beginning of big bang/physics questions

[malfunktion]

Science Peoples:

I know this has probably been asked a million times but I was wondering if someone could explain the theory (or theories) behind the beginning point of the big bang on a somewhat novice level. How did spacetime come about? Or is this still completely unexplained?

Ive also heard that the net charge of energy for the universe is zero. Is this true? Does the charge of the energy have anything to do with the "usefullness" of it according to entropy?

Last question, what is meant by "unuseful" energy in terms of entropy? And what effect does this have on the universe long term?

[malfunktion]

edited

[Luciana]

Considering that the three opening posts were exactly the same, and that 2 of them had 0 answers, I have deleted the two other threads named just like this one, in order to avoid confusion.

[Azathoth]

Originally posted by malfunktion
I know this has probably been asked a million times but I was wondering if someone could explain the theory (or theories) behind the beginning point of the big bang on a somewhat novice level. How did spacetime come about? Or is this still completely unexplained?

It is still completely unexplained. There are hypotheses, but they are very speculative.
For example, the Big Bang could be some sort of quantum fluctuation (in what? who knows) allowed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
Or, there are newer ideas that depend on the inflationary model of cosmology that suggest that our universe is just a small bubble that boiled off of a preexisting inflationary universe.
Those previous two examples should be accompanied by frantic hand-waving motions.

Ive also heard that the net charge of energy for the universe is zero. Is this true? Does the charge of the energy have anything to do with the "usefullness" of it according to entropy?

"charge of energy" doesn't make sense to me. The net charge of the universe appears to be zero. This agrees with most theories of cosmology, but it is an experimental result. The electostatic force is so much stronger than the force of gravity that any net charge in the universe would have a noticeable effect.

Last question, what is meant by "unuseful" energy in terms of entropy? And what effect does this have on the universe long term?

If you put a hot thing next to a cold thing, energy (heat) flows from hot to cold. After a while, the temperature evens out and heat stops flowing. This is the state of highest entropy (least amount of useful energy) There is no overall flow of energy, so there is no way to *use* that energy.
A heat engine works by extracting some of the energy that flows from hot to cold. If there is no hot and cold, your heat engine cannot do anything useful.
In the long run, people speak of the 'heat death of the universe', meaning that entropy will be at a maximum, and everything will basically be at the same temperature. Even though there is thermal energy, there is no way to extract useful work from it. Everything will be in a boring equilibrium state.

[Iamme]

Hi Malfunktion. It might interest you that in a Discover Magazine from perhaps one-two years ago, the cover article was about some guy figured out that it's possible to have everything start from nothing. He figured it out, I believe from what I remember, mathematically.

This whole issue that things just can't come from nothing, as Creationists argue, is the crux of the entire debate, about the Big Bang. They always argue that when a scientist says that all matter and mass was the size of a pinhead (that always gets an 'oh, sure' look, in it's own right)...they want to know where THAT came from. Well, this scientist/mathemetician? claims he figured it out, and tells alll about it in the article. Too bad I couldn't understand what the guy was talking about!

:D

If I can dig more up on this, I'll let you know.

[Iamme]

Malfunktion---Just got back from Yahoo. I asked it "spontaneous creation theory". Click into the first site there. A good read. Then, either click into the included site by the name I will list/ ask search engine "Hawking-Turok Instanton theory". This is what you are looking for. They will get into the Big bang and how there was creation from nothing, before the Big Bang.

[jan]

Originally posted by Azathoth
"charge of energy" doesn't make sense to me.

Perhaps it should read "change of (amount of) energy"?

[rockoon]

One theory (Hawkings) is that of a single massive particle.. temporarily named the instanton (http://web.uvic.ca/~jtwong/Hawking-Turok.htm) which lasts only an instant and decays into an expanding universe.

Another is the ekpyrotic (http://feynman.princeton.edu/~steinh/npr/) theory which proposes that some N-dimensional membranes collided resulting in an expanding universe.

Any others?

[Eos of the Eons]

I'm always wondering about our perception. We can see some 'recycling' going on in the universe and that none of the masses of bodies and any matter stays the same ever.

Can you imagine a concept of no beginning and no end? No start, no finish? The universe going on forever since space is (space itself, not the particles in it from quarks to suns) essentially nothing. Nothing can't end or begin.

All the matter floating around in this nothingness had to come from somewhere? Big Bang? Aren't there big bangs going on all the time out there in the universe? Some galaxies are older than others and there is no end of those either.

What if it was just always here? There was no big bang to make everything in the universe? There was just stuff floating around in nothing forever and ever and ever. Suns burning and dying or going Nova, planets forming and being destroyed in what ever manner.Galaxies expanding and collapsing.


Can we imagine no beginning of any sort? Just all that stuff floating around in space forever and ever?

