The Big Bang Theory

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RyanUTAustin

1,000+ Posts
I took many hours of philosophy and astronomy during my days in college and I have seen this question come up on another thread.

I just felt it deserved its own dedicated thread.

Now I don't pretend to know everything about the big bang theory but I wanted to throw something out there and see what yall thought.

How about the theory that we live in an oscillating universe?

Human beings invented time and demand a start and finish for things.

How about if the big bang or singularity happens over and over and there was never a start at all.

The universe just expands and contracts over billions of years and what we see is a product of the energy in perpetual motion.

Just throwing it out there.
 
Kind of eastern, don't you think?

Looks like the evidence is coming in on one way expansion and the heat death of the universe, rather than ocillation.
 
The universe will expand, then it will collapse back on itself, then will expand again. It will repeat this process forever. What you don't you know is that when the universe expands again, everything will be as it is now. Whatever mistakes you make this time around, you will live through on your next pass. Every mistake you make, you will live through again, & again, forever. So my advice to you is to get it right this time around. Because this time is all you have.
KPAX lol
 
The universe had to start from something. It couldn't have just always existed.

Even if there was a big "bang", something or someone had to have created the initial matter to blow up.
 
Strictly speaking the standard model doesn't speak to a "bang" per se. There was not a primordial explosion, so much as uniform expansion.

As to the notion of the cosmic oscillation... is this different than "curvature" question? As near as we can tell, the universe is "flat" which is to say nothing in our observation indicates that the universe COULD collapse at this point. Or at least if it did, neither gravity nor the geometry of spacetime (as we understand it) could be the agent of the collapse.
 
RayDog, geometric expansion of the universe still requires a "big bang"... which is to say, expansion viewed in the opposite direction still results in all of the matter/energy of the universe confined to a discrete location. As stated above, the "Big Bang" does not refer to an explosion. In fact, the term itself was originated by one of the theories opponents (Hoyle), and was adopted by the theories proponents. It simply states that all of the matter/energy of the universe came from a common source (in space and time).
 
Hey, don't knock "Heat Death", without it, we wouldn't be here. Everything in the universe that we know of has "frozen" out of the primordial energy. Heat Death gave us life.
 
I read about it as well and it makes perfect sense if you believe that the earth was created by an initial surge of energy that continues to move.

But shouldn't that mean that the energy will never stop because it would have to come into contact with something to make it stop?
 
In a "closed" universe, the universe expands until gravity (or geometry) brings everything back together.

In an "open" universe, the universe expands picking up speed as it going faster and faster forever.

In a "flat" universe, the universe continues to expand until the end of time... but not a second longer. It's the universe that Goldilocks ate.

By all measurements we live in a "flat" universe. The expansion we see is caused by a force we have yet to identify named "dark energy". As near as we can tell the universe is made up of about 5% baryonic matter (you and me), about 25% Dark Matter, and about 70% dark energy.
 
Once we find out what dark matter is (or isn't), a lot of this will come to light.

Speaking of light, once we get that concept mastered, we will be even closer to the origins of the universe.

The thing that frustrates me the most is that everything we know about the Universe now is already the past. If we are looking at a star 500,000 light years away, we are looking 500,000 light years into the past. That is how vast the Universe is.

It takes light (which travels 186,000 miles per second) 8 minutes to travel from our own Sun to reach our planet. Once we learn to manipulate these distances, we learn the origin of the universe.
 
Eastwood, as an interesting aside to your point that we can only see the past.

We run out of visible universe almost 13 billion light years away. Modern theory has the universe was "dark" for almost a billion years after the "bang". The Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation came to life about 400K post "bang". So if you add up the rate of expansion, with the distance (and time) we can see... the universe (at least what we can see) is currently about 156 billion light years from end to end.
 
Fair point, but what we see is uniform and geometric. If you apply "expansion" in reverse, then everything we can see in the universe was in roughly the same location 13.7 billion years ago. I've heard no interpretation of expansion which doesn't first flow from common origin for the universe.

That said, if you've got something I haven't read, I'd love to read it. I don't have a physics education and my knowledge comes 100% from having the hobby of cosmology. I'm all about new reading material.
 
Netslave, are you sure you are talking about FTL travel?

Special Relativity says nothing can go FTL, and says all motion results in time dilation (even if very tiny dilation). Which is to say if you left earth travelling very near "c", your local time would be much slower than earth's.

Lookup Einstien's twin paradox.
 
If time was a factor in their travels (assumind ETL isn't in the Alpha Centauri system), then they would seek technology that dealt with the distance issue instead of the speed issue.

If you could find a way to manipulate gravity to bring two points closer together (without upsetting the surrounding, ie. pulling stars together), then time doesn't become a factor.
 
Netslave, look up the Twin Paradox. If you are interested, even try the math, which for the most part is just algebra. It will truly bend your mind a little. It is a great tool for addressing the "constancy" of time.
 
Since the "speed of light" is measured in part by time, the gravity theory I proposed earlier would be a very outside the box solution the traveling faster than the speed of light.

If I got to the Sun in 4 minutes while using the gravity well theory and traveling .5 times the speed of light, I have reached the sun faster than light itself, therefore faster than light.
 
RayDog, again, that is a decidedly fair point, as it is hard to speak to something you don't have evidence for. That said, while the speed of light limits our view of the universe as it may exist at this moment, it does give us a unique opportunity to view how our universe developed. Which is to say, seeing in time may offer greater understanding of origin than seeing in space would. We seem to stop seeing things about 13 billion light years away... which could mean that 14 billion years ago there was simply nothing to see. What we do see is homogeneous and isotropic, and the Hubble Constant only seems to be refined as time goes on as opposed to being discreditted. Science can only speak to what can be observed, and when what we observed is played out in reverse... it would appear that all we can see occupied the same space at a discrete point in space and time.

The alternative is Steady State theory, which I'm not opposed to, I suppose, but is certainly at least equally problematic.
 
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