Part 1 of 2 on the question that has kept scientists arguing for years - mostly because it belongs in the realm of philosophy. Lots of humour is this take on the topic.
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There are a few people here who have a knack of jolting me out of my usual Gather induced torpor and getting me interested in starting discussions on the really interesting questions. Not so long ago Ann M. volunteered to be my muse by floating a question about what might have been going on in the universe before the Big Bang.
It is a question theoretical physicists cannot answer, mainly because they cannot agree on whether there actually was an event that might be called a big bang or not, and then on the pro-bang side of the argument, what the big bang might have been. I cannot answer either, but maybe I can offer some though provoking ideas.
Before Big Bang, Part 1: The Cosmic Mouse Turd.
Did anything exist before The Big Bang?
The problem science has with a pre big-bang Universe is that according to the equations of the theorists, a Universe could not have existed before such an event as it is the beginning of all things. Thus we find big-bang science getting close to religious creationism in that it proposes an absolute starting point.
This is where a poet and fiction writer has an advantage over scientists. Our minds can wander into the regions beyond time and space and consider that which is unscientific.
The most popular of the beginning of time theories proposes that before the big bang, which was actually more of a shwoooom than a BANG!!!, the whole Universe was compressed into a pellet of matter the size of a mouse turd. More serious science writers do not use the mouse turd analogy of course, they are more inclined to say a pellet of matter the size of a grain of sand or salt. Now that is just silly, the entire universe, consisting of an estimated hundred billion galaxies each with up to a hundred billion solar systems according to Compton's Online Encyclopaedia, could not possibly be squeezed so small an object. A mouse turd is much more realistic, not that reality has a lot to do with the theory.
Sharper minded realists among you will have already asked the question, "but what was in all the space outside the mouse turd?"
Many scientists try to evade this question. Press them though and they will patiently, as if talking to a dull witted child, try to explain that there was nothing outside. The mouse turd was everything. Space was compressed into it along with all the solid stuff and gas and dust, water, cheese, potatoes, Daniel O' Donnell records and everything. Time was in there as well, all collapsed and bundled up. There was nothing outside the mouse turd.
There's more to Space than empty space.
But space is nothing isn't it. Nothing is space. So where was all that nothing. After all no matter how complex the advanced mathematics of the theoretical physicists, if you take away nothing from nothing you sill have nothing. Space.
Space is fascinating, there is actually more space in stuff that there is stuff. Everything is made of atoms which consist of a very tiny nucleus of solid matter around which a number of electrons, also tiny particles of matter, are orbiting. That is all atoms are, except for a lot of energy; atoms, like those desperate wannabes who turn up on TV talent shows seem to have an inexhaustible supply of energy. Between the nucleus and the electrons is space but not space we can move through. This article is not about the workings of atoms so readers wanting to know more will find links to progressive science websites in the reading list appended. It is only important that readers of this article understand everything in the universe is made of atoms.
Matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. It could not have popped into existence when the cosmic mouse turd exploded nor could it ever disappear when the universe comes to an end. This is where the grain of salt / sand theory and with it the big bang starts to collapse. How does all that everything come into being. Maybe The Great Creator said "piff,paff,poof," and pulled it all out of a top hat, or perhaps the great scientist had packed the cosmic mouse turd with magic space dust that when mixed with hydrogen reproduces itself.
The real problem with all the big bang theories is that they are too obviously a device dreamed up by scientists because theoretical physics is based on mathematics and mathematics needs a common starting point; zero. You can go up or down from zero but not sideways and to understand pre big bang, or pre time I should perhaps say we need to go sideways from zero. There is no more evidence for the big bang, big shwooom or whatever than there is for the ancient creation myths.
Why do we need to go sideways?
A trip to Andromeda.
Consider how we measure our universe. The two criteria are distance through space and time, which curiously, rather arrogantly, we measure by the rotating of our insignificant little blue planet as it orbits its insignificant little star in a remote corner of the milky way. The main star of the Andromeda constellation, one of the stars of celestial navigation, is a hundred light years from earth, the distance covered in 100 years by light travelling at 186,000 miles per second. The numbers are too mind boggling to mean anything to us. Time too ceases to mean anything. So does time really exist?
