Big Bang theory just does not make sense

[mnmcreator]

I have looked at the Big Bang theory and I am trying to make sense of it all. There seems to be some questions that I can not get answered and looking for someone in the know to explain to me if they can.

[Steve Ward]

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/303548504185?var=0&mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=710-53481-19255-0&campid=5338268676&toolid=10044&customid=CjwKCAjwloynBhBbEiwAGY25dIF16fG42kzTWA7jZCzmIjCyq4SNjGoXpcYdf6nY2Znn-y4Zml5kORoCpAUQAvD_BwE

[AstroKeith]

What are your questions. You cant expect us to just explain everything! Also as you have just joined we need to know your physics/cosmology understanding level.

To be honest Wiki makes a good effort at explaining https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang

As well as Bang recommended by Steve above, the classic is "the Inflationary Universe" by Alan H Guth. A bit old now but its the basis for the current models.

[Mark2022]

Why waste time on unproven theories? 

[Marvin Jenkins]

By definition a theory is unproven. If very smart people didn’t waste time on theories there would be no facts.

[michael8554]

So much of cosmology is unproven theories.

Do Back Holes exist ? We don't know, but the evidence suggests they do, but they are unproven.

Do Dark Energy and Dark Matter exist ? We don't know, they are just theories.

Same with the Big Bang.

Michael

[vlaiv]

3 minutes ago, michael8554 said:

Do Back Holes exist ? We don't know, but the evidence suggests they do, but they are unproven.

Out of interest, what sort of evidence would you consider prove existence of Black Holes?

There is so much evidence on them that I really can't see term "unproven" being used for their existence.

We have detected gravitational waves from their merger. We have tracked objects gravitationally influenced by massive black hole in center of our galaxy, We have seen massive jets being ejected from some galaxies. We have even two images from radio telescopes of phenomena associated with black holes.

What else must there be to "prove" their existence?

6 minutes ago, michael8554 said:

Same with the Big Bang.

Not sure what people have on Big Bang that's confusing them.

I do think that there are some aspects of Big Bang cosmology that need further explanation (like inflation / inflaton field), but idea that stuff was very dense and was "condensed" at one point - is pretty much backed up by observational data.

We have CMB, we have baryon acoustic oscillations, whole idea fits well with GR which we have rather good understanding of and bunch of evidence.

[robin_astro]

https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html

[iantaylor2uk]

14 hours ago, mnmcreator said:

I have looked at the Big Bang theory and I am trying to make sense of it all. There seems to be some questions that I can not get answered and looking for someone in the know to explain to me if they can.

Are you a scientist? The big bang theory is a scientific theory so it does mean you need a fair bit of scientific knowledge to understand why it describes many of the features of the observable universe.

[robin_astro]

The details need some scientific knowledge but I  would say the key observations underpinning the basic "big bang" idea that the universe was once small and hot can (and should) be explainable  to  non scientists otherwise the layman has a right to be sceptical.   

Objects in the universe that are further away are measurably moving away from us faster so the universe is expanding and therefore was more compact in the past.

https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmo_01.htm

Stuff  cools as it expands (try setting off a CO2 fire extinguisher) . Except for a few hot spots (stars), the universe is now measurably still a few degrees above zero and so was hotter in the past 

https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB.html

Most of the stuff we see in the universe  is made up of only the lightest simplest elements (mostly Hydrogen and a bit of Helium) This because the early universe expanded and cooled rapidly such that  the soup of stuff that made up those atoms quickly got too cool and spread out before the larger  atoms of the heavier elements could form. The rest of the elements formed in the hot spots (stars)

https://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBNS.html

 

[iantaylor2uk]

I agree with you, but the point I was trying to make was that scientific theories don't really need to be understood by non-scientists to be correct, although the big bang theory is easier to understand compared to quantum mechanics, for example.

[wulfrun]

Interesting that OP hasn't returned to tell us what puzzles them...

