Has the Big Bang Prompted a Silent Debate?

[mike777]

Yes not only did we have Inflation right after the big bang but now it seems we have dark energy or anti gravity making some supernovas appear to be too far away and accelerating even more away from us than the math says they should be. This leads to a prediction of a Universe in Winter Death.

[helene_t]

That is one of the problems with the internet, that unless you are well-versed in a subject it is difficult to know if information is or is not accurate.

I would say it has become easier thanks to internet. If I read an article in a newspaper in the pre-internet era and I was suspicious that it might be feces tauri, it was a lot of work to get it verified. Today it's just checking up on google, wikipedia, yahoo answers (and of course bbo forum).

[NickRW]

I would say it has become easier thanks to internet. If I read an article in a newspaper in the-internet era and I was suspicious that it might be feces tauri...

Wow. You learn something everyday. I've never heard BS called FT before :)

 

Nick

[barmar]

In general, for a hypothesis to become an accepted theory, and ultimately a law of nature, it's not enough that it fail to be disproved. In addition, it has to make predictions about experiments that haven't been done yet, and then when you do them they should match the predictions.

 

This is why Einstein's relativity theories were so successful. They not only explained phenomena that had already been observed, but they made a number of predictions, and all of them turned out to be true, to an incredible level of precision. While it's possible that this was just a bunch of lucky coincidences, it's much more likely that Einstein actually understood how the universe works and his theories are true.

 

This is one of the problems with some current theories about cosmology and quantum mechanics. String theory, multiverses, etc. try to explain what we've seen, but they don't make any testable predictions. There's a book about the problem with string theory called "Not Even Wrong" -- the idea being that there's no way to tell if the theory is right or wrong, so it's useless and lots of money is being wasted researching it.

 

The Big Bang theory not only explained the observed red shifts, but it also made some predictions. The most well known is the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is the ambient heat of the universe left over from the big bang explosion. When this radiation was detected (in the 60's I think), it matched the prediction from the BB theory very closely. This is the type of thing that lends credence to a theory. An alternate theory would not only have to explain all the things that BB explains, but it would have to make new predictions that differ from those of BB, and then someone will have to do experiments to see which one turns out to be right.

 

There may be something wrong with a scientific process that presumes that the prevailing theory is the "true" one, and a new one has to go to extra lengths to overturn it and become accepted. But I think this just reflects practicality. If scientists had to accept all theories that match the known phenomena, it becomes extremely difficult to get any work done, because you can't use them all. So we generally stick with the first theory that shows success, until something better comes along.

[luke warm]

Sorry but I can't find any serious web pages questioning the BB theory. This redshift issue had been discussed before and a lot can be said about it but in any case it does not invalidate BB.

i think most problems with BB are caused by the questions left unanswered, helene... and before you say that might not matter, some great physicists would disagree with you... the very concept of a singularity, if you think about it, makes very little sense... why, if it contained all that now is, was it not a black hole? what caused it to explode or expand or whatever it did?

 

you are better able than i to judge whether any of these are "serious" issues

 

http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V09NO2PDF/V09N2tvf.PDF

[Al_U_Card]

The appearance of or similarity to a black hole does not mean that the state of singularity was indeed a black hole nor that there was a big bang. Science seeks to know what the reality was and their conjectures are all attempts at approaching that description.

[blackshoe]

In space, there is no sound. Therefore, there was no Big Bang. :-)

[Al_U_Card]

Actually, in the void, with a particle density of roughly one hydrogen atom per cubic deciliter, sound waves do travel but the sound would be so quiet in that rarified and tenuous atmosphere that only, well Jimmy, who's ear could hear it? :D

[helene_t]

i think most problems with BB are caused by the questions left unanswered, helene... and before you say that might not matter, some great physicists would disagree with you... the very concept of a singularity, if you think about it, makes very little sense... why, if it contained all that now is, was it not a black hole? what caused it to explode or expand or whatever it did?

 

you are better able than i to judge whether any of these are "serious" issues

 

http://redshift.vif.com/JournalFiles/V09NO2PDF/V09N2tvf.PDF

Thanks. That journal looks ok. (Except that it is published in Texas, lol).

 

As for the issues raised in the article, I have no qualified opinion about it. Obviously, if it was so simple that one could reject the BB just by "thinking about it" the theory would have been long gone. I could think of a dozen of answers to the questions of what caused the singularity to expand etc. but since I don't understand cosmology anyway it is not very interesting what I could think of.