At Astronomy Magazine: In less time than it takes to snap your fingers, the universe flashed into existence.
Big Bang
Ethan Siegel on where it all came from…
Siegel: “there is no guarantee that what remains in the Universe, today, gives us sufficient information to find the answers.”
One way of looking at it is that, if we are characters in the story, we can’t meet the author.
The trouble so many brilliant people have gone to in order to refute the Big Bang
Overall, the anti-Big Bang quests tend to make one believe, if nothing else did, that there must be something in the Big Bang. A useful summary by Brian Miller.
Sabine Hossenfelder asks: Will the Big Bang repeat?
Hossenfelder: I am not sure that CCC actually solves the problem it was supposed to solve. Remember we are trying to explain the past hypothesis. But a scientific explanation shouldn’t be more difficult than the thing you’re trying to explain. And CCC requires some assumptions, about the conformal invariance and the erebons, that at least to me don’t seem any better than the past hypothesis.
At Mind Matters News: How easy is it to imagine absolutely nothing?
Takehome: The non-theistic explanations are colorful but it is not clear that they solve problems. Rather, they demonstrate the difficulty we have imagining… absolutely nothing.
How small was the universe when the Big Bang started?
Ethan Siegel offers an opinion at Forbes: No matter how tempting it may be to think that the Universe arose from a singular point of infinite temperature and density, and that all of space and time emerged from that starting point, we cannot responsibly make that extrapolation and still be consistent with the observations that Read More…
At The Conversation: How could the Big Bang arise from nothing?
Wait. There is a simpler explanation: In the beginning, the Lord created the heavens and the earth.
At National Geographic: A million to one odds that the universe’s expansion mystery is a statistical fluke
At NG: In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.
The James Webb Telescope launched today, to study primordial galaxies
It is bound to shed light on many current mysteries and controversies — and to create new ones instead.
Big Bang theory is too big to fail, philosophers of science complain
In their view, it supports the entire discipline of cosmology in the sense that cosmologists are reputationally dependent on it. This is a new type of criticism of the Big Bang.
Experimental physicist Rob Sheldon on CNN’s “problem” with the Big Bang Theory
Sheldon: Just to clarify, Big Bang theory is doing just fine, the Inflationary addition which is NOT part of the Standard Model, isn’t.
At CNN: The Problem with the Big Bang Theory
The story is really about the fact that inflation theory — way Cooler than the Big Bang — was not especially confirmed. Get this: it’s important to remember that “there are no sacred cows in science, and scientists are always checking and rechecking even their favorite universal models.” – Don Lincoln Really, Don? Try doubting that humans are responsible for global warming and watch the herd of sacred cows stampede…
Rob Sheldon on the current trend to non-theist intelligent design (ID) theory
When some people wrote privately to protest that this ET>Big Bang stuff is all just one space bunny too far down the cosmic path, I (O’Leary for News) pointed out in response that Neil deGrasse Tyson (here), Martin Rees (here), and Elon Musk (here) have also suggested that very thing. Well, now theoretical physicist Rob Sheldon writes to offer some thoughts on the new-found popularity.
At Mind Matters News: Harvard astronomer: Advanced aliens engineered the Big Bang
Avi Loeb writes in Scientific American that when we humans are sufficiently advanced, we will create other universes as well.
Physicist Brian Miller reflects on claims that the universe had no beginning
Miller: Sutter asserts that Bento and Zalel’s article offers a credible response against the evidence for a cosmic beginning. Yet this claim is only based on what might be possible in the realm of the imagination.