If the universe is infinite in extent does that mean that the big bang was a local event? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

The Big Bang doesn’t exist and it never existed, nor do cosmologists believe it to have existed. The Big Bang is a point in time defined by a mathematical extrapolation.

An analogy is knowing that the rate of climb for a plane is 700 feet per second. If the plane is at an altitude of 7000 feet. You can extrapolate to a point 10 seconds ago when the plane had an altitude of 0 feet. It doesn’t mean 10 seconds ago that happened. Or at 11 seconds ago the plane was 700 feet below the surface of the Earth. We just just understand that the plane didn’t climb at 700 feet per second for more than 10 seconds.

This is exactly the same as the Big Bang. When physicists or cosmologists or astrophysicists speak about “the Big Bang” they mean “the era of Big Bang cosmology” which is a multi-billion year era where the evolution of the Universe is described by the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker-LeMaitre metric.

The Big Bang being 14 billion years ago tells us that something has to have changed by that point in time.

So there is no “point” where the Big Bang was, it was always an extended volume of space.

So how big was the Universe when it started?

When physicists speak about what came before the era of Big Bang cosmology, it describes it in two phases. The first phase is about explaining the way that the Universe became big, flat and homogeneous enough to support Big Bang cosmology. However, the Universe began, it almost certainly wasn’t nearly homogeneous and flat — that’s just an incredibly unlikely initial condition.

In the early 1980s Guth, Linde, Steinhardt, Albrecht realized that there was a way inside of General Relativity for the Universe to naturally evolve to a state that we observe (nearly homogeneous initial conditions). The amazing thing about this mechanism is that it is almost independent of how the Universe actually started. This mechanism is called inflationary cosmology. I would say that it is confirmed and simply waiting a Nobel prize to be conferred upon it.

Inflation doesn’t address how big the Universe was when it started, it just takes a bumpy Universe and makes it big and smooth. What happened before inflation is known as pre-inflationary cosmology.

Pre-Inflationary Cosmology

What predates inflationary cosmology is very speculative and could explain how big the Universe was when it underwent its era of inflationary cosmology which then led into Big Bang cosmology.

Coleman-Deluccia bubbles is a plausible scenario for what occurred before the inflationary era. Coleman-Deluccia cosmology gives rise to finite size bubbles of new Universes that are infinite in proper-distance (geometry is weird). This is no different than if you remove a point from a sphere, then this finite space can be stretched out to be an infinite plane. Below the North Pole maps out to infinity:

When you have plane, how do you know that it’s not a sphere? In the case of Coleman-Deluccia bubbles, you make little spheres (3-spheres) from the outside, but for people in the bubbles, they’re like infinite planes (3-dimensional planes). So the confusing moral of the story is that the Universe could have started out as a finite sized bubble, but we (as resident inside the bubble) view it as an infinite Universe.

It would be amazing to verify this (or any other) version of pre-inflationary cosmology. Unfortunately, it looks very plausible that inflation will have wiped away all the pre-inflationary information (inflation has a nasty tendency to do that). So we may never know for certain where the Universe came from.

http://www.yahoo.com/news/m/f51861d7-8732-3a03-ac73-9b8bbcc08b56/the-big-bang-was-not-a-single.html (click on the "read more" button to get to the forbes site, the forbes URL won't work on mingle for some reason)

The Big Bang
http://www.big-bang-theory.com/




My Observations & Questions


The Big Bang (Great Expansion)

The idea of the Universe starting out infinitesimally small and expanding to its present size does not work. If you think about the expansion of loose material, not all the material expands at the same rate. While a viewpoint from within the expansion might look to be expanding evenly away from you, different parts are actually expanding faster than others. This pushes your viewpoint off center. You are moving with the expansion.

If you accept the expanding balloon comparison all expansion is moving away from the center of the balloon as it expands. If that is the case, we should be able to detect where that center was, but we cannot.

The Grand Eruption

The way I see it. The time before the current Universe existed was filled with energy at True Absolute Zero. That energy was 'Frozen' (no frequency/vibration). At one point in time (not place) everything everywhere started to move at once (I have no idea what caused the movement). As it heated up, everywhere at once, it started to expand. The expansion initiated everywhere at the same time at below Planck scale. The energy released light as it expanded. Energy coalesced into particles that gained mass and gravity. Nuclear bonds formed and particles became objects. Gravity set those objects to motion. Some of those objects were unstable and exploded sending fragments across the newly forming Universe. Those fragments bonded with other fragments and the cycle continues to repeat. There is no viewpoint because every place is a viewpoint. The Eruption center is not a place, it is a time. We can detect the direction of time. That direction of time is in only one direction. Past to Future.

