The Big Bang and Absolute Zero

As has already been stated, that's not what happened.We've gone over this a few times recently, so you could try looking through our recent Big Bang threads. But I'll give you the easily-digested form again here.It's perfectly natural to hear a simplified version of the Big Bang model and think that it says that something "exploded." That's the intuitive response - but the actual event is completely counterintuitive.The Big Bang is not like a chemical, or even nuclear explosion. It's not even a "bang" - the phrase "Big Bang" was coined by a scientist poking fun because the new model competed with the one he had proposed earlier. The name, unfortunately, stuck.According to the Big Bang model, as you move forward in time, space itself expands. It's not just that matter is moving apart - the very space the matter exists in is actually growing. It's like an inflating balloon - if you draw dots on the balloon and then blow it up, the distance between the dots will increase, even though they aren't really moving on the surface of the balloon. Further, the farther apart the dots are from each other, the more rapidly the distance between them will increase. It will appear that two dots an inch apart will be moving apart more slowly than two dots three inches apart, becasue every square inch of the ballon is expanding uniformly.This is what we see in the Universe. There is a redshift effect when viewing very distant galaxies that basically is the visible version of the doppler effect (the effect that makes a car sound different as it passes you). The frequency of the light is slowed down (not the speed, but the frequency) becasue the galaxies are moving away, and this lower frequency shifts the light emitted by those galaxies a bit towards the red end of the spectrum. The curious thing is, all of the distant galaxies seem to be moving farther away from us, and the farther away a galaxy is, the more rapidly it seems to be moving away - exactly the same as in our balloon example, as if space itself were expanding.If we want to look backwards in time, we just reverse this expansion, and we can make some logical inferences and test their results. As we go back, the Universe should be smaller, which means the net density of the matter and energy in the Universe would increase (as there is less volume to fit the same amount of matter and energy, since neither can be created or destroyed). If you go way back, the Universe was so hot, small, and dense that normal matter the way we recognize it didn't exist - matter took the form of a quark-gluon plasma, basically an incredibly dense soup of particles so hot that they can't even form into neutrons, protons, or electrons. If you go back a little farther, our normal laws of physics stop working - the mathematical models stop making any sense. This is the period between T=0 and T=10^-43, a tiny fraction of a second, and we call it a singularity: a point where the normal rules no longer apply, and we really don't know much at all. Matter doesn't have to "disappear" or be destroyed to reach absolute zero, as I understand it. Neither does the volume need to approach zero - in fact, for any set quantity of mass, as you decrease volume, temperature will increase, not decrease. It doesn't work that way. As density increases, heat increases. Remember, we're talking about all of the matter and energy in the Universe being compressed into a crazy-small volume. Its was hotter than you can possibly imagine, so hot that the vibration of the particles approached relativistic velocities, so hot that the particles couldn't even form into protons or neutrons let alone atoms. Besides that, the Cosmic Microwave Background shows that the Universe was indeed incredibly hot in the past, as predicted by the Big Bang model.There also isn't necessarily a "cause" for the expansion of space. Causality is an artifact of our perception of time: we are moving in time in a single direction. But time is just another dimension like length, or width, or height. Our experience of time is just a side effect - the chemical reactions in our bodies, including those in our brains that comprise our thoughts, require entropy to increase. So, we experience time solely in the direction of increasing entropy, and we call this "moving forward in time."The best way to understand is that the Universe has a certain shape. Let's say that, if you could look at our Universe from the outside, it would look like the top half of a globe. Time is represented by the north-south axis, with "forward" corresponding to moving south. The spacial dimensions length, width, and height are represented by the circumference of the globe. The North Pole is T=0. Matter can be represented by the longitudinal lines. At T=0, everything is in a single point. There is nothing "before" T=0 any more than there is anything farther north than the north pole. As you follow the longitudinal lines south, the distance between them increases, even though they aren't actually moving at all - the space between them expands. There isn't a "cause" for any of this - there's no "cosmic dynamite" setting off an explosion, or whatever. We are just experiencing the shape of the Universe as we move through the dimension of time.We have no idea how the Universe "got here." It's a difficult question to even ask rationally, becasue time is a cokponent of the Universe - you can't ask what came "before" the diemsion that defines what "before" and "after" mean. The Big Bang isn't a theory of origins, but rather a model of the conditions in the Universe as it continues to expand. All we really know is that it does exist, and we know with reasonable certainty what it was like from T=10^-43 on until now, and we have some educated guesses about the period between T=0 until T=10^-43. "You're entirely wrong" would be the best answer. But don't feel bad - like I said, the whole Big Bang model is counterintuitive. It's best understood using mathematics, but that's best left to the physicists. Feel free to ask whatever questions you have - we actually have a few physicists on this board.How's THAT for a long reply?

