The Universe
- Thread starter funKYcat75
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Empty space is a part of the expansion, which isn't actually "empty," and is still expanding.
Every point in the universe is accelerating away from us, except those locked in by gravity like the solar system and our galaxy, other galaxies in our local group like Andromeda that is supposed to collide with us in something like a billion years.
Every point in the universe is accelerating away from us, except those locked in by gravity like the solar system and our galaxy, other galaxies in our local group like Andromeda that is supposed to collide with us in something like a billion years.
How are completely flawed Earthlings who can't even agree on things about Earth come close to being smart enough to understand the Universe and how it was created?
No one knows, if again the question even actually makes sense.
It's an unknown cause (dark energy) that's causing the universe to expand - not just expand, but accelerate faster and faster until eventually the universe just dies a heat death where particles are too far apart from each other to even interact after all the stars explode and the black holes evaporate.
That's the consensus view anyway, who knows if it's right or not, or if some new physics is discovered that explains it better some day.
It think the fact that there is information in DNA and consistent laws by which the universe is governed is further evidence of an intelligent unmoved first mover.
Agree with this to an extent but it’s amazing how far we’ve come into understanding quantum physics. The observed seemingly random nature of quantum particles is incredibly interesting. Despite everything in the universe being explained by equations, quantum physics seems to suggest a randomness to nature. It’s crazy how at the large scale matter is easily explained but at them smallest scales we observe randomness.
Easily programmable by super intelligent (artificial intelligence?) with enough computing power
It's not that there was nothing before the big bang, there was nothing as we have now.
There was maybe some sort of soup of elementary particles, and then you can go back before that where they came from, and before that, and before that. But we don't have the ability to run experiments to see exactly that so that's why it would all be hypothetical.
For some reason ppl think we have to have definitive answers with the limited knowledge humans have in general bc of our short billionth of a fraction of second of existence in the grand scale of time
There was maybe some sort of soup of elementary particles, and then you can go back before that where they came from, and before that, and before that. But we don't have the ability to run experiments to see exactly that so that's why it would all be hypothetical.
For some reason ppl think we have to have definitive answers with the limited knowledge humans have in general bc of our short billionth of a fraction of second of existence in the grand scale of time
I was just about to chime in that the Big Bang came from a single point of infinite density. So that is a lot of something.
This. The problem we have grasping these concepts is that our perceptions are grounded in 3 dimensions. Look at gravity... it is one of the weakest forces in the universe, but we think it as one of the strongest because we feel its pull almost constantly. Yet it is so weak, we can pick up objects that the entire world is pulling on!
I've been wrestling with these concepts since high school 50 years ago, and still every now and then I have an epiphany moment as I catch a very small glimpse of the wonder God had created. To all those who only believe In a mechanistic uiverse, I feel sorry that your world view is so small. You are apartment dwellers looking at the universe through the peephole of your door. At least open the blinds on your windows.
That's a fair question about who created God - but it certainly takes the stance of this all coming from "nothing" off the table. Even our feeble minds know that is impossible - that is where the mathematical equations that we understand come into play.
Any agnostic or atheist, I would assume, would agree that there is Order to this universe. From the complexities of human genome to the simple fact that there are NOT 1000 car wrecks a day on New Circle Road alone
... this all indicates to intelligent design. Do I know that 100% ... nope. BUT It makes much more sense than saying some amoeba suddenly appeared out of nowhere and the end result is what we have right now.... THAT is comical.
Again, this is written out in Roman's 1:20 --- it's in front of us to see.
"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that man are without excuse"
Natural Revelation is before our eyes and our minimal understanding of it all. There is Order to this universe. There is Beauty in this world.
I never want to discredit anyone’s religion, so apologies if this sounds harsh…i have trouble being tactful when talking religion sometimes.That's a fair question about who created God - but it certainly takes the stance of this all coming from "nothing" off the table. Even our feeble minds know that is impossible - that is where the mathematical equations that we understand come into play.
Any agnostic or atheist, I would assume, would agree that there is Order to this universe. From the complexities of human genome to the simple fact that there are NOT 1000 car wrecks a day on New Circle Road alone
Do I know that 100% ... nope. BUT It makes much more sense than saying some amoeba suddenly appeared out of nowhere and the end result is what we have right now.... THAT is comical.
Again, this is written out in Roman's 1:20 --- it's in front of us to see.