According to the theoreticians the only place in the universe time does not exist in the centre of a black hole. There nothing at all can exist, time disappears. This is called a singularity. In order to understand a singularity we need to experience one. When younger I experienced several, usually on the way home from the pub of a Friday night.
When looking at Andromeda we see light emitted by those stars when Teddy Roosevelt was President of the U.S.A, King Edward VII reigned in Britain and Kaiser Wilhelm II was steering Germany towards World War I. Even a hundred Earth years later there are very few people alive who remember those characters. To have even the vaguest personal memories of any, one would have to be at least a hundred and five years old.
Andromeda is a near neighbour in the cosmos. The most distant stars, the light emitted by whole galaxies so distant they appear to our most powerful telescopes as mere pinpoints, are estimated to be over 10 billion light years away. Our planet did not even exist when that light began its journey, There is no way we can be sure how far away the object we are seeing actually is, nor if what we are seeing is indeed an object. Time and space are artifices created by humans and are meaningless outside our solar system. We are only just beginning to be able to contemplate travelling to planets beyond our immediate neighbours.
How do we know the distant galaxies are over ten billion years old? We don't, its another guess.
The Redshift Conundrum
The age of stars is estimated by what astrophysicists call redshift. Visible light is a form of electromagnetic energy and governed by the same natural laws. Red shift means that as the light-frequency energy from a star travels through space its wavelength increases, moving the visible light towards the less energised red end of the spectrum.
Redshift is the basis of another cosmic theory, that the galaxies move away from each other at the speed of light. By measuring the redshift, astrophysicists estimate the distance we are from stars and thus estimate the age of stars. If the galaxies are indeed moving apart and the most distant ones detected by the Hubble telescope is indicated by its redshift measurement to be ten billion years old, then they could not have been where they appear to be ten billion years ago unless they are not part of the universe created by Big Bang.
Do those scientific measurements mean anything? Think about the comparatively short journey from Andromeda. We simply do not know what has happened to the light on its way to us. Has it been reflected off dust clouds, distorted as it passed through different gases or even water vapour? We just do not know though we can make some educated guesses over distances of one hundred light years. Ten billion light years is a very different matter. The energy we are seeing could have been emitted
by something completely outside our experience.
This is why we need to move sideays from zero. We cannot look forward or back with any certainty, to understand our universe we need to be able to step outside now and observe it from a distance to see the big picture.
We will do that in Part 2.
Further Reading.
Big Bang Theory - Conventional View
Big Bang or Damp Squib - An Alternative Cosmology
Also check out: Is Religion the biggest threat to rationality?
Another example of thinking outside the bubble - this time in politics
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Comments: 48
There certasinly IS a part 2, but nobody is going to hold a gun to your head and force you to read it.
We will never resolve the conflict between science and religion, basically science is about knowledge while religion is about money and power.
Simple logic tells us there had to be something even if we can never possibly know what it was.
Part 2, where we look at the flaws in our understanding of time, will be along tomorrow, I'll give you a nudge.
I'm not going to post a spoiler to part 2 of my own article. The bang teheory makes sense but the big part, i.e. it was the beginning of everything, is not a sustainable argument.
http://www.cix.co.uk/~antcom/mtl.html
Then you do not have to worry about the so-called "beginning" and the so-called "end" or really at so-called "point in time". Also, it's fun to make and play with a mobius strip. The theory is advantageous at a number of levels.
If I can find my rabbit bowel theory, I'll post it here.
Mobius provided the theory for Doctor Who and every Doctor Who fan knows when we go time tripping in our TARDIS we must not interfere with past events or it could have disastrous consequences.
Mobius had a decent theory and it can be fun to play with, but where is the mouse turd?
I'll stick with Immanuel Kant as least until I move on to quantum enganglement.
We will be most interested to offer peer reviews on your rabbit bowel theory.
Well, if you'd like to see if we could meld these two theories into a tight little bundle, you could liken the Mobius Strip to a fly strip - perhaps it has a nice little mouse turd stuck to it.