[peptoabysmal]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
I'm always wondering about our perception. We can see some 'recycling' going on in the universe and that none of the masses of bodies and any matter stays the same ever.

Can you imagine a concept of no beginning and no end? No start, no finish? The universe going on forever since space is (space itself, not the particles in it from quarks to suns) essentially nothing. Nothing can't end or begin.

All the matter floating around in this nothingness had to come from somewhere? Big Bang? Aren't there big bangs going on all the time out there in the universe? Some galaxies are older than others and there is no end of those either.

What if it was just always here? There was no big bang to make everything in the universe? There was just stuff floating around in nothing forever and ever and ever. Suns burning and dying or going Nova, planets forming and being destroyed in what ever manner.Galaxies expanding and collapsing.


Can we imagine no beginning of any sort? Just all that stuff floating around in space forever and ever?

I still like the original Alan Guth explanation. I know it is mostly being modified now, but I love the logical simplicity of it. It makes the more sense to me that the universe was manifested from nothing than it does to think that it was manifested from some super dense singularity of matter that somehow exploded.

Imagine this: That possibly outside our universe there is absolutely nothing, zero dimensions. I don't mean empty space, I mean absolutely nothing and nowhere. From that perspective, wherever you are, you are in the exact center of the universe, because every atom is in the same coordinate space from a zero dimensional perspective. The perception of distance and time could be merely our perspective, but we actually exist in many dimensions, giving the illusion of space and time. Or not, who knows?

[Dancing David]

EoE and Pepto, they both come to the same conclusion don't they an infinite recursion of expanding universes?

Malfunktion:
Perhaps reading up on why the theory came about would be useful.
1. there was this guy named Hubble who decided to do spectographs of the distant galaxies and lo and behold he noticed that the spectral lines were shiftd for the galaxies and that if he tried to estimate the distance of the galaxies and plot it against the spectral shift, he got a straight line, indicating that the farther the galaxies were the more shift they had.

2. the bright people decided that this must be because that the universe was expanding and that for some reason the farther apart you were the more you were receding from each other. Although there could be other reasons for this, they are eliminated.

3. Somebody else thought, wow if all these things are receding from each other, then wow, what if we run the movie backwards? And so came about the notion of the Big Bang (or the Big Band), as the movie goes backward some really hot things happen. All of the forces begin to combine with each other and all the particles too, sort of like the Peace-able Kingdom for physics. Alot of modern cosmology in fact is about the the time shortly after the Big Band started to play and how it worked. What is really cool is that the amount of hydrogen, helium and lithium works out to a nucleo-sysnthesis from the time of the Big Band.

In between there was this thing called the Steady State Universe which has fallen out of favor, where the universe expands but matter is destroyed at the edges and recreated in the center of the universe.

There are also some bright folks who now suggest that maybe the Big Bang was COLD and that it wasn't much of a bang as a pop.

There is this real bright guy named Alan Guth, he compared the expanding universe to freezing water, you have pockets where the water is not freezing but super cooled. What if the universe was similar? In that you have this expanding energy/space/time and that some of it begins to condense/freeze but other parts of it are still expanding. Some really cool things ensue, like the foamy structure of the universe and the potential for infinitely recursive expanding universes.

Hope that helps. ;)

Timothy Ferris wrote a book called

The Whole Shebang

which is not a great book but is a great introduction.

[Eos of the Eons]

What about the observance that some galaxies are moving towards us, and others are moving away. Doesn't that turn the 'expanding' uviverse on its nose?

I don't believe there was one big bang, and i certainly don't believe that the universe is expanding from some central point, nor is it likely that mass goes 'inside' at the edges of the universe and it all is reappearing in the middle of the universe.

Sure there are galaxies farther and farther away from us, but how do we all know what direction each is moving in and what rate of movement? There are billions and billions of galaxies and no observable end of them from our limited viewpoint.

I don't believe there is an edge of the universe, or a middle...

And we really know nothing about any of all this for sure, so yeah I could be dead wrong. I just say that our 'observances' are so limited as to be unable to make any conclusions at this point.

[jan]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
What about the observance that some galaxies are moving towards us, and others are moving away. Doesn't that turn the 'expanding' uviverse on its nose?

No. There may be some galaxies in our neighborhood that are aproching us, but the overall impression is still that everybody is running away from us, and the faster the more they are away.


I don't believe there was one big bang, and i certainly don't believe that the universe is expanding from some central point, ...


You don't have to assume that the universe is expanding from one central point. It is expanding everywhere. If you need a metapher, imagine this: you have a balloon with little dots painted on it. Every dot represents a galaxy. Now you inflate the balloon. The distance between two galaxies becomes larger and larger. From the perspective of one galaxy, all galaxies are heading away. But of course none of the dots is special. They all have this same impression of being the center of expansion.