"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that man are without excuse"
Natural Revelation is before our eyes and our minimal understanding of it all. There is Order to this universe. There is Beauty in this world.
There is certainly order to the universe, but I don’t find a God to be the most likely explanation for that. I find the injection of an intelligent god to be the creator to be cop-out explanation as catch-all to explain everything away that we don’t yet have the capacity to do as humans. Humans 2k+ years ago had no knowledge of the universe, what the stars and planets were, that black holes existed, that there were not just one galaxy, but many, etc. yet they wrote what has become the Christian Bible to establish a religion that doesn’t factor in the cosmos as at all. The Bible is earth-centric making humans effectively the center of the universe. I have to ask why a God would create a planet like earth rotating around a simple star like the sun in a random region in the Milky Way amongst trillions of galaxies, all so that human beings can have eternal life in heaven. Why does a god with that kind of power care about being worshipped? Why does he set all of this in motion to give us “free will” such that we are the only things that can influence whether we get to heaven. Lastly, why does he create a world that allows so much suffering and destruction and pain before an ultimate death? I know the simple answer is that we can’t know his purpose or that he works in mysterious ways. But to me, again, that’s just a cop-out to dispute logic. I’m not afraid of death and I’m okay with my presumed fate as a compound of decomposing matter that is ultimately recycled for the continued replenishment of the earth and the universe. I believe we came from stardust at our most basic. I understand the need for religion to deliver purpose to life to some people, I just feel like the life we have is too short to spend on what I believe to be a fairy tale. To be fair, I can’t quote scripture and I haven’t read the Bible since I was a kid. If you find meaning and purpose in that, then that’s great.
I agree with you that there is beauty to this world and that we understand very little of it. I bet there are billions of planets in the cosmos that are equally, if not morese, beautiful to earth that we will never know about. I hope we can continue the technological evolution so that in my lifetime we can understand much more of our existence and the universe. I actually believe our purpose, if we have one, is to understand our universe, to figure out how to utilize its secrets and manipulate its rules for our exploration and innovation. This is the stuff that excites me, even though the timescale that this happens is many lifetimes after mine. Maybe they will figure out how to upload our conscience to a computer before I’m gone.
I am a nerd. I can help.
First, we must separate what we've observed from what we obtained from reasoning. By measuring red shifts and blue shifts, we know that the universe is expanding. When an object is moving away from us, lightwaves emitted by the object are red. When an object is moving towards us, the light the object emits is blue. The red shift / blue shift phenomena is not specific to the Big Bang Theory, but a generally observed and proven function of lightwaves and movement.
Okay, so, our instruments tell us that most of the universe is moving away from us. So, as time moves forward, space expands. The logical inverse is that as time moves backward, space contracts. Using this logic, if you move backward in time, logically, space would contract to a single point.
On the surface, this is the core of the Big Bang Theory. There is more evidence supporting the theory. Microwave background radiation, for instance, which is measured background radiation dispersed throughout the universe in a very uniform way.
Of course the theory is limited by what we know. There are also challenges to the merits of the theory. Not in the way that a religious person may think, but more in terms of the details of the theory.
Here's another thing to ponder. If space itself is expanding, does that mean we, as humans, and our earth, also expand with space? Is the remote control a little bit further away every time you grab it? Possibly. Possibly. Probably?
Two questions, then.
Thanks for the reply.
Where does/did/will that single point exist though? Another way to ask that, is Space the “stuff” that we can see or measure or theorize, or is Space the big empty void in which the “stuff” exists?
What sort of objects are moving towards us and why? I think I’ve read that Andromeda and the Milky Way will collide at some point, but why? If everything expanded from one point, why would a Galaxy just run into another?
Thanks for the reply.
- Gravity causes galaxies to exist in a cluster called a local group; they are orbiting around each other essentially and eventually collide. The rest of them outside of our group are flying away from us as the universe expands. The ones further away from us are "flying away" from us "faster" due to more space in between expanding, eventually they all will be so far away from us (our galaxy/galactic group) that they won't even be visible.
- The Universe expanding doesn't mean we are expanding, just the distance is getting larger between galactic groups. Galaxies themselves, like us but due to nuclear and electrostatic forces, are still held to the same size by gravity (which we don't fully understand either, hence dark matter).
- Space is still "something." There is no actual vacuum, no real "nothing." If an actual "nothing" exists, then it's necessarily outside of our universe and is therefore not observable by us. "Where" does that single point exist doesn't make sense as a question, which I don't say that in the "that's a dumb question bro" sense btw in case it's interpreted like that. It's a good question. Where did it exist? It existed everywhere.
