Who are you? Philosophy:

someon
Wed, 15 Jul 2009 22:50:30 +0000

read what I said. There is not neccessarily some “chain” of causation. blah blah blah. Refer to previous posts. Anybody who knows some physics will tell you the same thing that I have. You can have perfectly consistent universes (for example, using the “no boundary” condition of stephen hawking) which do not require a beginning nor an end.

Space does not have to expand into anything. THe commonly used analogy is using a balloon with dots on it. As you blow the balloon, the “space” expands, and observers who live on the surface of the balloon would observe everything moving away from them. THis is essentially a 2-D analogue of what is going on in our universe. We see everything moving away from us in a manner consistent with space itself expanding. Again, when you are thinking of space expanding into something, that does not make any sense because that requires some sort of space outside of space.

The big bang did not arise “from” the primoridial elements; those elements arose from the big bang, and were not actually the first particles to arise either.

Sure conservation of mass and energy may be wrong- it is an empirical observation after all. But there is no reason to posit some more complicated law to explain why mass and energy seem conserved. In fact, conservation of mass and energy arises from certain symmetries in the universe. To give up that law is to also give up these symmetries (for example, the translational and rotational symmetries of physical law). Because those symmetries are so fundamentally true intuitively, it seems quite unlikely that conservation is not true, unless these symmetries break down in some situation.

There is no reason that things cannot exist forever. Anyway, the big bang was time 0. The origin. THe beginning. No, there does not “need” to have been something before that.And then: ta-da! Conservation is not violated because there is no period of time in which there there was nothing.

Also: source of discrediting of standard big bang model? As far as I know, no way of getting empirical evidence for “cyclic universes” has been thought of.