Any good husband knows this to be true in relation to inquiries about their wife's former boyfriends.
The star you are referring to that is 100 light years away may be one in our own galaxy that is the visual field where Andromeda is located. Dunno.
Galaxies are not moving away from us at the speed of light. Nothing is moving at the speed of light except light itself. Einstein's equations say that anything moving at the speed of light would have infinite mass, so it would take an infinite force to push it to that speed. Galaxies are moving away from us at a PORTION of the speed of light, and the red shift is caused by the Doppler Effect, just like the sound of a receding train or airplane falls in frequency. Lower frequency light is redder...shifted towards the infrared. The guy who discovered the red shift is the astronomer Edwin Hubble, and what he found is that the amount of red shift is proportional to the distance to the receding galaxy. And lastly, it is NOT a guess. It is based on measuring the apparent brightness of some very bright objects of known intrinsic brightness in distant galaxies.
If you want to know more about Andromeda, here is a Wiki link.
My "theory" is that, rather than moving sideways, we have a negative trend before the bang (actually, how could it make any sound, Bang or Schwoom in a vacuum - sorry, digression) wherein, someone, much like my husband, decided to pack the universe into as small a package as possible for traveling. Over time, he managed to compress it into about the size of a mouse turd (which is totally doable by my husband, believe me). Satisfied, and before he decided to try for grain-of-sand size, he took a nap. Meanwhile, his four year old son (or suitable analog) decided to take a whiz on it where upon it began expanding back to its original size. Covered in urine.
When I was a little boy, I remember finding some little round balls on the ground outside. "Don't touch those, that's from a bunny rabbit", warned my mom. But if that's true, how did they get so perfectly round? this was really cool.
I went back into the house to find something to solve this mystery. I found the ice cream scoop in the kitchen drawer, and walked back out to where my tonka trucks were building a road.
Satisfied, I returned to the kitchen, inspecting the little curved windshield wiper device on the scooper.
I never did catch a rabbit, so that I could turn it over, and see if I was right or not.
But the next time you think about the shape of the universe, getting bigger but at a slower rate, think also about the ice cream scoop theory.
Watch out for a black hole, a long drop onto a lawn somewhere, and then drying up and becoming compost.
It's dark in here.
But it is even harder for me to swallow the Creationist idea that some bearded fellow (why isn't it a woman?) waved a wand or something, and presto! we're all here!
Truth is, nobody has a clue how this all started, but the God idea is a cop out. Basically, it says, "I can't figure this out, so God did it." And then, having decided that, I can relax and quit thinking about it, and spend my time proselytizing others to convince them to believe the same inane idea.
I would rather continue to struggle to understand this grand and glorious Cosmos, and our place in it. Even though I do not understand how it came to be. that does not mandate the existence of a supernatural father figure who did it all with magic.
Hmm, enquiries about wives' ex boyfriends? Well yes that kind of information should stay in the past so long as enquiries about husbands' ex girlfriends do too. This is especially true now that websites like Friends Reunited are so well known.
Andromeda I got wrong because my encyclopedia on a CD is 10 years old. It seems astronomers have now decided the star formerly known as Andromeda Nebula is in fact a galaxy. Apparently it contains ten balck holes.
I agree with your science and stand by my own. You see the point I was making in all this is if I check out 6 sources, one will back your viewpoint, one will back mine and the rest will propose other theories.
It is pointless being too meticulous in checking data when posting an article like this, the whole point of the article is that actually we understand very little of the nature of the universe. Were I to check all the possinilities and present them with equal emphasis I would write a million words and still nobody would be any wiser.
When we talk of millions of light years, if I recall correctly and assuming the spped of light is constant though once outside our solar system this is by no means certain, light waves travel at arounf 6 TRILLION miles a year. It is meaningless. The canary islands are about 1500 miles from Britain, I've been there but cannot imaginme 1500 miles. Astronauts can because they have stepped away from earth sideways and so have been able to see Britain and The Canary Islands. And yet their perception is invalid because they are removed from the reference points by which we estimate distance.
