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----------------------- 2242 - BIG BANG - How can we understand it?
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- To understand the Big Bang you need to understand beyond Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. General relativity is the most revolutionary scientific advance of the 20th century.
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- It has been 82 years since Einstein put forth his theory. It’s been tested in scores of experiments and has always passed with flying colors and is now firmly established as our premier guide to understanding how gravity operates. Moreover, it is part of the foundation of Big Bang cosmology. And it is because of general relativity that we know the Big Bang was nothing like an explosion of space, time, matter, and energy
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- Albert Einstein developed general relativity in order to make his theory of special relativity include the effects of gravity. It is a better way than Sir Isaac Newton’s understanding how gravity works. One of these realms that separates the two theories was the Black Hole. The other was the shape and evolution of the universe itself.
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- Big Bang cosmology says that the universe came into existence between 10 to 20 billion years ago, and that from a hot dense state has been expanding and cooling ever since. Big Bang cosmology is based on Relativity being accurate over an enormous range of scales in time and space. General relativity has made these specific predictions:
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- 1…The entire orbit of Mercury rotates because of the curved geometry of space near the sun. The amount of ‘perihelion shift’ each century was well known at the time Einstein provided a complete explanation for it in 1915.
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- 2…Light at every frequency can be bent in exactly the same way by gravity. This was confirmed in the 1919 Solar Eclipse for optical light using stars near the Sun’s limb, and in 1969-1975 using radio emissions from star-like quasars also seen near the limb of the Sun. The deflection of the light was exactly as predicted.
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- 3…Clocks run slower in strong gravitational fields. This was confirmed using high-precession hydrogen maser clocks flown on jet planes and on satellites.
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- 4…Gravitational mass and inertial mass are identical. This prediction has been confirmed to within 1 part in a trillion of the exact equality required by General Relativity.
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- 5…Black holes exist. Although these objects have been suspected to exist since they were first introduced to astronomers in the early 1970’s, it is only in 1992 that a critical acceptance threshold was crossed in the astronomical community. It was when the Hubble Space Telescope observations revealed monstrous, billion-sun black holes in the cores of nearby galaxies.
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- 6…Gravity has its own form of radiation which can carry energy. In 1975 astronomers discovered two pulsars orbiting each other, and through careful monitoring of their precise pulses during the next 20 years, confirmed that the orbiting system is loosing energy at a rate within 1 percent of the prediction by General Relativity based on the emission of gravitational radiation.
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- 7…A new force exists called ‘gravito-magnetism’. Just as electric and magnetic fields are linked together a spinning body produces a magnetism-like force called “gravitomagnetism“. Relativity predicts that rotating bodies not only bend space and time, but also make empty space spin.
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- 8…Space can stretch during the expansion of the universe. This was confirmed by Edwin Hubble’s detection of the recession of the galaxies in 1929. More recently in 1993 astronomers have confirmed that the angular sizes of distant radio sources shrink to a minimum then increase at greater distances exactly as expected for a dilating space. This is not predicted by any other cosmological model that does not also include the dilation of space as a real, physical phenomenon.
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- We have now boxed ourselves into a corner. If we accept the successes of General Relativity. It is the theory which satisfies all known tests to date.
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- The Big Bang is:
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- 1) A pre-existing sky or space into which the fragments from the explosion are injected;
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- 2) A pre-existing time we can use to mark when the explosion happened;
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- 3) Individual projectiles moving through space from a common center;
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- 4) A definite moment when the explosion occurred;
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- 5) Something started the Big Bang.
- All of these elements to our visualization of the Big Bang are completely false according to Relativity.
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- Preexisting Space? There wasn’t any! The mathematics of Relativity state that 3-dimensional space was created at the Big Bang itself, at ‘Time Zero’. It was a ‘singular’ event in which the separations between all particles everywhere, vanished. This is just another way of saying that our familiar 3-dimensional space vanished.
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- Theorists studying the “Theory of Everything” have modified this statement somewhat. During its earliest moments, the universe may have existed in a nearly incomprehensible state which may have had more than 4 dimensions, or perhaps none at all.
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- Relativity’s mathematics treats both space and time together as one object called ‘space-time’ which is indivisible. At Time Zero plus a moment, you had a well defined quantity called time. At Time Zero minus a moment, this same quantity changed its character in the mathematics and became ‘imaginary’. In a famous quote by Einstein, “…time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live”.
