What’s your take on the Big Bang?
I readily admit I’m about as far removed from being an astronomical expert as you can get. What I am sure about is the explanation for creation of the Universe is a no brainer when comparing the biblical and Big Bang theories for its origin. The Big Bang wins hands down.
That being said, it still boggles my mind when trying to comprehend a bang that powerful.
Recently, the European space telescope Euclid allegedly revealed a group shot of 1,000 galaxies in a cluster 240 million light years away, against a backdrop of more than 100,000 galaxies billions of light years away.
The single Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain 100 – 400 billion stars and between 800 billion and 3 trillion planets.
A single light year is 5.8 trillion miles away.
Although easy to disregard the biblical explanation, I also can’t fathom a bang continuing to spew countless massive solid objects that far away with no end in sight. What is the source of all that subsequent mass? Does additional mass continue to materialize out of thin air? Was the mass already there before the force of the bang reached it?
Am I misconstruing what science claims? Is there something more than the big bang to explain the ever-expanding Universe? Any scientists out there who can explain it in layman’s terms?
R. Hult
3
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5 comments
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Keep in mind that there were no ears to hear the bang. A singularity orgasm that started it all. Our universe is alive!
DenoPenno
Level 9
Nov 15, 2023
1
That's my take on the big bang, a cosmic orgasm, but occurring from opposing forces colliding, so to speak. Likely not the only act of creation going on in the cosmos, but it's our source of creation as we know it.
This question fascinates me as well, and not being very well learned in astronomy and astrophysics, all I can do is blend what I know into a creative story, like creation myth, that explains what we know about the cosmos and our place in it.
In 1992, I read a book called "Science as Salvation" by Mary Midgely. One quote I copied into my notebook was this:
"Since the Big Bang became widely accepted, the urge to find some sort of purposive story for the cosmos has become almost irresistible."
It was actually before I read that book that I had already felt that urge to write something to help myself make sense of things, just using the basic knowledge that I had and a bit of metaphorical imagery. Mostly I was writing a story to help my kids understand a different creation idea than what is presented in the bible. That was about 35 years ago, and I don't know if I'll ever get back to finishing the book or seriously think again about getting it published. I'd need to run my ideas by someone who knows more than me about the cosmos!
I have my own thoughts about expansion, collapse, opposites striving for balance, and other thoughts, though they are perhaps more symbolic and poetic rather than scientific.
Lots of things puzzle me ... "In the beginning" I like to ask, the beginning of what? Time? How can time have a beginning. Isn't it something that has always been and always will be? Or did time just begin one day at 12:01am a gazbillion years ago?
You're asking a bigger question than can likely be answered in a short post, but I'd love to hear other's thoughts on the subject, who might be able to be more concise than me!
Julie808
Level 8
Nov 15, 2023
1
imagine all of the black holes in the universe, all of the stars, nebulae, and space gas compressed into the smallest singularity possible, that singularity becomes unstable and releases all its energy and subatomic particles and superlight speed, over eons, the particles start to form atoms, and later molecules. The heat is still enough to promote nuclear fusion creating Helium from the simple Hydrogen. The big solid objects that are traveling at those huge speeds are the results of billions of years of fusion and fission, gravity, Vader Whal forces still maintaining their relative speeds from the initial explosion. There were no big objects ejected from the big bang.
glennlab
Level 10
Nov 14, 2023
4
Do you mean van der Waals forces, if not I apologise and would like to know what is Vader Whal Forces as I never heard of this phenomenon
Black Holes. Maybe that's the answer. Interesting.
@LenHazell53 late night typing
over my head too, but it must have been real loud !!!!
Switchcraft
Level 7
Nov 14, 2023
1
@hankster and @Switchcraft and @raymondahult
No, it would have been completely silent as sound requires a medium in which to travel in the form of vibrations, since there was no space prior to the Big bang and as yet no atmosphere immediately after it the expansion (as it should be correctly called) had no medium for sound.
Big bang was a misnomer and was originally coined by the Astronomer and astrophysicist Fred Hoyle as a mockery of the whole expanding contracting universe theory. Hoyle who was an incorrigible publicity seeker and self publicist made his career out of being loudly and rudely wrong about almost every thing both within and outside of his own scientific field.
Hoyle's other great claim to fame was his stating that believing in evolution was the same as believing that a hurricane in a junk yard could spontaneously assemble a Jumbo Jet
(Yes he was a creationist and is still quoted widely on Answers in Genesis.)
His reputation was so bad that the one time he was considered for a Nobel prize in 1983, he was deliberately snubbed and the prize went instead to his mentor Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar and his pupil Willy Fowler, because it was genuinely believed that attaching the good name of the Nobel prize to such an incompetent as Hoyle would forever sully the award and wreck its reputation for serious academia.
@LenHazell53 Silent Explosion. Hard to imagine, but you make sense.
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