The Big Bang and Absolute Zero

And as far as we know, that did not happen.Nothing exploded. It is the nature of space that it either expands or contracts. That is a conclusion that comes right out of General Relativity.- The problem is that in the past, the universe was smaller, hence denser. According to thermodynamics, it must have been hotter. As we go back in the past the universe must get hotter, so it couldn't have been absolute zero.

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Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. -- Wendell Berry

Well, if you want to be pedantic, here is a more accurate way of describing the phenomenon.As we all travel through space-time (which we are forced to do, since we are all moving in the time-direction of our own frames of reference), we notice two things: absent of forces that hold objects together, the distance between any pair of objects increases; if the universe has a finite volume, this volume is increasing. This gives the illusion that space is expanding; an illusion, since at different times we are observing different spaces.Sort of like the 1-dimensional people on a 2-sphere moving down lines of longitude; at different times they are on different lines of latitude, but to them it will appear as if the line of latitude on which they sit is expanding.

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Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy. -- Wendell Berry

One thing that I will add is that since we have the law of conservation of energy and temperature is a measure of energy, then there are constraints on the temperature. This means that the pressure and the volume are no longer independent quantities, but one will depend on the other. For a process such as this (called an adiabatic process) we have, for an ideal gas:TV^γ = constantwhere γ is a constant.Of course, the early universe was not an ideal gas, but the idea is the same. Since temperature will depend on the unchaning amount of energy, this means that we really have one independent quantity, which we can choose to be the volume. Then the temperature will depend only on the volume, since the pressure will also be constrained.

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There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president. -- Kurt Vonnegut

Oh. I see. You meant to type: Well, the point is there is a God; we're not in a closed system.Without the apostrophe distinguishing we're from were and without the punctuation separating God, that sentence is unreadable. No shit, I truly could not figure out what that sentence meant when I first read it. I thought you were trying to say that God exists and that he wasn't a closed system.Proper spelling and punctuation are not optional, folks. It serious impedes the legibility of your posts when you don't write correctly.Back to our regularly scheduled thread.

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Speaking personally, I find few things more awesome than contemplating this vast and majestic process of evolution, the ebb and flow of successive biotas through geological time. Creationists and others who cannot for ideological or religious reasons accept the fact of evolution miss out a great deal, and are left with a claustrophobic little universe in which nothing happens and nothing changes.
-- M. Alan Kazlev