i apologize, that one slipped my sarcasm filter. i appreciate the civil response and valid criticism of my… err… response. 
The Big Bang theory does indeed correlate with a lot of data, but in fact most other alternative theories, including String Theory, the Multiverse and MoND (which is getting a serious look-in lately) also include the CMBR, expansion and abundance of matter. The Big Bang is not singular in this.
And in order to explain inflation we also have to invoke both dark matter and dark energy, both of which are still placeholders in the mathematical model.
The big bang is a good theory, but it’s not a theory in the same way that gravity or evolution is a theory. It’s not yet a given, but works well enough until we manage to crack the big questions (dark energy/matter, and the unification of the four forces).
I regret that I don’t remember where I read this, but: while pondering how something could come from nothing, one thinker asked “If there is absolutely nothing, what would prevent something from coming into existence?”
My personal suspicion is that everything that can exist does exist in a collection of universes. But what defines all that can possibly exist? The set of all sets of rules that produce a physically coherent universe? Now you’re considering something that exists apart from the big bang (though not “before” it, or “outside” it), and where did it come from? At least an abstract set of rules defining what is possible lifts things out of the morass of space and time.
One of my favourite scenes from Futurama is when they reach the end of the universe and find themselves looking out on the other universe. Fry: “So it’s true! There are multiple universes!” Prof. Farnsworth: “No, just the two.”
Well, I’m not sure if this is a good analogy, but a sparkler is just a small wooden stick with some grey stuff coated on it until someone lights it.
Add to that that a human being is just a collection of atoms that have come together in a completely random manner pretty much just by chance, and that if each atom in his/her body were simultaneously split in a nuclear fission, the resulting explosion would probably vaporize the Earth and everything solid around it for about 100,000 miles.
But don’t quote me.
Similarly, if you view the Big Bang as erupting from the point of a cone that gets ever smaller until it reaches a point that’s infinitely small (in other words, just keeps getting smaller and smaller infinitely – without end --) then perhaps one can wrap one’s mind around what there was “before” the Big Bang; namely a point that keeps getting smaller no matter from where you measure it.
As to the “If there is absolutely nothing, what would prevent something from coming into existence.” I would like to entertain that thought for a moment. It’s an interesting idea, but I think it’s strange to frame existence as being something that could have been ‘prevented’. I think you could just as easily ask “if there was absolutely nothing, then what conditions gave rise to existence?” I think the idea still just reinforces “why something rather than nothing” as the most profound question I can think of.
I do like that futurama quote!
I fail to see how my lack of detailed analysis of the full theory has any relevevance on the fact that the theory is based entirely on a single vantage point in space and time.
I am not an astrophysicist and I do not have an informed understanding of the full intricacies of the theory. But I do understand that we’re trying to make sense of things that are mind bogglingly huge and complex with only an incredibly small set of data.
I don’t believe any human can speak with any degree of true certainty on the origins of the universe. We can observe the available data, and we can build theories from that data to explain things, but it is vital to realize just how much relevant data we actually lack - how comparatively feeble our theoretical basis really is compared to the vastness of space.
I believe I came across some pondering of this while reading Charlotte’s Web to my kids last night:
“What do you mean less than nothing? I don’t think there is any such thing as less than nothing. Nothing is absolutely the limit of nothingness. It’s the lowest you can go. It’s the end of the line. How can something be less than nothing? If there were something that was less than nothing, then nothing would not be nothing, it would be something - even though it’s just a very little bit of something. But if nothing is nothing, then nothing has nothing that is less than it is.”
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I’m not arguing with your larger point either. I was just pointing out a fundamental misunderstanding that the article we are discussing specifically addresses. I can sympathize with the idea that we’re trying to make large conclusions from a very limited perspective.
I guess I negated my whole argument when I said the above. Of course, nothing ever “reaches” any point because there is no point to reach. But to understand this, one must reconcile that anything that exists in our physical universe (one of the multiverses) will always have something that is smaller than it, just as anything that is “big” will theoretically always having something bigger than it – in this sense, our universe is for all intents and purposes, infinite. At least for us. There are many groups of human beings to whom the concept of anything past the number of their fingers is just “many” and trying to explain otherwise would be a waste of . . err, time and energy.
I suppose it’s like the hotel with an infinite number of rooms. Of course, you’ll be wanting a room that’s close to the elevators. And room service would be a nightmare.
A lightning bolt?
I agree. Even physicists say that sometimes their conclusions are just as maddening to them as they are to a lay person, and of course, one to whom this was apparently the most maddening was Einstein himself. And if Einstein had a hard time with some of this stuff, what chance do WE have trying to figure it out?
