How do you think the universe came into being?

IronDuke

Ancient Mariner
My personal view is somewhat polemic among alot of my friends (from whom I receive raised eyebrows and mocking tones)

First, there are a few principles that I must outline.
1. Everything has a cause - nothing simply 'happens' for no reason. If you drop your beer, it will hit the floor because you are no longer holding the cup and gravity pulls it down. You caused it to fall by letting go.....but since it's beer, I'll assume it was by accident.

2. Aside from splitting atoms, one cannot destroy matter (although, some physicists don't know if it's even then actually destroyed, maybe just broken down into its constitute parts). You can change it, but not destroy it. If you have one pizza and cut it, you have two half pizzas (one half for me, I assume). When you and I eat the pizza, our bodies convert the pizza's matter into stuff we use to maintain our flabby bodies.

3. As matter cannot be destroyed, neither can it be created. To be sure, we can take existing things, change them in some way, and produce a brand new thing. But we cannot gain in actual material.

Side note, I realised upon their typing that these three premises conform to Newtonian beliefs quite conveniently

4. Time is linear, it is a river with a spectacularly strong current. (the Einsteinian view that if one can go fast enough he can slow down the relative progression of time doesn't really apply here.....you still end up in the same river heading in the same direction)

The Universe
I buy into the idea of a "Big Bang" creating the universe. There is plenty of solid evidence that indicates such an event billions of years ago caused our universe to rapidly expand.

BUT
- Into what are we expanding, where is the matter coming from, and, most importantly, what caused this to happen in the first place?

This is where I get into the polemic. In the modern, secular world, the very mention of 'God' or 'religion' carries with it the stigma of naïveté and ignorance. However, if the fundamental rules that govern the universe (let's call them Newton's Laws.....except for #4, that's what they are) are to be believed, then there must have been some catalyst that got the ball rolling. A big bang can't just happen in a state of nothingness exists. There would have been nothing to blow up.

So, it leads to the conclusion that something started this grand puzzle we call the universe. I choose to call it God...not necessarily 'God' in the Judeo-Christian sense, although a case can be made for it. You can call it whatever makes you feel good.

Of course, this brings up the question, since nothing can simply exist, of how did the God a write of get there to start the universe. That, my friends, I have neither the time nor the mental capicity to speculate on.


What do you believe? You really don't have to be as long-winded as me....except I know some people will...
glares at LooseCannon


PS- Feel free to rebut my hypothesis, I won't be offended. I promise!
 
Like the Duke, I also subscribe to the big bang theory. It isn't perfect, but it's the best explanation for the development of the universe that we have so far. Assuming one believes this theory, there is no way at all for science to explain the origin of the universe. All scientific laws and principles, with no exceptions whatsoever, break down at the point of a singularity (an infinitely small single point of infinitely dense matter and energy, which is how the universe began according to the big bang theory). Quantum physicists have made some remarkable conjectures about what might happen in a singularity, but there is no way at this time to see how correct their guesses might be.

Science can only give a vague idea of the nature of the singularity which started it all. Even if we progress to the point where we know more about the behavior of singularities, we can't move further back in time. The big bang was literally the beginning of time; there was no time before the universe began. Trying to imagine an outsider's perspective, where you are existing and aware of the passage of time and you get to witness the big bang from another vantage point, is not correct. There was no time or place outside of the big bang. This sounds intuitively weird, but it's the actual truth.

It's also a mistake to think that the universe is expanding into some pre-existing space. Space itself is part of the universe; there is nothing outside to expand into. It's true that the universe is getting larger, but that's a different issue than trying to locate the universe within some larger space. It's the same weirdness again: there is no location or space outside the boundary of the universe.

Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that my above statements are wrong. Let's imagine that there is a position and time outside our universe. Even if that is the case, we don't know about it and we never will. We're part of the system, and we can't detect anything outside the system. I mentioned Occam's Razor in another thread - cut out all unnecessary ideas which only complicate the issue. Since we can never see beyond our universe, for our purposes "beyond our universe" doesn't actually exist. Even if we found a way to see beyond what we currently think of as the universe, that new vista would simply be included in the new definition of the universe and the basic principle I just stated would still hold true.