...nor is it likely that mass goes 'inside' at the edges of the universe and it all is reappearing in the middle of the universe.


As far as I remember, the model was more like assuming an universe of infinite size, expanding, with new matter appearing everywhere, but in such small quantities that you don't have a chance to observe it.


Sure there are galaxies farther and farther away from us, but how do we all know what direction each is moving in and what rate of movement? There are billions and billions of galaxies and no observable end of them from our limited viewpoint.


Yes, but we do know what a star should look like that is fusing H to He, and we can pretty well infer from its red shift how fast it is approching or moving away. The tricky thing is to determinate how far away stars/galaxies are: is it a large far away one, or a near small one? But although this is tricky, it can be solved (for example, there are some sorts of stars having a standard size, so if we know how big they appear to be, we know how far away they are).

[Eos of the Eons]

Well, at least that all is a little more informative, but of course if everything is expanding...they are saying the universe is constantly getting bigger...but what if it's just not because it never ends, and something that never ends can't grow or shrink...it just is...

or is it that there is just more and more matter out of 'nowhere'?

or, If it all just is, then there is already all the matter that will ever exist, so everything is just getting farther and farther apart? Expanding forever into the nothing that never ends?

[jan]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
...or, If it all just is, then there is already all the matter that will ever exist, so everything is just getting farther and farther apart? Expanding forever into the nothing that never ends?

Yes, this is almost what the most favoured model says. It is assumed that the universe has an infinite size (and is filled everywhere), but things are getting farther and farther away. If you go back in time, you arive at a point of infinite density, the Big Bang.

There are some variations. One variation would be that the universe is not infinite, but is like the surface of a ball: if you go straight in one direction, you will end where you started (other possibilities would be a hyperbolic infinite universe, or even a hyperbolic finite universe, but let's go easy to start with it). It could also be possible that some day the expansion of the universe becomes slower and slower and eventually reverse, and everything collapses into the Big Crunch. But as far as we know, those variations are not as likely as the orthodox model.

[Eos of the Eons]

Yeah, I can't see it as a ball, cause balls aren't infinite. The collapse thing really doesn't sound reasonable either. But if everything is expanding, then they started out expanding from some original point, which I can't see either.

I'm totally in with the infinity though.

Thanks for all that!

[Iamme]

Eos---I am with YOU on your theories. I have thought your way for years. But so have astrophysicists considered this. They know more than you and I. They claim that matter in the universe was NOT always here, simply rearranging itself. All we can do, Eos, is take their word for it.

I believe it is quite philosophically logical to believe that since we KNOW that stars are out there BILLIONs of light years away (The distance would be approximately 13-15 billion times 6 trillion miles!!!!) As long as we know it's out THIS far...heck...why isn't it just going on forever?

What logic would there be to have some size that gets out to this many miles and just quits? Why? It sounds more 'heady', philosophical, perhaps logical, to look at magnatism, how the positive loops around and chases the negative, forever....that similarly, you look deeper and deeper INTO an object, into the subatomic...deeper, and deeper,,,and deeper until...you are into infinitygoing the OTHER direction into space. Like the whole thing circles around and meets itself, like the N and S poles of magnetism.

But, these scisntists claim all matter decays and that it all ends. Thus, it had a beginning. They say.

But maybe there was always some form of non-matter energy always here. THIS I don't know about nor can remember reading any theories/counter theories on this.

I tried to find the Discover magazine where that guy formulated how something came out of COMPLETE vacuum nothingness, and I can't find it. I lent out some of the issues + some neighbor kid destroyed some of the covers and because it was a cover feature story...well...I'd have to literally thumb through all these issues. A person could e-mail Discover magazine and ask them what issue that was in. It was in an issue from I'd say 8 months to 2 years ago, max.

And, for all science-curious people...you are missing out on a lot of good stuff if you don't subscrbe to Discover magazine. Heck...you're missing out on their back page 'brain bogglers' that humble you to think you are a complete moron.:D

[jan]

Originally posted by Iamme
Eos---I am with YOU on your theories. I have thought your way for years. But so have astrophysicists considered this. They know more than you and I. They claim that matter in the universe was NOT always here, simply rearranging itself. All we can do, Eos, is take their word for it.


No, I think this is far too pessimistic. You don't have to take their word for it, you can ask me :wink:. But perhaps you shouldn't start with the newest and weirdest theory, like inflation.


Eos of the Eons,

try to imagine an infinite plane with a lattice on it. Two neighboring points on this lattice may be one inch apart (so a lattice point and his second next neighbour are two inches away, and so on). Now the plane starts to expand, and the lattice with it, until two neighbouring lattice points are now two inches away (and a lattice point and his second next neighbour are now four inches away, the next point is six inches away, and so on).

