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Let's talk about the "Big Bang" (theory)

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
So -- I've been reading a little about the sun and its composition. And the idea by (some, i guess) scientists is that the sun and stars came from a Big Bang. So the question is: how big was the material in the clump? that initiated the "Big Bang"? A secondary question is: did that clump have anything outside of that clump? There are more questions but maybe we can talk about it a little. :)
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
So -- I've been reading a little about the sun and its composition. And the idea by (some, i guess) scientists is that the sun and stars came from a Big Bang. So the question is: how big was the material in the clump? that initiated the "Big Bang"? A secondary question is: did that clump have anything outside of that clump? There are more questions but maybe we can talk about it a little. :)
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)
I suggest you read the Wiki article on the Big Bang first, and then revert with questions. There’s little use repeating in our own words stuff that is amply explained already.
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
I suggest you read the Wiki article on the Big Bang first, and then revert with questions. There’s little use repeating in our own words stuff that is amply explained already.
OK, I will read it asap. I did look at it briefly and the very first sentence takes me aback. Here it is: "The Big Bang theory describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature.[" And I know by now that nothing is really nothing, something I never understand anyway even before I believed in God, but from that first sentence in the wiki article, we go back to a proposal about the foundation. How did those elements of "high density" and temperature get there? There is one answer possible: (1) no one knows. Because even if someone believes God put those elements there, how does he know that? Therefore, and Einstein I'm not, no one knows whether the theory is true or not, or real or not. But -- that's me. And again, what's "outside" that conglomerate of substance called what composes the high density and temperature? Anything? (Again -- no one on earth can say beyond conjecture.)
 

Polymath257

Think & Care
Staff member
Premium Member
So -- I've been reading a little about the sun and its composition. And the idea by (some, i guess) scientists is that the sun and stars came from a Big Bang. So the question is: how big was the material in the clump? that initiated the "Big Bang"? A secondary question is: did that clump have anything outside of that clump? There are more questions but maybe we can talk about it a little. :)
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)


First, no, the sun did not directly come out of the Big Bang. Nor did stars directly come out of it.

The earliest stars formed millions of years after the BB and the sun didn't form until about 9 billion years after.

Second, there was no 'clump'. The hot dense material was literally everywhere.

OK, I will read it asap. I did look at it briefly and the very first sentence takes me aback. Here it is: "The Big Bang theory describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature.[" And I know by now that nothing is really nothing, something I never understand anyway even before I believed in God, but from that first sentence in the wiki article, we go back to a proposal about the foundation. How did those elements of "high density" and temperature get there? There is one answer possible: (1) no one knows.
And we have a winner!

We have a lot of speculation, but we do not know. I can list some of the bits of speculation that are based on science that we know. But previous to about a few seconds into the BB expansion, we simply do not know.

Because even if someone believes God put those elements there, how does he know that? Therefore, and Einstein I'm not, no one knows whether the theory is true or not, or real or not. But -- that's me. And again, what's "outside" that conglomerate of substance called what composes the high density and temperature? Anything? (Again -- no one on earth can say beyond conjecture.)

No, the whole universe was at high density and pressure. if it was not, the background radiation that we see *today* would not be nearly as uniform as it is.
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
First, no, the sun did not directly come out of the Big Bang. Nor did stars directly come out of it.

The earliest stars formed millions of years after the BB and the sun didn't form until about 9 billion years after.

Second, there was no 'clump'. The hot dense material was literally everywhere.


And we have a winner!

We have a lot of speculation, but we do not know. I can list some of the bits of speculation that are based on science that we know. But previous to about a few seconds into the BB expansion, we simply do not know.



No, the whole universe was at high density and pressure. if it was not, the background radiation that we see *today* would not be nearly as uniform as it is.
I mean, once again, you know this how? Just to say, how did the hot dense material get to be? any idea? or was it purportedly by some always there without beginning, just always there...I guess it got too hot and so exploded? :)
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
First, no, the sun did not directly come out of the Big Bang. Nor did stars directly come out of it.

