How did the universe come into being? (1 Viewer)

Discuss.

Someone once said 'I wonder what this button does?" and then pressed it

CJ_London said:

Someone once said 'I wonder what this button does?" and then pressed it

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That would be the Big Man himself.... you know... he looks just like Charlton Heston...

scott-atkinson said:

. you know... he looks just like Charlton Heston...

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I thought that was His son

Brian

That would be the Big Man himself.... you know... he looks just like Charlton Heston...

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Actually I thought it was a woman - they know how to press all the right buttons

CJ_London said:

Actually I thought it was a woman - they know how to press all the right buttons

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You are assuming that bringing us lot into being was the right thing?


Brian

You are assuming that bringing us lot into being was the right thing?

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that was due to a bug in the boot up process - we were all supposed to be women

The original energy that formed the Big Bang was a random Quantum fluctuation.

Two competing requirements control the nature of reality. One promotes an even distribution of energy while the other promotes the maximisation of disorder.

An infinite completely homogenous expanse of nothing would require an infinite amount of order. Hence there are inevitable variations in the energy even though the total comes to nothing.

One of those variations became our Universe.

I'm very interested in stuff like this. I'm only aware of two plausible 'theory of everything's. One is string theory, which I latched on to some time ago. Another I read about more recently is quantum loop gravity.

Firstly, I would like to explain what the big bang theory actually states. It was not so much an explosion of matter, it was an explosion of space itself. The big bang is when the actual space came into being. The space itself grew at varying rates. After the big bang, there was a period where the universe grew incredibly fast for reasons we don't understand. This is called inflation. I am not a fan of inflation, but that is the accepted theory. As a side note, there is a lesser known theory called variable speed of light that postulates that the speed of light is variable over incredibly large lengths of time that negates the need for inflation all together.

Back to the universe growing. When we think of the universe growing, it is not appropriate to think about matter moving away from each other. It is more appropriate to think that the space between objects is actually stretching. The distance between you and I, regardless of where you are, is currently growing. A scientist by the name of Hubble discovered this when he discovered that all stars in our sky are red shifted (like the way a train sounds when it moves away from us). The light from other stars is stretched due to the universe itself is stretching. This is still happening, and even more puzzling, is that the rate of acceleration is growing. This increase in acceleration is attributed to the undiscovered Dark Energy.

Now, back to the theory of everything! To understand how the universe works, we need to combine two different flavors of physics: gravity and quantum physics. Gravity explains physics on a large scale, while quantum physics describe physics on very small scales. We do not know how gravity works at the atomic level. Figuring that out is the key to a more fundamental understanding of physics.

String theory was our first attempt. It postulates that you can break a particle down into smaller pieces so many times, and eventually you have strings that cannot be broken down. These strings vibrate at a certain frequency, depending on what particle the string was a part of. Also, the string can be open, or closed (a circle). An open string is physically attached to certain dimensions, while a closed string is free to move about the dimensions (string theory says that there are actually 11 dimensions!). An interesting thing is that if there is a particle of gravity (a graviton), as string theory says, it would likely be closed. This can explain why gravity is so weak compared to the other forces. For instance, a simple magnet can lift a paper clip against the pull of the entire earth. If this is right, then we are simply not seeing all of the gravity that the earth exerts, because it exists in smaller dimensions we are not privy to.

String theory has all kind of implications, but perhaps the biggest is that our entire universe exists on something called a brane. You can think of a brane as a sheet of paper. A further possibility is that there are other branes, and that occassionally these branes can impact one another. Each of these impacts could be a Big Bang.

If you want to see more about string theory, Nova put together a great documentary available free online. Just go to PBS or Nova's site, and search for a show called The Elegant Universe. It is hosted by Brian Greene. It is quite long, so be prepared. It is incredibly easy to understand though. It's all in laymans terms.

Quantum loop gravity is another interesting theory. There was an article about this in the Scientific American some time ago. Most people suppose that space is a sheet, all one big piece. QLG puts that space is quantized, or that there are points of space. I think this theory is interesting because it sounds to me like it explains the Planck distance. I'm not going to elaborate any more on this one, because I'm not that versed in it.


Here's the link for The Elegant Universe. You'll see part one, it's the second video. I believe there are three parts.

What you are referring to are called virtual particles. This may seem the same, but is actually different than the big bang. The big bang was the creation of space itself, not just matter.

AccessBlaster said:

Explosions don't spontaneously happen in a cold dark vacuum.:banghead:

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Before the big bang, there was no vacuum. And yes, they do! Virtual particles are created and almost instantly destroy each other. The particles are both matter and antimatter.

About the egg and the chicken:
Someone said to me that first, shoulda been the rooster (or the **** ?!) (in Romanian is used the same word).
So we have a reference point here

speakers_86 said:

What you are referring to are called virtual particles. This may seem the same, but is actually different than the big bang. The big bang was the creation of space itself, not just matter.

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I'm not an upholder of the Big Bang theory. I do acknowledge, as mention above, that matter and energy can change form.

There was nothing, so how do we set up constants? The big bang theory is not a theory of everything. It is only an extrapolation of things as we see it today. If everything is moving apart now, it stands to reason that it was once much closer. I think the next big step is testing string theory, though that is extremely hard.

Understanding the past may very well depend on how we understand the present.

Sean Carroll on the Higgs field… (He is a good speaker.)

27 minutes and 55 seconds into this…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwdY7Eqyguo

Worth watching the whole thing but it still doesn’t mean it’s the whole story.

Chris.

So theoretically my ex actually IS the center of the universe as those 3 properties describe her soul

AccessBlaster said:

Ok then please setup a base line with some constants.

here is my theory:

1.Pitch black
2.min -459.67°F
3.vacuum

This is where I would start

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Fifty2One - sounds like the story of the guy who comes into a bar and tells the bartender, "What I want is tall, cold, and full of gin" - to which a bar-fly responds, "Sir, you speak of the woman I love."