Usually, if something grows, it grows within a larger context. But there is no outside reference for our plane with the lattice. If you feel more comfortable with it, you may imagine one lattice point being the center of the expansion, not moving at all, while all the other points move. But as long as you don't have any reference outside the plane, there is no way to decide which point this center point is. And since you don't need this center point, and the mathematics stay the same if you go without a center, it is of no use to insist that there must be a center point.

[TillEulenspiegel]

Originally posted by malfunktion
Science Peoples:

I know this has probably been asked a million times but I was wondering if someone could explain the theory (or theories) behind the beginning point of the big bang on a somewhat novice level. How did spacetime come about? Or is this still completely unexplained?

Ive also heard that the net charge of energy for the universe is zero. Is this true? Does the charge of the energy have anything to do with the "usefullness" of it according to entropy?

Last question, what is meant by "unuseful" energy in terms of entropy? And what effect does this have on the universe long term?

The hardest phrase explorers can utter is : "I don't know"
That is not a bad thing, in fact in keeping with the scientific method, It is a real affirmation of the true nature of science.

I have my beliefs, but I am not an expert. The opinions of experts demonstrate an informed opinion based on mathematical models, that does not make them correct.

The summery of your quest is based on the most exaggerated of extremes.... Unbelievable amounts of energy and in a time frame that is almost immeasurable that occurred Billions of years ago, in time slices of billionth of seconds. So that is by itself is a trial by fire even for those who "know".
So rest assured if You feel the need to know there are many at the top of thier field who share Your need.to know. Maybe we'll find out.
No one knows.

[Dancing David]

It is all speculation thats for sure, our modern version of the turtles on the elephants.

The universe is so huge, thats what I think is cool, just so freaking immense.

[peptoabysmal]

Originally posted by Eos of the Eons
Yeah, I can't see it as a ball, cause balls aren't infinite. The collapse thing really doesn't sound reasonable either. But if everything is expanding, then they started out expanding from some original point, which I can't see either.

I'm totally in with the infinity though.

Thanks for all that!

You obviously didn't know Jedi Knight - Sorry couldn't resist ;)

Keep in mind that an origin point may be only an origin point from our perspective. The universe may be just one of a great number of universes, perhaps even occupying the same space, but never interacting.

[rockoon]

Actualy the only reason to believe it all expanded from a single point is occams razor. Imagining the universe 15 billion years ago is still only imagination. There is no actual evidence of it.

[jan]

Originally posted by rockoon
Actualy the only reason to believe it all expanded from a single point is occams razor. Imagining the universe 15 billion years ago is still only imagination. There is no actual evidence of it.

I would like to disagree. There are different models how things developed after the big bang, those models have consequences, and you can test wether these consequences hold. For example, it turns out that some models predict that the universe is younger than its oldest stars, which is of course a bit odd, while others are not refutated that way. All big bang theories predict a background noise as a remnant of earlier times. And since this background noise can be observed, it is evidence. A stady-state theory has to be able to explain that background noise, and prefereably without an ad hoc hypothesis. I don't know of any stady-state theory that has a convincing explanation for this, but on the other hand, I certainly am not an expert of stady state theories.

Of course you can always come up with some kind of yound-earth-theory ("god made it all look like big bang"), but in such a case, Occam indeed would come handy.

[rockoon]

Originally posted by jan


I would like to disagree. There are different models how things developed after the big bang, those models have consequences, and you can test wether these consequences hold.

Thats what we do. And its not proof of anything. Otherwise we would have 'proven' relativity with all the tests we have done. But we haven't.. relativity stands out due to occams razor. There are an infinite number of theories which can explain the same measurements we have taken. The same is true for the big bang hypothesis. The ekpyrotic theory comes to mind as an alternate explanation that hasnt been disproven experimentally.

If string theory holds out I believe the big bang theory will eventualy be understood to be untrue and that the ekpyrotic theory will explain more over the long haul. On the other hand maybe string theory wont hold out.

In either case we will adopt the simplest model that describes the most observations. Thats how occams razor is applied and why we havent 'accepted' any alternatives as being more likely to be true (yet).

[jan]

Originally posted by rockoon

Thats what we do. And its not proof of anything.


I never claimed we proofed anything. I think the questions was if all theories, certain stady-state theories for instance, are equally likely, or whether you have to believe a scientific theory on faith, or whether science is indistinguishable from mythology. The word I used was evidence. If you prefer, I can repeat myself, using technical terms like "corroborated".

Originally posted by rockoon

In either case we will adopt the simplest model that describes the most observations. Thats how occams razor is applied and why we havent 'accepted' any alternatives as being more likely to be true (yet).

No. Science does not only develop theories to explain our observations. Usually, a scientific theory makes new predictions about new kinds of observations nobody ever asked for to be explained. Not very parsimonious. You may describe this in terms of Occam's razor, but that description is not very accurate.