The earliest stars formed millions of years after the BB and the sun didn't form until about 9 billion years after.

Second, there was no 'clump'. The hot dense material was literally everywhere.


And we have a winner!

We have a lot of speculation, but we do not know. I can list some of the bits of speculation that are based on science that we know. But previous to about a few seconds into the BB expansion, we simply do not know.



No, the whole universe was at high density and pressure. if it was not, the background radiation that we see *today* would not be nearly as uniform as it is.
So there was no end, you say to that hot gaseous material, is that how you and others figure it? It was just -- everywhere with no end????
??
 

gnostic

The Lost One
So -- I've been reading a little about the sun and its composition. And the idea by (some, i guess) scientists is that the sun and stars came from a Big Bang. So the question is: how big was the material in the clump? that initiated the "Big Bang"? A secondary question is: did that clump have anything outside of that clump? There are more questions but maybe we can talk about it a little. :)
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)

Like @exchemist said, you need to read up, do little research, and understand the sources you are reading from, and even then it doesn’t make you expert, so I would suggest in getting help by asking questions.

From what I understand on the subject. At the start of the Big Bang, the universe was just extremely hot and dense, and in plasma state, where matters (eg molecules, atoms, protons, neutrons, electrons, etc) as we know it, don’t exist yet, because it is too hot and dense.

As temperatures drop, the Universe becomes cool enough for elementary particles to form, eg quarks, gluons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, W bosons, Z bosons, Higgs boson, etc. These particles didn’t form at the same time, so you need to read up on the Big Bang timeline to understand when each particles form, eg Quark Epoch, Lepton Epoch, Hadron Epoch, etc.

For examples, quarks were formed during the Quark Epoch, and formed from the quark-gluon plasma. And if you know anything about atoms and particle physics, you would know that 3 quarks would make composite particles of either protons, or neutrons, and that didn’t occur until the Hadron Epoch.

Atoms didn’t form until the period of the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN), when nuclei formed without electrons, so there were elements of hydrogen, deuterium (a hydrogen atom with isotope of one neutron), helium and lithium formed their nuclei, but the universe was still hot and dense plasma, so these atoms formed without electrons.

It wasn’t until 378,000 years after the Big Bang, that the universe was cool enough for the electrons to bond with these earliest atoms (hydrogen, helium and lithium atoms) in a period known as Recombination Epoch.

This bonding between atom nucleus and electron, cause a number things to happen:
  1. Atoms became electrically neutral and stable.
  2. Photon particles would decouple from neutral atoms, leaving heat signatures as Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR).
  3. Universe don’t exist completely in plasma state, so the universe that was opaque BEFORE the Recombination Epoch, became transparent DURING the Recombination Epoch.
  4. And as transparent Universe, photons can travel freely, and not be scattered and reabsorbed by hot plasma.
  5. These photons are the oldest light detected in the still young universe (378,000 years after the BB). These photons and heat signature it left behind, are known as the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR).

All these events in the Big Bang timeline (including the Recombination Epoch), occurred before the stars and galaxies formed.

After the Recombination Epoch, the next phase was the Dark Age, because once all the atoms became neutral, photons stopped decoupling, and for unknown number of tens of million years there was no light in the cool universe.

Then the Big Bang explains another epoch known as Reionization or the Cosmic Reionization, where plasma formed again, reheating the Universe, these plasma formed in the clouds of molecular hydrogen.

When one of these clouds of molecule hydrogen reach critical mass and critical density, the cloud would reach point of gravitational collapse, igniting thermonuclear fusions (fusion better known as Stellar Nucleosynthesis), hence the formation of the earliest star.

The earliest generation of stars didn’t form like @Polymath257 said, millions of years after the Big Bang, but more like AFTER the 300-million-year after the Big Bang.

In 2016, the most oldest and most distant galaxy detected in the Observable Universe was GN-z11, with redshift (z) of 11.09, so about 13.4 billion light years away. So GN-z11 formed about 400 million years after the Big Bang.

