the study of the big picture so to say of how everything started aka - the BIG BANG theory - in general? whom of you believe in this "theory" and why? Was the universe started by this big bang? if so then where did the material come from that supposedly exploded and became everything we see or know of in the universe? any thoughts?

I am the type of person that needs to have faith in a force or higher power than myself .. something guiding me and watching over me .. I am certainly not qualified to answer any big bang question but like to think that God created the heavens and the earth ..

from what i have read and heard, it came from a black hole in another dimension...........how they figure that i dunno.............sure wish they had left the politicians in that other dimension tho............

"In the begining God created the heavens and the earth" Gen 1:1. The very first verse of the first book of the whole bible answers that question.

hmmmm? - the problem i see with everything coming from another dimension is - where did that 'OTHER" dimension come from? i think common sense would even make aparent to those stating that theory - that it does not hold water - in other words - it does not explain the beginning of everything - out side of faith based belief and explanations, there seems to be no other difinitive answer?? is that the case?? thoughts please

thats like asking were does infinite start,
i already know were i've been,
i want to know were i'm going.
try quantum mechanics/physics

Hannes Alfven proposed a much better theory -- plasma cosmology -- although it, too, is not without its questions and inconsistencies.

I highly recommend Eric J. Lerner's book, "The Big Bang Never Happened." Looking at the time scales needed for the formation of galactic superclusters, the total lack of any evidence for the existence of the "dark matter" necessary for the Big Bang to hold up, and the absolute impossibility of replicating anything even remotely like the "Big Bang" under laboratory conditions (something from nothing), I can no longer subscribe to Big Bang as a viable explanation.

i've studied q mechanics to a degree as well as other "theories" im looking for answers outside the box- so to say- thnx for your replies so far i dont believe in the BB theory i'm just curious as to those here who may (as I) have other answers or thoughts as to negate the notion made by cosmologist and others? stating that it merely is not true or your not concerned does not bring forth answers, it merely states the obvious, it questons the very exsistance of god as we know of him - i believe it is important even though you may think it will not affect your future - remember we really have no future for sure - only now, though that doesnot negate the very sure possability that we will be here past now - smiles.

I haven't read a great deal of quantum mechanics, but I know enough to say that if all the matter in the universe were concentrated in a supermassive black hole, you'd have an awful hard time getting any matter out of there. One interesting note is that it would be spinning at nearly the speed of light...

However based on the movement of galaxies, it seems apparent that they all passed through, or originated from a single point, the center of the known universe. From wikipedia:


Although everything seems to have come from a single point, it's hard to say why the thing blew apart, or if the point at the center of the universe was the only supermassive black hole. The known universe is only some 14.5 billion years old, and we can't see anything beyond 14.5 billion light years out, oddly enough.

THANKS ANTIMATTER - BUT THAT STILL DOESNOT ANSWER THE QUESTION OF WHERE ANY MATTER CAME FROM TO BEGIN WITH? ANY FURTHER THOUGHTS?

Well, as far as we know, matter cannot be destroyed or created. You could say the current amount of matter has always existed, in same way that people say God has always existed, but that isn't a particularly satisfying answer to me even.

I've entertained the thought that if there was absolutely nothing... no laws of cause or effect, couldn't something come into being spontaneously? As well as laws to govern whatever spontaneously came into being? But then you ask, why did stuff stop coming into being spontaneously, then? Again, not a satisfying answer.

Issac Asimov wrote a short story that deals with the death and recreation of the universe called "The last question". The last question being "How can entropy (the running down of the universe from a high state of energy to a low one) be reversed?

Here's a link to the story in question.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

I won't spoil the end for you, it's good, but not any more plausible than other ideas.

My feelings is that the big bang will probably never be fully understood (But then again, few things are) Science does it's best to answer questions based on what can be observed, and there's not much of the big bang that can be observed at this point. We can only hypothesize based on the knowledge we have of what happens at a quantum level, and other observable discoveries. "Where did matter come from" is just another question that may be unanswerable, like why are protrons and electrons attracted to each other? I don't know, but they are.

why not?

No data to suggest otherwise.

THAT'S SOME NICE INSIGHT ANTI MATTER, WITH POST LIKE THAT IT MAY ATTRACT OTHER THINKERS ON THE SUBJECT,i BELIEVE THE "BEGINNING GOES BACK ALOT FURTHER THAN THE COSMOLOGIST BELIEVE AND THAT THE "BEGINNING" THEY STATE WAS NOT THE BEGINNING, BUT I WILL DELVE DEEPER INTO THAT WHEN I HEAR MORE GOOD RESPONSES FROM YOU AND OR OTHERS, IT'S A VERY INTERESTING SUBJECT AND FULL OF PIT FALLS AND NUANCES YET UNEXPLORED TO ANY GREAT AMOUNT EVEN THOUGH IT MAY APPEAR TO HAVE BEEN.

PS: I THOUGHT PROTONS AND NEUTRONS AND ALL OTHER MATTER WERE ATTRACTED TO EACH OTHER BECAUSE OF MAGNETIC GRAVITATION? AM I WRONG IN MY THINKING?

I wasn't able to find anything on the term "magnetic gravitation", but what I was asking was more of a rhetorical question. What is the force that causes the attraction of positively charged protons and negatively charge electrons? If it's "electromagnetic gravitation", then what is the cause of that force, etc? Quantum mechanics comes up with models which (as best as possible) account for the data they have collected regarding the movement of particles at the subatomic level. No model is yet perfect, but there are attempts to unify all quantum theory in an aptly named "Theory of Everything".

Strangely enough, I think most people here are interested in dating, as opposed to discussing quantum and cosmological theory. If you're looking for a partner that appreciates those things, then a convention might be better picking than here.

