Some questions about Big Bang?

Question

Hi,

1) We can't create something from nothing, so Big Bang's primordial fireball of radiation was always there, right?
2) If space and time are connected, this means time was also always there with the fireball of radiation, right?
3) Which action did lead the fireball to expand?
4) What makes this theory better than others?

Please don't answer with links.
Thank you very much.

I asked this question in "Science&Mathematics".
Religious answers have no place in here.

If you want to talk about god or creation, please go to "Religion & Spirituality".
Thanks.

Answer 1

1. no, we just dont know what caused it. technically, from our point of view yes it was always there since when it came into existence so did time, so it was there since the start of time in our universe. if you believe m-theory, string theory, or any other various theories that are gaining ground then it wasnt always there because our universe wasnt the first universe. those theories may very possibly be wrong though

2. technically yes, space-time came into existence at the same exact time as the "fireball". but thats just space-time for our universe, there could be others.

3. we honestly have no idea. some theories say these tiny membranes (with 11 dimensions) are like very small strings packed very tightly in our universe and outside of it. and when 2 of them collide (and it happens a near infinite amount of times at any given moment) it creates a new universe that immediately creates its own space and splits off from our own universe. again, just a theory, but its gaining ground.

4. many things point to it. the galaxies moving away from eachother. the cosmic microwave background which is radiation left over from the big bang. the big bang model correctly predicts the amount of hydrogen and helium in the universe. the presence of deuterium (hydrogen isotope), the only known source of this would be from the big bang. those are just the biggys, there are others.

Answer 2

My attitude is that with the extreme conditions that must have been present at the very early stages of the universe we could easily have had "new" physics operating that we can't even guess at now.

I remember a PBS show years ago where a fellow made an example of the seemingly 'special' concentration of oxygen in the earth's atmosphere. He said that it just happens to be exactly right -- not so much that a fire once started would burn up everything, and not so little that a fire couldn't keep going on its own. He wondered why the concentration seemed tuned to the 'right' value.

The answer was negative feedback. The concentration is actively steered to the value it has. If the oxygen concentration happens to get higher, more fires will burn and deplete it. If the concentration gets lower plants will be able to produce more as they grow better.

I wonder whether there were physical processes in action during the early moments of the BIg Bang that in a similar way steered some of the physical constants via negative feedback to the values we see today. We'd see no trace of these processes now because the energy density is way too low.

It's just a wild idea...

Answer 3

1) We can't create something from nothing, so Big Bang's primordial fireball of radiation was always there, right?

That's not quite true. There are such things as virtual particles. Hawking what integral in using them to describe black hole explosions.

Technically, if there were large amounts of anti-matter, our complete universe could exist as nothing but a geometric point, existing as mathematical formulae within a larger set of space (such as 10D string theory indicates).

That answer is a whole bunch of unknown.

2) If space and time are connected, this means time was also always there with the fireball of radiation, right?

This is unclear.

3) Which action did lead the fireball to expand?

Energy pressure combined with the expansion constant of space itself.

4) What makes this theory better than others?

There is no TOE, not yet anyway.

Answer 4

1. Wrong. Virtual particles are created spontaneously all the time.

2. I have no idea what you are trying to say.

3. Perhaps a quantum fluctuation. I don't know.

4. The Big Bang Theory correctly models the expansion of the universe, its chemical composition, and its cosmic microwave background.

You seem to think that the BBT describes the origin of the universe. It does not. It says nothing about when the universe was less than 10^-35 seconds old.

Answer 5

We dont know what it was like before the big bang, as out universe did not exist, there may have been a universe with different laws so it may have been possible for something to come from nothing. there may have been nothing at all, no time or space.

there is alot of evidence to support the big bang theory, such as reshift. This is the effect caused by the stars moving away from use.

Answer 6

1 they say theres always been something "here" just not in our universe. it was on the "other side"

(I know links, but their videos so might not be as boring and cumbersome as a full paged link)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_B0Kaf7xYMk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOkAagw6iug&feature=related

3. it was a after effect of its creation.

4. all are theories... correct.
as long as there is some kind of math that DOES back up the theory then, its a good theory until it is proven wrong.

I'm very open minded about string theory and hope for its success, but at the same time I am very open minded to its failure to so that we can either readjust the idea or just drop it and move on.

still waiting for results from data collected at CERN and the new particle accelerator in may 2008 to prove or disprove string theory.

Answer 7

The Big Bang is the cosmological model of the universe whose primary assertion is that the universe has expanded into its current state from a primordial condition of enormous density and temperature. The term is also used in a narrower sense to describe the fundamental "fireball" that erupted at or close to an initial time-point in the history of our observed spacetime.[1]

Theoretical support for the Big Bang comes from mathematical models, called Friedmann models. These models show that a Big Bang is consistent with general relativity and with the cosmological principle, which states that the properties of the universe should be independent of position or orientation.

Observational evidence for the Big Bang includes the analysis of the spectrum of light from galaxies, which reveal a shift towards longer wavelengths proportional to each galaxy's distance in a relationship described by Hubble's law. Combined with the evidence that observers located anywhere in the universe make similar observations (the Copernican principle), this suggests that space itself is expanding. The next most important observational evidence was the discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964. This had been predicted as a relic from when hot ionized plasma of the early universe first cooled sufficiently to form neutral hydrogen and allow space to become transparent to light, and its discovery led to general acceptance among physicists that the Big Bang is the best model for the origin and evolution of the universe. A third important line of evidence is the relative proportion of light elements in the universe, which is a close match to predictions for the formation of light elements in the first minutes of the universe, according to Big Bang nucleosynthesis.

Answer 8

The only bullshit is simply and close minded people who refuse to hear about another possibility other than GOD. I am a catholic at heart but that doesn't mean I don't have the free will of GOD to question the religion and not my faith!

The Bible, religion, scriptures are all a sense of hope. If everyone and everything in this time and all of your life is against you, the trully devout can turn to GOD. So questioning and having an open mind to a possibility that existance was created in some other way instead of GOD creating EVERYTHING minimizes that small amount of HOPE!! GOD gave us all the free will of man. So, It's hard for me to understand how some people would let themselves be blinded and not hear out the idea of another possibility of our existance.

Answer 9

Every phenomenon in the Universe above the quantum level, can be analyzed in your very logical, causal way. The Universe, itself, can't. That is because it is all there is or ever was. So it defies our attempts to attribute a cause for it. A cause would be before the universe or outside of it, and nothing can be. Not only can't we create something from nothing, we can't even imagine it.

This is the ultimate enigma and as counter-intuitive as it may seem, I think we have to resign ourselves to the fact that we will never be able to explain it.

Answer 10

We must face the fact that before time zero,the universe did not exist.
Nothing existed before time zero time,but you can't get something from nothing.
There must have been a potential and the potential had to be finite,an infinite potential couldn't have triggered.
A single quantum space-time pulse of minimum size and duration was initiated,it contained all the ingredients required to evolve into the universe we experience today.