In 2022, another more distant galaxy was discovered, called HD1, z (redshift) of 13.27, so about 324 million years after the Big Bang.

By finding the most distant galaxies in the Observable Universe, astrophysicists can pinpoint when the star’s first formed. At the moment, HD1 and GN-z11 have provided our best clues, yet.

And this where the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) come in, with it near-infrared instrument and much higher resolution than the aging Hubble Space Telescope (HST).

And as Polymath257 said, our Solar System didn’t form with the Big Bang’s earliest generation of stars, our Sun formed over 9 billion years after the Big Bang.

Our sun, is at least, a 3rd generation star.

At this time, we have no technology and no telescopes capable of detecting first generation of stars, so the best we can do, is finding distant galaxies to determine when first stars possibly formed.
 

gnostic

The Lost One
So there was no end, you say to that hot gaseous material, is that how you and others figure it? It was just -- everywhere with no end????
??
You are asking questions, but clearly you don’t understand any answer.

Instead of asking questions about the Big Bang (which you will never understand, no matter how many answers are given to you.

So how about asking questions about young stars forming closer to home, like in the Orion Nebula or the Eagle Nebula.

Young stars are being formed from the molecular cloud of mostly hydrogen.

You need to understand that more mass hydrogen, the more dense these cloud become, therefore the hotter it get. Hot enough for star core to cause and start nuclear fusion, converting hydrogen into heavier atoms, like helium. This process is known as Stellar Nucleosynthesis.

There are other types of Stellar Nucleosynthesis, that can convert to heavier atoms, like oxygen or carbon, but the star’s core have to be more massive and even denser than our sun’s core.

Nucleosynthesis is about converting a number of lighter hydrogen nuclei into heavier nucleus (eg helium, oxygen, nitrogen or carbon).

Stellar Nucleosynthesis is what heat up the outer layers of the star, including the surface (Photosphere).

To really understand star formation, you need to understand nuclear physics, especially on nuclear fusion, while is the opposite of nuclear fission.
 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
I mean, once again, you know this how?

You're asking how science works. This is a fundamental question when learning about science. After the basics, focusing on particle physics and astrophysics would be helpful. Then you could look at the evidence that we've discovered from the background radiation of the universe, red shift, evidence that the universe is expanding and what we know from the laws of physics about the origin.

Or, if you want to bridge religion and science: In the beginning God created the big bang and the laws of the universe as we know them today.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
So there was no end, you say to that hot gaseous material, is that how you and others figure it? It was just -- everywhere with no end????
??
"Everywhere" or "the end," is defined by the reality and dimensions of the universe, be it a singularity or the expanded universe we know today. Beyond its boundaries there is no existence, no "where."
I mean, once again, you know this how? Just to say, how did the hot dense material get to be? any idea? or was it purportedly by some always there without beginning, just always there...I guess it got too hot and so exploded? :)
No, more like expanded, and its origins, if any, and nature are unknown. But roll back the clock ~13.7 billion years from the universe we observe today, and an expansion from a singularity is what you get.
 
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YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
"Everywhere" or "the end," is defined by the reality and dimensions of the universe, be it a singularity or the expanded universe we know today. Beyond its boundaries there is no existence, no "where."
No, more like expanded, and its origins, if any, and nature are unknown. But roll back the clock ~13.7 billion years from the universe we observe today, and an expansion from a singularity is what you get.
:) I just wonder how you got the date like 13.7 billion years ago, plus that idea of an expansion from a singularity. That mass -- ? -- is a singularity? ok, I think I'm kind of finished with that. Questions: what caused the siingularity to explode? How big was the singularity? And I guess a question that's been asked by others, where's the "center," in other words, from what point did it start at, that is, assuming someone believes it started 'somewhere'?
 

YoursTrue

Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
You're asking how science works. This is a fundamental question when learning about science. After the basics, focusing on particle physics and astrophysics would be helpful. Then you could look at the evidence that we've discovered from the background radiation of the universe, red shift, evidence that the universe is expanding and what we know from the laws of physics about the origin.

