How did round planets form from the explosion of the Big Bang?

Hi Aptera! Welcome to the cosmic monkeyshines I notice that your original thread proposal is entitled Why I see creation to be more scientifically correct than evolution.. When I examine your posts though, I don't see any actual argument for creation at all. All your content appears to be about areas of scientific theory which you find confused or difficult to believe or understand. How do these perceived flaws advance the theory of creation in any way?You appear to be taking creation as some sort of "default" position, based on the worldview in which you were raised or perhaps a sense of historical priority. This is a very dangerous way to think. Other default positions include the flat earth, geocentric astronomy, and objects falling at different speeds based on their weight. All these ideas have been shown to be categorically false. Why should creationism be any different?Let's examine your objections to the current view of cosmology. We will start with the most philosophical one, and see how it compares to the creation theory. Where did God come from? Who created God? If the universe requires a creator, why wouldn't God require one? Are there an infinite number of Gods, each creating the next? Where did the idea of God really originate?We don't follow the misleadingly-named "Big Bang" theory because we find it philosophically appealing. Far from it! It begins with the relativity math, but Einstein himself hated it. He preferred to believe in a steady-state "eternal" universe. But the math implies that the universe may be expanding or contracting, and thus, in its current state at least, may have a beginning and an end. Hubble did the necessary research, examining nearer and farther portions of the universe and comparing their doppler shift. After a lot of work, and repeated replication of his results, the most distant parts of what we see are found to be consistently red-shifted quite off the scale in ways that normal motion cannot account for. That means that the universe, not just the objects in it but spacetime itself, is expanding at a steady rate.When we work this expansion rate backwards, we find that 10 to 20 billion years ago, there is a point known as the Singularity where normal math breaks down, because the density of existing matter-energy is such that we begin dividing by zero. So anything we talk about using this math has to begin immediately after that point. This implies an extemely tiny high density area expanding outwards at at least the speed of light. And that is all that relativity can tell us about it. Fortunately, we have more math than just relativity to work with. For extremely small phenomena like the one we appear to be describing, the prevailing theory is quantum mechanics. Again, Einstein hated this stuff, because it implies that the real underlying framework of the universe is statistical in nature rather than deterministic. "God does not play dice with the universe!" wailed the old man with no hairbrush. But science proceeded to do its work, regardless of people's "choice" of philosophy to like.Quantum mechanics gives us a sort of periodic table of the observed and implied "particles" of the subatomic level, known as the Standard Model. Some of the items on the Standard Model are bosons, waveforms which mediate the macro properties of the fields composed of other waveforms; and one group of these is scalar in nature, like the infamous Higgs boson, which is responsible for the rest mass of existing matter. Just as all of the other quantum forms are implied by the math and/or shown in the colliders to have higher energy levels, so would these scalar bosons.Alan Guth and Alexis Starobinksi, working independently, decided to apply this high-energy scalar model to the early universe implied by relativity and see what came of it. In such a tiny high-density situation, every single quantum effect would be taking place in essentially the same place at the same time. In such circumstances, the scalar fields would supersede the other more limited ones, and the highest energy scalar field would decide the outcome of the interactions. This results in a massive expansion of spacetime, at much faster than the speed of light to which mere matter/energy is limited, in the first zillionth of a second of the universe as we know it. This theory is called Inflation, and the theoretical entity responsible is known as the inflaton.Amazingly, this resolved a tremendous number of the known problems and questions about the relativity version of the Big Bang. For example, why are all sides of the universe which we can see basically consistent with one another? They haven't been in contact for billions of years, why haven't they changed in totally different ways? Why aren't any of the rare phenomena like monopoles that would have been generated in such a quantum stew present in our local universe? Why is the universe so flat overall, instead of wildly curved one way or another? The new theory solved all these problems, without ever intending to.This is how the theory in science really works. One starts by investigating one tiny aspect of one problem, and before one knows it the correct solution expands outwards, resolving any number of unrelated problems in other fields. Perhaps one is working on why there are so many different kinds of finches in the Galapagos. Other people have worked on things like this already, but their theories were crap. Then the correct theory is found, and wham! Like dominoes, all the unresolved flaws in geology, paleontology, archaeology, radiometrics and sociology fall. I will touch on this again when we get to whatever thread your bio questions end up in ...Note that these aren't the same kind of "flaws" you think you are seeing in the current cosmological model. For example Gravity is a curvature of spacetime. Curvature tends to make things round. In three dimensional space it produces oblate spheroids, like our planets. In two-dimensional planes, like an orbit, it produces ellipses. This is how things work, no surprises at all. Please stop believing things, it can only make you stupid. Doubt everything. Begin by refraining from choosing to believe things, and work your way up from there.

I DO NOT BELIEVE ANYTHING

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This remark was made, in these very words, by John Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the educated, to think that everybody must "believe" something or other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist, and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X, one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse of X.

