Autonemesis

No, it's not. It's a fundamental property of the universe, called Planck time. If you want to be literate in this kind of discussion, go look it up.


No, it's not.

Now you're babbling. This is nonsense talk, a bunch of quasi-technical words strung together by someone who has no idea what they mean.

As I told you, the universe sprang into existence (already expanding like a mother-effer) when it was already 10^-43 second old. That's the big bang - the fact that the universe was expanding when it started. Running the clock backwards, the Planck time at 10^-43 second is where it "fades" to nothingness - including the clock. Nothingness is surely not tied to any physicality, and doesn't need to have a beginning, so we can say nothing caused the Universe to exist, and we have hard data to back it up!

Where's the hard data for your God? He seems to hide from scientific inquiry. I wonder why?

Answerer

Magus, you can't even define nothing. So how are you going to convince us that you are rgiht?

Bersec

Ok, I think I understand what Magus is asking. Actually, there is a theory that complements the Big Bang. The universe is currently expanding, there is plenty of data to support that. Also by the rate and direction of expansion, all matter came from a single point. As far as we cal tell the expansion will continue forever until you cannot see the galaxies any more (they will eventually be too far apart for light to reach). UNLESS the expansion halts. Right now the unknown variable that can stop the expansion is the dark matter (we are just beginning to understand and grasp the concept). If there is enough dark matter out there, the expansion will eventually stop and material will start to contract and eventually collapse into a singularity again (picture black holes eating other black holes until there is a single black hole left…a singularity!). There are many physicists actually working on this scenario. If it is proven, then that means that the universe goes thru cycles of explosion, expansion, and collapse for eons and eons…

Magus55

Kind bud, you don't have hard evidence for the Big Bang, you have speculative evidence and assumption - since we can't go back in time to the point of the big bang, you can never claim it as a fact.

And matter can't destroy or create itself, and it had to have a beginning so the Big Bang to me is just as lame an idea as you think God is. But whatever, don't really care, I don't believe in the Big Bang just like you don't believe in God.

Main Entry: en·er·gy
Pronunciation: 'e-n&r-jE
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -gies
Etymology: Late Latin energia, from Greek energeia activity, from energos active, from en in + ergon work -- more at WORK
Date: 1599
1 a : dynamic quality <narrative energy> b : the capacity of acting or being active <intellectual energy>
2 : vigorous exertion of power : EFFORT <investing time and energy>
3 : the capacity for doing work
4 : usable power (as heat or electricity); also : the resources for producing such power

eh

Well there is no guarantee that the universe would bounce back, but it can't be discounted. Maybe Tim Thompson can comment on something related to the big crunch that came up recently.

A couple of months ago, someone posted a link to an article about the possibility of a dynamic cosmological constant. Apparently if supersymmetry is the correct approach to quantum physics, the cosmological constant can go from having a positive value, to zero and then towards a negative value. That, the article claimed, would cause the universe to contract and possibly end in a singularity.

Any comments?

Autonemesis

I showed you links to the MAP images. If you'd read it you'd know we can look back in time. That the big bang happened is apparent as the moon revolving around the Earth, and the Earth around the Sun. This is not some simulation or extrapolation. This has been observed and imaged. There is no question anymore that at a time in the past - now measured more accurately than ever before - the universe was compact, hot and expanding extremely rapidly, much more rapidly than it is now.

Then get lost. Quit wasting our time.

That's the definition that applies in a physics context, not the other one.

DMB

Magus: perhaps you'd like to explain how your god, who is non-physical, is able to exert any sort of influence on the physical universe that is under discussion.

Xianity claims to be accessible to just about anyone. Cosmological physics doesn't. For a start, you have to know a lot of mathematics. You don't need faith to "believe in" the Big Bang. You need a lot of knowledge, which clearly you don't have. Unlike xianity, physics is not claiming anything that anyone needs to believe on faith. The results are there for anyone to examine with the correct tools.

Also unlike xianity, physics does not require that you accept any particular model. The term "Big Bang" was a pejorative one coined by a proponent of a rival theory that at one time looked equally plausible. But physicists, although they are only human and may like the feel of one theory more than another, know that theories stand or fall on evidence. So they keep looking for new evidence. And they don't just look for confirmatory evidence; they look for evidence that will shatter aspects of a theory. As we type this stuff, some physicists are producing theories that challenge accepted ideas such as Special Relativity. That's how science works. It's not a bit how religion works.

ex-xian

Your making some unsupported assumptions here. First of all (and this was pointed out before), the laws of physics and principles of cause and effect are only applicable to this universe. I do disagree that before t=0 there was nothing, but before t=0, there was nothing in this particular temporal/spatial universe.

Second, the big bang did not come out of nothing. Go read a few books by Hawking or popularzations of quantum physics.

Friar Bellows

Magus55, did you actually visit those links (and read and understand the material contained therein) that Tim Thompson pointed you to? In other words are you actually interested in learning something about the Big Bang theory? I would guess not, because I've been reading stuff like those links for years, and I'm still learning new things about this fascinating subject. But maybe you're a genius and I'm just stupid.

Jesse

Magus55:
That still doesn't solve the problem of where the matter and energy came from. If there was nothing before the big bang, and the instant it exploded, matter was there , how did the matter get there from nothing?

As I've already said, the "Big Bang theory" refers almost entirely to the idea that the universe has been expanding from a superdense state, not about what happened at the instant of t=0, whether all the matter and energy "came from nothing", whether it was really the beginning of time, etc. Physicists know that general relativity will probably break down in the first 10^-43 seconds, that you'll need a theory of quantum gravity to deal with that, so they're agnostic about what was happening before that time. The 'Big Bang' is just a theory of the subsequent expansion. Got it?