I’m not qualified to answer most of those questions, but they are good ones!
A lot of the things you mention are things the James Webb is designed to tackle. It’s going to look for so-called First Light* which are the first photons emitted by the universe.
As for getting physical probes out that far, the laws of physics as we currently know them make that impossible so we’ll have to settle for telescopes.
*Scientists have a real knack for accidentally naming things in a way that ensures creationists will get all riled up about them
This I can answer- it’s because good engineers and scientists are very very cautious in their estimates of things. Everything is engineered for the worst case and they quote the worst case in their estimates. Usually, the worst case doesn’t happen. Contrast this with tech bros and marketing people who only go around quoting absolute best case for everything which also never happens, and no wonder people are cynical.
Engineers rate parts by testing them. How long do they survive at 4 degrees K? How much thermal expansion will they endure? How much radiation might they encounter? How long will they survive if the radiation is 2x, 4x, or more than predicted? All these data points and many more are tested for each and every part in the vehicle. That includes wires, adhesives, connectors, solder, nuts and bolts, chips, sensors, everything.
And you do failure analysis. What kinds of stresses will this part undergo during launch? What can go wrong with each of these bits? How do you prevent the failure? How do you recover from that failure when turning a wrench isn’t an option?
That kind of advance thinking doesn’t go into your average vacuum cleaner.
And to estimate the lifespan, you’re way out on a limb. There aren’t disks full of reliability data from a thousand previous Mars Rover missions, so all you can base it on is earth-bound testing. Which isn’t very useful data because even the gravity is different. So it involves guessing; and conservative guessing at that.
I’ve read that the team of engineers working on just the automatic flag raising system on the Chang’e lunar landing mission spent 11 months designing, building, and testing the arm that raised the Chinese flag. 11 months for a flagpole that goes up – not even down. But seeing as how it was planned to feature prominently in photos of the historic event, and end up on covers of science textbooks for the next hundred years or so, it was considered pretty darn important that it work flawlessly.
When you treat every single part of the vehicle with that much care, the kinds of failures we’re used to with our mass produced trinkets just don’t happen. But if you thought a Bugatti Chiron was expensive today, if it was built to spaceflight specs it would probably cost 20 times its list price, or more.
The part that boggles my mind is that there isn’t a “direction” to the “center” of the big bang; the radiation from from the big bang comes from All directions because the idea is that the big bang happened EVERYWHERE at Once; it isn’t from one place expanding out(from “there”) to all the others, it’s All the places stretching from All of them to Everywhere Else simultaneously (how do points a, b, c, expand Towards one another while INCREASING the space between them? without exceeding the fixed speed of light? and accelerating? space-timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly)
Right, because the Big Bang created space and time. That really hurts my brain and makes the topic hard to discuss (especially with religious people). Like, a super common question is “what happened before the Big Bang?”. But you can’t ask the question because the Big Bang created time. The word before has no meaning.
It’s hard to explain to people that there are questions that can’t be asked because they are equivalent to asking “Why six horses with purple?”. The words are nonsense in the context of the question, no matter how reasonable the question sounds to our ears. Our brains are really poorly equipped for studying cosmology.
This is how dualists sound to monists, also. It seems to me that most people can’t switch gears to operate outside their basic conceptual memeplex, so I tend to respect people (like physicists and cosmologists) who are trying to encompass the world in a new way.
I don’t think cosmologists and physicists would agree with you on that one. They have a lot of clever ways of testing things, and the Big Bang is extremely well supported by evidence from many many different sources, including the time creation aspect. Nothing I’ve said about it here is controversial or cutting edge. I’m not knowledgeable enough to say something cutting edge or controversial about cosmology .
I don’t think I care for the analogy because dualism is unfalsifiable and has no quality evidence to support it. It’s an extraordinary claim based on very little. I don’t want to have an argument about dualism though because I’m an atheist, dualism always boils down to religion, this is not the thread for it, and I’m tired. So if you do want to argue that, you win, and I concede.
Cosmology is the opposite- we have extensive math showing how things probably are, and the more physical evidence we get, the more the models tend to be confirmed. The problem then becomes wrapping our brains around the implications of the math and the evidence. That’s the hard part- catching ourselves up to what’s already been proven true. It’s why, for example, quantum mechanics has taken so long to become mainstream (almost 100 years now). No matter how clear the proof is that it’s true, we resist because it feels like it can’t be true. It’s violates all our feefees about how the universe should work.
I don’t understand what you’re arguing here. If your only accepted standard of proof is someone standing at the Big Bang with a stopwatch, no we don’t have that. We don’t need that though. There are lots of ways to triangulate evidence for the early conditions of the universe.
That one aspect really isn’t, though. Everything right up to the big bang is extremely well tested cosmology, but the idea that there’s nothing before it is speculation. And some physicists have speculated otherwise, that the singularity might have arisen from something pre-existing like quantum fluctuations or a collision between strings or whatever. We simply don’t have a good theory of everything to tell.
That time starts there is certainly plausible and honestly I’d say even makes intuitive sense, but there’s not a lot you should call confirmed about the other side of a boundary that we can’t even quite observe in itself.
I didn’t say you did. I said cosmology has. It’s like you haven’t read anything I’ve written upthread. I’m not the right person to teach you cosmology but I encourage to read up on it. This stuff is not controversial, as I said. This is National-Geographic-article level cosmology.
I’m done trying to explain this. Believe or not, it’s fine.
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