I know one theoretical physicist Mick, and know of another, Irish comedian Dara O'Briain who have both turned their back on the subject having realised it is enritely meaningless and all the scientific theories are backed not by evidence but by mathematical modelling based on too many assumptions. Mick declined to join this thread as he has seen the level of religious debate and havind converted to Islam after giving up science and devoted his life to its study, he did not feel he would be very welcome here.
Dara O'Briain at Myspace
Dara O'Briain clip on You Tube
But as I said, allowing for the fact that I did not double check my data, knowing that any second source would probably contradict my first, I stand by my article. Its point is not to prove the accuracy of the science but to show the "science" in this field of study is no more real that Middle Earth in Lord of the Rings.
Its a pity it was my friends (who should know me better) walked into the trap. I was hoping to catch someone I could string along for a couple of hundred comments :-)
I was not aiming to define anything but simply to show how ridiculous all these theories are
Sheryl,
As my editor Bert would expect me to write as boringly as others on this topic. Big Bang science you see is like religion, you pick your favourite theory and try to convince everyone else.
My position is that Big Bangers are doing exactly what primitive humans did and dreaming up stories (they'd rather I said theories but I say stories) that offer some reason for our being. We're here, we don't know how we got here, we don't know how long we will be here, we don't know what happens after we have all left. Lets hope the last person to leave Earth remembers to turn off the lights.
As I tried to illustrate with the line from Kant, time and space are simply human consructs and have no meaning without humans to measure them. The question is how many of us are sane enough to deal with it.
I love the urine theory, but are you saying the universe was not compressed into a mouse turd but a Pot Noodle.
We could be onto something there.
Your theory stands up against any of the "scientific ones. Good thing you are not British though, as those perfect little round balls from Rabbits get called "currants" here - which has led many a lively minded kid into a very unpleasant experience.
I don't think you would get any argument about that, Ian. But the fact is that those are the parameters, along with language and our limited physical senses, with which we construct our definition and understanding of everything. Why should space and the origin of the universe be any different? Is it any less valid to describe the history of the Grand Canyon in terms of time, space, matter, etc?
Exactly, all the so called science is spurious, big bang is just a mathematical device to provide a point zero from which everything is measured. There can be no boundary fence around infinity and no clocks can measure eternity.
Thanks for the laugh.
Though the millions of years it took to form are beyond imagining the grand canyon can be examined close up, we can analyse the composition of the rocks etc. and we have data with which to compare.
Once we get outside our solar system we have no idea what is going on. What are conditions in space like outside our galaxy, does light travel at a constant speed in a vacuum or does it apparently slow down due to the waves elongating as the redshift supporters claim?
Beyond those regions we can study the rules do not exist.
Examine the big picture Sheryl, in this area scientists are as adept at ignoring inconvenient facts as religionists.
An infinite universe is the only answer. There was no nice, scientifically convenient beginning. Its no big deal, there are plenty of questions here on earth we will probably never know the answer to. How the F did Dubya ever get elected? for instance.
But, your argument would mean that we can never intuit from results what the causes were based on our experiences. That would knock quite a bit of science completely off the block. Would you then argue that there is no basis for electrons since we can never actually VIEW them with our senses, but must intuit their behavior and structure from the observed results?
Since engineers and the rest of the world hear point values (or occasionally mean values), they often don't realize that the modelers are actually giving a value like 450 (with an uncertainty of 80%) - the uncertainty's unvoiced and certainly sucks a lot of confidence out of that 450 number but no one knows. (Nor is an uncertainty of 80% ridiculous - I've seen uncertainties described as "an order of magnitude" [+/-10X] on models we're making life and death decisions with. Scary!)
"Everything you know is wrong"
We can view electrons with instruments that are here within out time and space. But how big are electrons? Does string theory hold up - there is a big argument going on about it in the scientific community right now. There is even a theory that holds every atom is actually as big as whole universe. And that ties in with a line in the Druidic writings that is echoed in the Rig Veda. "The Oneness is so great that all other things are contained within it and yet so small its whole is contained within the smallest thing."
