Other Theories Other Than The Big Bang

[mikey32shaw]

Hi all, I have just finished reading a really enjoyable book on the Big Bang and managed to understand most of it. Not being a academic of any sort but just someone with a mere interest in this kind of thing is there any other theories that may have resulted in the start of the universe?

I know the Big Bang is the one that is universally followed and with good reason. I just wanted to know if there were any other scientists out there thinking differently?

Mike

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[JulianO]

There are other theories kicking around, but the big bang is the most mainstream right now, mostly because it best fits the facts. 

I do rather like this theory as a sort of alternative (and very readable book) - it also fits most of the facts, but avoids the singularity somewhat.

[Ronnie67]

Yeh there are quite a few theories,  I liked.  Before the big bang there was an alternative universe which collapsed thus creating our universe, I recently completed a course named "From the Big Bang to Dark Energy" and one of the topics mentioned the beginning of the Universe and it gives a good explanation by   Professor Murayama, unfortunately I cannot get a copy of the lecture

[acey]

Depends what you mean by alternative to the big bang. If you mean the idea that what we see now is the result of cosmological expansion from an initial very dense state, there are very, very few serious scientists who would say otherwise - I can't think of any. I would have said Chandra Wickramasinghe, who held out on steady-state theory along with Fred Hoyle, but I think even he has dropped that idea now (his Wikipedia page only talks about their other controversial idea, panspermia).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe

But if you mean alternatives to the idea that the initial state was a singularity, or ideas about some prior state that might have initiated the big bang, then there are quite a few ideas around that are considered serious but speculative, e.g. this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekpyrotic_universe

And if you mean speculative pseudo-science, religious doctrines or armchair philosophy, there are zillions of ideas - e.g. "turtles all the way down".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

[ollypenrice]

A very seductive refinement or extension of the BB has been proposed by Lee Smolin. It's more hypothesis than theory, maybe, but it's clever. The idea is that collapsed stellar-dervied black holes seed new universes 'elsewhere' to this one. These have some kind of memory of our universe and resemble it enough to be maybe better or maybe worse at making stars. The ones that are worse have fewer babies, so to speak, but the ones that are better have more. More stars to collapse means more new starforming universes ever more prolific than before.

The point about this is that the formation of stars seems to need fine tuning of the numbers, but without stars to make elements nothing interesting seems likely to happen. No us, for example. No complexity. Smolin's hypothsis is intended to envision a mechanism by which star forming universes become highly probable rather than highly improbable. The idea is taken from evolution by natural selection, a theory which can explain the evolution of complexity. Smolin's book is called The Life of the Cosmos. I found the whole way of thinking fascinating.

Olly

[Alien 13]

A very seductive refinement or extension of the BB has been proposed by Lee Smolin. It's more hypothesis than theory, maybe, but it's clever. The idea is that collapsed stellar-dervied black holes seed new universes 'elsewhere' to this one. These have some kind of memory of our universe and resemble it enough to be maybe better or maybe worse at making stars. The ones that are worse have fewer babies, so to speak, but the ones that are better have more. More stars to collapse means more new starforming universes ever more prolific than before.

The point about this is that the formation of stars seems to need fine tuning of the numbers, but without stars to make elements nothing interesting seems likely to happen. No us, for example. No complexity. Smolin's hypothsis is intended to envision a mechanism by which star forming universes become highly probable rather than highly improbable. The idea is taken from evolution by natural selection, a theory which can explain the evolution of complexity. Smolin's book is called The Life of the Cosmos. I found the whole way of thinking fascinating.

Olly

Very interesting it does seem to me as a novice with this topic that "natural selection" is playing a part, the recent discovery of possible earth type planets and lots of them and is  part of the star forming process thats inevitable rather than the result of a lucky role of the dice.

[Jussi]

And if you mean speculative pseudo-science, religious doctrines or armchair philosophy, there are zillions of ideas - e.g. "turtles all the way down".

The truth is that it is beyond anyone's comprehension, today and in a million years time.

And if you think otherwise there is at least one person you are fooling.

It all leads to metaphysical thought  whether you like it or not.

turtles all the way down!    how about dark this and dark that, all the way down..

thats what I call speculative pseudo science

still, some people will swallow anything the high priests of materialism utter

[ronin]

There was a program on this 6-8 months back, it was a repeat of an earlier showing. Likely to come up again sometime.

From what was said it seems that a lot of cosmologists/Th Physicists now think there was a "before the big bang". Just what never really came out, equally I suppose it is not possible to describe/determine much.

We are at a very early stage of understanding whatever it is we are floating around in. It was Zwicky that first threw in the possibility of dark matter and that was a theory in 1933, many thought he was nuts, we didn't find a pulsar until 1967. We know very, very little. So to an extent there really are no answers. We know so little we are possibly not even asking the right questions. From a talk I attended I think in the last 10 years the theory of the universe and how it operates has had to change 3 times, and no change has been a minor tweek, each has been a throw away of the previous and start again.

Doubt if the program is on the iPlayer still but check the Horizon offerings, may still be around.

[CumbrianGadgey]

There are other theories kicking around, but the big bang is the most mainstream right now, mostly because it best fits the facts. 

I do rather like this theory as a sort of alternative (and very readable book) - it also fits most of the facts, but avoids the singularity somewhat.

I was just about getting my head around the big bang and this crops up! I tried to do the normal reading 10% bit but it hardly showed me anything. I just got to the interesting stuff and it stopped!

you couldn't manage to summarise it for impatient cheapskates like me could you? (who don't want to either pay for it or wait for it to be delivered!) I'm not too bothered about it avoiding the singularity so long as it makes sense of the rest. After all, the big bang theory sort of misses out on what happened for the first part of the universes life as a singularity. I've already asked a question about that.

cheers!

[JulianO]

Imagine the universe contained in a sort of box, in more dimensions than 3. For simplicity though think of the universe as a flat piece of paper.

Very close by is another universe on a flat piece of paper, just a small gap between them. 

They are attached by weak springs. 

They bang together, and this creates a lot of hot matter into this empty universe (and the other one). It looks like a big bang, as hot matter is sprayed in everywhere. The two pieces of paper recoil out, but will eventually come together again.

Stars form, galaxies evolve, and die. Dark energy takes over stretching everything out very thin, eventually all the stars go out, and the universe is vastly stretched so there is hardly anything anywhere. The two pieces of paper eventually come together and bang again. We have another big bang.

Hence another cycle begins.

[Qualia]

And if you mean speculative pseudo-science, religious doctrines or armchair philosophy, there are zillions of ideas - e.g. "turtles all the way down".

It all leads to metaphysical thought  whether you like it or not....still, some people will swallow anything the high priests of materialism utter

I think Acey is being ironic, Jussi. In light of the references and the quoted line above, we could argue that it is putting forward the position of Scientism, namely the philosophical idea that says that philosophical ideas per se are worthless, because only science has answers to questions, and/or says that only scientific questions are worth asking. But, since this position is a philosophical notion, not a scientific one, it is self-refuting. If true, it’s false; if false, true So much for armchair philosophy, hey

Back to the OP, this might get the ball rolling.