Big bang question. Any physics major here?

[MickyD]

Special relativity doesn’t explain when I’m in a work meeting with so little gravity to it why time slows down.

Maybe your colleagues are working so fast relative to you that they appear slowed down from your viewpoint. Minutes pass for them while hours pass for you.

(And to be pedantic myself: special relativity doesn't take gravity into account - that's general relativity! )

 

[Ave IT]

Special relativity doesn’t explain when I’m in a work meeting with so little gravity to it why time slows down.

Good point .... and neither can the last 20 minutes against Hull be explained by bleedin' Einstein either ... a friggin' eternity I never want to go thru' again.

 

[Andy S]

Hopefully, Betelgeuse doesn't do its thing in your lifetime Andy!! - rather hoping it already did it's thing during the lifetime of your distant ancestors 640-odd years ago.

I didn’t realise that Betelgeuse was only 650 - 700 light years away. I always thought it was more like a few thousand.

A good visual for the differences in the speed of light and the speed of sound is the Beirut ANFO explosion, especially the balcony ones where the sound and shock wave take a couple of seconds to travel the couple of kilometres distance.

 

[Bryan Tregunna]

Reading this thread has confirmed one theory: I'm thick!

 

[unhinched]

Having explained to them that the Big Bang occurred nearly 15 billion years ago, we then looked at a picture showing the universe ‘shortly after the big bang’.

A good question is 'what was before the big bang ' ?
Dawkins just showed his limitations ( again) by telling Piers Morgan that such a question "cannot be asked" !
"There is no 'before the big bang' " he claims ..." Time itself began at the Big bang", he claims.
Or rather he refuses to put his own name to those answers, but rather gets out of it by saying " this is what physicists would tell us"
On questioning the possible lack of logic in these 'answers' , with physics meant to be logical, Dawkins weakly offers : "Modern physics is exceedingly mysterious " .. " it's very difficult to understand "... and so on.
If he's right , it sounds like a weird cult of intellectualism to me.

Save your grandchildren from it Mervyn !!!

 

[Brussels Bureaucrat]

A good question is 'what was before the big bang ' ?
Dawkins just showed his limitations ( again) by telling Piers Morgan that such a question "cannot be asked" !
"There is no 'before the big bang' " he claims ..." Time itself began at the Big bang", he claims.
Or rather he refuses to put his own name to those answers, but rather gets out of it by saying " this is what physicists would tell us"
On questioning the possible lack of logic in these 'answers' , with physics meant to be logical, Dawkins weakly offers : "Modern physics is exceedingly mysterious " .. " it's very difficult to understand "... and so on.
If he's right , it sounds like a weird cult of intellectualism to me.

Save your grandchildren from it Mervyn !!!

That's just the difference between religion and the scientific method though isn't it? I'm not a great fan of Dawkins either, but the nature of science and scientists is that they say when they don't know something and try to advance understanding by observation and experimentation. As I've said earlier in this thread I'm a Christian, and like most Christians in this country, I believe that the Big Bang is much more plausible than the idea of the Earth being created in seven days a few thousand years ago, which was debunked centuries ago. Humility is not Dawkins' strong suit, and saying a question "cannot be asked" is clumsy, but scientific progress is based on the idea of people admitting that they don't know things, rather than believing that the scriptures have all the answers and leaving it at that.

As for physics being mysterious and difficult to understand - well, yes? Who can possibly argue with that?

 

[mervyn]

It’s a while since I read it, but in ‘The mathematical universe’ the author describes the idea of a multiverse in which a series of new universes is created via their own big bangs, stretching into infinity. He suggests imagining a never-ending plate rack of universes. Certainly thought provoking.

 

[Lousy Pint]

That's just the difference between religion and the scientific method though isn't it? I'm not a great fan of Dawkins either, but the nature of science and scientists is that they say when they don't know something and try to advance understanding by observation and experimentation. As I've said earlier in this thread I'm a Christian, and like most Christians in this country, I believe that the Big Bang is much more plausible than the idea of the Earth being created in seven days a few thousand years ago, which was debunked centuries ago. Humility is not Dawkins' strong suit, and saying a question "cannot be asked" is clumsy, but scientific progress is based on the idea of people admitting that they don't know things, rather than believing that the scriptures have all the answers and leaving it at that.

