From John Farrell, author of The Day Without Yesterday: Lemaiître, Einstein and the Birth of Modern Cosmology, at Nautilus: But Lemaître wasn’t satisfied. By 1931, he had come to believe that Einstein’s “initial condition” state could not be stable. Reaching back to Friedmann, he proposed his Primeval Atom hypothesis, essentially the Big Bang 1.0, that Read More…
Big Bang
Wayne Rossiter: Darwin and the Pope
Concluding our religion News coverage for the week, From Wayne Rossiter, author of Shadow of Oz: Theistic Evolution and the Absent God: at his book blog: Over the weekend, I had a friend ask me about this story, in which Pope Francis has seemingly cast in with Darwinian evolution. Now, I have learned from previous Read More…
Ethan Siegel: Why there is more to universe than the standard model
At Forbes: While experiments are telling us that low-energy supersymmetry and extra dimensions probably don’t exist (or are so constrained that they’re irrelevant), there are plenty of pieces of evidence that there’s more to existence than the Standard Model alone. What else is out there? There are five strong, independent lines of inquiry that reveal Read More…
Print your own baby universe for free
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 Read More…
New theory links flow of time with Big Bang
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 Read More…
Researchers: First stars formed later than thought
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 Read More…
The Big Bang, The First Cause, and God
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 Read More…
Prominent Atheists Fundamentally Misunderstand First-Cause Arguments
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 Read More…
Poached Egg’s common sense cosmology
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 Read More…
Foundational Philosophical Alternatives
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 Read More…
Oscillating heavy particles as Big Bang clock?
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 Read More…
For 2016: Renew that hit on the Big Bang
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. Read More…
Sean Carroll and the Time with Two Heads
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 Read More…
Why need anything have come before Big Bang?
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 Read More…
Did New Scientist come before the Big Bang?
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 Read More…