Questions for the Experts <( Thats You!!)

[JustAJ]

i would like to apologize for claiming that the theory of evolution had any gaps.  I have been studying the subject for a while and realized that it is a lot more "gapless" than i thought.

But i had one question that i couldn't find the answer to, so i thought i would ask it here.

What caused the big bang?  What caused the bang?


 (This probably doesn't belong in this section.) I'm sorry

[Thumpalumpacus]

No one knows what caused it.  It may not have had a reason at all.  There's certainly no evidence that it did.

[KDbeads]

And it may not have happened at all, may have been another start to the universe, or maybe not.  There are several theories that have merit.  We don't know exactly what happened for sure.  Personally I like the physics entailed in the big bang theory but I don't know what came before, what sparked the expansion, etc.... and you know what?  I'm okay with that :hail:

[Thumpalumpacus]

This is the real root of religion: this distaste for uncertainty.

[Tank]

What caused the big bang?  What caused the bang?

At this time, unknown. But it is worth understanding that the term 'Big Bang' was first used by an English atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle. At the time the universe was considered to have been around forever and was in a 'steady state', Hoyle agreed with this view. When it was discovered that where ever you look in the sky that what you could see was moving away there was a lot of scientific head scratching. If everything is moving away from you it means that space itself is expanding. It doesn't mean that things are moving through an infinite space from a starting point (like an explosion), it means that space itself is getting bigger (like blowing up a balloon) and has been expanding for a finite length of time. Hoyle immediately realised that if the universe was expanding then the 'steady state' he though was right was in fact wrong! So the term Big Bang is a little misleading, it should really be The Big Blow!

However addressing your initial question. And this is just informed speculation as there is no testable hypothesis for what happened. We do know that we don't know what happened because all the rules that appear to work in the universe we see today stop working (ie are able to predict actions) very close to the initial point the universe first appears to have come into existance. Before this moment space and time appear not to have existed so any idea of cause and effect is meaningless. So there may well not have been a cause in the sense that you and I understand it on a day-to-day basis.

Of course the problem with this 'unseen cause' is that humans hate not understanding why something happens! In days gone by our ancestors had knowledge but lacked understanding and invoked superstition to fill the gap. Two examples of this would be, the Sun rising and diseases killing people. Our ancestors could see the Sun rise, it did it reliably every day so they had knowledge, they could see it happen, but the didn't know why it happened, they had no understanding. So they put God into the equation so they could sleep at night! Our ancestors saw people get ill and die from diseases, they had knowledge, but they did not understand why people got ill and died, they had no understanding. So they put daemons into the equation so they could feel they understood the world around them. The 'first cause' argument for the 'Big Blow' is exactly the same. We have knowledge that the universe exists, we can interact with it, but we don't know why it is here. So some people can't cope with not knowing why it is here so they invoke superstition to explain the existance of the universe. Are you seeing a pattern here?

It also appears that the early universe was incredibly simple, comprising protons, electrons and a shed load of energy all mediated by a number of forces such as gravity and electro magnetism. All we can see around us can be explained by the interaction of these particles and forces over the known life time of the universe.

Not knowing why something is the way it is, is not a good reason to say something like 'God did it!' That answer has been repeatedly discredited over millennia.

I hope this helps a little.

[Tank]

This is the real root of religion: this distaste for uncertainty.

Absolutely! Religion is simply institutionalised superstition in the same way that science is just institutionalised curiosity.

[The Black Jester]

What caused the big bang?  What caused the bang?

At this time, unknown. But it is worth understanding that the term 'Big Bang' was first used by an English atheist astronomer Fred Hoyle. At the time the universe was considered to have been around forever and was in a 'steady state', Hoyle agreed with this view. When it was discovered that where ever you look in the sky that what you could see was moving away there was a lot of scientific head scratching. If everything is moving away from you it means that space itself is expanding. It doesn't mean that things are moving through an infinite space from a starting point (like an explosion), it means that space itself is getting bigger (like blowing up a balloon) and has been expanding for a finite length of time. Hoyle immediately realised that if the universe was expanding then the 'steady state' he though was right was in fact wrong! So the term Big Bang is a little misleading, it should really be The Big Blow!