Or, if you want to bridge religion and science: In the beginning God created the big bang and the laws of the universe as we know them today.
If persons want to make statements about what they know or think, it's helpful to know how they get to their conclusion or understanding. Not just to say something is so without going beyond that. At least that's how I am now about these things.
In reference to bridging religion and science, so far I have seen no evidence of things emerging, growing, or moving out from one cell to another forming the beginnings even after a very long time. I see mention of how long ago -- and from that I figure such as billions of years ago means that the predictor figures that's how long it would take in his estimation for things to "take place" (evolve).
For instance, I have skin. Those laws to form skin were in the sperm and egg that started my existence in my mother's womb. But the question is: where is the evidence in real-time or past time that human bodies eventually emerged from a chance meeting of elements combining to grow into the lifeforms we are aware of today?
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
:) I just wonder how you got the date like 13.7 billion years ago, plus that idea of an expansion from a singularity. That mass -- ? -- is a singularity? ok, I think I'm kind of finished with that. Questions: what caused the siingularity to explode? How big was the singularity? And I guess a question that's been asked by others, where's the "center," in other words, from what point did it start at, that is, assuming someone believes it started 'somewhere'?
We don't know what was the reason and cause for the singularity to begin to expand, but the nature of the singularity itself was unstable. An analogy is how oily rags in a trash can could burst into flames. If someone asks who caused the rags to burst into flames the answer is no-one, the nature of the oil and rags themselves self-cause the effect. There does not have to be outside causes for phenomenon.
 

blü 2

Veteran Member
Premium Member
If persons want to make statements about what they know or think, it's helpful to know how they get to their conclusion or understanding. Not just to say something is so without going beyond that. At least that's how I am now about these things.
The physical sciences proceed by empiricism ─ looking at reality (the world external to the self) and setting out to describe, and then to understand and explain, what is observed; and by induction ─ drawing general conclusions from an aggregation of specific instances (which is why you'll often encounter the idea of 'repeatable experiment' in this context). Thus no scientific conclusion is ever absolute or complete, never protected from unknown unknowns; and as our understanding of the physical universe increases, and as we encounter new problems like 'dark matter' and 'dark energy', our viewpoints and emphases and priorities will shift, and what was true yesterday may (or may not) need to be adjusted for emphasis, or glossed, or amended, or replaced altogether. As Brian Cox put it, a law of physics is a statement about physics that hasn't been falsified yet ─ they're always a work in progress.

At the same time, when you look at the achievements of science and of technology, I trust you'll realize they're altogether remarkable. Scientific method is a subset of reasoned skeptical enquiry ─ the idea that earned the Enlightenment its name ─ and no other philosophy of enquiry has had even a tiny fraction of its achievements.
In reference to bridging religion and science, so far I have seen no evidence of things emerging, growing, or moving out from one cell to another forming the beginnings even after a very long time.
On the one hand, you're correct to say that so far we haven't found a complete path leading from the ordinary chemistry of nature to the first (or first successful) self-reproducing cell, the first biochemistry. (The problem of "abiogenesis" ─ which, just to be clear, is a different thing to evolution, a starting point that the theory of evolution takes for granted, since obviously there are living things, and obviously they've evolved and continue to evolve in all kinds of ways.)

On the other hand, studies of abiogenesis are ongoing, and we now know a lot more about possibilities than we did at the end of the last century. Stay tuned ...
 

