"Horizon": What Happened Before the Big Bang?

[abacus9900]

The only absurdity lays in the fact of you (or anyone else) making the 'scientific' claim that it was all created out of nothing. Sure that can be forwarded as a very tentative hypothesis in the full knowledge that it cannot be tested , but it follows that hence sceince has ended.

naymissus, I have just looked at the Horizon programme once again on BBCiPlayer and the fact is none of the leading minds any longer believe the BB theory in its current form. Now, would you not think that was enough to convince any reasonable person that something must be wrong with it??


www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdkmj/Horizon_20102011_What_Happened_Before_the_Big_Bang

[Progenitor A]

Oct 14, 2010 20:24:20 GMT 1 abacus9900 said:

The only absurdity lays in the fact of you (or anyone else) making the 'scientific' claim that it was all created out of nothing. Sure that can be forwarded as a very tentative hypothesis in the full knowledge that it cannot be tested , but it follows that hence sceince has ended.

naymissus, I have just looked at the Horizon programme once again on BBCiPlayer and the fact is none of the leading minds any longer believe the BB theory in its current form. Now, would you not think that was enough to convince any reasonable person that something must be wrong with it??


www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdkmj/Horizon_20102011_What_Happened_Before_the_Big_Bang

Indeed yes, Abacus

But perhaps STA does not belong in the ranks of the reasonable - in fact she would argue the opposite of anything that you or I proposed.

[abacus9900]

Indeed yes, Abacus

But perhaps STA does not belong in the ranks of the reasonable - in fact she would argue the opposite of anything that you or I proposed.

Frankly, I think she is mentally disturbed.

[Progenitor A]

Oct 14, 2010 20:49:15 GMT 1 abacus9900 said:

Indeed yes, Abacus

But perhaps STA does not belong in the ranks of the reasonable - in fact she would argue the opposite of anything that you or I proposed.

Frankly, I think she is mentally disturbed.

Let's just plump for eccentric.
Perhaps she is just venting off the frustrations that she finds in life - perhaps difficulty at work, a rocky phase in marriage; perhaps she just says here what she would like to say at work, im marriage, but knows that if she did so any relationships would be impossible

[olmy]

Oct 14, 2010 20:35:34 GMT 1 Progenitor A said:

Indeed yes, Abacus

But perhaps STA does not belong in the ranks of the reasonable - in fact she would argue the opposite of anything that you or I proposed.

OMG! ROTFLMAO!

The ultimate irony!

[Progenitor A]

Oct 15, 2010 9:52:14 GMT 1 olmy said:

Oct 14, 2010 20:35:34 GMT 1 Progenitor A said:

Indeed yes, Abacus

But perhaps STA does not belong in the ranks of the reasonable - in fact she would argue the opposite of anything that you or I proposed.

OMG! ROTFLMAO!

The ultimate irony!

;D
Tht's two times now that you have laughed your arse off!
Perhaps now we will have less cheek!

[speakertoanimals]

and the fact is none of the leading minds any longer believe the BB theory in its current form. Now, would you not think that was enough to convince any reasonable person that something must be wrong with it??

Wrong AGAIN.

For those of you who obviously haven't been listening -- EVERYONE already knows that general relativity is WRONG! Why? Because it isn't a quantum theory of gravity.

Hence something is wrong with the cosmological models we derive from relativity -- we're just not sure what. Doesn't mean that the models derived from relativity aren't meaningful, useful, don't describe some aspects of the real case etc etc.


Leaving aside inflation, we then have several ways that quantum effects MIGHT come into play in very early universe.


One picture is quantum cosmology, and universe appearing spontaneously as a quantum fluctuation. Not full quantum gravity, but a useful approximation that hopefully captures some important aspects as regards the universe.

Other ways are that at the smallest scale, space and time are no longer continuous (which gets over infinite density singularity stuff), hence loop quantum gravity, suggestions that the bang was actually a bounce. And various other suggestions........

The point is that to appreciate ANY of this (which is current research), you first have to understand the standard cosmological models derived from relativity, which still correctly describe a lot of the broad picture, even with weird quantum effects and extra inflation stuff coming in very early on.

This is NOT saying there is something fundamentally wrong with the Big Bang, in that no one (much) is suggesting that the whole expanding and hotter and denser in the past picture is going to be proved wrong. Instead, it's just arguing about the really teeny-tiny details.

To anyone that thinks this is equivalent to -- I always knew that Big Bang was nonsense, infinite denisty makes no sense, now I can believe that current theoreticians agree with me -- dream on, you're wrong again! Because frankly, quantum gravity will only make things much MORE weird than the fairly trivial singularities that come in with the classical theory of relativity.................

To those who seem to want to try and probe my psyche -- given your analytic skills as regards physics and maths, no one should be at all surprised to discover you're totally wrong.

Even funnier, those who think I have some sort of stress at work -- well, given that I'm a university lecturer and researcher, it's even MORE fun, in that I get paid to argue as part of doing research, and even more fun again -- I don't just get to get frustrated at those who fail to understand, I get to FAIL their exam papers as well.

What does frustrate me, here and at work, are those who DON'T WANT to learn, who aren't worried about the difference between what is true and what is false -- but I think that is something we should all be concerned about. Even worse when people are prepared to argue for what they know is wrong, just for the sake of some sort of twisted entertainment. Which is truly despicable,because as well as being ignorant yourself, you then try and spread that ignorance to others. Okay spreading ignorance about cosmology might not have about such serious repercussions as spreading ignorance about climate change, but if someone is prepared to do one, they'll be prepared to do the other, and we all will suffer if we loose track of our ability to distinguish truth from lies, or if we persuade people to think it doesn't matter that much.