1. The Hubble Deep Field indicates that light has impacted the detection equipment from a great distance. If light strikes the detector that has traveled 14 billion years to get there then other light from the same source has traveled 14 billion years in all directions from its source. That means that light has a radius of 14 billion years (28 billion year diameter). That diameter is a ball, not a plate.

2. If we were to direct the Hubble Deep Field in any direction, would we get the same results of 14 billion years. Some cosmologists say YES others say NO.

If YES is the answer, that indicates that the Universe origin is everywhere at once. Or, we are not detecting the edge.
If NO is the answer, that indicates that the Universe is expanding in a specific direction.

3. Considering that we are within the Universe there should be a region that is shallower than others. That would be the direction in which the Universe is expanding.

4. Since the Universe appears to us as expanding in all directions the center must be within everything. I'm not saying that humans are the center of the Universe. I am saying that all matter everywhere is.

5. Matter everywhere is moving in all different directions as observed by our detection devices. Therefore location is not the center of the Universe. Time is.

In trying to explain the Universe we are failing to see the picture for the paint. The answer is right there in front of us. Time is the center of the Universe. It is moving from past to future.




The reason science sees the Universe as a ball like this is because our limits of observation restrict us from seeing further. If we were to move our view sideways by 10 billion light years would we still detect a sphere at 14 blys? The stars and galaxies would change but would there still be something to detect?



It is because we are viewing using light as a fixed identifier. With the confirmation of gravitational waves and knowing that light is affected by gravity (gravitational lensing) all light that gets detected is affected. Therefore our current scientific view of the Universe is inaccurate. Until a fixed identifier can be reestablished and the Universe can be remeasured we are stuck with this view.



The Universe may be a twisted multi-dimensional miss-mash of geometric shapes. All of which could hide important facts concerning its nature.


The Cosmic Microwave Background


Again, our view is spherical. Limited by our technology level.

The CMB is riddled with pockets of different densities/temperatures.



The Universe within 1 billion Light Years


The voids in this view are labeled in red. Note that only three voids are named yet there are many other voids shown. Voids are holes in density. They are holes because we do not have the technology to directly determine what exists there. The voids could be full of matter that is not hot enough to radiate light. Or...They may be completely empty. No data does not mean nothing is there.

From what we know about light and time we determine that the Universe began 14 bya. That is because we determine that the faintest light striking the detection equipment has traveled for 14 billion years to reach the detector. What that simply means is that light that is 15 bly has not reached the detector. If we are using the wrong detector our assumptions are inaccurate. If anything is hitting us from 15 billion years ago it invalidates all our assumptions. Since we only have a limited detection ability, we determine the Universe to be 14.7 billion years old.
We see light from all directions at nearly the same age. That is proof that our detection process is limited and proves that our assumptions are wrong.





The Universe is not a separate thing. Everything we can detect is a component part of the Universe. You, me, the dirt, the wind, the air, sound and even our thoughts are part of the Universe.
When we imagine we are outside the Universe looking in on it, the Universe is imagining it, because we are the Universe. When we love, it is the Universe loving. When we create art, it is the Universe creating art. When we dream, the Universe is dreaming.

Since everything is the Universe, when we imagine a place that is outside the Universe part of the Universe expands in that thought. Therefore the Universe is not just matter and energy.

In that we are the Universe, it implies, by reason, that the Universe is sentient because we are sentient. Since we are an insignificant part of it there is great likelihood that there are other sentient parts within it as well. We just haven't met them yet. The sentience of the Universe is the sum of all its sentient parts. Like sensors.
We cannot detect its sentience because we don't have enough data. We cannot talk to the Universe because we are only a part of the whole. The cells on your toenail cannot talk to you either. They may be trying but you can't hear them. You can talk to them but they can't hear you.

Trying to determine the cause of the Universe is like your fingernail trying to determine your birth. If your fingernail had sentience. All in all it really doesn't matter. The Universe is, that's all.

Nice reply, though and informative as always... My only thought is that just because everything is expanding in all directions doesn't necessarily mean there is a center. If the the universe is trillions of years old like I feel it is, then it could mean that it's not expanding, but just following the natural course of gravity as defined by its own course... Our brief time in studying it and our limited field of vision cannot answer this question.... Basically, with our FOV, we are the center of the universe.... Think of it as being on a boat in the middle of the ocean, no matter which way we look, we can only see a 13-14 mile radius...

was the "big bang" a local event
__________________________________________________________________-
Are you talking about the orgy at my house last week?

http://www.setterfield.org/Data_and_Creation/ZPE-Plasma_model.html#dating
Much more enlightening and actually jives with scientific discovery and some of it has been proven in lab. Much of the crap being thrown out STILL has lots of theoretical guesses and supposition.