Interesting thoughts on the "Big Bang"
Posted: Thu Mar 07, 2013 2:47 pm
The Big Bang was NOT a Fireworks Display!
"The BIG BANG wasn't really big. Nor was it really a bang. Even the name "Big Bang" originally was a put-down cooked up by a scientist who didn't like the concept when it was first put forth. He favored the idea that the universe had always existed in a much more dignified and fundamentally unchanging, steady state.
But the name stuck, and with it has come the completely wrong impression that the event was like an explosion and that the universe is expanding today because the objects in it are being flung apart like fragments of a detonated bomb.
Virtually every basic aspect of this intuitive image for the Big Bang (we ARE stuck with the name) is incorrect.
So, how should we think about the Big Bang? Our mental 'fireworks' image of the Big Bang contains these basic elements: 1) A pre-existing sky or space into which the fragments from the explosion are injected; 2) A pre-existing time we can use to mark when the explosion happened; 3) Individual projectiles moving through space from a common center; 4) A definite moment when the explosion occurred; and 5) Something that started the Big Bang. All of these elements to our visualization of the Big Bang are completely false according to mainstream astrophysical theory.
Preexisting Space?
There wasn't any!
Preexisting Time?
There wasn't any of this either!
Individual objects moving out from a common center?
Nope! Curved space distorts the paths of particles, sometimes in very dramatic ways. If you stepped into a space ship and tried to travel to the edge of the universe and look beyond, it would be impossible. Not only could you not reach a supposed "edge" of the universe no matter how long or how fast you traveled, in a closed universe, you would eventually find yourself arriving where you departed. The curvature of space would bring you right back, in something like the way the curvature of Earth would bring you home if you flew west and never changed course. In other words, the universe has no edge in space. There is nothing beyond the farthest star.
As a mental anchor, many have used the expanding balloon as an analogy to the expanding universe. As seen from any one spot on the balloon's surface, all other spots rush away from it as the balloon is inflated. There is no one center to the expansion ON THE SURFACE of the balloon that is singled out as the center of the Big Bang. This is very different than the fireworks display which does have a dramatic, common center to the expanding cloud of cinders. The balloon analogy, however, is not perfect, because as we watch the balloon, our vantage point is still within a preexisting larger arena which GR says never existed for the real universe.
The center of the Big Bang was not a point in space, but a point in time! It is a center, not in the fabric of the balloon, but outside it along the 4th dimension...time. We cannot see this point anywhere we look inside the space of our universe out towards the distant galaxies. You can't see time after all! We can only see it as we look back in time at the ancient images we get from the most distant objects we can observe. We see a greatly changed, early history of the universe in these images but no unique center to them in space.
Projectiles moving through space?
Sorry! Like spots glued to the surface of the balloon at eternally fixed latitude and longitude points, the galaxies remain where they are while space dilates between them with the passage of time.
If space is stretching like this, where do the brand new millions of cubic light years come from, from one moment to the next? The answer is that they have always been there. . . . It is a mystery why our consciousness insists on experiencing the universe one moment at a time, and that is why we end up with the paradox of where space comes from. There really is no paradox at all.
Space is not 'nothing' according to Einstein, it is merely another name for the gravitational field of the universe. Einstein once said, "Space-time does not claim existence on its own but only as a structural quality of the [gravitational] field". If you could experimentally turn-off gravity with a switch, space-time would vanish. This is the ultimate demolition experiment known to physics for which an environmental impact statement would most certainly have to be filed.
The gravitational field at one instant is wedded to itself in the next instant by the incessant quantum churnings of the myriad of individual particles that like bees in a swarm, make up the gravitational field itself. In this frothing tumult, the gravitational field is knit together, quantum by quantum, from perhaps even more elemental building blocks, and it is perhaps here that we will find the ultimate origin for the expansion of the universe and the magical stretching of space.
Was there a definite moment to the Big Bang?
Today's theory is that our universe emerged from an infinite density, zero-space 'Singularity' at Time Zero, but physicists now feel very strongly that this instant was smeared out by any number of quantum mechanical effects, so that we can never speak of a time before about 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang. Just as Gertrude Stein once remarked about my hometown, Oakland, California that "There is no 'There' there", at 10^-43 seconds, nature may tell us that before the Big Bang, "There was no 'When' there" either. The moment dissolves away into some weird quantum fog, and as Steven Hawking speculates, time may actually become bent into a new dimension of space and no longer even definable in this state.
Something started the Big Bang!
At last we come to the most difficult issue in modern cosmology. Time itself may not have existed. How, then, do we speak or think about a condition, or process, that started the whole shebang if we are not even allowed to frame the event as "This happened first...then this...then kerpowie!"? This remains the essential mystery of the Big Bang which seems to doggedly transcend every mathematical description we can create to describe it.
I wrote this essay before seeing the new IMAX file at the Air and Space Museum 'Cosmic Journey", by far one of the nicest and most heroic movies of its kind I had ever seen. But of course it showed the Big Bang as a fireworks display. No matter. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to accept the fact that the Big Bang was a spectacular moment in history. What is amazing is that the daring audacity of humans may have demystified some of it, and revealed a universe far stranger than any could have imagined."