However addressing your initial question. And this is just informed speculation as there is no testable hypothesis for what happened. We do know that we don't know what happened because all the rules that appear to work in the universe we see today stop working (ie are able to predict actions) very close to the initial point the universe first appears to have come into existance. Before this moment space and time appear not to have existed so any idea of cause and effect is meaningless. So there may well not have been a cause in the sense that you and I understand it on a day-to-day basis.

Of course the problem with this 'unseen cause' is that humans hate not understanding why something happens! In days gone by our ancestors had knowledge but lacked understanding and invoked superstition to fill the gap. Two examples of this would be, the Sun rising and diseases killing people. Our ancestors could see the Sun rise, it did it reliably every day so they had knowledge, they could see it happen, but the didn't know why it happened, they had no understanding. So they put God into the equation so they could sleep at night! Our ancestors saw people get ill and die from diseases, they had knowledge, but they did not understand why people got ill and died, they had no understanding. So they put daemons into the equation so they could feel they understood the world around them. The 'first cause' argument for the 'Big Blow' is exactly the same. We have knowledge that the universe exists, we can interact with it, but we don't know why it is here. So some people can't cope with not knowing why it is here so they invoke superstition to explain the existance of the universe. Are you seeing a pattern here?

It also appears that the early universe was incredibly simple, comprising protons, electrons and a shed load of energy all mediated by a number of forces such as gravity and electro magnetism. All we can see around us can be explained by the interaction of these particles and forces over the known life time of the universe.

Not knowing why something is the way it is, is not a good reason to say something like 'God did it!' That answer has been repeatedly discredited over millennia.

I hope this helps a little.

Thanks for the summary, Tank.  Makes me want to add a few Physics books to my Amazon list...

[JustAJ]

Would u say that atheists who accept the theory of the big bang would need a certain amount of "faith" in it like religious people do?

[pinkocommie]

Would u say that atheists who accept the theory of the big bang would need a certain amount of "faith" in it like religious people do?

I don't think it would be equatable to anything religious because the big bang theory is based on evidence while religious faith by definition is belief despite of or in the absence of evidence.

[JustAJ]

I'm not saying it is "religious" just that u would need a certain amount of faith to accept the theory. faith in the sense of the begining.

I mean the theory is nearly air tight except (from my limited knowledge)  the very start,  how the big bang "banged".    so would u need a small amount of faith to accept the theory.

[pinkocommie]

Well, the parts of the theory that aren't concrete have multiple possible explanations that are put forth to explain those bits until an answer is found, so no, I still don't think accepting the big bang theory in any way is equatable to the kind of faith involved in religions.  Those possible explanations are still based on known evidence and in no way is there a point where scientists start making positive claims that are accepted as truth before the claims are verified.  I disagree with your comparison.

[Tank]

Would u say that atheists who accept the theory of the big bang would need a certain amount of "faith" in it like religious people do?

No, I don't not, if one uses the word 'faith' in the religious interpretation of blind and unquestioning Faith. There is no one word that sums up my position with regard to scientific theories. I would hope that my understanding comes down to a rational and reasonable appreciation of how the scientific method works, which leads me to accept that the theories resulting from this process are an acceptably accurate description of reality, within our current levels of information. That is not Faith as such, as Faith is an unsupportable position.

Within my ability, level of knowledge and education I should be able to understand any scientific theory, I can follow biological arguments like a bloodhound. Cosmology is a little harder but I feel still within my capabilities. Quantum mechanics I can follow at a surface level but no more really. So do I have 'Faith' in scientists that expound about Quantum Mechanics? No, I have faith (with a little 'f') that those scientists are well educated experts in their subjects and are basically trustworthy people, as most are. I have the same level of faith in these people as I do in the surgeons that opened up my eyes and changed my lenses when I got cataracts.

