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this is what happened.
Topic Started: May 16 2009, 01:45 AM (239 Views)
the breeze
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Friday May 15 2009 • Home >> The Existence >> How Was the Universe Formed?


How Was the Universe Formed?


Biologist E. O. Wilson said, "If any positive evidence could be found of a supernatural guiding force...it would be one of the greatest discoveries of all time."1

In recent decades, physicists and astronomers have found such evidence in how the universe was formed.

Scientists believe that our universe began with one enormous explosion of energy and light, which we now call the Big Bang. Scientists are convinced that this was the singular start to everything that exists. That fraction of a moment was the beginning of the universe, the start of space, and even the initial start of time itself.

Nothing we observe today existed prior to that exact moment. Further, it was something outside of time, outside of space, and outside of matter that caused all of this to come into existence.

The realization that our universe started, and did not always exist, brings enormous challenges to nontheistic scientists. There does seem to be some kind of "supernatural guiding force" that E. O. Wilson alluded to.

Are scientists certain of this Big Bang Theory? Yes. In the late 1920's, astronomer Edwin Hubble saw through his telescope that galaxies (some millions of light years away) were hurtling away from each other at fantastic speeds. This was not caused by some force thrusting them away from each other. Rather, they were still moving as a result of a primeval explosion, all from one point of origin.

In this point of origin, all the mass in the universe was compressed into a single point of infinite density...smaller than a single atom.2 Then in a cosmic explosion--the Big Bang--the universe came into being. Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in Physics, gives further description, "At about one-hundredth of a second, the earliest time about which we can speak with any confidence, the temperature of the universe was about a hundred thousands million (1011) degrees Centigrade. This is much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together."3 He goes on, "The universe was filled with light."

This eerily parallels the record, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth...and God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light."4 It came about not from matter, but from pronouncement. A spoken word. "Let there be light."

Looking at the sacred texts of all the major religions, only the Bible describes what scientists have since discovered: there was an explosion of light and a beginning to our universe...from outside of the universe itself. With it came the very start of space, matter and time. It was a singular starting point for everything. Over and over in the Book of Genesis is the description, "And God said...." followed by "...and it was so."

Instead, could our universe have come about through the laws of physics: such as gravity, electromagnetism, speed of light, etc.? No, because those things did not yet exist. The initial start of the universe itself produced the laws of physics and everything began without them.

Astrophysicist Robert Jastrow, a self-described agnostic, stated, "The seed of everything that has happened in the Universe was planted in that first instant; every star, every planet and every living creature in the Universe came into being as a result of events that were set in motion in the moment of the cosmic explosion. It was literally the moment of Creation. ...The Universe flashed into being, and we cannot find out what caused that to happen."5 As stated, this conclusion is distressing to atheistic scientists. To observe a reaction and not be able to document the cause is unsettling.

Jastrow concludes, "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."6

Imagine the relief of these scientists when astronomers Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle advanced what became known as the "steady state" universe in 1948. Their theory was that the universe was infinite in age. Thus, no creation or no cause was needed.

However, in the 1960s, the steady state theory suffered a devastating blow when two radio engineers at Bell Labs (Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson) discovered mysterious radiation coming from space. It came equally from all directions. When the temperature of the radiation was measured, its source was confirmed. This radiation did not always exist, or come from one part of the universe. It came from that singular, original moment of creation.

Later, in 1996, NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite also further confirmed that the primordial background radiation pointed to an explosive start of the universe. The levels of hydrogen, lithium, deuterium, and helium that exist in our universe today confirm it as well.

Are there any scientists who still want to counter the implications of the Big Bang Theory? Yes. There are scientists who are uncomfortable living with: (1) an unknown cause or (2) the conclusion that God is the cause. So they opt for a third option.

What explanation do these scientists give for the start to our entire universe, energy, time, and space?

They attempt to simply negate the foundational premise that science rests on: that everything that begins to exist must have a cause.

Physicist Victor Stenger says the universe may be "uncaused" and may have "emerged from nothing."7 Philosopher Bertrand Russell adopted this position in a debate on the existence of God. He said, "The universe is just here, and that's all."8

It is one thing to state that something is eternal, and therefore no "cause" is necessary. But it is entirely different to scientifically observe the start of something, the instantaneous beginning of something, and then try to say that it had no cause.