- The Universe expanding doesn't mean we are expanding, just the distance is getting larger between galactic groups. Galaxies themselves, like us but due to nuclear and electrostatic forces, are still held to the same size by gravity (which we don't fully understand either, hence dark matter).
- Space is still "something." There is no actual vacuum, no real "nothing." If an actual "nothing" exists, then it's necessarily outside of our universe and is therefore not observable by us. "Where" does that single point exist doesn't make sense as a question, which I don't say that in the "that's a dumb question bro" sense btw in case it's interpreted like that. It's a good question. Where did it exist? It existed everywhere.
Question one is difficult to answer and I think many people have similar lines of reasoning / questioning. To some degree is a result of overthinking what the Big Bang Theory is.
I think it's important to point out with the Big Bang Theory is that it's an explanation of what has occurred in the observable universe. It doesn't posit what exists / existed beyond our visible horizon. The mathematics and observations thus are accurate with in what we know and observe. It doesn't make conclusions outside of those parameters.
Space itself is what is expanding though. Think about a slightly deflated balloon where any point inside the balloon is represented in a matrix. As the balloon expands, any two points of the matrix become further apart.
In terms of red shifts and blue shifts, observable blue shifts are limited to our local cluster of galaxies. So, galaxies closer to us have a higher probability of moving towards us. Andromeda is the most well known example, but there are 40 galaxies in our local group spanning over 10 million lightyears. I am not sure, to be honest, if there are examples outside of that. Good question.
Another thing about collisions of galaxies is that we are talking about huge swaths of space. When the Milky Way collides with Andromeda, there are very tiny odds that celestial bodies actually collide. What does get intermingled, however, is gravity and gravity is what is pulling the galaxies towards each other.
Neil Degrasse Tyson is speaking at the Louisville Palace in June. Im going to tailgate.
Yes, all that. Beat me to it.
Ah. Gotcha. That makes sense, as much as all of this can make sense.
This is what screws with my head the most. This elusive pointof energy just existing everywhere, or nowhere. I want be able to visualize that, but as hs been mentioned, whatever that was is something that we as humans can't even begin to understand.
And this quote I saw from Quora, "The big bang happened at a time, not at a place." Ouch.
Look man, I ain't some genie you rubes can just summon when you feel like it. I've got astronomy and **** to do.
I'm a big space nerd and love reading and watching stuff about the universe and its origins. The only thing I can't stand is when some people speak in incredibly specific absolutes. I was watching an interview with Michio Kaku and he said something along the lines of "40 seconds after the big bang" and the guy doing the interview goes "40 seconds? exactly?" and he just goes "yes, exactly"
like htf could you know that?
like htf could you know that?
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so Interstellar was somewhat accurate? we think?
the universe isn't flat so to speak or linear in any direction but infinite in all directions. is it really expanding then or are things just moving, some away and some towards others. what seems like expansion in one direction is a collision in another.
the universe isn't flat so to speak or linear in any direction but infinite in all directions. is it really expanding then or are things just moving, some away and some towards others. what seems like expansion in one direction is a collision in another.
Christopher Nolan employed Kip Thorne to keep the science as close to realism as possible.
If there was ever a time when nothing was in existence then nothing would have ever come into existence, thus something or someone had to have always been there.
Nothin' from nothin' leaves nothin'
You gotta have somethin' if you wanna be with me
You gotta have somethin' if you wanna be with me
My favorite cliche' on this topic is "its not what we know, it's what we know we don't know". Quantum theory doesn't jib with conventional Newtonian theory. Scientist have been trying to come up with a unified theory since Eisenstein's days so far no luck. 98% of the universe is dark matter or dark energy. We don't know what either of these things are or how to measure them. We don't understand how time, speed and gravity relate. We don't know how "spooky action at a distance" works which has been proven to be a phenomena but defies the logic in classical physics.
So the bottom line to understanding the big questions is we are incapable of doing so at this stage in our evolution. That's the answer no one wants to hear but IMO it's the only answer that fits the facts.
So the bottom line to understanding the big questions is we are incapable of doing so at this stage in our evolution. That's the answer no one wants to hear but IMO it's the only answer that fits the facts.
Ah, the thought of what was “before” when we just admitted that time itself may have not preexisted creation.