BBC's "Big Bang Night" Documentaries - A Question

quote:

47 seems as good an answer as anything else.

I thought 42 was the answer!

I couldn't quite remember!

Everything makes sense now!

Ron

That's the same Cox that played in D-Ream (things can only get better)!

Brian Greenes' books "The Elegant Universe" and "The Fabric Of the Cosmos" gave me a really enjoyable insight to modern cosmology and string theory-and even try to approach the question of what came at the very beginning.

Bruce

Hi Ron

Good question! This might help.

Cheers - John

Science is what you do when you don't know what you're doing.
Thats what one of the scientists on the prog last night said.
I like it.
Matt.

Thanks guys,

The BBC article means that we may now have to consider the origins of TWO universes!

I will order Mr Greenes' books from the library.

Things can only get better..tum ti tum ti tum

quote:

Originally posted by Ron Brinsdon:
My headachingly frustrating question for the group is "How do you create something from nothing"?

You don't.

There seems to be an inbuilt system in the human condition that makes us not believe in anything we can't see. It's the old thing of if a tree falls in a forest with no witness, does it make a sound? We tend to believe in nothing outside our own limits of consciousness.

If someone travels towards you from a great distance, say on a straight 10 mile road, do you believe they came out of nothing? No.

We have to believe that there are other dimensions around us that exist in parallel. The sudden existence of this universe can then be explained by it suddenly bursting outside of the dimension it originally existed within, creating a new one. Just because we can't see the other ones (plural) doesn't mean they don't exist. Consider UFO's and ghost phenomena in this context and you begin to see answers. There is no magic, only science.

I recall Stephen Hawking postulating that the universe is perceived to be a certain way because we wish it to be so.....HELP!!!

quote:

There is no magic, only science.

....I am open to the ideas of a parallel universe, multidimensional universes etc, but these concepts just shift Ron's basic question further out without providng a possible answer. The energy (which converts into mass according to Dr Cox) had to come from somewhere in whatever was 'the begining'.

regards
geoff

Ewan,

Quite happy to consider the co-existence of multiple universes and other dimensions but my real dilema is along the lines of the old "If God created the Universe, who Created God" question. In your answer, who or what created the parallel dimensions that created our universe? Does it go on ad infinutum?

I happen to believe in both ghosts and UFO's but it is not helping.

Geoff P,

You not only beat me to it but put it in a much more scientific way!

Ron

I'm just thinking in terms of an empty box made of say, plasterboard. There's a party going on in the next box and suddenly someone gets shoved into the wall and the plasterboard breaks, and the party spills into the box. That's our Big Bang.

I guess if you could get an overall view of all the boxes, there would be a good chance we could never understand it anyway, even if it were laid out for us. We keep supposing we might learn everything, but it would be like trying to teach Latin to a mouse. We most likely have nothing like the brain capacity to grasp it, even though we like to kid ourselves otherwise.

When humans reach the edge of their understanding they have an inability to just say "I don't know" and therefore invent a mechanism to carry the responsibility of not having an answer, and call it God. So instead of having to say "I don't know" they can say "God did it" which implies they actually have an explanation. It's just the human mind reverting back to the most primitive instincts. The truth is most likely to be that there is an answer, but we wouldn't understand it any more than a cat has the ability to build New York.

If time begins at the start of our universe then 'before' does not exist as a concept....does it?

Just thought I'd lob that one in.

Bruce

I've thought about this parallel dimension thing before, and I'm not sure it amounts to the same thing as a parallel universe which suggests an existence that is not related to our time frame.

You see Bruce, where were you in 1867 for instance? It seems pretty conclusive to me with all the evidence around me and my life experiences that the world before I was around actually existed. That helps resolve the problem of whether the universe exists outside of my consciousness and therefore I can safely assume that I am in a dimension with a time slot between two times when I will not exist as a person in this dimension. i.e. I was dead before I was born and I will become dead again.

So where was I and where will I go?

Well, it might be that I will pass in and out of this dimension into another. My consciousness cannot come from nothing and it it is logical that it will not disappear into nothing. It helps explain life before death, life after death, the phenomena when the barrier falters, and lots of other things besides - including sleep. Have you ever been under general aesthetic? It's a weird one. It's not like dreaming, it's more like being halfway dead without the crossing over or the dreaming. Waking up you know where you are, but you are also aware that you were not asleep in the regular way.