[Knighty2112]

My big problem with the big bang is we just keep kicking the can further down the road, but don’t get to any satisfactory answer as to the actual (for want of better terminology) the first point of its creation. With the current model there has to be something before (no matter how small) that has to have been before the big bang, otherwise we get to something that would be impossible; the instant creation of something from absolutely nothing. So we find ourselves faced with a dilemma; either we stare down in the rabbit hole of existence into a never ending sequence of events that eventually led to the big bag (otherwise we still face the possibility of something been created at some point from absolute nothing (no space, time or any other kind of dimension). If we go with the view that at some point there was a very first point of creation for the universe (in whatever form that first creation took to eventually lead to where we are now), then we are faced with these dual dilemmas that have no easy answer. Sadly, I am not smart enough to say which one is correct, and I kind of think that science will never be able to answer this fully satisfactorily either.   

[Franklin]

39 minutes ago, wulfrun said:

Interesting that OP hasn't returned to tell us what puzzles them..

Maybe he was talking about The Big Bang Theory on the telly?

[vlaiv]

1 minute ago, Knighty2112 said:

My big problem with the big bang is we just keep kicking the can further down the road, but don’t get to any satisfactory answer as to the actual (for want of better terminology) the first point of its creation. With the current model there has to be something before (no matter how small) that has to have been before the big bang, otherwise we get to something that would be impossible; the instant creation of something from absolutely nothing. So we find ourselves faced with a dilemma; either we stare down in the rabbit hole of existence into a never ending sequence of events that eventually led to the big bag (otherwise we still face the possibility of something been created at some point from absolute nothing (no space, time or any other kind of dimension). If we go with the view that at some point there was a very first point of creation for the universe (in whatever form that first creation took to eventually lead to where we are now), then we are faced with these dual dilemmas that have no easy answer. Sadly, I am not smart enough to say which one is correct, and I kind of think that science will never be able to answer this fully satisfactorily either.   

There are couple of issues with your reasoning there.

First - who says that something can't be made out of nothing? As far as we tell, with present "configuration" of our universe, general rule is that something can't be made out of nothing, but at the moment of creation - we don't really know or understand conditions and there is no reason to extend our current experience to that "region" of existence. Things are different enough that our rules of physics might not apply there. Maybe in those conditions quantum fluctuations lead to popping into existence more permanently then they do nowadays.

Second - there is a good chance time popped into existence in the same time as space as two are related into single entity called space time (as far as we can tell - at least they appear to be connected). In that sense - there is no "prior" to popping into existence and rules of causality as we knot them need not apply. Way we think that cause predates consequence may not be correct in that case and there might not be a cause for consequence that is our universe.

In any case - big bang does not say how things came into existence, nor it aims to explain that part.

It starts some time after supposed popping into existence or some other event. It starts when things are bunched up at very high temperatures in what we might call dense "ball" of energy.

[Knighty2112]

16 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

There are couple of issues with your reasoning there.

First - who says that something can't be made out of nothing? As far as we tell, with present "configuration" of our universe, general rule is that something can't be made out of nothing, but at the moment of creation - we don't really know or understand conditions and there is no reason to extend our current experience to that "region" of existence. Things are different enough that our rules of physics might not apply there. Maybe in those conditions quantum fluctuations lead to popping into existence more permanently then they do nowadays.

Second - there is a good chance time popped into existence in the same time as space as two are related into single entity called space time (as far as we can tell - at least they appear to be connected). In that sense - there is no "prior" to popping into existence and rules of causality as we knot them need not apply. Way we think that cause predates consequence may not be correct in that case and there might not be a cause for consequence that is our universe.

In any case - big bang does not say how things came into existence, nor it aims to explain that part.

It starts some time after supposed popping into existence or some other event. It starts when things are bunched up at very high temperatures in what we might call dense "ball" of 

Great points vlaiv, but still kicking the can down the road!  

