Origins of the Universe

Debate Room
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I’ve been thinking about the origins of the universe - and I have issues!

Observation of distant stars indicates the universe is expanding and the expansion is increasing in speed. 2 thoughts:

  1. When they wind things backwards in time, they get to an infinitely dense object they are calling a Singularity. I have a problem with infinity. It’s OK as a mathematical construct, but I don’t think nature works like that. Further, my experience is that nature finds a way around such problems.

  2. The accelerating expansion implies it is going to infinity. Again, I have problems with infinity.

There’s also the issue of a Creation Event (patent pending). The Big Bang Theory speculates an origin point in time and space - to the thrill of theists everywhere.

I have a problem with Creation Events. I’ve never experienced a creation event, and I don’t know of anyone who has either. The logical conclusion is that they don’t happen.

I have heard there is one hypothesis where there was a previous universe that collapsed on itself, creating a highly dense object (which I will call a Space Seed), and that seed expanded into our current expanding universe

-AND -

The universe goes through continuous expansions and contractions.

For this to work, the currently accelerating expansion has to slow down, stop, and start shrinking. Obviously there’s no evidence for that.

However, this hypothesis does solve the problems of an infinitely dense object and a creation event. But it doesn’t solve the problem of infinite time - which I don’t have as much problem with compared to an infinitely dense object.

So what do you think? Do you have the same problem I have with infinity? Do you have the same problem I have about Creation Events. What about my preference for infinite time versus infinite space or infinitely dense objects?

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I don’t know that we can dismiss infinity as an idea in applied mathematics.

For example, if we live in an oscillating Universe (as you touched on in you post about contractions and expansions), then the Universe may be infinitely old, so time may have an infinite progression and an infinite duration.

If we admit that time may be infinite, then perhaps there are other qualities in the Universe that may be infinite as well.

I tend to believe that the Universe is infinitely old, because this idea seems to satisfy Occam’s Razor. If the Universe and time had a begining, then what caused the begining?

If we say that God created the Universe, then where did God come from? If God has always existed, then why not save a step and decide that the Universe has always existed?

Similarly, if some natural process created the Universe, then where did this natural process come from?

This is why it seems–to me–more parsimonious to decide that the Universe has always existed infinitely into the past.

But maybe I’m wrong.

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Does it, though? Are there any current cosmologists who claim this?

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Theists seize upon this and deliberately misunderstand it as “admitting” that there was a specific moment of “creation” or “something from nothing”. That is not what the singularity / Big Bang posits. It simply is as far back as we can “wind back” time but it in no way suggests what came “before” it. And we have to put “before” in scare quotes because time has no meaning / didn’t exist “before” – or at least we cannot really say much of anything about it.

The Big Bang certainly allows for an infinitely cycling universe or for our universe to be a one-off that blarted out of some multiverse entity, which, in turn, it would be entirely inappropriate to ascribe godlike powers or agency to. The Big Bang points to nothing but natural processes – albeit, processes we don’t completely understand at present, and due to the nature of things, may never be able to fully grok.

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If only the god-did-it-ists could bother to learn some actual physics.

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Ahem, been there and done that. Enjoy.

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yep, that comes from as you said rewinding the clock: past a point that is known to be unreliable; an act of “mathematical madness”. So there is no demand you believe in something being infinitely dense to accept the big bang theory. In fact, we already know you can’t pack matter past a limit, and that limit is called a black hole. When you add matter to a black hole, the surface area of its event horizon grows proportion to what was thrown in. Which suggests it isn’t infinitely dense.

I understand your hesitancy, but going towards infinity isn’t the same as infinity. The number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 [time] is going to infinity.

That is a common misconception. In the Big Bang theory, the distance between two particles (in cosmology a particle is typically a galaxy) is described by two numbers. The first number represent the regular distance between two particles BEFORE the big bang/expansion. The second number (called the scale factor) multiplies this initial distance with the result being the distance at a later time (typically now). This scale factor represent the expansion that has happened between then and now, and is closely related to the Hubble parameter (constant). Both values are always positive (non-zero), so nowhere does it describe a single point (of creation or otherwise).

But after this discussion, maybe you can understand why when you are watching a video about cosmology; they fudge a little and say things that aren’t perfectly accurate, as there isn’t time or desire from the audience to hear even a small amount of the nitty gritty details under the hood.

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Hi! I’m also curious about the origins of the universe myself.

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My hypothesis on this is that the big bang was the result of matter exiting what we would call a white hole and that matter had always existed in some form from where it came from i doubt we will ever know unless you’re willing to attempt to bend space time or something. Einsteins laws of relativity are pretty interesting in how the math explains this. I don’t think the big bang can be called a beginning necessarily as its more like the matter kind of just traveled from point a. to point f.

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It is matter – and also energy and time and space. I’m am not a physicist (IANAP) but based on what I have read, time itself has no meaning (or least not defined / known meaning) prior to the singularity so it become very difficult to speculate about in an informed way.

As you suggest, we’re inside a closed system and have no way at present, and maybe ever, to observe it from the “outside”. Maybe universes like ours typically cycle in and out of “whatever” or emerge on a one-off basis and end in heat death. A lot of things could be true. All we can be certain of is that there is more to total reality than we can rightly apprehend. This is something that can be hard to sit with, even for non-theists. We have to remind ourselves that it is okay to operate within the scope of our abilities and perception. We can’t, and don’t need to, know everything.

The problem is that our minds evolved curiosity and the need – one might say, even, the angst – to know everything possible because it’s a survival mechanism. But the actual utility of this really only extends to our immediate environment. The impending supernova at Betelgeuse can happen, or not; the most it will do on earth is put on an interesting light show. It scratches an itch to know all about it but it isn’t an existential issue. Neither is what came before the Big Bang or what happens in other universes or whether our universe is cyclic or ends in heat death.

