10000000000 trillion years ago, in a diffrent universe.

The thing what gets me, is wtf were expanding into, and i mean how does it even work, i mean what was it like before the universe. or we could be part of a computer game, but honestly , this # just #s with your mind, don't think how it works, just get along with it. I'm going for my phd in physics next year anyway, we gotta write a paper on this subject.

reply to post by Illustronic


Sorry for the ignorance but I am not a physicist or mathematician.

The LHC site and links do support (something from nothing) theory or at least a link to such a theory.

The LHC project will afford man to re-wright his existing models on his understanding of some things, for example when I went to school I was taught the dinosaur did die from a Kliment change but now kids are thought a huge meteor came down in the Yucatan Peninsula and caused the decimation of the dinosaur . We were also taught gravity is a pulling force (now they have proven it to be a pushing force) from outer space.

Finally regarding man and north America "most recent finding" we were taught that man came across the frozen barren straight but now they have found multiple tools which pre-date the given model of man coming to north America with respect to his tools he used, in fact they think there are multiple entry point on north America 1000's of years before there existing model.

My point if I have one, is man is finding out that his model and understanding is wrong and they have to go back and rework or create new models.

I think with LHC , and some of the new "Star Trek theories" like the one for warp drive and the one previewed on this site with the proton will be building blocks for great advances and understanding.

reply to post by riches321


Not sure where the link is on this site for the new Proton theory but if you follow it and check out the link for the submitted scientific paper (6 pg pdf) it goes in to black wholes and how there nature effects the way all matter aligns it self.

Originally posted by smithjustinb
I do support the notion of a Big Bang, but my question is, where did that unfathomably dense point of energy and mass come from?

Had it always existed?

The first something can only have come from a nothing...

so...

What exactly is a "nothing" that can have "something"?

and...

Why doesn't The Big Bang happen again?

I have my opinion, but I want to hear yours.

God has a problem with this (the big bang) also, but fortunately comes up with the solution in under 5 minutes as you will see in the following clip...enjoy!

reply to post by letthereaderunderstand


I liked the video. Check this out.

www.abovetopsecret.com...