In physics, studying the behavior of a system can reveal forces acting on the system from outside. This is how Neptune and Pluto were discovered: people studied the solar system and calculated that outside forces were at work; when the source of the forces (new planets) was found, they were included in the system. So if we consider the universe as a system, are there any forces acting from outside? None that science can see right now, but this is where religion enters the picture.

Scientists don't resort to religious explanations of phenomena because these types of explanations can't be tested in a rigorous manner. It's not that scientists dislike the notion of God (although it's true that some scientists are atheists). We just can't fit God into a test tube or a computer simulation, so we look for other options. By the same token, we can't actually disprove religious claims; we can only provide alternative explanations which can be experimentally verified.

So after all that, the answer to the question in the title of this thread (how did the universe come to be?) is: We don't know and probably never will, so whatever idea rocks your boat is perfectly alright.

Finally, with all due respect to the Duke, I'd like to add some minor corrections to his post. (I'm sure if I tried to make a historical post, he'd have plenty of things to correct me about (which is why I usually don't do so.).)

Splitting atoms does not destroy matter; it converts matter to energy. Matter and energy are the same thing in different states, like steam and ice are both forms of water. It's not completely correct to say that the amount of matter in the universe can never change, although conservation of matter does hold true for most reactions you're ever likely to encounter and live through. The correct statement is that the sum total of matter and energy in the universe is conserved, though the amounts of each part individually can change.

The Duke also stated that his points 1-3 are Newton's 3 laws. This is incorrect. Newton's 3 laws are:
1. The motion of an object will remain unchanged unless the object is acted upon by a net force.
2. Force = mass * acceleration.
3. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The 3 points the Duke listed are mostly correct (except as noted above), but they aren't Newton's laws. In fact, Duke's #1 goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who finally concluded that the origin of the universe had to lie in an agency which violated this principle: the "unmoved mover".

As for me: I think there's an old man sleeping on a tropical beach somewhere, and our "universe" is just his dream. Natural disasters? Just some mild indigestion from the shellfish he ate earlier in the evening. War? His id and superego are having it out. One of his left-brain neurons does fifty push-ups and we get a new invention. One of his right-brain neurons does a tap dance and we get a new work of art. Somewhere deep in his mind, one specific right-brain neuron is banging its head like a frenzied puppy, and dreaming up Maiden albums for us to gobble up.
 
i agree with the big bang theory but i dont believe that before the big bang there was nothing. there had to have been something there to explode. maybe a different earth exploded? maybe we are not the first here. maybe there were previous forms of us that destroyed themselves. who knows? of course im not ruling out the possibility of god i just think that god has been created by religions to fill gaps in stories that they cannot explain. i know someone who believes that god created the big bang. (he's a religious science nut [!--emo&^_^--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/happy.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'happy.gif\' /][!--endemo--] )thats always a possibility.

but one question still remains

how did eddie come to form?
 
mayeb it isnt even expanding. how can anyone prove it is? is there a giant ruler in space..... that would be cool....... anyway its just a theory it is expanding. i cant see as it is expanding. i think the only thing that is expanding is the sun which will one day engulf us all.
 
The universe (Under the Big Bang theory) IS expanding. I just looked this up in a book, Our Universe by Roy A Gallant. Under the Big Bang theory, the universe was once an incredibly dense ''Primeval Atom.'' This atom unexplainably exploded, and all matter within that atom began expanding at nearly the speed of light. About 100,000 - 1,000,000 years later, enormous clouds of Hydrogen and Helium began to form. The clouds of gas became the proto-galaxies. Eventually, within these galaxies, stars form. Dust and gas clouds shaken by a nearby exploding star collapse into a spinning disk. Thus, planets are born. Planets are bombarded by meteorites and moons form. Moons are pulled towards planets and in turn orbit them, and planets are pulled toward stars, and solar systems are created.