Which would not make much sense except it seems to predict Peter Higgs theoretical sub atomic particle the boson or "God Particle" that is thought to be the source of gravity.
The point about The Grand Canyon is that we experience it in the now and by observing actual events as they happen we can extrapolate trends and guess what might have happened in the past. The past before documentation is pure speculation though.
But when we have to rely on such a ludicrous artifice as The Big Bang then we can't possibly refer to the wild guesses that are made as intuition.
This book, New Physics which when someone first gave me a link I thought was going to be a God Squad thing, might contain something new. I haven't splashed out to buy it but the linked pages do knock a lot of holes in established physics theory including redshift. The page shows that current thinking on big bang, time etc. cannot even be dignified with the adjective "speculative," it is fantasy and wishful thinking and does not stand up to logical analysis. There is not one shred of evidence to support Big Bang or any other theories about deep space and deep time. There are even arguments in the scientific community as to whether black holes exist or whether we are misinterpreting patterns radioactivity emitted millions of years ago.
At least with The Grand Canyon we can see the big hole. This is why I take the Pythonesque and surreal approach used in the post.
I worked in the Nuclear industry (only in computers, I cound have been really dangerous otherwise) so I know where you are coming from. A theoryb that cannot be tested is worthless.
The Higgs theory was testable (in theory) but instruments sensitive enough did not exist for forty off years. Now it will be tested just as soon as either CERN or MIT wins the race to switch on the latest generation of particle acellerator and smash a few atoms.
CERN though they had identified the boson last time but the energy their sensors picked up turned out to be the tiny tidal surge on Lake Geneva. And the sensors were deep underground.
But if the Higgs Boson is isolated and Higgs' tehory proved, it changes everything.
The Universe truly is weirder than we know.
Please accept my apologies.
And I agree that the Big Bang concept is far-fetched (literally). It's just an extrapolation of observations, and it leads anyone who follows those observations to a logical absurdity.
But it is no more absurd than any other notions about the nature and origin of the Universe. As you say, it is indeed weirder than we know at ALL scales, from the micro to the macro.
Perhaps its a matter of the blissfulness of ignorance.....or "a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing."
Me, I'm pragmatic. I don't have to know what happened to whatever makes me me before I was born or what will happen after I die. By the same token, I don't lose a lot of sleep trying to envision what the beginning of everything was.
However, I would be surprised if the beginning of everything (if such a thing exists) was really the beginning we think it was. It's arrogant enough that so many people think this measly planet harbors all life in the universe. To assume that what we can see expanding necessarily encompasses all matter in all infinity doesn't make sense to me. On the other hand, that doesn't mean there wasn't anything like the Big Bang. I just think there is going to be surprises.
To Steph and Sheryl...I frankly admit that I am mystified. And I do not expect to learn the answers in the few years that I have left. That is really frustrating, but I have to accept it.
The alternative is to accept some theocratic fantasy.
I do get rather tetchy when people focus on the scientific detail and pass over the joke. That's because it happens so often to me in Britain where we have a breed called the boy-scientists, whose childish enthusiasm for all things scientific leads them to view every issue from a narrow perspective and analyse it in forensic detail.
The problem with redshift for example is that while we can be 100% sure of our analysis when the teacher shines a torch bean through a prism or when the sun shines through a rainstorm, a lot of unknowns come into play when we speak of one light year rather than a hundred or a million.
So in my approach detail is not important because (a) I haven't time of patience to check it all and (b) the perspective is philosophical.
But so long as you got the mouse turd joke (one well known theory posits a grain of rice, about the same size but not nearly as funny) and can wait for the punchline in Part 2, the article should be entertaining.
I decided to do it because the boy-scientists over here have started behaving as if big bang is a proven fact. That is there response to a mini resurgence in fundamentalist religion and I feel it is counter productive.
Our Universe was created by two other universes frotting each other. The French existentialists will love that. So do I, its a wonderful idea - and there could be something in it.
Its when people tell me I'm wrong because I do not believe in their God or agree with their politics that I start to get taller and turn green.
That is exactly my point, there is no answer. I'm not sure about a creative force though, I incline more to the view that things just ARE.