Does that help?

[deekayfry]

The big bang is grounded in part in Hubble's Law.  When Edwin Hubble peered into a telescope and put a spectrometer on it.  He noticed that when galaxy and/or stars moved away from us the spectrometer results had a shift towards the red end of the visible spectrum.  When stars/galaxies moved towards us the spectrometer showed a shift towards the blue end of the physical spectrum.

The phenomena can be better described by the Doppler Effect.  The analogy here is how we perceive the placement and movement of sound.  When you sit in your car and you hear an ambulance driving in from behind you.  You will notice the pitch of the sirens increase as the ambulance approaches, as in becomes more shrill.  When the ambulance passes and moves away from you the sirens become more dull when the pitch decreases.  The reason for this is that the sound waves are compressed coming towards you and expand as they move away from as in from the moving source.

Light does pretty much the same thing.

Why all the jazz about this?

Hubble's Law states that recession velocity, the speed of which the galaxies are moving from us increase with distance.  So galaxies that are much farther away are moving much faster from us.

From this we can THEORETICALLY infer a central point in time where there was some "bang" with the outer energy and matter flinging away faster than the inner energy and matter.  This is a reasonable model, by the way.

There are PROBLEMS with this okay?  And it is a crazy mix of simple explanations and at times overly complex explanations.

(somewhat simple explanation)
First and foremost, we assume that the Hubble Constant is correct on a linear scale.  As most engineers, scientists, physicist will tell you, nothing in nature is linear.   In small intervals... maybe.  Any more than that not so much.

Second, we assume that we have theoretically assured distances from the "brightest" objects in the universe, ie Type I Supernovas, Cepheid stars, etc.  Unfortunately, I cannot hold a tape measure to a couple billion galaxies, measure their distance, and speed against a half dozen or so Type I Supernova and come up with a confident scale of distance.  It is like trying to measure speed and distance of foam on a waves from a seashore based on how bright they appear at noon.  We can infer a rough idea, but it is hard to deduce it to any certain physical scale.

So again, why all the jazz?

(this is the complex part)
I will submit this much.  The Big Bang Theory is pretty solid.  The theory of relativity supports this, that is the speed of light is constant and is the same in all inertial reference frames and with that we can extrapolate the age of the Universe based on the speed of light.  Relativistic results has been observed and tested rigorously since Einstein presented his theory.

Since, science is not a belief and not a religion, I accept these gaps in the theory.  There are far more glaring gaps in religion.  Religion is a system of beliefs and faith and proclamations of mostly untestable proofs.  Even the historicity of all of it is tenuous at best.  It is prima facie, religion is a system of beliefs for which there are no falsifiable proofs.  Dogma, faith, creeds are stated and cannot be proved or disproved.  Science is a system of knowledge acquisition set against a few centuries worth of practicing the Scientific Method.  In science, theories are NOT beliefs, and are equally provable or disprovable.

This method is far from perfect, but it was never intended to be perfect to begin with.  Theories are just that, theories.  It is a tool that seems to work when explaining something interesting or intriguing.  If it does not work, or its scope is limited it is perfectly all right to discard the theory or modify it.

Theories are NOT statements of faith of beliefs.  This is where the WHOLE argument falls flat on it face.  In other words, it is moot to even consider accepting any theory even "when there are gaps."  Furthermore, "accepting it" or "not accepting it" is irrelevant.

The overall fallacy is assuming that pure science requires faith and belief.  It does not, it never did, and it never will.

[i_am_i]

[strike:uvoso3k5]Bad[/strike:uvoso3k5] Poor writing and poor spelling, I don't know, it just rea[l]ly gets to me.

I love irony.

I like drinking.

[Squid]

[strike:206ngbxw]Bad[/strike:206ngbxw] Poor writing and poor spelling, I don't know, it just rea[l]ly gets to me.

I love irony.

I like drinking.

I second that...