What you "buy" is irrelevant. You're wrong.Space is not composed of anything possessing mass. Not neutrinos, not photons. You're wrong. Period.Neutrinos and photons, like other particles, occupy space.Your comparison to the bowling ball/trampoline analogy is irrelevant - you're taking the analogy too far. Mass warps space, and the easiest way to visualize it is to picture a bowling ball on a trampoline. But the analogy stops there - space is not an "object."Space is any given quantity of the dimensions length, width and height. The measurements of those dimensions by an observer in an outside frame of reference are altered by the presence of mass. Space is also intimately tied to time, as per the relationship described by Relativity. Space itself has no mass and is not composed of particles. Strictly speaking, you could say that mass is the warping of space, and that which we say "has" mass is simply that which warps space. Cavediver/Son Goku could clarify how space itself is related to quantum fields, but relevant to your statements, you're simply completely wrong.

Of course distance is not an "object." Space is not an "object" per se, either.The definition of matter is "that which has mass and takes up space." If space were composed of matter, we would be saying "space has mass and takes up space." That doesn't make sense.You are the one insisting that space is composed of neutrinos and photons. You are the one making the outlandish claim, so the burden of proof is on you to profide the evidence for your whackjob model. Sure it is. Space is expanding. The amount of distance between two given objects discounting any additional forces such as gravity is currently becomong larger without physical motion. That's pretty clear. Space has properties of the potential to do work? What properties would those be? Please, enlighten us. Mass can be describes as that which warps space (the warping of space being gravity). How can you say, essencially, that "space warps space?" That doesn't make sense. Then how can you say that it is so? At best that would be an unsupported hypothesis. At worst (and I think this is the case) it's utter BS. And that's true. Energy is the potential to do work. You can't have something "made" of the potential to do work. Star Trek is wrong - "balls of pure energy" and other such nonsense is the purview of science fiction. Space has no substance as you or I would envision it. It's counterintuitive because of the way we experience the spacial dimensions.But Son Goku and cavediver are physicists. I'll take what they say regarding physics over your rubbish any day.Honestly, you sould like tesla right now. You seem to be proposing something along the lines of the "aether" model that was discarded in the middle ages. Now you really sound like tesla. You've compeltely stopped making sense. It's not, except that the intervening space between galactic clusters is far more likely to have small amounts of matter in between. And of course the shear amount of intervening space. Because mass warps space/time. That has nothing to do with your ridiculous notion that space is "made of neutrinos and photons." Space can contain those and other particles, but it is not made of them.Space is defined as any measurement of the dimensions length, width and height. What's the mass of a cubic meter? The correct answer is "a cubic meter of what?" Space alone has no mass.

Well, I stand partially corrected. Thank you.Still no "neutrinos and photons" making up space though, right? Please tell me I've at least got that right so I don't feel like I've made myself a complete ass

