Queue on 17/6/2009 at 15:33
So I was listening to a recent interview with (
http://mkaku.org/) Dr. Michio Kaku (back in April, I think) and he said something (out of the many interesting things) that really struck me: the static, say when tuning into a television channel that's not being received, is actually radiation being received that's around us; 50% of which is the planet Jupiter; an additional 10% is the Big Bang. Cool, huh?
I was relaying this story to a guy I know, and he quickly corrected me in that the Big Bang is a
theory. When I asked him the question: How can one call it a theory,
still, knowing that a) you can here the bloody thing (even sounds like a...well...a really big bang), and b) you can see the damn thing (at least you can "see" it 300,000 years after the fact once it finally had cooled down enough), thus lending pretty tangible evidence that it happened; especially when you can hear and see it as opposed to the notion that an omniscient spook got bored one day and decided to make play things out of dust and muck, put them in motion, and dictated that they must play the whole questioning and faith game without any physical evidence (sort of like existential Hide and Seek)? His reply: Who's to say that you are hearing and seeing the Big Bang?
:grr:
gunsmoke on 17/6/2009 at 15:44
Big Bang. Overwhelming evidence it exists, and it is a fairly logical theory. It's a truth in my mind, especially since I believe that "god' is really your conscience.
henke on 17/6/2009 at 15:46
Uh... I'm not following, what do you mean by "see" and "hear" the Big Bang?
Quote Posted by Queue
as opposed to the notion that an omniscient spook got bored one day and decided to make play things out of dust and muck...
Why do you even bring this up? Disproving religion will not prove the Big Bang, you know.
Vivian on 17/6/2009 at 15:50
I think you're talking about the cosmic microwave background or whatever its called - one theory is that its left over bang, far as I know. But yeah, big bang = theory. They found that thing in the hubble deep field thats hot enough and in roughly the right place, but I didn't realise it was officially the big bang 'for deffo'. Anyone less lazy want to dig up some links?
DDL on 17/6/2009 at 16:09
Well, redshifts demonstrate that everything in the universe seems to be hurtling away from everything else (i.e. rewind time, and everything's heading toward everything else, this clearly must reach a singular point if you go far enough back), and the cosmic microwave background radiation (which I guess maybe is the TV static stuff?) sort of points toward there having been a start point that was very very hot that expanded very very fast. So yeah, the idea that everything was (near enough) a single point at one stage is pretty much solid.
But there are still a HUGE number of unanswered questions, like "why the background asymmetry? If everything was a pointsource, shouldn't matter and heat in the residual "shell" be evenly distributed? Why do clumps of stuff exist? It's not like matter expanded into space and met uneven resistance: SPACE was what was expanding: being "outside" the big bang is a nonsense concept.
And given that clumps of stuff DO exist, you can actually calculate how they formed, and it transpires that a standard model for universe expansion (i.e. work out the speed stuff is now, extrapolate back) doesn't fit: things couldn't move fast enough to get clumpy before being so distributed they were unclumpable, so you have to bring in inflation theory, where (for some reason) the universe expanded exponentially for a bit, and it all gets a bit "wait, what? WHY?"
So yeah: while it's overwhelmingly the most likely conclusion, there are a lot of assumptions and unknowns, so it's effectively still a theory, really.
demagogue on 17/6/2009 at 16:22
First, not sure what kind of response you're expecting us to give (or you should expect to give him). If someone doesn't want to play ball, you just take your ball and go home.
But to try to think of an intuitive answer for us non-specialists, if only for our own sakes, the first obvious response is because the big bang theory predicted the background radiation. I mean, the math of the theory tells you exactly what you'd find, decades before we even had the technology to find it. So when they did discover it and made the connection, it was immediately obvious what it was because it fit the prediction. It's not like they came up with the theory to explain the radiation; they had the theory and
then looked for the radiation. And then they found it: smoking gun.
Another response, an actual techy answer (that I've read about), is that the radiation essentially carries its own clock with it which dates its age, its wavelength. It was originally around visible light (380 to 750 nm wavelength) but was stretched by the stretching of space (to 1.9 mm), the cosmic red shift. So if you know how fast space is expanding, which we do from the red shift observations, you can figure out how old it is. Or vice versa, you know how old the universe is from the cosmic red shift, then you calculate how stretched out the light from the explosion would be, you get a number, and then later you find background radiation that has that number. I'm sure there's tons of footnotes to make there, but in my reading that was the basic punchline I gathered of what makes it so credible.
And then just blantantly obvious features about it. It comes from
everywhere! It's a burst of radiation that comes from freaking every point in the sky, from areas that are billions of lightyears apart. It's not a credible response to say there just happened to be billions^billions of explosions that occured at every point in space at the same time with the same temperature. There was one explosion, and yes it's "everywhere" because everywhere used to just be right there.
Edit:
Quote Posted by DDL
So yeah: while it's overwhelmingly the most likely conclusion, there are a lot of assumptions and unknowns, so it's effectively still a theory, really.
But he's not trying to get into the subtleties of different variations in the details of the theory, just the basic "smoking gun" answers to the most basic questions. And in that respect, the basic elements of the theory are solid ... it has its smoking gun evidence, and has just been reaffirmed over and over for the last few decades.
It's a "theory" in the analytic sense of a set of mathematical ideas and logical inferences to organize data ... it's not the data itself. But there's nothing particularly bad about that.
Queue on 17/6/2009 at 17:26
In the vacuum of space, will anyone hear us scream 400 years from now?
Koki on 17/6/2009 at 17:29
Kaku is a dolt.
gunsmoke on 17/6/2009 at 18:57
Quote Posted by Koki
Koki is a dolt.
;)