Even David Hume, one of the most skeptical of all philosophers, regarded this position as ridiculous. For all his skepticism, Hume never denied causation. In 1754, Hume wrote, "I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without cause."9

Pure scientific findings consistently point to only one conclusion: the universe had a singular start, an explosion, where everything we know--the universe, time, space, scientific laws we observe--all had a beginning. If you have ever wanted to believe in God, but certainly did not want to do so in contradiction of known scientific facts, science provides you reason to believe that God exists and powerfully created all things.

It is logical to conclude that God, who is from the beginning, eternal and outside of time, created time. God who is present everywhere and cannot be confined to space, created space. God who is spiritual, non-physical and outside of matter is the source of our universe and all that is. This is the message blatantly repeated throughout the Bible.

"Lift your eyes and look to the heavens: Who created all these? Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth."10

"...for he commanded and they were created."11

The Bible says that God formed the earth to be inhabited, with us in mind from the start. He gave people his breath of life and a brief stay upon the earth with the full purpose that we would seek him and find him. If we do not come to know him, we have missed the entire purpose for our existence. Who knows better than God the reason for our being?

Do you want to know the Author of the universe? Here is what he promises, "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you."12 If we will seek to know him, God says, "I will be found by you."13 In fact, he states, "Let not the wise man boast in his wisdom. Let not the mighty man boast in his might. Let not the rich man boast in his riches. But let him who boasts, boast in this: that he understands and knows me..."14

Do you want to begin a relationship with God? Here is how you can: Knowing God Personally.

Portions of this short science article describing how the universe was formed are adapted from Dinesh D'Souza, What's So Great about Christianity, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007, Chapter 11.


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They attempt to simply negate the foundational premise that science rests on: that everything that begins to exist must have a cause.

Set a pile of atoms of a radioactive element on the table in front of you and watch it.

After some interval of time - known as its half life - half of those atoms decay.

Put a single atom of the same element on the table in front of you and no one knows how long it will take before it decays nor is there any cause for it to do so. Not everything that happens in the universe has a cause and atomic decay is one of the best examples.

No one is saying there was nothing before our universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago. No one except those to don't wish to tell you the truth of what science is ACTUALLY saying and we know who those people are... you've been cuttin' and pastin' their stuff for quite some time.

As I said before, you may not be able to comprehend even the most basic ideas of quantum cosmology, but your failure to do so does not negate the work that's being done on it.

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What happened before the Big Bang?

Martin Bojowald

Was the Universe before the Big Bang of classical nature, described well by a smooth space–time? Or was it in a highly fluctuating quantum state? This is one of the most basic questions that we may ask once it is accepted that there was something before the Big Bang. Loop quantum gravity1, 2, 3 applied to isotropic models4 has shown that the quantum evolution of a wavefunction extends through the Big Bang5. Although a general demonstration is still lacking, this may suggest that calculations, and possibly future indirect observations, may allow us to see the Universe as it was before the Big Bang. Here, we analyse an explicit model with a pre-Big Bang era, indicating limitations that would imply that it is practically impossible to answer some of our questions. Assumptions (or prejudice) will remain necessary for knowing the precise state of the Universe, which cannot be fully justified within science itself.


http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v3/n8/abs/nphys654.html

Paul Davies wraps it up neatly, including the decay of atoms:
Quote:
 
What Happened Before the Big Bang?

Well, what did happen before the big bang?
Few schoolchildren have failed to frustrate their parents with questions of this sort. It often starts with puzzlement over whether space "goes on forever," or where humans came from, or how the planet Earth formed. In the end, the line of questioning always seems to get back to the ultimate origin of things: the big bang. "But what caused that?"


Children grow up with an intuitive sense of cause and effect. Events in the physical world aren't supposed to "just happen." Something makes them happen. Even when the rabbit appears convincingly from the hat, trickery is suspected. So could the entire universe simply pop into existence, magically, for no actual reason at all?