Son Goku answered this perfectly. Remember, stars initiate fusion because they are compressed by gravity, and the compression raises the temperature until the reaction begins. The Bose-Einstein condensate is crazy-cool, but it has nothing to do with the Big Bang. Frankly, the conditions were just completely different. That's good, becasue that isn't a good representation fo teh model. Don't worry too much - it's incredibly counterintuitive, and you can't understand it completely without all of the crazy-hard math you only learn in upper-division physics classes. I certainly don't understand the math behind it. I have a good layman's grasp, but I don't know the why of it, either. I'd suggest you ask Son or cavediver. And as far as I know, that's accurate. See what I mean about counterintuitive? As I understand the model, space is unbounded, and yet space is expanding. It's like an infinite balloon, but the surface is still stretching.But when we model the Big Bang starting with an incredibly hot, dense, and "small" Universe, we wind up simulating a Universe that looks uncannily similar to our own. We were even able to use such modeling to predict the existence of the Cosmic Microwave Background, and even the structure of the CMB looks like what the model predicts. It's another one of those counter-intuitive things. Our experience is tied to time in a single direction in at a single "rate." But time is just another dimension like the spacial ones. We experience time the way we do because the electrochemical reactions in our bodies, including the ones in our brains, only work in the direction of increasing entropy - in other words, the reactions that constitute our thoughts require a sequence of events moving forward in time. This means we can only ever "experience" time forwards.But to an outside observer, someone outside of the Universe and not dependent on the forward passage of time for thoughts and experiences, time would just be another dimension like depth or height. The Universe looks different at different locations in time, just as it does in different spacial locations, and its state in one coordinate is closely tied to its state in neighboring coordinates. Our experience of time is just an artifact of the way our brains work, nothing more.That help at all?

Space is not required to contain anything, though. Space can be empty. Most of space, in fact, is empty. The vast majority of the volume taken up by even an atom is empty space, not particles. Moving through interstellar space is not like moving through an atmosphere. This again smacks of the aether model which was proven wrong back in the middle ages. ...only if the expansion is happening at the speed of light. We've gone over that in a different thread. It takes 7.5 billion years for the light to reach us, but the intervening space has been expanding as well, causing the redshift. The distant object could be stationary, or moving, it doesn't matter.The key is really that the more distant an object is, the greater the redshift. This means that every cubic centimeter of space is expanding uniformly, and the more intervening space between two objects, the "faster" the rate of expansion will appear. Nearby objects have a far lower redshift than distant objects. The expanding space model is so far the most accurate model we have for duplicating the observed evidence. As I understand it, the structure of the Cosmic Microwave Background is such that it appears space is not "curved" in that way. Such models have been proposed in the past, but were discarded. You'd have to ask cavediver or Son Goku for a better answer than that - they're the physicists, and they know and understand the mathematics and evidence involved. I only know what the Big Bang model states in layman's terms. ...the Big Bang model, which proposes that the Universe was ever hotter, smaller, and more dense as you approach T=0, and was so hot and so dense that the CMB was left as a cosmic "echo" or sorts as the Universe continues to cool down.It's a really good model, you know. It does account for all of the evidence we have accumulated so far. It's the model that predicted the CMB, so obviously the CMB fits the Big Bang model perfectly well.

Perhaps you should try reading some of the other threads on Big Bang cosmology here.Big bang cosmology is factual. As in, the expansion of the Universe is an observed fact. There are mountains of evidence supporting the expansion model, but when it comes down to it, you yourself could look through a telescope, measure the redshift of distant bodies relative to their distance from us, and conslusively show that the space between all objects is expanding. The laws of thermodynamics also state that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed in a closed system, genius."Always existed" and "beginning" become very strange concepts indeed within cosmology. It is entirely accurate to say that all of the matter and energy in the Universe have "always existed," meaning they exist at every coordinate of time.But the Big Bang has never been a model of cosmological origins - it's the model of Universal expansion. It models the observed expansion of the Universe and makes testable predictions based on those models. The Big Bang model has allowed us to work out what conditions the Unvierse would have existed in long ago, and we have been thus far able to very accurately model the Universe all the way back to a bare fraction of a second after T=0 itself (and the only reason we don't know much regarding T=0 is becasue our math stops making snese under the extreme conditions predicted).And the Universe is increasing in entropy, all the time. Your premise assumes that enough time has passed since T=0 for the Universe to reach uniform temperature and the lowest possible energy state. That simply is not the case - it will take many billions more years for the Universe to reach "heat death." There is quite a bit, actually, but that's not the topic of this thread. Feel free to start a new topic regarding evidence for "macro-evolution." We're limited to a certain number of posts per thread here, so off-topic tangents like evolution in a cosmology thread are counter-productive.

