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

Posted by: Ron Brinsdon on 05 September 2008

Excellent progs which avoided too much PhD talk and put across the objectives of the new Particle Accelerator in an interesting and informative way. But........

One scientist (surname of Cox I think) made a comment like "In the beginning, there was nothing. No space, time, matter, just nothing. Then 13.5 billion years ago the Universe exploded into life - The Big Bang"

My headachingly frustrating question for the group is "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. There must be some theoretical physicists out there in Naimland!

47 seems as good an answer as anything else.

Looks like another wet weekend in the Midlands,

Have fun,

Ron
Posted on: 11 September 2008 by Ewan Aye
for sale
Posted on: 11 September 2008 by tonym
A Black Hole has formed down the back of our settee. So far it's swallowed three remote controls, a pocketful of loose change and the top off my favourite novelty Gary Glitter pen.

Should I complain to CERN? It appears to be growing!
Posted on: 11 September 2008 by Tim Jones
I worry a bit about the state of particle physics. I know as much as any muddle-headed middle brow about it, and am beginning to suspect that the increasing complexity of the Standard Model is evidence that it's not going to work out.

In particular, the methodology that everyone seems to adopt these days is to hypothesise a particle (especially those which mediate the forces, bosons, etc) and then start looking for it. There was something a bit wrong with those attempts to find neutrinos and gravity waves a few decades ago. The point is that the method is set up so as to say 'x effect will demonstrate the existence of particle y'. X effect, perhaps predictably, occurs in some way or other, therefore particle y 'exists'.

I am very, very pro-science (in a kind of Rortian way). Perhaps we're approaching a paradigm shift in particle physics?
Posted on: 11 September 2008 by BigH47
Re:For Sale,
I thought all the nutters er funny posters spent all their time on this forum?
Posted on: 12 September 2008 by Stuart M
quote:
Considering the 'Big Bang' was infinitesimally small,

Thats one theory?

Another is that it wasn't and that the infinitesimally point does not occur and so the equations do not break down this solves a load of but raises others if this is possible. (Can't remember exactly but I think it was a version of quantum loop gravity - an alternate theory of everything to string theory - that allowed this)

Or if it say a collision of branes (M-theory), caused the bang perhaps not all dimensions (not necessarily the 4 we know) were infinitely small point could some of the dimensions be not infinitely small. Or could there be more than one points created when the branes intersected?

Or is there a meta universe that's steady state, but the bit that we can observe (speed of light etc) restricts us and has had multiple big bangs (M-Theory, quantum fluctuation, some alien LHA experiment) are going on all the time but we can never know about them as were stuck in our space time bubble.

All mind bending stuff - my guess is the LHA will throw up some big surprises - how long before we make sense of them is another question