This simple, schoolchild query has exercised the intellects of generations of philosophers, scientists, and theologians. Many have avoided it as an impenetrable mystery. Others have tried to define it away. Most have got themselves into an awful tangle just thinking about it.
The problem, at rock bottom, is this: If nothing happens without a cause, then something must have caused the universe to appear. But then we are faced with the inevitable question of what caused that something. And so on in an infinite regress. Some people simply proclaim that God created the universe, but children always want to know who created God, and that line of questioning gets uncomfortably difficult.

One evasive tactic is to claim that the universe didn't have a beginning, that it has existed for all eternity. Unfortunately, there are many scientific reasons why this obvious idea is unsound. For starters, given an infinite amount of time, anything that can happen will already have happened, for if a physical process is likely to occur with a certain nonzero probability-however small-then given an infinite amount of time the process must occur, with probability one. By now, the universe should have reached some sort of final state in which all possible physical processes have run their course. Furthermore, you don't explain the existence of the universe by asserting that it has always existed. That is rather like saying that nobody wrote the Bible: it was. just copied from earlier versions. Quite apart from all this, there is very good evidence that the universe did come into existence in a big bang, about fifteen billion years ago. The effects of that primeval explosion are clearly detectable today-in the fact that the universe is still expanding, and is filled with an afterglow of radiant heat.

So we are faced with the problem of what happened beforehand to trigger the big bang. Journalists love to taunt scientists with this question when they complain about the money being spent on science. Actually, the answer (in my opinion) was spotted a long time ago, by one Augustine of Hippo, a Christian saint who lived in the fifth century. In those days before science, cosmology was a branch of theology, and the taunt came not from journalists, but from pagans: "What was God doing before he made the universe?" they asked. "Busy creating Hell for the likes of you!" was the standard reply.

But Augustine was more subtle. The world, he claimed, was made "not in time, but simultaneously with time." In other words, the origin of the universe-what we now call the big bang-was not simply the sudden appearance of matter in an eternally preexisting void, but the coming into being of time itself. Time began with the cosmic origin. There was no "before," no endless ocean of time for a god, or a physical process, to wear itself out in infinite preparation.

Remarkably, modern science has arrived at more or less the same conclusion as Augustine, based on what we now know about the nature of space, time, and gravitation. It was Albert Einstein who taught us that time and space are not merely an immutable arena in which the great cosmic drama is acted out, but are part of the cast-part of the physical universe. As physical entities, time and space can change- suffer distortions-as a result of gravitational processes. Gravitational theory predicts that under the extreme conditions that prevailed in the early universe, space and time may have been so distorted that there existed a boundary, or "singularity," at which the distortion of space-time was infinite, and therefore through which space and time cannot have continued. Thus, physics predicts that time was indeed bounded in the past as Augustine claimed. It did not stretch back for all eternity.

If the big bang was the beginning of time itself, then any discussion about what happened before the big bang, or what caused it-in the usual sense of physical causation-is simply meaningless. Unfortunately, many children, and adults, too, regard this answer as disingenuous. There must be more to it than that, they object.

Indeed there is. After all, why should time suddenly "switch on"? What explanation can be given for such a singular event? Until recently, it seemed that any explanation of the initial "singularity" that marked the origin of time would have to lie beyond the scope of science. However, it all depends on what is meant by "explanation." As I remarked, all children have a good idea of the notion of cause and effect, and usually an explanation of an event entails finding something that caused it. It turns out, however, that there are physical events which do not have well-defined causes in the manner of the everyday world. These events belong to a weird branch of scientific inquiry called quantum physics.

Mostly, quantum events occur at the atomic level; we don't experience them in daily life. On the scale of atoms and molecules, the usual commonsense rules of cause and effect are suspended. The rule of law is replaced by a sort of anarchy or chaos, and things happen spontaneously-for no particular reason. Particles of matter may simply pop into existence without warning, and then equally abruptly disappear again. Or a particle in one place may suddenly materialize in another place, or reverse its direction of motion. Again, these are real effects occurring on an atomic scale, and they can be demonstrated experimentally.

A typical quantum process is the decay of a radioactive nucleus. If you ask why a given nucleus decayed at one particular moment rather than some other, there is no answer. The event "just happened" at that moment, that's all. You cannot predict these occurrences. All you can do is give the probability-there is a fifty-fifty chance that a given nucleus will decay in, say, one hour. This uncertainty is not simply a result of our ignorance of all the little forces and influences that try to make the nucleus decay; it is inherent in nature itself, a basic part of quantum reality.

