Big bang question. Any physics major here?

[Ave IT]

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 !!!

Hi unhinched .... I shall try treading very carefully here lest we stray into anything too contentious and understandably spook the mods or in any way offend anybody's beliefs......

But to say you cannot sensibly ask the question what came before the Big Bang is no more unreasonable than saying you cannot ask what came before God or any other supernatural creator. The whole point is that time itself began with the Big Bang so by definition there was no 'before'. Presumably you or anyone who believes in a supernatural creator would say God exists outside of time as he created it and hence you cannot sensibly ask where did God come from or what existed before Him? It's no different.

The remarkable thing that we humans cannot really comprehend although it is demonstrably a 100% cast-iron fact is that time doesn't pass equably the way we perceive it. There is no such thing as a universal time which is something that Einstein predicted and was later proven beyond all doubt. Time itself passes at a different rate for the satellites that send our GPS signals to Earth and we have to correct for that fact - our SatNavs simply wouldn't work without doing so and Einstein's equations tell us how much we must correct for that truly astonishing fact. Even more mind bending is that we can see matter falling into black holes across the universe accelerated to near light speeds to vanish forever in an instant (for it) - yet we see it apparently frozen in time on the edge of the event horizon because our time is flowing at a different rate. Wow!

 

[Ave 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.

I have to push back a bit there GT but can see where you’re coming from because although it’s true to some extent that we cannot but help view thru’ human eyes and perceptions, I think you’re over stating things somewhat and underestimating what we actually know.

OK - we know what we know from what we can see and determine from here on Earth. Science has developed a wholly coherent understanding of the nature of matter from sub-atomic particles, thru to atoms, to the elements and the fundamental forces of Physics that determine how the Chemistry and Biology that give rise to life on Earth works. But it is a good question of how we can be sure it’s the same elsewhere in the universe. Well not only is there no evidence that the laws of Physics would be different elsewhere but we can look out into the depths of space and see exactly the same processes occurring billions of light years from Earth. The James Webb Space telescope for example can even ‘see’ what is happening in the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars and even work out the atmospheric ‘weather’. It does this by looking at the same absorption spectra produced by the chemicals in the atmospheres as the planet passes in front of the star – in other words things are just the same as here on Earth in terms of how things work which means the same laws of Physics and Chemistry apply everywhere.

Given that’s the case then by far the most stable and likely way for any kind of life to emerge (certainly multi-cellular life) would be for it to be Carbon-based and water has huge advantages as a solvent for the complex chemistry associated with life. The chemical elements are like Lego bricks and they can only plug together in certain ways to build things. We may lack the imagination to think of what they may eventually build but whatever it is it will still have the same type of bricks and plug together in the same ways.

 

[GreenThing]

I have to push back a bit there GT but can see where you’re coming from because although it’s true to some extent that we cannot but help view thru’ human eyes and perceptions, I think you’re over stating things somewhat and underestimating what we actually know.

OK - we know what we know from what we can see and determine from here on Earth. Science has developed a wholly coherent understanding of the nature of matter from sub-atomic particles, thru to atoms, to the elements and the fundamental forces of Physics that determine how the Chemistry and Biology that give rise to life on Earth works. But it is a good question of how we can be sure it’s the same elsewhere in the universe. Well not only is there no evidence that the laws of Physics would be different elsewhere but we can look out into the depths of space and see exactly the same processes occurring billions of light years from Earth. The James Webb Space telescope for example can even ‘see’ what is happening in the atmospheres of planets orbiting distant stars and even work out the atmospheric ‘weather’. It does this by looking at the same absorption spectra produced by the chemicals in the atmospheres as the planet passes in front of the star – in other words things are just the same as here on Earth in terms of how things work which means the same laws of Physics and Chemistry apply everywhere.

Given that’s the case then by far the most stable and likely way for any kind of life to emerge (certainly multi-cellular life) would be for it to be Carbon-based and water has huge advantages as a solvent for the complex chemistry associated with life. The chemical elements are like Lego bricks and they can only plug together in certain ways to build things. We may lack the imagination to think of what they may eventually build but whatever it is it will still have the same type of bricks and plug together in the same ways.

Yes, I totally agree with this and as people with far more understanding than me discovered this, it’s probably correct. But it still fits the box of what we know and can observe from our own eyes. Life must be carbon based and if we want to find other life, we must find water (both of which you’ve explained very well). However I’m open to the possibility that what we know is so much in its infancy that future developments will prove our basic understanding completely wrong. Not that any of us will be around to find out.

 

[GreenThing]

Just to add that I’m not a flat earth idiot and I’m not trying to debunk anything that’s been said on here and prove people wrong. I just think that there’s probably a lot going on that as humans we cannot detect due to the senses that we have.

 

[mervyn]

Just to add that I’m not a flat earth idiot and I’m not trying to debunk anything that’s been said on here and prove people wrong. I just think that there’s probably a lot going on that as humans we cannot detect due to the senses that we have.

I think you’re right. We know and understand the many things that are there but we cannot see. Radio and TV waves, pulses and signals around the universe picked up by our antennae. But what about things that our biological construction and limited knowledge means we miss the unknown unknowns.