If you look at it that way, then you can’t really call religious people “wrong,” as unfortunate as that conclusion might be. There may very well be a large bearded man watching over everything we do all the time, under our beds and between the grooves in our pine floors, just as there might be four supreme beings betting on what we’re going to do next with Quatloos. If you’re prepared to accept that the universe erupted from a point that is infinitely small and that before that, there wasn’t even nothing, then Large Bearded Men flinging plagues of locusts on people from afar is actually not such a big stretch.
I don’t know if this really has anything to do with what your saying but… If the timeline of the universe leads to an increasingly small point in both space and time (? is that what we’re saying with the cone anology ?) then is there a big-bang at all? or is it just an infinitely gradual expansion?
Or we live in the eye of a blue-eyed giant named Macumba
And all this time, I’ve been bluffing about holding my breath!
I don’t accept that humans, original species, or anything we observe necessarily came about by chance. We are able to conceive of rules that seem to govern a lot of what we see. I don’t believe that “God did it” is a satisfactory answer, and within science and philosophy, I see “random” as the intramural god of the gaps.
We don’t really know what “chance” is.
Does ‘random’ exist? that is an interesting question.
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True. Prevention invokes the idea of causality, which seems bound to our ideas about time and space, neither of which can exist in absolute nothing.
But then, you’re invoking causality again.
To be honest, I’m an “infinite regressionist”, and believe that the ultimate origin of things will never be conceivable by humans, in large part because causality is a fundamental part of how we perceive things. It seems that with this question, we might as well use our eyes to see X-rays. Perhaps “something” is and becomes in an environment that is ignorant of the human ideas of causality.
It is what it is, so to speak.
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“It is what it is, so to speak.”
What a lazy argument.
Along with bringing causality as a negative to the argument of this post. And the mustard on top is, “It seems that with this question, we might as well use our eyes to see X-rays. Perhaps “something” is and becomes in an environment that is ignorant of the human ideas of causality”
No, we may never discover the answer to life, the universe, and everything. But at least we-as-humans are looking, and if it is discover-able we will find it despite the passive-aggressive attempts at saying that we can’t.
Well, according to the accepted reasoning as it stands now, literally our entire universe just burst into being in time frames that physicists have actually measured – like, femto-seconds and such like, in which a time length of 10 to the power of minus 12,000 zeroes is an actual reality – maybe the time it took for an object 500 trillion times smaller than a proton to double in size. I can’t see how these people can say these things with such certainty – seems to me someone is just grabbing figures out of thin air – but if they are to be believed, then the entire observable universe (some 47 billion light years across, at last count) sprung into being from a point that was perhaps a sextillionth of a trillionth of a quintillionth of a billionth the size of one Planck length in less time than it takes light to travel a billion sextillionths of a millimeter, and I find it extremely difficult to understand how anyone could come to such a measurement with such confidence, although no doubt they’d be happy to cover a very large blackboard with the equation proving exactly how they know this.
What I really want to know is, WHO IS THEIR PROOFREADER?
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Nothing lasts forever?
Nothing is worth fighting for?
Yes we have no bananas?
Sounds like a bunch of Hey propaganda to me.
Well, if I thought I had anything LIKE a handle on concepts of such magnitude I’d be talking out an unmentionable orifice.
When I say that the atoms that form a human being got together “by chance,” well, it’s quite simple to understand that I didn’t mean they were all just wandering around one day and then stumbled into each other to form an egg or a spermatozoa – more like, “by chance” because they were the closest atoms handy at the time.
Pretty much everything we see or know about could be classified as completely random, but then again, they seem to obey certain sets of rules, the origin of which we are not privy.
I would be most tempted to say that it is not within the capabilities of the human brain to either understand nor grasp certain concepts such as infinity, just as I don’t expect my cat to be able to understand the concept of “tomorrow.”
So, I would just prefer to leave it pretty much at that – we don’t know, but our finest minds are trying to figure it out, they’re getting better at it, and even they admit there are certain things that are inherently unknowable, at least by our brains, which is at least one step ahead of theists, who pretty much insist that they DO know how everything came together, which is in itself a complete fantasy and immediately discardable by anyone with a minimum of intelligence and powers of observation.
then again, in an unknowable universe, to be perfectly fair, I CAN"T blanket-deny that there COULD be a huge old bearded guy rolling dice all day for eternity, just as I can’t prove that chupacabras DON’T prowl the forests of South America, or Bigfoot hangs out with Dog the Bounty Hunter.
