The "big bang" never happened did it. The universe has always existed and is never ending isn't it?

Question

Both in time and space it is eternal

no yolandm

How can a thing expand - for a thing to expand it must have something outside of it to expand into like a balloon has.

Its only our logical earthbound mind that thinks things must always have a beginning and end in time and in space in my opinion

Ben - thanks for your answer but can you explain what you mean by singularity? What was outside the singularity for it to expand into?

Ben - thats interesting but it is hard to comprehend like you say. The singularity must be God to my way of thinking, free of all opposites which all creation is made up of.

Answer 1

A common misunderstanding of the big bang theory is that it explains the moment of creation. It does not, there are theories which try to do this but not the big bang.

The big bang tries to explain what happened after the moment of creation until now. It does not attempt to explain the moment of creation as the maths don't work. And if the maths don't work then its not science its something else, you could call that something else philosophy or religion.

Answer 2

1:The "big bang" never happened did it
Wrong! A shed load of extremely good evidence that it did. Try doing the OU Cosmology course so you'll understand it.

2: The universe has always existed
The answer to question 1

3:never ending isn't it?
True! It's going to expand forever until the average energy density is zero.

4:How can a thing expand - for a thing to expand it must have something outside of it to expand into like a balloon has
Because to are too stuck in your own preconceptions. You need to look beyound what you see.100 years ago nobody would have thought time was a dimension

5:Its only our logical earthbound mind that thinks things must always have a beginning and end in time and in space in my opinion
Quite the opposite in fact. It is my so called logical earthbound mind that can comprehend spacetime and the Big Bang.

6:What was outside the singularity for it to expand into?
The very fact that you have to ask this questions shows you do understand the under lying concepts to cosmology which I could explain but not here.

7:The singularity must be God to my way of thinking, free of all opposites which all creation is made up of.
No because the suggest intelligence and I don't see any conculsive indication of intelligence.

Answer 3

All models of the universe have the feature that at some time in the past (between 10 and 20 thousand million years ago) the distance between neighbouring galaxies must have been zero. At that time, which we call the big bang, the density of the universe and the curvature of space-time would have been infinite. Because mathematics cannot really handle infinite numbers, this means that the general theory of relativity predicts that there is a point in the universe where the theory itself breaks down. Such a point is an example of what mathematicians call a singularity. In fact, all our theories of science are formulated on the assumption that space-time is smooth and flat, so they break down at the big bang singularity, where the curvature of space-time is infinite. This means that even if there were events before the big bang, one could not use them to determine what would happen afterward, because predictability would break down at the big bang.

Correspondingly, if, as is the case, we know only what has happened since the big bang, we could not determine what happened before-hand. As far as we are concerned, events before the big bang can have no consequences, so they should not form part of a scientific model of the universe. We should therefore cut them out of the model and say that time had a beginning at the big bang.

Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention. (The Catholic Church, on the other hand, seized on the big bang model and in 1951 officially pronounced it to be in accordance with the Bible.) There were therefore a number of attempts in the past to avoid the conclusion that there had been a big bang. Instead they ended up showing that there was a high probability the universe could have had a singularity, a big bang, if the general theory of relativity was correct. Today the big bang theory is widely accepted globally as it is simple and made definite predictions that could be tested by observation.

In addition, we can determine the present rate of expansion of the universe by measuring the velocities at which other galaxies are moving away from us, using the Doppler effect. This can be done very accurately. However, the distances to the the galaxies are not very well known because we can only measure them indirectly. So all we know is that the universe is expanding by between 5% and 10% every thousand million years. The present evidence therefore suggests that the universe will probably expand forever, all we can really be sure of is that even if the universe is going to recollapse, it won't do so for at least another ten thousand million years, since it has already been expanding for at least that long. This should not unduly worry us as by that time, unless we have colonized beyond the Solar system, mankind will long since have died out, extinguished along with our sun.

And as Einstein once said, "God does not play dice".

Answer 4

The Big Bang is a plausible theory. You have to remember scientists are theorizing in the human context. It makes sense to us that the universe started this way. Space is infinitely big. Big bangs could easily happen anywhere in space. YOU CANNOT DISAGREE, but only hypothesize. Scientists never claim they are right! But, they are the ones making technological advances which stem from their research. Everything has a start and an end. I feel like the universe and beyond can be figured out through mathematics, but it will take technological advancements to get us there. You cant complain because a majority of people are interested to know either 'how human life was generated' and/or 'is there another instance of human life in space'. So human beings as a whole are inquisitive about the topic.