The lesson of quantum physics is this: Something that "just happens" need not actually violate the laws of physics. The abrupt and uncaused appearance of something can occur within the scope of scientific law, once quantum laws have been taken into account. Nature apparently has the capacity for genuine spontaneity.
It is, of course, a big step from the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of a subatomic particle-something that is routinely observed in particle accelerators-to the spontaneous and uncaused appearance of the universe. But the loophole is there. If, as astronomers believe, the primeval universe was compressed to a very small size, then quantum effects must have once been important on a cosmic scale. Even if we don't have a precise idea of exactly what took place at the beginning, we can at least see that the origin of the universe from nothing need not be unlawful or unnatural or unscientific. In short, it need not have been a supernatural event.

Inevitably, scientists will not be content to leave it at that. We would like to flesh out the details of this profound concept. There is even a subject devoted to it, called quantum cosmology. Two famous quantum cosmologists, James Hartle and Stephen Hawking, came up with a clever idea that goes back to Einstein. Einstein not only found that space and time are part of the physical universe; he also found that they are linked in a very intimate way. In fact, space on its own and time on its own are no longer properly valid concepts. Instead, we must deal with a unified "space-time" continuum. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is a four-dimensional continuum.

In spite of the space-time linkage, however, space is space and time is time under almost all circumstances. Whatever space-time distortions gravitation may produce, they never turn space into time or time into space. An exception arises, though, when quantum effects are taken into account. That all-important intrinsic uncertainty that afflicts quantum systems can be applied to space-time, too. In this case, the uncertainty can, under special circumstances, affect the identities of space and time. For a very, very brief duration, it is possible for time and space to merge in identity, for time to become, so to speak, spacelike-just another dimension of space.

The spatialization of time is not something abrupt; it is a continuous process. Viewed in reverse as the temporalization of (one dimension of) space, it implies that time can emerge out of space in a continuous process. (By continuous, I mean that the timelike quality of a dimension, as opposed to its spacelike quality, is not an all-or-nothing affair; there are shades in between. This vague statement can be made quite precise mathematically.)

The essence of the Hartle-Hawking idea is that the big bang was not the abrupt switching on of time at some singular first moment, but the emergence of time from space in an ultrarapid but nevertheless continuous manner. On a human time scale, the big bang was very much a sudden, explosive origin of space, time, and matter. But look very, very closely at that first tiny fraction of a second and you find that there was no precise and sudden beginning at all. So here we have a theory of the origin of the universe that seems to say two contradictory things: First, time did not always exist; and second, there was no first moment of time. Such are the oddities of quantum physics.

Even with these further details thrown in, many people feel cheated. They want to ask why these weird things happened, why there is a universe, and why this universe. Perhaps science cannot answer such questions. Science is good at telling us how, but not so good on the why. Maybe there isn't a why. To wonder why is very human, but perhaps there is no answer in human terms to such deep questions of existence. Or perhaps there is, but we are looking at the problem in the wrong way.

Well, I didn't promise to provide the answers to life, the universe, and everything, but I have at least given a plausible answer to the question I started out with: What happened before the big bang?
The answer is: Nothing.

http://www.fortunecity.com/emachines/e11/86/big-bang.html
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breeze posts quote mining and Eric posts information. Thanks, Eric.
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Chris
May 16 2009, 04:06 AM
breeze posts quote mining and Eric posts information. Thanks, Eric.
Mining's not so bad. It's the lack of understanding that bothers me the most.

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It is one thing to state that something is eternal, and therefore no "cause" is necessary. But it is entirely different to scientifically observe the start of something, the instantaneous beginning of something, and then try to say that it had no cause.

Breezy's lack of understanding is... um... understandable because the people from whom he *thinks* he's learning are equally as ignorant.

They'd do so much better if they could just get over this Medieval obsession with cause! When quantum theory (the only perfect theory yet devised by man) came through the door, cause and causality went flying out the window. It's tough to be stuck in an Aristotelian mindset in a quantum universe!
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Modernity doesn't suit them.

Quote mining misrepresents.
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