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Author Topic:   The cosmic conspiracy.
Rahvin
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Message 26 of 173 (698412)
05-06-2013 7:35 PM
Reply to: Message 24 by justatruthseeker
05-06-2013 7:14 PM


First we should clear one thing up. The Big Bang IS creationism, just without mentioning a god. The difference is the Bible says God created the heavens and the earth, science says a singularity did it, although no mention of how the singularity came to be, odd since science does not allow matter or energy to be created from nothing, or anything to exist for eternity, (laws of Thermodynamics).
That is a massive misconception of Big Bang cosmology.
"The singularity" is not a discrete entity. It's not a causal force for anything. It's not even remotely how a singularity is portrayed on "Star Trek."
The word "singularity" is in essence a placeholder for "our math based on regular physics seems to break down here, so we lack the ability to accurately predict the conditions of the Universe here."
We know that the Universe is expanding due to, basically, direct observation. The red-shift of light from distant galaxies (particularly the fact that the red-shift increases the farther away the galaxies are) means that the space between objects that are not gravitationally bound to each other is increasing/ It's just like dots drawn on a balloon that is then inflated - the dots that are farther away will move apart faster than the dots that are closer together. You can try this at home. Even lines on a rubber band work.
If we extrapolate this expansion backward in time, we see that everything moves closer together, and space shrinks - the distance between the galaxies becomes smaller. The farther back we go, the smaller the space in the observable Universe becomes...and the more densely packed the matter becomes, because there's less space to distribute it in. Increasing density increases the temperature, so we also know that the Universe was much hotter in the past.
This was verified in part by the discovery of the Cosmic Microwave Background - a radiation echo, essentially, of the extremely hot, dense nature of the Universe a few billion years in the past.
But what happens if we continue to extrapolate backward? Eventually, all of space, all of matter, would exist in a single, dimensionless point - with infinite density, among other things that just don;t work with your typical physics equations.
This is the singularity - it's not a "thing," per se. It's just a way of saying that we don;t have a model for this state of the Universe, yet.
You've probably heard that black holes have a singularity at their core, and this is true as well....but that doesn't mean necessarily that every black hole is another Big Bang waiting to happen. The word "singularity" doesn't actually refer to any sort of "first cause," or any cause at all. It merely means that "our existing equations don't work here, conditions are too extreme."
At no point does the Big Bang model point to the creation of matter or energy - all of the mass/energy of the Universe existed at all points of time. The notion of a "cause" is somewhat tricky when it comes to the singularity, though, as this is one of the examples of normal models breaking down.
There's an easy enough analogy to help explain, though.
Imagine that the Universe is a globe. North-South denote time, with North being the past, and South being the future. East-West represent the spacial dimensions of length/width/height.
As we move South from the North Pole, we see that space becomes larger, mirroring the expansion of space that we see in reality.
But what happens if we try to go farther North than the North Pole?
It doesn't make sense. You cannot, be definition, go farther north than the North Pole.
Asking about "before" or a "cause" for the Big Bang is similar. A more accurate description of the problem is that mass warps space-time - and with literally all of the mass of the Universe existing at a single point, the warping of space-time is impossible to describe with current models. Time could wrap in on itself, something like what the North Pole does on a globe, where traveling North suddenly turns into traveling South - so traveling into the past might suddenly turn into traveling into the future as you pass that single point in time.
The fact is that we just don;t know - but the reality doesn't look at all like what you just described. "The Singularity" is in no way a synonym for "God."

The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion (either as being the received opinion or as being agreeable to itself) draws all things else to support and agree with it. - Francis Bacon
"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." - John Rogers
A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity. — Albert Camus
"...the pious hope that by combining numerous little turds of variously tainted data, one can obtain a valuable result; but in fact, the outcome is merely a larger than average pile of shit." - Barash, David 1995.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 24 by justatruthseeker, posted 05-06-2013 7:14 PM justatruthseeker has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 27 by justatruthseeker, posted 05-06-2013 7:57 PM Rahvin has not replied

  
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