How loud was the Bang? What's wrong with people who believe a singularity can explode?

Answer 1

no bang involved.

Answer 2

The name 'Big Bang' was given to the theory by the proponents of the other theory, at the time, called 'Steady State'. The name was given in derision because, they wanted to stress, nothing good can come out of an explosion.

Although the 'Big Bang' theory survived and Steady State collapsed, the name did cause the intended confusion.

There was not an explosion. There was (and still is) an expansion of the universe from something which, for lack of a better name, we can call the primordial atom: a state of extreme density and temperature.

The Big Bang theory can be pushed back to the Planck Time (a very, very, very short time AFTER the beginning). Before that time, our knowledge of physic does not apply.

Because the density and temperature were far greater than anything we can understand, we presume it was a singularity. But we do not know.

The Big Bang was so 'loud' that its echo is still heard 13.7 billion years later as a radio hiss (at microwave frequencies). It is called the Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) and the part we 'hear' comes from about 400,000 years after the 'start'.

Answer 3

First, the Big Bang was not an explosion.
It was a sudden expansion of the universe from an infinitely small and hot point. Since there was no space at all until the universe started to expand, there was no air of any kind to carry any sound. And of course, no one to hear anything anyway.

Second, it didn't explode.
While a singularity can't "explode" in today's universe with current physical laws, those laws didn't exist yet at the moment of the Big Bang - that event created space/time itself, the quantum forces we know today, the particles, and the quantum mechanical laws.

Answer 4

"What's wrong with people who believe a singularity can explode?"

Usually there is nothing wrong with them. They just don't understand what the big bang is and that the singularity in cosmology is not a mathematical point in an otherwise Euclidean space.

The other day there was this article about rubies and sapphires left over from supernovae explosions. Many people seem to think these are gems stones floating around while astronomers are simply talking about microscopic alumina dust with spectroscopically detectable iron and nicker/titanium traces. Same thing... the article only makes sense if read with the right semantics for the words used to describe the phenomena.

In case of general relativity one has to work pretty hard for a couple of years (more like three or four) to really understand the concepts the way they are meant. If taken out of the context of a full time undergraduate physics course, a term like "singularity" means nothing or takes on a meaning that does not map to what happened in reality.

This is troublesome, even and especially for science. Science is not meant to be a domain of the few but it should enhance the lives of the many. If it loses its ability to talk to non-scientists in terms that give them a profound insight into reality, science has lost one of its goals and aspirations. But the further science advances, the harder it becomes for scientists to translate their knowledge into an accessible form that requires less than a lifetime of learning to understand.

But it is also troubling if people deliberately misunderstand terms. If someone comes to a scientist and has a certain idea about something and the scientist explains carefully how and why that idea is wrong, that person would be well advised to listen and to go home and to attempt to learn more about the topic. But if, instead, the same person comes back time and time again with the same mis-interpretation, it is not a problem the scientist has to deal with (except by maybe pointing out to others who could be influenced by that person) that the uttered opinion is nonsense and not scientific.

One can see both. Sadly enough, there are plenty of people who are not approaching science with an open mind but with a dogma and who use Q&A to air their dogmata rather than to ask science questions.

In case of the big bang cosmology, there are any number of deliberate misinterpretations of something an initial singularity that try to portray it as un-scientific, nonsensical or simply impossible to push religious and economic agendas. In layman's terms this kind of behavior could be called anything from window putty to lies. And IMHO that pretty much covers the range of opinions quite well.

Having said all of this, understanding the singularity and how and why it is not an explosion is hard. Very hard. Probably harder than just very hard.

But impossible it ain't. I have met hundreds of people who understand it just fine and could even calculate some of the non-trivial properties of the theory. All over the world one can find thousands, probably tens of thousands who could do the same. And another hundreds of thousands to millions who could be taught almost immediately.

And pretty much everyone who comes here can ask someone like that who can give the hard but right answer rather than the easy and wrong answer.

So what is wrong with having the wrong idea? Nothing, if one is willing to trade it in for the right idea. Even if that means hard work and some serious intellectual sweat.

Answer 5

I'm no expert on singularities. I know squat about singularities. However as an ex sonarman I do know sound. Sound by definition requires a source and a reciever. Since no one was around to hear the explosion, by definition there was no sound. QED

Oops. Mr. Nice Guy is right. IForgot the medium. Well there was one AFTER the Bang.

Answer 6

Everybody has a different idea of what the singularity was. I always thought it was a point of energy. Energy means there will also be heat, but I don't know about density, how can energy have density? There was no explosion, after 10-43 second, the expansion began.

Answer 7

gr....if only all extra terrestrial things could be answered....

wheres the boundaries of nothing?
what created the big bang?
what created the thing that created the big bang?
and that?
and that?
everything had to start out as nothing, but nothing is something and can physically be impossible to be infinity.
therefore, it relates back to : wheres the end of nothing?

the bang couldve been as quiet as wind because if it was so loud, wudnt it break everything?

Answer 8

No sound in space. Big Bang is a misnomer. A lot of principles are backed by a single point of expansion theory.

Answer 9

How loud was the 'Big Bang'?
That's gotta be a whole new level of something, even for around here.
Unrecoverable syntax error. Skipping to end of file.

Doug

Answer 10

Richard is A OK. Sound also needs a medium. Air or water or something. Prior to the big bang there was nothing, so it made no sound.

Answer 11

LOL nice it's a trick question. There is no air in space and sound needs to travel through something to be heard. So the real answer is that it could no be heard because the sound did not pass through a medium.