Heyo

Veteran Member
I mean, once again, you know this how?
For the epistemology it is useful to look at the history of science.
Einstein and his contemporaries considered the universe as being eternal. An observation by Edwin Hubble changed that. He found that most of the universe is moving away from us. The farther away an object is the faster it is receding.
(To learn how we know if an object is moving away from us, you'll need to read up on redshift.)
From that observation the theory was born that if things are expanding now, they must have been closer in the past. And, assuming no other force prevents it, must have been in a very tiny space long, long ago.
 

questfortruth

Well-Known Member
So -- I've been reading a little about the sun and its composition. And the idea by (some, i guess) scientists is that the sun and stars came from a Big Bang. So the question is: how big was the material in the clump? that initiated the "Big Bang"? A secondary question is: did that clump have anything outside of that clump? There are more questions but maybe we can talk about it a little. :)
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)
Big Bang is miracle. No further research is possible. God did it.
 

exchemist

Veteran Member
:) I just wonder how you got the date like 13.7 billion years ago, plus that idea of an expansion from a singularity. That mass -- ? -- is a singularity? ok, I think I'm kind of finished with that. Questions: what caused the siingularity to explode? How big was the singularity? And I guess a question that's been asked by others, where's the "center," in other words, from what point did it start at, that is, assuming someone believes it started 'somewhere'?
That age figure comes from the observations we can make today about the universe. We see a couple of things. One is that the universe is expanding. We can tell that from the "red shifts" of distant stars. If you don't know what a red shift is, let me know and I will try to explain: it's a bit of physics to do with the spectra of stars. The other is something called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR). This is more of the same sort of physics.It is consistent with there having been a hot plasma everywhere in the universe, a long time ago, when the universe would have been much smaller (according to the expansion rate we can measure). The radiation from that plasma has been bouncing around the universe ever since and has expanded along with the universe, so much that its wavelengths are now stretched out so much that they have become microwaves, of the sort that a body at a very cold temperature of 2.75K would emit. Based on the rate of expansion, and knowing what the minimum temperature is for the plasma that emitted it (3,000K), we can work out how long ago it would have been emitted and what size the universe would have been at that time. We get a figure of about 13.4bn years ago.

If we then extrapolate the expansion back further we get a "singularity" about 380,000 years before that, i.e. the universe seems likely to have expanded from a single point, about 13.8bn years ago. It is worth stressing that our observations (of expansion rate and CMBR) give us a model, allowing extrapolations to be made, but we have no observations from earlier epochs to help us validate what may have happened before then. All we can do is apply what we know of the particle physics of plasmas etc. Indeed, if we go back to the first milliseconds of supposed expansion, all our models cease to work, so we can't say what happened right back at the start. So the answer to your further question about the start has to be: "We don't know".

But there is a further interesting thing. If we apply our particle physics, we can predict in what ratios various primordial elements ought to have been created, if they condensed from the plasma/radiation "soup" that the CMBR suggests. And those are fairly close to the ratios we can observe, analysing the spectra of stars and so on. So it fits, more or less (there's a bit of a problem with lithium).

As you are a religious person, you might be interested to know that the discovery of the expansion of the universe, and the idea it expanded from a "primaeval atom", was made by a Belgian Catholic priest, Fr. Georges Lemaître S J.;)
 

HonestJoe

Well-Known Member
(Not that anyone knows...but we can try to see maybe what scientists are saying...well, some of them anyway.)
I think the fundamental problem here is that this is a highly complex and technical set of questions that most of us simply aren't in a position to fully understand. The general concepts and principles of things like The Big Bang can be explained in layman's terms but once you get in to the kind of detailed questions you're asking, you'd need a fundamental understanding of the underlying physics to grasp the answers. So, unless you're willing (and able) to invest the time and effort in getting that fundamental understanding, even those people who do understand all the answers won't be able to explain them in a way we could fully understand.

There are loads of much more immediate and relevant scientific concepts most of us can't fully understand - how airplanes fly, how nuclear power works, what actually causes inflation, how do vaccines work etc. No one person can get a full understanding of all of those things so we all have to accept that we rely on the experts in any given field once we move beyond the basic concepts. There are probably areas in which you're better educated or experienced in and therefore have a fuller understanding of that the average person, but you'd still struggle to explain the specific details to a random person if they didn't already grasp the basics.

As they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing (and I assume "they" know what they're talking about ;) ).
 
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