Big Bang

From Hanneke Weitering at Space.com: Have you ever wondered what the universe looks like in all of its entirety, or how it would feel to hold the universe in the palm of your hand? Good news: It is now possible to do both of these things — all you need is a 3D printer. Researchers at the Imperial College London have created the blueprints for 3D printing the universe, and have provided the instructions online so anyone with access to a 3D printer can print their own miniature universe. You can see a video on the science behind the 3D-printed universe here. The researchers’ representation of the universe specifically depicts the cosmic microwave background (CMB), or a glowing light throughout Read More ›

From ScienceDaily, re UC Berkeley’s Richard Muller’s new book NOW: The Physics of Time (W. W. Norton) Ever since the Big Bang explosively set off the expansion of the universe 13.8 billion years ago, the cosmos has been growing, something physicists can measure as the Hubble expansion. They don’t think of it as stars flying away from one another, however, but as stars embedded in space and space continually expanding. Muller takes his lead from Albert Einstein, who built his theory of general relativity — the theory that explains everything from black holes to cosmic evolution — on the idea of a four-dimensional spacetime. Space is not the only thing expanding, Muller says; spacetime is expanding. And we are surfing Read More ›

From Science Daily: ESA’s Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years. More. Paper. (public access) – Matthieu Tristram and Collaboration. Planck intermediate results. XLVII. Planck constraints on reionization history. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2016; DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201628897 Doesn’t that reduce the time for origin of life? See also: Galaxy started forming stars only 200 million years after the Big Bang? Follow UD News at Twitter!

Over on a recent thread there has been much interesting discussion about a recent debate between theist philosopher Rabbi Daniel Rowe and atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling.  HeKS provided a review of the matter, focusing largely on his analysis of Jerry Coyne’s responses.

I agree with HeKS’s general observation that Coyne failed to adequately address the issues.  Indeed, it seems Coyne failed to adequately understand some of the issues, a situation that is all too common.

However, I want to focus in this post on a specific aspect of the discussion, namely, some of the points raised by sean samis, starting @37 on that thread.  In his comments, samis urges caution in drawing any conclusion from the Big Bang about deity’s existence or involvement.  I do not necessarily share all of his conclusions, but I think a number of his points are worthy of additional discussion.

First of all, let me apologize to HeKS for starting a new thread.  I initially began this as a comment to the prior thread, but it became long enough that it required a separate post.  Additionally, I want to focus on a specific issue that tacks in a slightly different direction than the prior thread.

If the Universe Had a Beginning, then What? Read More ›

Recently, a debate was held in London between theist philosopher Rabbi Daniel Rowe and atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling. The subject under dispute, unsurprisingly, was God’s existence. It’s a very interesting debate to watch. I’d never heard of Rowe before, but I was familiar with Grayling, who is sometimes referred to as the Fifth Horseman of New Atheism. Generally speaking, the “New Atheists” haven’t shown any natural genius for philosophy. Grayling, though being a professional philosopher, does not prove to be the exception here. Instead, he shows that even when they have the benefit of philosophical training, it does them very little good when they engage in debates over God’s existence. I think it would be pretty uncontroversial to say that Read More ›

Take two of these: 4) We cannot appeal to the singularity as the cause of the universe. If the big bang singularity is precisely nothing, we are left with the question of how the universe then came into existence out of nothing. Others have argued that a big bang singularity would be a real physical state; but if so it would still just exist at the time t=0. In that case we have to ask “how did the singularity come into existence out of nothing?” 5) Some speculate that future scientific research will provide strong evidence in favour of cosmologies that avoid a beginning of the universe. For example, in the oscillating universe model the universe expands, then collapses back Read More ›

Criminologist and former atheist Mike Adams summarizes the three foundational philosophical alternatives to the Cosmos:

First, we can say that it came into being spontaneously – in other words, that it came to be without a cause. Second, we can say that it has always been. Third, we can posit some cause outside the physical universe to explain its existence. The second option is no longer reasonable. Science has been leading inexorably to the conclusion that the universe is not infinite but instead had a beginning. . . . Reasonable people grasp intuitively that it makes far more sense to say that something came from something than to say that something came from nothing. Of course, admitting that the universe was caused by something rather than nothing comes with a price. Any cause predating the physical universe must therefore be non-physical in nature.

