So. the Big Bang looks to not be a fact. Now what?

Little if any newer science discredits what has gone before. It refines it.

Most celestial mechanics remains Newtonian and it tells us where our satellites will be centuries from now to within inches. If we wish to calculate where our galaxy will occupy millennia hence to the same degree we may have to consult Einstein, or we may be off a whole foot, your choice.

 

Why do you think so?

 

I have a theory that matter is born from a vacuum.
Imagine water being stretchhed by a piston in a cylinder. It's unclear where the steam bubles came from. So is natter - with the expansion of space, new atoms appear, which then combine into stars and galaxies.

 

I'm guessing that you aren't really asking for a blow by blow on why the "big ban theory" is so widely accepted.

Can you cite a claim that Webb disproves that well established theory?

 

There is a claim going round that it has, but mostly it has caused questions on some of the details. Some galaxies are younger than we thought, they are more structured (interconnected) than we thought, and bigger.
The basis of the claim about the big bang theory was a misrepresentation of a scientist Kirkpatrick.
Kirkpatrick said: "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning, wondering if everything I've ever done is wrong."
But Kirkpatrick was waxing lyrical about the endless discoveries that keep being made, rather than questioning the whole basis of big bang theory.

 

Expansion does lead to new vacuum energy.

We know from E=mc^2 that there is an equivalence between mass and energy.

However, the new star creation that is shown by our telescopes is coming from clouds of hydrogen and dust drawn together by gravity.

Your piston thing is very different. Water includes dissolved gasses. There are solid principles that describe what happens when pressure changes.

 

As far as I understand Webb discovered galaxies that formed before the Big Bang

 

Well, this is where you need to cite a respected source of astrophysics or cosmology.

 

Well, the "Big Bang" was never actually how most people thought it would be. There was never some monolithic, gargantuan explosion the way the word suggests. It was actually closer to the Genesis account of "let there be light".

 

That story has been floating around for months. Where you been?

 

True. The name came from a scientist who, for whatever reason, hated the idea of a rapid expansion. So, he gave it the worst name he could think of. But, it stuck!

 

Although I am a Christian, I find much validity in this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_cosmology

Still, I don't think it explains to a conclusive point how everything BEGAN in the first place....


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Religious texts have a lot of value for some things, but they're not very good at present day observable cosmology. iow, the Hindus aren't a good source for studying the big bang.

 

--and it's wrong as all hell. NASA tries not to get into pissing contests w/ pseudoscience rants but they weighed in here. Another reasonably good source is space.com.

 

I got this far;
All matter is based on three inert gunas (qualities or tendencies):[2][3][4]

• sattva (goodness)
• rajas (passion)
• tamas (darkness). .. .. and thought nope, not for me

 

IMO the answer lies I quantum physics which we are just beginning to explore.
My instincts, and I put it no higher than that, tell me that if a photon can be in two places at once and travel random directions and distances to arrive back at the point of origin, we already have an unpredictable unstable nature in the universe.

I also still hold the view that of necessity, creation/existence is dual and cannot be singular. The moment you have "something" you have the "lack of something", the opposite. You cannot for instance have the existence of a table without the possibility of there not being a table.
But when we don't have a table we cannot imagine à table because we can only imagine what used to be there...we need à model or pattern of what isn't there and that isn't possible.

So the creation of our current universe could be the change in nature between what wasn't there into what was there before it wasn't there. A flip from one state of being to another, between the "being there has to include the possibility of not being there". Such as on a coin heads automatically includ3s tails.

And one day it might flip back in a kind of "tails" existence.

I think quantum physics will one day tell us what causes this flip in what we call reality.
Who knows...maybe the flip is caused by a quantum particle doing its rounds of the universe trying to get home, and it collided with something that upset the status quo of the previous reality.

But whatever state the universe was or is in, it has to have always been, because if it IS, it automatically has to be an "ISNT" .
You cannot have just one of them. That is fundamentally impossible.
I can only suspect that what we see is one side of the coin, the other being the state of not being, the state of which we will never see. I do not believe the two states can exist at the same time. That is fundamentally impossible...you cannot be and not be at the same time.
So I do not think we will ever know what was before the flip of what we know as reality. Because it would cause us to cease to exist and instead exist only in the other state of being. We cannot be and not be at the same time.

 

let's look at this together.

You and I seem to be at a scale of size where things like movement, mass, locality (the fact that something can be at some place) can exist. At the very small level (quantum states) and at the very large distances (millions of lightyears) these ideas are not all that useful, they become iffy.

Where we are is w/ things in places moving around and that's how we like to see 'em. Consequently when we talk about the big bang and the whole universe we need to be careful.

otoh this thread is based on pseudo-science and that becomes separate topic of why some folks go off their crazy ways. We can chat about that too if u want but it is a separate topic..

 

Yes but you didn't look at what I suggested.
My main premise is the basic and irrefutable principle that if tou have one state or being you HAVE to have the other.
You cannot have being without not being.
So if we are in a state of being it is perfectly valid to have a state of not being. And vice versa. A state of not being can always potentially become a state of being.
So if we call our state of being "actual" it is possible that it can also become "not actual" which also has the potential to become "actual" .
So what existed before the BB is ...nothing.
It can become nothing again.
The question is what makes it flip. Or us flip.
And instability is a major part of that. Without instability the flip would not happen.

 

I was thinking more about the loosely-described explanation provided in Hinduism that the universe expands and collapses regularly over the course of many billions of 'years' in an exercise not unlike what we think of as "breathing" in, and out. I know it's an esoteric concept and, as such, I shouldn't have bothered to offer it in this thread.

I don't feel like 'evangelizing' for a Hindu "religion", either; rather, I merely wanted to create an alternate awareness of what "universe" may be, per se, and thus contribute at least a different idea of what it does, and has done, even though, as a Christian, I don't subscribe to Hindu beliefs regarding the specific theistic personages known as Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, et al.

I won't repeat the mistake of trying to share any of that here, but I will observe with interest to see which one of our erudite community reveals what the REAL answer to the 'riddle-of-the-origin-of-the-universe' actually is.





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You've shared a lot that I can respect and I do thank u for ur input.

My thinking is that we can understand the riddle-of-the-origin-of-the-universe a lot better if we first take the time to consider just what it is we're talking about. What do we mean by "universe"? Is is the continuous space/time where our input/output can connect to? If we say yes then we need to pause and consider black holes that may not be part of our universe because no physical back and forth communication is possible, yet there's a gravitational field from a black hole in our universe that seems to come from the black hole.

That's just one example, lot's of other paradoxes there also.

 

Yes, humans don't know everything. Plus in this case I think it is especially difficult to develop evidence that a proposed answer is correct, or even just more likely to be correct than some other proposed answer.

 

It's true that humans still don't know what "was" before the singularity that subsequently expanded as per the big bang. Getting evidence of that process is hard to impossible given the nature of the problem.

What you are saying about there being "nothing" before that singularity is one possible guess. But, there is no actual reason to believe that there was "nothing" before that singularity. "Nothing" is a really tough concept to work with, as it applies to all matter, energy, space, time, and the total absence of any other concept that we know about. "Nothing" is a serious absolute.

It seems more likely to me that our singularity came from some confluence of energy that did exist "before" our singularity.

There are serious models that for sound reason suggest that there are other universes - actual theory, not sci-fi. In those models, there is energy "outside" our universe.

I'm not suggesting this refutes your idea of "nothing". But, I do suspect there is a long way to go with that.

 

OK.
but the concept of nothing is only the absence of something.
It could be that each of your universes are existential bubbles of "being" while there are others which are in a state of non being with the potential to be.
Imagine à table. It is there.
Remove it ans it is not there.
But it has the potential to return and be there.
We know that antimatter pops in and out of matter...the two states of being exist, but .one gives into the other.
Now imagine if the one (antimatter) flips matter to become the dominant reality.
Reality as we know it, disappears, but still has the potential to flip back.
But we locked into one reality, cannot KNOW another.
We aren't talking about rocks and we stars etc. We are talking about there not being rocks ans stars which might flip back into the reality we see.
So the universe is infinite but in two states. There and nor there. But potentially to flip the existential reality.

 

Well, if there is a true "nothing", there would be no way to detect it, and there would be no information concerning what it once "was". So, "flipping" doesn't make sense. I don't believe you have a real idea of "nothing".

Matter and antimatter can come into contact, in which case they leave behind energy only. What's weird about our universe is that it is mostly matter. It's not known why, but at least we don't have to be seriously worried about such collisions. Our universe would work the same if everything were antimatter.

 

I do indeed have an idea of "nothing" in that it always contains the idea of something. It has to. You cannot have a one sided coin, for example.
So logically where there is nothing, there is the possibility of something.
Matter and anti matter are part of the somethings of our universe. In fact it has been proven that particles of antimatter "pop up" into existence for no known reason.
In my thinking both would not exist...imagine nothing but a totally empty void/vacuum, but with the potential to become something if it flips like a coin to show its other face. Something.