[abacus9900]

It's very difficult to have a reasonable discussion with someone who is simply out of touch with reality and who keeps denying easily checked facts.

[speakertoanimals]

Of course, this all rests on the assumption that I give a tinkers cuss about what idiots say about me. Au contraire, except that when they start getting really abusive, then I know I've got them on the run, and they've totally given up trying to argue with me on the actual science.

I've just found this talk by Penrose:

www.newton.ac.uk/webseminars/pg+ws/2005/gmr/gmrw04/1107/penrose/

Glad to see he sticks to hand-written slides!

[abacus9900]

STA, I will try one more time. The BB, in the context of just 'happening' with no apparent cause is now regarded by a number of leading cosmologists (including Roger Penrose) as wrong and in need of another interpretation. That is the simplest way I can put it and if you cannot still understand there must be something wrong with you. I'm not denying the inflationary model but that is not the issue here; it is about what caused the BB to occur. Simple enough?

If you do not believe me then please watch the Horizon programme at:


www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00vdkmj/Horizon_20102011_What_Happened_Before_the_Big_Bang

[speakertoanimals]

The BB, in the context of just 'happening' with no apparent cause is now regarded by a number of leading cosmologists (including Roger Penrose) as wrong and in need of another interpretation. That is the simplest way I can put it and if you cannot still understand there must be something wrong with you.

I think you are misunderstanding where this before the big Bang stuff is coming from, and why. As far as I know (given I haven't watched that particular program, but given the standard of Horizon in recent years, I might not have missed much!), the objection isn't some sort of philosophical objection to creation ex-nihilo.

As I said before, given that quantum gravity might modify singularity, we then have prospect that perhaps a before. Hence totally proper that we explore various hypotheses, that there was no before, and that there was. This isn't to say that ex-nihilo is wrong per se, just that there are possibly more possibilities than we thought a while back, given that things like loop quantum gravity seems to be suggesting the singularity doesn't go all the way.

Now one seeming problem with bounce and bang scenarios is how you get over the problem with the second law of thermodynamics, and Penrose new book is waiting on my to be read shelf.

But this isn't a simplistic creation ex nihilo wrong, other stuff better scenario, for any sort of supposedly 'obvious' reasons such as things just happening is daft.

What is at fault is not so much your reporting of the actual debates, but your interpretation of the reasoning behind the debates.

[abacus9900]

You just don't get it, or at least don't want to get it, do you, STA?

[Progenitor A]

Oct 15, 2010 13:28:42 GMT 1 speakertoanimals said:

......well, given that I'm a university lecturer and researcher, it's even MORE fun, in that I get paid to argue as part of doing research, and even more fun again -- I don't just get to get frustrated at those who fail to understand, I get to FAIL their exam papers as well.

Well STA, if this is the attitude you have toward your students (actual or purported) then my advice to you is that you should keep such sentiments strictly to yourself if you value the job that you are doing.

[abacus9900]

Well STA, if this is the attitude you have toward your students (actual or purported) then my advice to you is that you should keep such sentiments strictly to yourself if you value the job that you are doing.

I mean she bangs on about there being no philosophical objections to the BB theory yet to suggest that the universe was a causeless event is decidedly not philosophical, it's not science and it's not religion either, since all of these are based on either a causal agency and or reason and logic, something that cannot be applied to a non pre-BB definition because the idea itself is a non-definition, a scientific cul-de-sac, a void. You know what happens don't you? Science uses maths and observations in order to construct models of the universe but these will always be representations of reality and when absurd conclusions are arrived at through the current knowledge then the data must either be incomplete or misinterpreted. You get this in maths where sometimes paradoxical results are obtained (like arriving at infinity, or dividing by zero, etc.) and generally this indicates that something is wrong with the maths, so I think where people like STA go awry is that they automatically assume conclusions such as the BB one must be correct because the maths and the observations lead to it. This can be very fallacious and I am very surprised that a so-called physicist would fall into such an obvious trap. What's more, she has the gaul to accuse me of misinterpreting what was said about the subject when they made it perfectly clear what they meant and she has not even seen the programme!! She then goes on to denigrate the Horizon programme as if these guys and gals had somehow been misrepresented by careful editing. Is it just me, or what!

[speakertoanimals]

yet to suggest that the universe was a causeless event is decidedly not philosophical, it's not science and it's not religion either, since all of these are based on either a causal agency and or reason and logic, something that cannot be applied to a non pre-BB definition because the idea itself is a non-definition, a scientific cul-de-sac, a void.

So what do we have here? Another misguided attempt to claim that creation ex nihilo is against science, reason, logic, philosophy etc etc.

Obviously someone who has neglected the scientific advances of the last century, and what quantum theory has to say about the nature of reality.

Rather than being a scientific cul-de-sac (and what would that matter if it was?), the quantyum cosmology ideas are actually perfectly good science, in accord with quantum theory and experiment. Rather than a void, actually a source of quite a few decent scientific papers, and testable science, as the Cambridge guys say on their website.

Not the ONLY suggestions, granted, but perfectly good science all the same, and anyone who thinks they are not, or thinks they can dismiss them with a few empty sentences is probably as stupid as some posters on here have shown themselves to be.

O, and as regards my comments about students, some people don't understand irony either.....................