As for physics being mysterious and difficult to understand - well, yes? Who can possibly argue with that?

You say that the big bang is more plausible, but who's to say that God, at the end of his seven days, years, millennia or whatever, didn't create the big bang?

 

[Brussels Bureaucrat]

You say that the big bang is more plausible, but who's to say that God, at the end of his seven days, years, millennia or whatever, didn't create the big bang?

That's just God of the Gaps stuff isn't it. "We don't know therefore God" is the oldest trick in the book.

 

[Lousy Pint]

That's just God of the Gaps stuff isn't it. "We don't know therefore God" is the oldest trick in the book.

Until scientists prove otherwise, God of the Gaps will have to do.
And I'm still waiting to know what was happening in the infinite time before the BB. My guess is, I never will

 

[mervyn]

This discussion reminds me of a funeral wake I attended, where the the vicar who had conducted the service introduced me to her husband, a recently retired Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge. He was clearly a very devout Christian, and over the course of several pints he explained to me the rationale behind his absolute belief in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, his belief that we are indeed in an infinite multiverse, and his belief in an interventionist god. It was a marvellous one to one lecture, which lasted over an hour, and he lost me several times. However the simple summary of his belief was that both his scientific and religious views were not incompatible, and that his god, who sent his son to earth, simply came along 2000 years ago.

 

[Brussels Bureaucrat]

Until scientists prove otherwise, God of the Gaps will have to do.
And I'm still waiting to know what was happening in the infinite time before the BB. My guess is, I never will

Nope, I don't think I will either. My guess is that there wasn't any 'time' in the sense that we understand it.

 

[Brussels Bureaucrat]

This discussion reminds me of a funeral wake I attended, where the the vicar who had conducted the service introduced me to her husband, a recently retired Professor of Astrophysics at Cambridge. He was clearly a very devout Christian, and over the course of several pints he explained to me the rationale behind his absolute belief in the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, his belief that we are indeed in an infinite multiverse, and his belief in an interventionist god. It was a marvellous one to one lecture, which lasted over an hour, and he lost me several times. However the simple summary of his belief was that both his scientific and religious views were not incompatible, and that his god, who sent his son to earth, simply came along 2000 years ago.

Russell Cowburn by any chance?

Professor Russell Cowburn FRS | Department of Physics

www.phy.cam.ac.uk

 

[mervyn]

Russell Cowburn by any chance?

Professor Russell Cowburn FRS | Department of Physics

www.phy.cam.ac.uk

No, this guy was much older, the funeral was 12 years ago, and he looked about late 60s then. Can’t recall his name at all.

 

[GreenThing]

Nope, I don't think I will either. My guess is that there wasn't any 'time' in the sense that we understand it.

‘Time’ in the sense that we understand it rings plenty of bells for me. We understand an awful lot about the universe, but we only understand it while relating it to what we know happens on earth, views through human eyes. A lot of our scientific theories are fudges to patch holes in other theories to make them work. We assume that science is the same everywhere under all conditions.

We look for evidence of life elsewhere in the universe, but we do that by looking for water and other things that will support carbon based life. But does life have to be carbon based? Maybe there’s life all around us which feed on other substances which we cannot detect with our limited senses. We also send messages for alien lifeforms to respond to, but how will they understand it? Will alien life forms speak English? Will they have the technology to receive the radio signals? Also, considering the distance covered the lifeforms receiving any signals will not receive them for years and years, with the reply coming back another years and years later.

All in all, I think we are too limited in our understanding to work out what is actually happening in the universe and while a lot of our theories work for us, the truth may well be that we’re way off the mark. I think that we’re closer to the caveman in our understanding than we are the sophisticated humans we believe we are. Other, undetectable life forms are probably viewing us in the way that we look at bacteria in a Petri dish, and relatively speaking, our intelligence is probably at the same level.