One can argue that science is a double-edged sword. It opens us to a wider perspective but also creates more unanswered (and sometimes unanswerable) questions. So there’s both a sense of mastery and a sense of anxiety and smallness that issue from that broader awareness. A lot of consciousness is in ways more than we can bear.

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So I started to read @Calilasseia 's article and only got a quarter of the way through before I felt overwhelmed. And given my short attention span, I jumped forward to try to get to the bottom line. The thing I most picked up on was that there maybe more dimensions than the 3 we are used to. And it’s in those dimensions that things can occur that are impossible in the 3 we usually work with.

I’m going to have to come back to that and see if I can get further.

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I do owe a “thank you” to Get Off My Lawn for pointing out certain flaws in an idea–regarding the origins of the Big Bang–that I have been obsessed with since I was a teenager.

I have argued (in prior posts) that I think that the Big Bang was an extremely unlikely statistical anomaly in the second law of thermodynamics that is 100% likely to happen in an infinitely old Universe.

GOML pointed out that if I argue that one statistical fluke resulted in the Big Bang in a Universe that is in a state of maxmum entropy, then I must consider all statistical flukes equally to avoid a subtle double standard.

The example (which I thought was a powerful argument at the time) which I gave to back up my argument was a pollen grain attached to a microscopic bungee cord that is placed under tension by Brownian Motion.

Well, it turns out (as is often the case) that a layperson speculating outside of his or her field can make some gross, fundemental mistakes without being aware of it.

I have since learned about the “Brownian Ratchet” which is–for all intents and purposes–the same thing as my pollen particle with an elastic Bungee cord attached to it.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/201305/physicshistory.cfm&ved=2ahUKEwie5eCwxpGOAxV9STABHSS3G1oQFnoECEEQAQ&usg=AOvVaw0BY7OGShLoencwQf6NNSZL

The Brownian Ratchet fails as a device to extract energy from Brownian motion because we look at the effects of Brownian motion on one part of the device while failing to recognize that this same Brownian motion causes any energy “gains” to be reversed just as quickly in another part of the device.

So, my idea that the Big Bang is a result of the random shuffling of molecules in a state of maximum entropy is probably wrong for the same reasons why the Brownian Ratchet fails to function.

The microscopically tiny paddle wheel is supposedly being turned by molecules hitting it and causing it to turn like a pollen grain moving around at random from Brownian motion.

See below:

17510261397085907280858993412612
17510261397085907280858993412612265×190 9.04 KB

Maybe I can salvage my bruised ego by showing that the Brownian Ratchet can be applied to cosmology, but I’m sure that someone else has done that too.

In any case, everyone was nice enough to not be dismissive, so thank you again.

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Several observations:

It’s possible that our “universe” is just one of many in a larger “cosmos”. We would never be able to detect anything outside of our universe due to the horizon problem. If this is the case, then the “time” that’s postulated to have started at the Big Bang might be just a local time and not related to a "cosmic time’ in the larger cosmos.

The Big Bang has got lots of evidence for it having occurred, but I think a more interesting question now is where did the matter and energy come from that propelled the Big Bang? Or, to put it another way, why is there something rather than nothing? Did that matter/energy always exist, or did it come into being at some specific time? One possibility is that it resulted from a quantum fluctuation in the vacuum that resulted in inflation and the universe we now observe. This is a valid hypothesis, but until we have a more complete theory of quantum gravity it’s unlikely to be developed much further. It’s possible that to us, inside our universe, this quantum fluctuation has lasted billions of years, but to an observer outside our universe, it’s lasted just briefly before going POOF!

There is an answer to the question of the origins of the universe, but we don’t yet have a complete theory of everything, and may never have one, that would let us make more progress on a final answer to this question.

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i’m of the opinion there is no net energy/matter in the universe. That there is 0, has always been 0, and always will be 0. From this view, there is no need to worry about where it came from; in this framework that question is gibberish.

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A lot of unanswered questions but at least we now know what dark matter is. After all the conflated bluster by idiots theorising about mini black holes, gravity coming from another universe, string theory, exostic matter blah blah blah… it turns out to be intergalactic gas. Lol.

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I believe you will find today that the expansion rate of the universe is slowing and a theory holds that when the expansion stops a shrinkage will begin. We need to fill in the blanks.

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I believe you will find today that the expansion of the universe is accelerating and Dark Energy is a place holder to explain that acceleration. Scientists need to find out if Dark Energy is real or what about the current Physics is wrong.

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That was the assumption when I was a child, and the question was, at what rate is it slowing down? The three (obvious) options were:

  1. It slows down forever but never stops.
  2. It slows down, stops and reverses.
  3. It slows down just the right amount to stop forever.

Well they measured it; surprise, it ain’t slowing down. That entire assumption was wrong. Oops. It happens. That is why measurement is so important!

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Indeed, the assumption that the expansion of the universe was slowing down, was based upon the following observations that were current at the time, namely:

[1] Gravity is present, universally pervasive, and an attractive force between masses;

[2] No counterbalancing repulsive force is known to exist.

That was the situation, say, 50 years or so ago. Cosmologists devised a formula for what was termed the deceleration parameter, which is related to the Hubble parameter H as follows:

q = - (1+(dH/dt)/H2)

For a long time, q was thought to be positive, and a value of q=½ was the value favoured by cosmological physicists prior to 1998. But, in 1998, it was discovered that the actual value of q was negative, courtesy of type 1a supernova redshift measurements. This marked the point at which dark energy, a repulsive force counteracting gravity, was introduced.

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OH yeah, its just a kinematic equation. You can’t put in forces you don’t know about :grin: