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Topic: Math Says Big Bang was Big Bounce (Read 986 times) |
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Walter Watts
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Math Says Big Bang was Big Bounce
« on: 2007-09-01 13:59:00 » |
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Math Says Big Bang was Big Bounce
Physicist shows the mathematical viability of a collapsing
universe before the big bang.
http://podcast.sciam.com/daily/sa_d_podcast_070702.mp3
Walter
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Walter Watts
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Hermit
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Re:Math Says Big Bang was Big Bounce
« Reply #1 on: 2007-09-02 14:43:07 » |
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I know that my greatly loved friend Walter knows the following, but knowing that others could be confused let me make a small explicit clarification:
Math says many things are possible, many of them mutually contradictory. On the one hand, this story is important because it makes a wider range of pre-existing scenarios, some of which were earlier seen as unsupportable because of a lack of appropriate descriptive methods, possible. On the other, just because a discontinuous function can be written to describe something, does not mean that that function describes an event that has occurred. In other words, "'Could be' isn't 'was'."
With our current understanding of physics the question of what was there, or what happened, "before" the big bang remains opaque to us and probably always will be because the lack of space-time (and totally different rules of physics) makes cause and effect, before and after completely meaningless in proximity to the violent singularity which instantiated our Universe.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Bass
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Re:Math Says Big Bang was Big Bounce
« Reply #2 on: 2007-09-03 09:30:54 » |
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So, in other words Hermit, we can never know what kind of pre-existing conditions/reality, were, prior to our universe.
Shame. I was really looking forward to the answer to that question 
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Hermit
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Re:Math Says Big Bang was Big Bounce
« Reply #3 on: 2007-09-03 23:48:40 » |
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We have a very good idea of what they were like 10^-38 seconds after the Big Bang and later; which allows us to make informed guesses what it was like all the way back to Planck time (10^-42 seconds post BB). Where there is a respectably closed singularity staring back at us.
Ask any cosmologist once Hawking Radiation has been disproved, or solid evidence supporting it found, and the guesses will be much better.
For now I clew to the consensus position that while there are powerful arguments, there are still no observations that Black Holes radiate. I thus assume that the Schwartzchild radius (2GM/C^2 = Rs) is probably effective at protecting us from singularity contamination at all scales except the quantum. Which doesn't so far as we know affect us directly, but may yet affect our comprehension of physics.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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