Before Big Bang God or Singularity

It isn't that your questions are hard, but that people are having great difficulty finding explanations that make sense to you.--Percy

I'll leave Son Goku and Cavediver to respond to the rest, but about this: We don't know whether or not the universe is infinite, so cosmologists often confine estimates of the present size of the universe to just the observable portion. The current size of the observable universe is around 92 billion light years. The 156 billion light year figure is a common misconception. See the Wikipedia article on the Observable Universe.--Percy

Hi ICANT,I again leave it to Son Goku and Cavediver to respond to most of your post, but about just this: Through the 1st third of the 20th century it was assumed that the universe was eternal and static. The only supporting evidence for this view was that the stars in the sky appeared unchanging, though I suppose the occasional nova was a small clue that this view wasn't correct.The next hint for a non-static universe came from Einstein's theory of general relativity, whose solution required that the universe could not be static, but had to be either shrinking or expanding. Convinced the universe was static, Einstein added a compensation factor (the infamous cosmological constant) to force his solution to yield a static universe.Edwin Hubble's work during the 1920's revealed that the universe is actually expanding. The idea of a static universe, which was unsupported by much evidence anyway, was replaced by an expanding universe because the visual evidence allowed no other conclusion.So it was the idea of an expanding universe, not the big bang, that replaced the idea of a static universe. The big bang derives from extrapolating the expanding universe backward in time. If you do that then you find that about 13.7 billion years ago all the matter and energy of the universe, in fact, the entire universe, existed within an extremely tiny volume. We cannot project backward in time to a singularity because the model, based upon general relativity, breaks down at that point. But the theory can be used to very accurately project backward in time until just after the singularity.--Percy

Well, we can't know anything for sure in science, but what I'm saying is that theory and observation match very well back to about 10^-43 seconds after the beginning, so we have a lot of confidence in the theory for that time and after. Before that time I would just echo what Cavediver has said, that we only have lines of research that may eventually bear fruit. *You* might think you know this, but your task here is to convince other people that you know this. Given the lack of theory and evidence for the period before 10^-43 seconds and the fact that you're not a member of the scientific cosmological community and are relatively unknowledgeable on the subject, the possibility that you actually know something science doesn't is minisculy small. If you could really contribute meaningfully and creatively to cosmology it would mean that we lived in a world where people off the street could walk into Einstein's study and help him complete his equations.This is no dig at you, but it is appropriate to note the well known psychological reality that confidence is inversely proportional to knowledge, and you continually display a great deal of confidence in making pronouncements about things of which you know little.--Percy

In that case, that changes what you said in Message 296 to this: This is less correct than when you said "static universe". The steady state universe was proposed by Fred Hoyle as an alternative to the Big Bang, not vice-versa.You're being fed a ton of information. I hope some of it is staying with you.Rather than learning cosmology piecemeal with the discussion's shifting focus, you should just check out a book on cosmology from the library. You don't have to accept what it says, but you would at least learn about our current scientific understanding of the origin of the universe. Though I've never read it, I heard good things about The First Three Minutes, but that book is old now. Maybe someone can recommend something more recent.--Percy

You're saying, "I know."I'm saying, "Scientifically, I don't know, and there's no possible way you could know, either." What in the world leads you to think such a thing! In 1919 when Sir Author Eddington verified Einstein's general theory of relativity, it was on the front page of the New York Times within days, and now you're claiming that in the Internet age new information takes years? These sites are not about recent trends in cosmology. Any significant turnabout in cosmological circles would be trumpeted on the front page of the Times on both sides of the pond. Scientifically, God has no merit as an explanation because he is a phenomenon for which there is as yet no evidence, and this discussion is taking place in one of the science threads.I hope that you *are* learning something from this, but it is clear that your main motivation is to find confirmation for your religious beliefs within science, or at least to convince yourself that science does not contradict them. But what's really important is the eternal soul, and that has nothing to do with scientific theories about the origin of the universe.--PercyEdited by Percy, : Grammar.

The title of this thread includes the word God. Not your fault, we probably shouldn't have promoted the thread into the science forums. I did not say we can not know. I said we do not know, and that there are several lines of research in this area.I think your attempts to summarize what Cavediver and Son Goku have been telling you about the singularity and T=0 are also incorrect, but I'll let them speak for themselves.I know that people are not always being consistent in their terminology and that this makes things difficult, but that can't be helped, that happens in all discussions, it only becomes a problem when people don't share a common background. When I'm talking with colleagues on technical subjects they can misspeak in significant ways and I'll still understand precisely what they're saying. They might say, "The C interface won't be confused by the mangling," and I'll know that they could only mean C++, not C, but if they're trying to communicate C++ mangling to you, a non-programmer, that kind of mistake could drive you batty and lead you to all kinds of erroneous conclusions.So lacking a background in physics may be causing you to attach too much importance to the meanings of minor words and phrases, but if you keep at it you should eventually get what Cavediver and Son Goku are saying. But you telling Cavediver and Son Goku what's so about cosmology and how contradictory their views are makes no sense at all and can only get in the way of your understanding.--Percy