The Sudden Dawn of the Cosmos and the Constancy of Physical Laws

quote:

---

According to the Big Bang Theory, the universe, having never before existed, suddenly appeared at the time of the Big Bang, when something exploded

---

Expanding on what jar said, the Big Bang Theory states that 13.7 billion years ago the universe was very hot and the size of a pea and mostly composed of particles. It then explains how we got the universe we have today from that pea-sized soup.What proceeded that is unknown (maybe it was apple sized for five million years prior, then stadium sized for a trillion years, etc.) and the Big Bang Theory makes no statements on the origin of the universe.

quote:

---

conforming to the Laws of Physics

---

"Laws of Physics" is a very pre-1800s way of viewing physics. Modern physics postulates that the world is composed of various "objects" (e.g. fields, spacetime) and derives the consequences of these postulates, which match current experiments. Laws tended to be absolute statements about observed behaviour.Modern Quantum Field Theory for instance couldn't be broken down into "Laws", there'd be infinitely many if you tried.In this sense Modern Physics is more like biology, i.e. entities and their behaviour.

I was a bit unclear in the previous post.I meant that we don't use "Laws" as it's an outmoded way of viewing physics, i.e. absolute dictums on observed quantities, e.g. "Momentum is conserved".In modern physics we simply describe conjectured basic objects and have complex mathematical models describe how they behave. "Laws" like "Momentum is conserved" then fall out as a consequence of their behaviour rather than being the basis of physics.

No, our current understanding is that the universe does not in fact have "Laws". Not merely that we haven't found them, but that there are in fact no such laws in general. The universe's behaviour is described by statistical relations, meaning certain events are more or less probable.
At the quantum level it's the total opposite of what you have said as in fact there is far less consistency at that scale, the statistical nature of events is much more apparent than at our scale.

Since they've come up on this thread a bit I just wanted to mention that virtual particles don't actually exist. They're a mnemonic device to help in setting up QFT calculations, but the theory doesn't really say there are particles popping in and out of existence from the vacuum.Also in general QFT doesn't really give much objective content to particles or atoms. The number of particles in your body for example is observer dependent with no objective value.It was also mention above that the spin value of an electron upon observation is an example of something which does not follow from previous physical facts, but merely has probabilities of assuming various values. This is 100% true, just to add that all probabilistic events in quantum theory have this character, i.e. the random events of quantum theory are outcomes of observations. The theory doesn't deal with events occurring independent of observation. If somebody doesn't measure a given property of a particle, then that property has no value, not even a randomly selected one.