The Big Bang event is the leading scientific cosmological theory when it comes to explaining the origin and evolution of life, the Universe and simply everything. While the Big Bang event is the leading candidate and the standard model, it’s not the only one. That’s fortunate, because while a fair bit of once theoretical now verified observational evidence supports that standard cosmological model, it also comes as well with a fair bit of metaphysical baggage. It’s mainly that metaphysical baggage that concerns me.
Continued from yesterday’s blog…
CORRECTIONS TO THE BIG BANG STANDARD MODEL
1) Correction number one - the Big Bang was a macro event:
I’m not out of my stark raving mind, so it’s the standard modellers that are totally nuts. Now that’s easy to say, but basic everyday logic backs me up. Let’s start with the notion that it is impossible to achieve infinite density. There is a limit, a finite limit, to how much stuff you can cram into how much space there is available (which is what density is – mass per unit volume). Once that limit is reached, any more stuff added on will not increase the density any further, just increase the volume. Keep on keeping on piling on the stuff and it won’t take very much stuff that’s value added to increase the volume beyond the realm of the quantum. Once beyond that boundary, you’re in the realm of the macro, and macro means sizes above that of a pinhead.
In this case, I suggest the ultimate size was multi-billions of pinheads worth. Regardless, macro rules the Big Bang. In our reverse-the-expanding-universe film, try imaging doing that with an expanding hot air balloon. If you reverse that inflation, do you stop when the balloon is devoid of air (the sensible thing to do), or do you continue the contraction until the balloon is smaller than the full stop at the bottom of this sentence’s question mark? Of course you don’t go beyond the point of commonsense, yet that is what the standard modellers have done. Further, they insist we swallow their lack of commonsense (not of course that that is actually suggested by them), hook, line and cosmological sinker.
2) Correction number two - The Big Bang spewed out matter/energy into existing time and space:
If the Big Bang event was a ‘spew’ event, an event which must have had both pre-existing space and time coordinates (if you spew, you do so at a particular place at a particular time), and if matter/energy can neither be created or destroyed, then of necessity the Big Bang spew (of matter/energy) happened I repeat in already existing space and time. Nothing could be more obvious.
BIG BANG EVIDENCE
If the Big Bang is so apparently wrong on so many fundamental counts, then what’s the positive evidence for it? What prompts cosmologists to advocate the standard model?
1) Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR): If you have a massive hot explosion (like the Big Bang), and all that heat energy expands and expands, then you’d expect the temperature of the area occupied by that energy to drop, the temperature ever decreasing as the volume that finite amount of energy occupies increases. As the energy expands it gets diluted and thus cools, but can never reach an absolute zero temperature. And that’s just what we find on the scale of the Universe. There’s a fine microwave energy “hiss” representing a temperature a few degrees above absolute zero that’s everywhere in the cosmos. That’s the diluted heat energy of the very hot Big Bang – well it has been a long time and is now spread throughout a lot of volume. That microwave “hiss”, called the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMBR), was predicted way before it was discovered, and one bona fide way of confirming evidence for a theory is to make predictions that are born out by experimental observations.
2) Composition of the Universe: At the theoretical but expected temperatures and pressures of the Big Bang, you might expect a certain amount of some interesting nuclear chemistry to take place and generate various substances. Particle physicists used to calculating such things predicted the relative amounts and types of stuff the Big Bang event would generate, and the theory matches observations to a high degree of accuracy – nearly all hydrogen and helium will be created by a ratio of roughly three to one. All the rest of stuff (very, very minor amounts relative to hydrogen and helium) that we know and love (like oxygen and iron and gold, etc.) was synthesised via the conversion of hydrogen and helium to those heavier elements by nuclear fusion processes – cosmic alchemy – in stars and often resultant supernovae, not in the Big Bang.