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My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

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My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers c. 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

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Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.-- Robert Anton WilsonEdited by Iblis, : provisional corrections

Yep. Thanks! Super! Explain to me what gibberish like this example is talking about and how it works please. Neutron - WikipediaI could have sworn that the reason I can't think of a neutron as an electron that fell into its proton and started doing it with a passing neutrino was something to do with the spins not adding up. Am I understanding this incorrectly? Or am I just saying it wrong?Either is fine, but I needs to know! I've been trying to grok fractional spin for whatever, weeks and weeks now, and I'm still apparently clueless. LOL, I thought the one I was going to get jumped for was claiming Darwin solved sociology problems. Che sera, sera.I guess what I'm really looking for is an appropriate thesaurus entry for "universe" in this context. The Higgs to whatever extent is applicable, and the inflation certainly, are responsible for this big mess of expanding whatall that under other circumstances I tend to refer to as "the shebang". Maybe I should have gone with "spacetime as we know it"?Here, explain this bit of layman-itis to me, that will likely help more than Roget's could http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-ph/pdf/9901/9901124v1.pdf Oh I would never use the Higgs to explain gravity, I would speak, as I did above, of curved space. I might mention the elusive graviton, but I don't have the slightest how it allegedly does the job, so you kind of have your work cut out for you Seriously though, weren't people arguing for years as to whether the inflaton and the Higgs were really the same guy? I still don't understand the difference between them, other than that higher energy level crap I posted.

I see a large part of where I'm going wrong now, I jumped straight from the beginnings of the bestiary to the standard model as if they were remotely the same thing. I think I'm going to cut out most of both paragraphs and replace them with one paragraph that tracks the way I usually do when I give this argument, qm gives us the standard model, the model gives us scalar bosons, high-energy scalar bosons give us inflation. It ought to flow more smoothly that way and act as a cleaner introduction to the array of problems inflation seredipitously solves.I just thought I had finally understood something about "angular momentum" from studying neutron decay, oh well, you win some, you learn some. I believe I will take whatever the cut material grows into as I proceed up again in a rant about the particle zoo, you will likely get another chance to sharpen me up then Edited by Iblis, : PS: matter isn't frozen energy, it's boiled space!
*flinches*

Hi slevesque If I understand Son Goku correctly, he's talking about the observable universe. This is a tricky bit of semantics, there is still a debate as to whether the universe is finite, infinite or flat, and those words in that context don't mean quite what we might want them to mean.But the observable universe is only from here to the edges that were expanding slower than the speed of light once inflation collapsed into normal expansion. These were only about a billion and half light years away then but because of the continued expansion the signal from the first scattering (several million years later) and the first suns (about 400 million years later) has taken more than 13 billion years to reach us. Those are the last signals we will receive from that distance, because it and theoretical areas beyond it have moved away at speeds that simply leave this final red-shifting 4k hum and later starlight signal perpetually traveling to us without showing any further duration.In the meantime, based on the observed expansion, the implied universe or "co-moving now" is actually about 78 billion light years in radius, that is, that is how far those edges are predicted to be now 13.7 billion years later. This figure is being adjusted outward to account for dark energy, but I have not seen a consistent new figure yet.This section is what grew from smaller than an atom to the size of a fist to the size of a melon to 3 billion light years wide to more than 156 billion light years wide. You understand? This has no bearing on how much stuff was actually involved in the process, that could have been twice as much or ten times as much or an infinite amount.This is where the curvature measurements begin to possibly tell us more. Inflation left the universe almost perfectly flat. We are investigating it very carefully to determine whether any slight overall curvature can be detected. If this curvature is inward, or convex, then there is a point some great distance away where it curves around again. We think we know that this point would be further away than the 78 billion light years mentioned above, as if it were less than the light from the cosmic microwave background (that 4k hum I mentioned) would be arriving in a repetitive pattern by now that showed that it had circumnavigated the universe.That would be something that we could think of as a finite universe, and would tend to indicate that the area affected by inflation was not infinite. It would also indicate a universe that could end up collapsing in on itself into a Big Crunch. But the Dark Energy seems to indicate that this will not be happening, and so evidence is being eagerly sought to show that the universe is actually curved outward, or concave. This would be an infinite universe, but whether that means that the area affected by inflation was itself infinite in the normal sense is still a matter of great uncertainty.On the other hand, if it is perfectly flat, as it certainly appears to be (within a 2% margin of error that keeps getting smaller as more effort gets thrown at the question) well then, it may indeed be Euclidean. But there would not be any way to tell whether it was infinite or finite, so far as we are aware of now, and so in that case this question might have no relevant meaning for science.The finite but unbounded universe that Rahvin is describing would be the closed curvature version, note that this finiteness does not keep the example sphere from growing larger, it just remains finite through the process like a balloon being blown up. There is some question as to whether the open version could be imagined with the same analogy, only from inside the sphere; in which case I do not expect you would consider it to be infinite either, regardless of whether it continued growing larger forever or not.A universe that does not come round on itself and collapse will still eventually meet a fate of sorts, in that the particles will all become so far apart that no further interaction between them is possible, each particle will be separated from the others by a distance growing faster than the speed of light. At this point the space between them may well collapse into another "false vacuum" and new epochs of inflation could occur.To understand this issue of curvature better, imagine gravity as curvature inward, toward the planet, and expansion as curvature outward, away from the beginning of time. In this sense Dark Matter is closedness, Dark Energy is increasing openness. And all the discussion has assumed that the whole universe (not just the observable part) is spherical, this assumption is somewhat groundless. It may well be shaped like a peanut, or a pringle, or a doughnut, for example. Nor does any of it refer to dimensions beyond the standard 4, though we are reasonably sure there are more.

I agree with cavediver. Can you propose a smart thread please? What I mean is, do show the video, it's delightful. But also summarize what seem to be the best arguments from it in your own words, so that people have things to argue for and against and build their own posts out of.The brilliant posts this current thread is acting as a vehicle for need to be somewhere with a less shallow beginning than Why is stuff round?