Outside of that (are universe) we know nothing only because we have no real proof. But that at this moment in time. 1, 000 years from now we might have powerful enough telescopes to find a new discovery. I am a bit skeptical about the invention of telescope that powerful, but the idea should live on. I believe that we reside in a multi verse. It seems logical, and must of us don't want to believe it, because we have no proof and we believe even more that we will never will. If you watch documentaries you'll see that religion goes hand and hand with science, but its more symbolic than anything. Its not like theres a human floating in space somewhere in control of everything. Unfortunately, thats what religion has become. Thankfully, they have separated church and state.

Answer 5

I believe that the big bang happened myself, but if you dont that is fine.
No-one else can tell you the "right" answer as it is your faith that matters.
I believe that the universe came from a singularity in space 14 or so billion years ago and is stil expanding. And soon enough (5 billion years) we will have the big crunch and the universe will collapse and then start all over again.

Hope I helped :D

UPDATE:
A singularity is a tiny point in space and time, a trillion times smaller than the atom. In other words it is small. Outside of the singularty there is nothing, as quoted in doctor who, no light no dark no up no down no time, nothing.
It is a very hard theory to grab hold of, but it is quite fascinating.

UPDATE NO. 2.
I forgot to say that the universe came about because, it that singularity there was about an ounce of matter and the pressure caused it to expand.

UPDATE NO. 3
It doesnt really matter what the singularity was, God, or a dot.
You never know, they might be the same thing???

Hope I helped :D

Answer 6

This will be my first answer so here it goes. The Big Bang is still considered a theory by the scientific community in the area of physics (astrophysics, I think would be more correct). It is based on the most current understanding of this subject by scientists (very important); if later on, data shows that it never happened, the scientific community will correct this idea. At this time, it is strongly believed that it did happen and that the universe is still expanding. Current technology and limits of travel rates will prevent us from reaching the end of the universe for the time being. This would be the best answer I can give you because answering such question is beyond the known capabilities of humans. This is a question that might just be too big to ever answer. Hope it helps you think about the limitations that we as humans face when we try to understand such huge questions such as this one or the existence of a God. Science, maybe because of the bigger threat of microscopic organisms, has recently tended to focus on understanding microscopic organisms and has forgotten about the big questions such as the one you asked.

Answer 7

Fact: Distant stars are moving away from us. Stars that are further away are moving faster than stars closer.

This is why the "big bang" theory is so popular, some people believe that at some point, the stars will stop moving away from us and eventually begin moving back towards some center point where everything will come crushing together and trigger a second big bang.

However this leaves the question "whats space expanding into?"
Now just for fun i propose this, Just because stars seem to move away from us doesnt mean that the universe is expanding, maybe we are all just shrinking, so things appear to be further away ;)

Answer 8

dan the man is flat wrong. So called "big band" theories are an attempt to explain a number of observed facts, chiefly -1. The Universe is expanding - that is, all the distant galaxies are moving away from us. This was observed in the 1920 or 1930s, 15 to 20 years BEFORE big bang theories were proposed in the early 1950s. 2. The entire universe is filled with microwave radiation which indicated a temperature of 2.7 Kelvin. This was observed ACCIDENTALLY by commercial applied scientists in the early 1960s and turned out to be consistent with big bang theories 3. The Universe appears to have had a definite start about 13.7 million years ago.

These facts are consistent with big bang theories. They are not consistent with continuous creation, they are not consistent with Genesis, they are not consistent with the Koran, they are not consistent with Hindi scriptures either.

Do not let creationists and other frauds and fools convince you that the "big bang" is "just a theory" There is a theory there, sure, but is there to explain observed FACTS.

Answer 9

I'm afraid that the 'big bang did happen' it is no longer a theory; there is a lot of detectable evidence to support this statement. Not only can we observe galaxys flying away from one and other, Cosmic microwave background radiation was discovered in 1965. This radiation is the fossil of the big bang, or to put it another way the echo of the big bang.

Answer 10

Correct the Big Bang never happenned.

However we can tell that the universe had a beginning.
The first law of thermodynamics tells us that mater/energy cannot be created or destroyed.
The second law of thermodynamics tells us that the amount of useful energy is running out.

If the universe was eternally old then there would be no useful energy left. Since there is useful energy around the universe is not eternally old.

The fact that the universe exists, and is full of not only matter and energy, but vast amounts of information, is evidence of design and of the Creator.

Information *never* arises spontaneously, only from an intelligent source.