Prove it. Show objective, reproducible evidence that a deity actually exists.Here's your problem:IF(the Universe as we observe it) = (Big Bang model) + (various other scientific models including evolution)AND(the universe as we observe it) = (Big Bang model) + (various other scientific models including evolution) + (God)THEN(God) is at best irrelevant, and at worst nonexistent.You're actually doing something even worse than that, though. You're trying to replace all scientific models regarding the Universe with, literally, "goddidit."You're saying "god" created everything to be the way we observe it, but you're not providing a mechanism by which your deity "creates." You've disengaged your brain, stopped all observation, rational deduction, modeling, useful prediction, and everything else associated with thinking, and waved everything away with "goddidit."That doesn't explain anything. Not anything at all.You're attributing the existence of the Universe to a deity you cannot objectively prove to even exist while unilaterally insisting that all of the scientific models regarding anything prior to (I'm assuming this part) 6000 years ago are incorrect, in direct contradiction of observed evidence. Feel free to start a geology thread. The Earth is several billion years old. That has been known as a fact for a very long time. Even before Darwin and the Theory of Evolution, it was well known that the Earth was at least millions of years old - no honest estimate younger than that has seriously been entertained in centuries, for very good reasons. That statement isn't even self-consistent. "Matter cannot be created, so who created matter?" You aren't making sense. What is it with you and mocking things you don't even begin to comprehend?Why don't we start this way: state, in your own words, a brief summary of the Big Bang model of cosmology. Tell us what you think the Big bang model is, and we'll see if you're anywhere close. After all, you can hardly criticize the Big Bang model if you don't even know what it is, can you?

It would seem you have a misconception regarding the Big Bang model.At T=0, you cannot say there was "no time in which it (the Universe) could have existed." T=0 is simply a coordinate, a location in time, which is a dimension in the same sense as the spacial dimension. To say that "time did not exist at T=0" is not true; you could say that the concept of "before" T=0 does not make sense in the same way that asking what is North of teh North Pole does not make sense, but in no way is there a suggestion that there is "no time in which it could have existed."Similarly, at T=0 the spacial dimensions length, width and height were "smaller" than they are today. In fact, it is the constriction of the spacial dimensions (a reversal of the directly observed expansion of the Universe) that causes the extreme density and heat of the first moments - all of the energy and matter in the Universe were compressed into a very small volume.But again, saying that the spacial dimensions were smaller than they are today, even to the degree where the entirety of the Universe was compressed to a size analogous to a modern atom, still does not suggest there is "no place" in which the matter and energy of the Universe could exist. It's true that it did not exist in the form we see today, as it was too hot and too small for conventional atoms and subatomic particles - it took time for the Universe to expand and cool down enough to form even protons and electrons from the quark-gluon plasma. But again, the Big Bang model does not imply there was ever "no space," just as it does not imply that there was ever "no time."The "no outside" bit is a conundrum. There may be additional dimensions of which the four dimensions of space and time that comprise our Universe are but a subset, meaning there could be multiple Universe existing in a fifth dimension of sorts. But the Big Bang model doesn't involve such things - there are hypotheses out there that suggest additional dimensions, but they aren't relevant to this discussion as they have been inadequately tested (as far as I understand, they are mathematical models that require testing to determine accuracy and relevance to reality).The singularity is the point at which the mathematics and laws of physics we currently use stop making any sense when applied to the state of the Universe. In the time between T=0 and T=10^-43, which is the barest, tiniest fraction of a second, we cannot describe the Universe or make meaningful testable predictions regarding the Universe because of the extreme conditions of density and heat. We require additional information regarding high-energy physics to venture into that bare moment, and scientists are working on experiments to gain that information as we speak.So your "problems" with the Big Bang model don't really exist. There is no point in the existence of the Universe where there is "no time." There is no point in the existence of the Universe where there is "no space." Time and space are features of the Universe, and your "problems" are analogous to saying "your model of water doesn't work because there was no wet." "Wetness" is a property of water; when discussing the Universe, time and space are basically what we're discussing, and can never be said to "not exist" without the Universe not existing.And of course the Big Bang is not a model of the "origin" of the Universe in terms of explaining why it exists; it is a model of the observed expansion of the Universe, with testable predictions regarding the past all the way back to T=0.