Sten Odenwald
Published in the Washington Post
http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/bang.html
"The BIG BANG wasn't really big. Nor was it really a bang. Even the name "Big Bang" originally was a put-down cooked up by a scientist who didn't like the concept when it was first put forth. He favored the idea that the universe had always existed in a much more dignified and fundamentally unchanging, steady state.
But the name stuck, and with it has come the completely wrong impression that the event was like an explosion and that the universe is expanding today because the objects in it are being flung apart like fragments of a detonated bomb.
Virtually every basic aspect of this intuitive image for the Big Bang (we ARE stuck with the name) is incorrect.
So, how should we think about the Big Bang? Our mental 'fireworks' image of the Big Bang contains these basic elements: 1) A pre-existing sky or space into which the fragments from the explosion are injected; 2) A pre-existing time we can use to mark when the explosion happened; 3) Individual projectiles moving through space from a common center; 4) A definite moment when the explosion occurred; and 5) Something that started the Big Bang. All of these elements to our visualization of the Big Bang are completely false according to mainstream astrophysical theory.
Preexisting Space?
There wasn't any!
Preexisting Time?
There wasn't any of this either!
Individual objects moving out from a common center?
Nope! Curved space distorts the paths of particles, sometimes in very dramatic ways. If you stepped into a space ship and tried to travel to the edge of the universe and look beyond, it would be impossible. Not only could you not reach a supposed "edge" of the universe no matter how long or how fast you traveled, in a closed universe, you would eventually find yourself arriving where you departed. The curvature of space would bring you right back, in something like the way the curvature of Earth would bring you home if you flew west and never changed course. In other words, the universe has no edge in space. There is nothing beyond the farthest star.
As a mental anchor, many have used the expanding balloon as an analogy to the expanding universe. As seen from any one spot on the balloon's surface, all other spots rush away from it as the balloon is inflated. There is no one center to the expansion ON THE SURFACE of the balloon that is singled out as the center of the Big Bang. This is very different than the fireworks display which does have a dramatic, common center to the expanding cloud of cinders. The balloon analogy, however, is not perfect, because as we watch the balloon, our vantage point is still within a preexisting larger arena which GR says never existed for the real universe.
The center of the Big Bang was not a point in space, but a point in time! It is a center, not in the fabric of the balloon, but outside it along the 4th dimension...time. We cannot see this point anywhere we look inside the space of our universe out towards the distant galaxies. You can't see time after all! We can only see it as we look back in time at the ancient images we get from the most distant objects we can observe. We see a greatly changed, early history of the universe in these images but no unique center to them in space.
Projectiles moving through space?
Sorry! Like spots glued to the surface of the balloon at eternally fixed latitude and longitude points, the galaxies remain where they are while space dilates between them with the passage of time.
If space is stretching like this, where do the brand new millions of cubic light years come from, from one moment to the next? The answer is that they have always been there. . . . It is a mystery why our consciousness insists on experiencing the universe one moment at a time, and that is why we end up with the paradox of where space comes from. There really is no paradox at all.
Space is not 'nothing' according to Einstein, it is merely another name for the gravitational field of the universe. Einstein once said, "Space-time does not claim existence on its own but only as a structural quality of the [gravitational] field". If you could experimentally turn-off gravity with a switch, space-time would vanish. This is the ultimate demolition experiment known to physics for which an environmental impact statement would most certainly have to be filed.
The gravitational field at one instant is wedded to itself in the next instant by the incessant quantum churnings of the myriad of individual particles that like bees in a swarm, make up the gravitational field itself. In this frothing tumult, the gravitational field is knit together, quantum by quantum, from perhaps even more elemental building blocks, and it is perhaps here that we will find the ultimate origin for the expansion of the universe and the magical stretching of space.
Was there a definite moment to the Big Bang?
Today's theory is that our universe emerged from an infinite density, zero-space 'Singularity' at Time Zero, but physicists now feel very strongly that this instant was smeared out by any number of quantum mechanical effects, so that we can never speak of a time before about 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang. Just as Gertrude Stein once remarked about my hometown, Oakland, California that "There is no 'There' there", at 10^-43 seconds, nature may tell us that before the Big Bang, "There was no 'When' there" either. The moment dissolves away into some weird quantum fog, and as Steven Hawking speculates, time may actually become bent into a new dimension of space and no longer even definable in this state.
Something started the Big Bang!
At last we come to the most difficult issue in modern cosmology. Time itself may not have existed. How, then, do we speak or think about a condition, or process, that started the whole shebang if we are not even allowed to frame the event as "This happened first...then this...then kerpowie!"? This remains the essential mystery of the Big Bang which seems to doggedly transcend every mathematical description we can create to describe it.
I wrote this essay before seeing the new IMAX file at the Air and Space Museum 'Cosmic Journey", by far one of the nicest and most heroic movies of its kind I had ever seen. But of course it showed the Big Bang as a fireworks display. No matter. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to accept the fact that the Big Bang was a spectacular moment in history. What is amazing is that the daring audacity of humans may have demystified some of it, and revealed a universe far stranger than any could have imagined."
Sten Odenwald
Published in the Washington Post
http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/bang.html