Also, I would greatly appreciate it if you would type lowercase.

Forgive me, will do, your probably right but i'll see if there are other answers before i give it up -

Let me know if you find anything interesting.

Hi Tribo,

I have been studying these questions of the natural world since early childhood. If I may, I would like to share some of the things I have pondered.

The Theories

Loop Quantum Gravity

Today there are several plausible answers to the question of how the Big Bang got stated. None of them are verifiable, but some fit the data better than others.

One of them comes from a theory called LQG (Loop Quantum Gravity) and suggests that our universe could have been started from a black hole in another universe. I personally don’t buy into this theory for several reasons. One of which is that it doesn’t exactly fit in with what we already know to be true of black holes in our own universe. Also, as you’ve already stated, it is quite unsatisfying because we are then presented with the question of where the very first black hold came from, etc.

String Theory

String Theory has membranes that exist in a higher dimensional space colliding into each other to cause the Big Bang. I don’t buy into String Theory to begin with for a mathematical reasons. So I won’t bother wasting anymore time on it.

Quantum Theory

This brings us to Quantum Theory which I believe has the best explanation thus far. Quantum theory says that the universe began as a quantum fluctuation that the theory actually predicts can happen because of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This gets the universe started from nothing more than a ‘quantum field”. A fellow by the name of Alan Guth then came along and showed how a process of ‘inflation’ could take over to cause that initial quantum fluctuation to grow exponentially to an almost infinite size in basically no time at all.

The theory is, of course, highly mathematical and as with all mathematical theories it is dependent on the original settings of the variables. The interesting thing about Alan Guth’s inflation theory is that if we take the current universe and extrapolate it backwards to see what those variables would need to have been we get reasonable numbers!

This of course, doesn’t prove the theory, but it does suggest that it is highly compatible with everything else we believe we know at this point. So I’d have to say that the quantum fluctuation theory along with Alan Guth’s inflationary model seems to best fit the data we have thus far.

So How Does this Big Bang Work?

Where did it Bang?

Everyone wants to think of the Big Bang as having started as an infinitely small 3-dimensional point. However, that’s the wrong picture to begin with. Living within the universe it appears to be 3-dimsional to us. However, that’s not its true nature.

I prefer to think of the Big Bang as happening everywhere at once (at least from our vantage point of being within it). We can’t point in any direction and say, “The Big Bang started over there”. We can’t point in the direction of where the Big Bang started because that place is not in our 3-dimensional space. We are inside the Big Bang so to speak. The entire universe that we can see “banged” at the same time. Every point with our universe is the center of the Big Bang.

So What Banged?

Where did all this stuff come from?

According to quantum mechanics it didn’t come from anywhere. It’s been here the whole time. Matter doesn’t exist as an entity in its own right (like in the Newtonian Sense). We know now from Einstein’s famous equation E=mc² that matter is just a form of energy. Matter is energy bound up as standing waves.

Moreover, what most people don’t realize is that because of how Alan Guth’s inflation model works, it’s not necessary for the original quantum fluctuation to be infinitely dense. Matter is created during inflation, and because of the inflationary process. In fact, Alan Guth’s inflationary model answers more question than originally thought. His model also predicts the Higgs particle and explains how momentum came to be. It also addresses issues associated with the Pauli Exclusion principle of Fermions.

This is something else to consider, by the way,…. In the early stages of the Big Bang there were no Fermions, all that existed were Bosons, and there was also no Higgs particles so the laws of physics would have been quite different at that time. (i.e. no laws of conservation of momentum for example). There would have been no such thing as momentum in the early Big Bang. Nor would fermions have needed to obey the Pauli Exclusion principle.

A quite different universe from the one in which we now reside. Of course, all of that only existed for a matter of seconds, or possibly minutes (or possibly eons!!!) the very concept of time as we know it may not have made sense in those early stages of the universe as well. Although, there are reasons to believe that time was a constant, and the reason for that is that when nuclear physicists run these equations to create the universe we see today, their calculations suggest that inflation only lasted for the briefest amount of time. Much longer than this and we would not see the universe that we see today.

So Where Did the Energy Come From?

Well, this is the big question. Quantum physics predicts the original quantum fluctuation. But it assumes the existence of a quantum field. In other words a quantum field must have always existed with the precise properties that Quantum Mechanics says that it has. Once given that, and Alan Guth’s Inflation model, everything else unfolds naturally.

So the real question in this theory is, What is a the quantum field?

Well, from a physics point of view, a quantum field is something that cannot be directly detected. The only thing that can be detected are vibrations within the quantum field. We detect these vibrations as ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’.

When the quantum field is vibrating it creates the “physical world” around us. When it is at complete rest, it is virtually undetectable.

We observe that virtual particles arise and annihilate each other in matter/anti-matter pairs. We see this happening all the time in particle accelerators. So we can state properties about the quantum field, but we have no idea what it is, or even how to control it precisely. We can only state probabilities about how it behaves.

Finally Spirituality

Well, when physics ends, metaphysics begins. It is my personal belief that the quantum field is the essence of God. The universe is nothing more than a manifestation of God’s essence. God creates us quite literally in his own image. We are vibrations of God’s essence. We are a direct manifestation of God as is everything in this physical universe.

This fits in perfectly with my own spiritual beliefs as a pantheist. Or, perhaps you might say that my pantheistic beliefs fit in perfect with what we know about physics. I’m not sure if one came before the other. My spiritual beliefs, and my scientific investigations just happily converged.

I’m not complaining.

DISCLAIMER: All of the above is merely my view, based on a lifetime of study and investigation. Nothing I have stated has been proven to be true. However, I would argue that everything I’ve stated is highly compatible with all known observations of the physical world up to this point insofar as I know.

(barring those damned typos that are bound to be in a post this size!)