It's an interesting subject, but it won't get you anywhere to discuss it further, although we love to. I think Bruce we have to accept the concept of time as being a common element, and therefore by acknowledging the world existed before we were ourselves born, we can apply the same logic to the space we call the universe, because it exists within something else that has a concept of existence.

quote:

If time begins at the start of our universe then 'before' does not exist as a concept....does it?

There may have been a parallel universe that started earlier though!
Can we do something simple like string theory or calculus instead.

I used to love Calculus! And Applied Maths ...

Really this is theory as it works [as in Newtonian] and I get stuck on the more advanced stuff. So the imexplicable thing is that I am not stuck with the abstractness of music!

ATB from George

String theory fails miserably at having a stab at spirituality and the bigger picture beyond the existence of the universe, which I think is absolutely necessary in order to address the "who am I" question. I believe our spiritual existence is massively older than our physical bodies, and I believe we don't even exist in mind within this dimension. I know this sounds crazy, but I think our brain is just a wi-fi device to where we actually reside in another dimension. It doesn't compute that our conciousness resides in a bodily organ. That's how we can pop in and out.

You probably think I'm crazy now. One thing I am convinced of is that saying "God did it" is ridiculous. I am not in any way religious, but if you look at what Jesus taught, he was absolutely correct. The language of explanation is different of course, and we seem to have misunderstood him, but he seems to have been a genius philosopher. Forget the bull of all the things he was supposed to do, or his virgin birth and all that church manipulated propaganda, strip it away and look at the man, and you'll see an Einstein just trying to get a message across in the only way the public would understand.

quote:

Originally posted by Ron Brinsdon:
There must be some theoretical physicists out there in Naimland!

Ron

Ok my name is Ian and I'm a theoretical physicist - sounds a bit like AA. Cosmology is not my research area - but I do teach it to our undergrads.

My Ha'penth..

The question of what happened in the real beginning is currently unknown and not understood. We have no reliable theory of such extreme conditions when both gravitation and quantum effects are equally important (this is what string theory etc is trying to remedy). Until we do there is no chance of finding an answer.

What we do know (or more precisely, we'd be professionally gobsmacked if it were otherwise), is that our common conception of time will not help is much to explain what happens literally at the Big Bang. So simple questions like 'what happened before the big bang?' may be similar to 'Where do you go when you go north from the North Pole?'

I'm on my way to the airport but will write a bit more later.

I can second the Brian Greene recommendations - the Elegant Universe is the best popular science book I've ever read.

Ian

Ian. You can't just up and leave us like that when you can explain it! Come back.

NOOOooooooo......

quote:

quote:
If time begins at the start of our universe then 'before' does not exist as a concept....does it?



There may have been a parallel universe that started earlier though!
Can we do something simple like string theory or calculus instead.

I forgot these

Dear H,

No need to state the obvious - the smileys!

ATB from G

quote:

"How do you create something from nothing"?

I know this is the ultimate question of life ,the universe and everything but why is this always glossed over in these documentaries. The progs always want to concentrate on
what happened in the milli-milliseconds after the bang or is my question one of theirs too?

What,in laymans terms please,is the current thinking on this.

Ron,

Scientists can't answer this one (nor can anyone else!). They really are quite basic in what they can answer.
Even Richard Dawkins stumbles on this one.

Your ideas are just as valid as anybody else's

Cheers

Don

Dear all,

I'm the one who said that there was nothing before the Big Bang (Brian Cox) so I'll clarify. It's actually not necessarily correct! It's a BBC compromise in order to remove the PhD talk, as Ron said (and I'm not totally happy with it, but there you go). In fact, the correct answer is that we don't know if time and space began 13.7 billion years ago - all we can say from observation is that something interesting happened back then and the piece of the Universe we can see was very hot and has been expanding ever since.

There are theories that suggest that the Universe has been around for ever, and what we see as the big bang was a collision of two "sheets" or "branes" - on one of which we are sitting.

A friend of mine Neil Turok wrote a good book on these admittedly speculative ideas

http://endlessuniverse.net/

As a matter of interest, I have a Horizon documentary coming up in autumn which which covers some of this.

Cheers,

Brian

A fascinating discussion as I can see we all agree.

I'm not a physicist as I can tell others are, but I strongly maintain that the God hypothesis is un-necessary. I know it was mentioned before, the ad infinitum argument, but I want to direct readers to Victor Stenger:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Failed-Hypothesis-Science-Sho...id=1220702912&sr=8-1

A brilliant book that covers how the univers came about!

Kind regards,

Jon