3) Expansion: If you have a large explosion, a really big bang, a violent vomit event, you’d expect the bits that received the most oomph, the bits with the most energy would be expelled the fastest; other bits with less energy would lose the race (if this were a track meet). And thus the bits of spewed stuff spreads out – fastest in front, like a marathon run. A bacterium on one of these bits would see every other bit moving away from it. Some faster bits are outpacing the bacterium inhabited bit; the bacterium occupied bit is outpacing and leaving behind the slower bits. If the bacterium assumes it is standing still, then both the faster and slower moving bits appear to be receding away from it. The bacterium observes all other bits moving away from it at speeds proportional to their distance from it. The bacterium might assume from all of this that its bit was a special bit – the centre bit – but we can see that’s not so. Any bacterium on any of the bits would conclude the same thing. They too would be wrong. Does that mean there was no centre? Of course there was. Equally incorrect would be the conclusion that there was no centre – there was, the site of the original big spew.
Substitute our local gravitationally bound cluster of galaxies as the bacterium’s bit; all other external galaxies and clusters of galaxies that have no connection to our local galactic group are the other bits, and there’s your analogy. Do we observe these other galactic bits to be moving away from us at velocities proportional to their distance from us? Yes indeed; you bet we do; spot-on!
As an alternative, let’s look at a marathon analogy. We have this long distance marathon that starts off with say 1000 runners at a specific point in time and space. The finishing line is at a 150 mile radius out and the runners can run in any direction they choose. They, for the sake of this analogy, run at 15, 12, 9, 6 or 3 miles per hour. Let’s look at the relativities from the point of view of the middle runner, the one running at 9 miles per hour. After one hour he sees the 15 mph runner six miles ahead running at a relative velocity of 6 mph; the 12 mph runner 3 miles ahead with a relative velocity of 3 mph; the 6 mph runner 3 miles behind also at a relative velocity of 3 mph; and the 3 mph runner 6 miles behind with a velocity relative to our 9 mph runner of 6 mph – that’s assuming all took off and headed in one direction.
But if the 9 mph runner looks at those running in the exact opposite direction, the anti 3 mph runner is 12 miles behind with a relative velocity between them of 12 mph; the anti 6 mph runner is 15 miles away with, you guessed it a relative velocity difference of 15 mph; the anti 9 mph runner is 18 miles distant, relative velocity 18 mph; the anti 12 mph runner is 21 miles away at 21 mph relative velocity; the anti 15 mph runner is 24 miles away and moving away at 24 mph. Translated, there is a direct correlation between how far away the various runners are, and how fast they are running, which you can graph for verification. After two hours the distances between any two runners moving at different velocities will have doubled; after three hours trebled; after four hours quadrupled, and so on, though each runner is maintaining their respective velocities. Again, the relationship holds for each runner; each runner might think themselves in the centre as all other runners appear to be moving away from that runner’s point of view, yet it’s not the case that any runner is the centre – yet there was a centre when the starting gun went off.
Now kindly note that there is nothing in that trilogy of evidence for the Big Bang that requires that event to have: 1) created time; 2) created space; and 3) to have been a quantum-sized happening.
WHERE’S THE RECIPE BOOK?
The ultimate recipe book that would support the Big Bang event’s causality with the creation of time and space; the origin of matter and energy, has yet to be written by those advocating that very point of view.
There’s no recipe to the best of my knowledge for how to cook up a batch of time!
Equally there’s no recipe for how to bake a cake of space!
How do you mix up a quark salad or a neutrino soup when there’s nothing in the pantry to start off with? Can anyone please give me the recipe?
From an equally empty supermarket you apparently can produce a kinetic energy pie. I want to see the recipe for that!
The Universe, it has been said, is the ultimate free lunch. But a lunch still needs a recipe book. When physicists, astrophysicists and cosmologists can actually write and publish such a cookbook, well then its Nobel Prizes all around. Till then, I think they should veer away from statements about the creation of time, space, matter and energy from nothing. Till then, my mantra remains “there is no such thing as a free lunch”.
To be continued...
No comments:
Post a Comment