[saac]

2 minutes ago, Knighty2112 said:

Great points vlaiv, but still kicking the can down the road!  

Sometimes the can has to be kicked down the road, doesn't alter the fact that it is a can though.  We know how the can came to be but we don't need to know why in order to kick it. 

Jim

[andrew s]

@Knighty2112  the simple answer is we don't have a scientific theory for what you call the point of creation.  We have to stop when the temperature and density are so high that we don't have access to any data about that regime. 

Regards Andrew 

[Zermelo]

22 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

quantum fluctuations lead to popping into existence more permanently then they do nowadays.

I read somewhere that it had been speculated that this was exactly what had happened - quantum fluctuation gives particle-antiparticle pair, inflation expands space and multiplies matter and antimatter, then asymmetries in the physical laws result in excess of matter over antimatter, which is left over to create our universe

 

27 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

there is no "prior" to popping into existence and rules of causality as we knot them need not apply. Way we think that cause predates consequence may not be correct in that case and there might not be a cause for consequence that is our universe.

I have a book somewhere, can't remember which one, that explains this. Just as curved spacetime can give rise to a volume that is finite but unbounded, so can it result in a situation where time can begin at some finite point in the past, and yet not have any "boundary", i.e. there was no beginning as such to the universe. I really couldn't get my head around the details.

Both of these points show how our difficulty with "causation" of the universe might be mistaken.

[Knighty2112]

8 minutes ago, saac said:

Sometimes the can has to be kicked down the road, doesn't alter the fact that it is a can though.  We know how the can came to be but we don't need to know why in order to kick it. 

Jim

Hi Jim. What I want to know is what’s kicking the can if that’s what we are now calling the universe!  
 

[Knighty2112]

5 minutes ago, andrew s said:

@Knighty2112  the simple answer is we don't have a scientific theory for what you call the point of creation.  We have to stop when the temperature and density are so high that we don't have access to any data about that regime. 

Regards Andrew 

Hi Andrew. Yes, after 50 plus years of trying to find that answer I realise that science doesn’t have an answer for that. Some are fine with that, but for me it just niggles away still trying to glean back in time and space past that initial inflation after the big bang and the formation of the universe we inhabit now.  

[PeterC65]

What @Zermelo says above is the current scientific explanation about what happened at the big bang. Over the last decade the scientific understanding of this whole problem has moved forward considerably. The explanations are a mix of relativity and quantum theory, both of which are quite counter intuitive.

 

[andrew s]

5 minutes ago, Knighty2112 said:

Hi Andrew. Yes, after 50 plus years of trying to find that answer I realise that science doesn’t have an answer for that. Some are fine with that, but for me it just niggles away still trying to glean back in time and space past that initial inflation after the big bang and the formation of the universe we inhabit now.  

I am in that's ok camp. We can get to about t = 0.0001s of the start which is good in my view especially if you take it as a percentage of the period we do have a good theory for 0.0001s to 13.8 Gyrs

Regards Andrew 

[saac]

6 minutes ago, Knighty2112 said:

Hi Jim. What I want to know is what’s kicking the can if that’s what we are now calling the universe!  
 

Gus I get that. It's an excellent and entirely natural question and as much as it is unsatisfactory but as others have said "science" is not really equipped to answer that.  So that takes us back to what the Big Bang theory sets out to do.  It is up front and as honest as can be, it sets out only to describe how the universe evolved (the stages of its evolution), it makes no claim to do anything other than that.  In that respect, and given the compelling supporting evidence, it does seem pretty secure, maybe not perfect thankfully  - some things still to be reconciled, but pretty solid nonetheless.  I don't think we are then kicking the can down the road, not with the Big Bang theory anyway.  Maybe what we are doing is looking at an altogether different question and getting frustrated because science can't help out with that one. 

Jim 

[saac]

8 minutes ago, andrew s said:

 0.0001s to 13.8 Gyrs

 

That is not a bad ratio at all  

Jim