If our universe is dense enough, it is believed that gravitational attraction will slow down the expansion and reverse it. The galaxies would eventually slow down, come to a stop, and being falling back inward. If this happens, all matter will tumble together again in the Big Squeeze, billions and billions of years from now. The universe will reverse the process, compacting back into the ''Primeval Atom'' and perhaps explode all over again, and the entire process will occur again.

The problem is, our universe may not be dense enough, and will therefor just keep expanding and expanding.


Did I get that right? SMX? You know more on this than I do, even after reading a few passages..
 
I wouldn't call myself a smart bastard ... I realize that for every fact I know, there's a billion things I have no clue about. [!--emo&:D--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/biggrin.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'biggrin.gif\' /][!--endemo--]

The reason that scientists believe the universe is expanding is because of the Doppler shift that is present in light from distant stars. Think about when you've heard a car with a loud motor drive by you on a street: the pitch of the sound rises as it approaches and falls as it drives away. That's a Doppler shift involving sound, and it happens with light too. Light which comes from objects that are moving away from us is shifted towards the red end of the light spectrum, and it turns out all starlight - that's right, every single star in the sky except the sun - is red-shifted. Therefore, all the stars are getting farther away; the universe is expanding.

That doesn't mean we're at the center of the universe. Everything is getting farther away from everything else. Imagine if you drew a bunch of dots on a balloon and then blew it up: all the dots get farther away from each other as the balloon expands, but none is at the center.

The density of the universe isn't the only factor affecting whether or not the expansion ever ends. The speed of expansion in relation to the density is the real culprit. While there's a very small level of uncertainty about it, scientists are 99.9% sure that the universe is expanding fast enough that it will not collapse backwards.

GodBeWithYou's post is essentially right in all other areas. The early universe was unbelievably hot - billions of degrees. I said in my earlier post that matter and energy are the same thing in different forms; at that heat, matter is vaporized and everything is energy. As the universe expanded, it cooled down. It didn't lose heat, because there's nowhere else for the heat to go; but the same amount of heat distributed over a larger volume means a cooler average temperage in any given location. As things cooled down, some energy condensed into matter just like steam condenses into water.

In other words: you, me, and every other person and thing around us is actually pure energy! We're just so cool that we look different at this moment in time.
 
So I guess, then, the questions are, What caused the Primeval atom to explode? And where did the atom come from? Where did TIME come from? Why don't any other atoms randomly explode?
 
What exploded in the big bang was a singularity: all the energy and matter of the entire universe compressed into one tiny little point. It was not an atom. Calling it the "Primeval Atom" is fine; I kind of like that name myself. But it was not an atom in the same sense as the atoms all around us today.

Where did it come from and why did it explode? Those are questions science can't answer. I myself don't have any theories about it. After all, it happened 15 billion years ago, give or take a few billion years. I'm more concerned with more modern stuff.

Time is part of the universe. It came from the big bang. Which only leaves the same unanswered question: why did the big bang happen?

I wouldn't say that atoms don't explode nowadays. While I can't think of any examples offhand, chemistry is weird enough that there just might be exploding atoms somewhere. However, some atoms can randomly lose subatomic particles and change to different atoms - that's what radioactivity is. It's not explosion, but it's the closest thing I can think of right now.
 
I have a very simple life philosophy about this stuff: don't ask, cause you probably don't want to know the answers.
 
Here's one more thing to give you guys headaches. Taking the balloon analogy: If the universe is expanding it can expand until, yes, it explodes (or pops). Or it can simply reach a critical mass and start shrinking (like a balloon loosing air). Now I just thought of this. If the universe explodes, will that explosion give way to a new "big bang" and start a new universe? Of course the theory of the universe collapsing in on itself (imploding) and exploding again is quite familiar (at least to me).
 