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- Space is not where individual objects are moving out from a common center. Curved space distorts the paths of particles, sometimes in very dramatic ways. To explain this many have used the expanding balloon as an analogy to the expanding universe.
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- As seen from any one spot on the balloon’s surface, all other spots rush away from it as the balloon is inflated. There is no one center to the expansion on the surface of the balloon that is singled out as the center of the Big Bang.
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- This is very different than the fireworks display which does have a common center to the expanding cloud of cinders. The balloon analogy, however, is not perfect, because as we watch the balloon, our vantage point is still within a preexisting larger arena that Relativity says never existed for the real universe.
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- The center of the Big Bang was not a point in space, but a point in time! It is a center, not in the fabric of the balloon, but outside it along the 4th dimension…time. We cannot see this point anywhere we look inside the space of our universe out towards the distant galaxies.
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- We can’t see time! We can only see it as we look back in time at the ancient images we get from the most distant objects we can observe. We see a greatly changed, early history of the universe in these images but no unique center to them in space.
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- What if I told you that you could decrease the distance from your house and the Washington Monument by ‘standing still’ and just letting space contract the distance away? Relativity predicts exactly this phenomenon, and the universe seems to be the only arena we know today in which it naturally occurs.
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- Like spots glued to the surface of the balloon at eternally fixed latitude and longitude points, the galaxies remain where they are while space dilates between them with the passage of time. There is no reason at all we should find this kind of motion to be intuitive.
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- If space is stretching like this, where do the brand new millions of cubic light years come from popping out from one moment to the next? The answer in Relativity is that they have always been there. To see how this could happen.
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- Space is not ‘nothing’ according to Einstein, it is merely another name for the gravitational field of the universe. He once said, “Space-time does not claim existence on its own but only as a structural quality of the gravitational field. If you could experimentally turn-off gravity with a switch, space-time would vanish as well“.
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- The gravitational field at one instant is wedded to itself in the next instant by the incessant quantum churnings of the myriad of individual particles that make up the gravitational field itself.
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- The gravitational field is knit together, quantum by quantum, from perhaps even more elemental building blocks, and it is perhaps here that we will find the ultimate origin for the expansion of the universe and the magical stretching of space. We hope the much anticipated Theory of Everything will come up with this explanation.
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- Our universe emerged from an infinite density, zero-space ‘Singularity’ at Time Zero. But physicists now feel very strongly that this instant was smeared out by any number of quantum mechanical effects, so that we can never speak of a time before about 10^-43 seconds after the Big Bang. That is certainly very short period of time.
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- “There is no ‘There’ there”, at 10^-43 seconds Before the Big Bang, “There was no ‘When’ there” either. The moment dissolves away into some weird quantum fog. Time may actually become bent into a new dimension of space and no longer even definable in this state. Ordinary Relativity is unable to describe this condition and only some future theory combing Relativity and quantum mechanics , the Theory of Everything, will be able to tell us more.
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- What started the Big Bang? Relativity can tell us nothing about the stages leading up to the Big Bang Time itself may not have existed. This remains the essential mystery of the Big Bang which seems to transcend every mathematical description we can create to describe it.
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- All of the logical frameworks we know about are based on chains of events or states. All of our experiences of such chains in the physical world have been ordered in time. Even when the mathematics and the theory tell us ‘What happened before the Big Bang to start it?’ is not logical.
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- We are haunted by the circumstances far removed from the greater physical world we are now exploring. No wonder it all seems so alien and complex.
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- (More reviews on this subject are available if you are interested)
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- 2146 - Astronomy is seeing history. Lists 14 more reviews about the Big Bang.
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- 1242 - How does spacetime change at the micro level? The uncertainty fluctuations remain wavy at the micro level and inversely proportional to the time resolutions of our measurements. The more we learn we find the less we know.
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- 1241 - How can space and time be related?
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- 1258 - How much space is in our Solar System?
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- 814 - Fast speed and short time? What are the limits?
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- 2074 - Much to do about nothing.
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- 1006 - Is time slowing down?
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- 854 - Time, GPS, and entropy?
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- 842 - Pressed for time?
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- 784 - Time is what God created to keep everything from happening all at once.
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- 392 - Time dilation using the Pythagorean Theorem.
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- January 22, 2019
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-------------------------- Tuesday, January 22, 2019 --------------------------
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