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From ScienceDaily: While previous experimental and theoretical studies give clues to spatial variations in the primordial universe, they lack the key element of time. Without a ticking clock to measure the passage of time, the evolutionary history of the primordial universe can’t be determined unambiguously. “Imagine you took the frames of a movie and stacked them all randomly on top of each other. If those frames aren’t labeled with a time, you can’t put them in order. Did the primordial universe crunch or bang? If you don’t know whether the movie is running forward or in reverse, you can’t tell the difference,” explains Chen. This new research suggests that such “clocks” exist, and can be used to measure the passage Read More ›

Further to Sean Carroll and the Time with Two Heads, a friend writes to ask about a quantum equation that rolled through earlier this year, that predicts the universe has no beginning: The universe may have existed forever, according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The model may also account for dark matter and dark energy, resolving multiple problems at once. Although the Big Bang singularity arises directly and unavoidably from the mathematics of general relativity, some scientists see it as problematic because the math can explain only what happened immediately after—not at or before—the singularity. “The Big Bang singularity is the most serious problem of general relativity because the Read More ›

Another stab at: What came before the Big Bang? = We  all hates the Big Bang. From Harper’s: Working with Alan Guth, a pioneering cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carroll has developed a not-yet-published theory called Two-Headed Time. In this model of the universe, time has existed forever. But unlike the static cosmos imagined by Aristotle and Newton and Einstein, this universe changes as the eons go by. The evolution of the cosmos is symmetric in time, such that the behavior of the universe before the Big Bang is nearly a mirror image of its behavior after. Until 14 billion years ago, the universe was contracting. It reached a minimum size at the Big Bang (which we call Read More ›

No, it’s a serious question, as New Scientist asks, and wants money to hear an answer: But one always finds oneself coming back to the Big Question with a Bigger Question: What if nothing did? What if it is like asking what is the natural number that comes before 1? For that matter, what if we just didn’t exist before we were conceived? For whom is that a problem and why? Don’t know or care, just wondering. See also: Cosmology in the age of confusion.

Every so often, we run posts linking to people speculating about what happened before the Big Bang. Pop science mag New Scientist offers to tell us the latest speculations, if we will but sign up eventually to pay something like US$22-$49 to discover, According to the big bang theory – our best explanation for why space is expanding – everything exploded from nothing about 13.8 billion years ago. Cosmologists have been able to wind things back to within a tiny fraction of a second of this moment. But now they’re stuck. Of course, any further attempt at discovery means assuming that 1) a Big Bang happened 2) anything at all happened before the Big Bang 3) our brains are shaped Read More ›

From the New Statesman: To support Minkowski’s proposal, a 2014 paper published in arXiv, says the universe had no beginning and will have no end (a “block universe”), according to a new model that applies quantum correction terms to complement Einstein’s theory general relativity. The model also helps solve the problem of dark matter and dark energy. What some cosmologists now believe is that rather than matter collapsing, causing a “Big Bang”, the matter bounced (“the Big Bounce”). Ie, they believe the universe has energy levels and goes through a cycle of collapses and bounces. “[The Big Bounce] is actually in doubt because we now know that our universe is not going to re-collapse. It is actually going to expand Read More ›

From Rob Sheldon: The ideas of the Big Bang theory have been resisted by astronomers and cosmologists for decades if not millennia. Plato was against, Augustine was for a creation event. In modern times, the initial idea was put forward by a Belgian priest, Fr Georges Lemaitre in about 1927. Albert Einstein hated the idea, and preferred to insert an “anti-gravity” term into his famous set of gravitational equations to balance the attraction of gravity, and thereby obtain a steady-state, static, unchanging and eternal universe. It was only after Willem deSitter showed that Einstein’s solution was unstable, and Edwin Hubble showed that all the galaxies were moving away from us at increasingly faster speeds the further away they were, that Read More ›