What would the ''Balloon'' be expanding into? There's nothing outside the universe, because like SMX said, the universe isn't expanding into some pre-existing space, because space itself is part of the universe. So then the balloon isn't expanding to the point where the space inside it outdoes the boundaries and it explodes, because there is nothing for it to explode into.

(I think?)
 
One day a guy named eddie said lets create the world and then BAM!!!
The world was created!!
 
[!--QuoteBegin--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--QuoteEBegin--]Time is part of the universe. It came from the big bang. Which only leaves the same unanswered question: why did the big bang happen?[/quote]

Can you prove this SMX?

Let us suppose for a moment that this statement is true. If there is no time, what could have caused this 'nucleus' of mass to explode (explode in this case i mean to be the opposite of implode and not to be confused with large fireball etc).

If we consider time to be there at the point of this 'big bang', surely the entire thing is a little more fathomable. Maybe our universe is one of many, hanging in a sort of X-Space (a space of infinite volume). With time applied, other options are available to explain the formation of the universe. Maybe two 'nuclei' of universes hit each other to form the big bang. Maybe a subatomic particle careering into our universes massive ball of mass was enough to trigger it. Or for instance a low frequency vibration.

However even with a theory as madcap as this the question still remains to explain the formation of these 'nuclei' and X-Space. This suggests some form of Deity (a god of some form) again. I dont believe in God and am not a religious person, but maybe theres something behind the idea...

[!--emo&:D--][img src=\'style_emoticons/[#EMO_DIR#]/biggrin.gif\' border=\'0\' style=\'vertical-align:middle\' alt=\'biggrin.gif\' /][!--endemo--]
 
I think it's quite likely we'll see a "Big Crunch", resulting in a new "Big Bang", eventually. Perhaps, from science point of view, the question Why this is happening...is a futile question...or it's not valid.

We now know that the Universe has been expanding for nearly 14 billion years, and it might continue to do so for over hundreds of billion years before the relatively weak force of gravity collapses and sends Universe on its way to reincarnation or ultimate doom. We won't live to see it, anyway.

Recommended reading:
Stephen Hawking:
- The Universe In A Nutshell
- A Brief History of Time

...this man is a genious.
 
[!--QuoteBegin-Tormentor+Apr 24 2004, 09:14 AM--][div class=\'quotetop\']QUOTE(Tormentor @ Apr 24 2004, 09:14 AM)[/div][div class=\'quotemain\'][!--QuoteEBegin--]
- A Brief History of Time

[/quote]
This IS a must read! It's short, simple and a great subject for cocktail parties conversations!
 
okay, so we have all quenched our thirst for knowing everything to the extent that there WAS a big bang that set the world that we live in on fire. but we go further and ask, "what caused the big-bang?" to which, there's apperently no answer and even if there is, we'll never know it, so might as well let it go.


but what about us? aren't we a part of the universe ourselves? our brain, our intellact, aren't they all made up of the matter ( or energy) that were once condensed in a singularity? in other words, why is it nessecerry at all that a system ( a set of initial conditions and another set of equations that determine the later ones) will itself discover where it came from?

i say, it ISN'T! we all interpret and analyse what we see and hear. but the process of analysis itself is just a set of chemical reactions, which leads to products, which survive or don't depending on how competent they are(mr. darwin). so, what we belive to be the absolute truth, might just very well be a way of nature to keep us satisfied with what we are given. and we will never know if that IS the case or not, 'cause the nature won't let us. so, JUST LET GO!

just something to think about, what do others say? what makes more sense, that we are, for no apparent reason, so bruting brilliant that we WILL someday find the reason why everything is the way it is, or that maybe we are just another phenomena of the nature, which will eventually die down?
 
How can you even SUGGEST to "let it go"? If we would have EVER "just let it go" there would be no electricity, airplanes, cars, hot water, computers, spaceships, satellites, GPS systems, microwave ovens, radio etc. We would still be in the dark ages if Man (as a race) had just "let it go". Our curiousity and inquirey IS what drives us to progress, Not to give up and admit defeat.
 
Back
Top