(October 31, 2017 at 8:48 am)Rhondazvous Wrote: I wanted to get a picture of what happened during the big bang, so I was reading the 5th chapter of Isaac Asimov's nonfiction book How Did We Find Out About the Universe.
He starts with something called the Cosmic Egg and goes on to say that this egg exploded and a Russian American physicist dubbed the explosion big bang.
This is astronomically opposed to what I've learned so far from the Knochel-Hawking school of cosmology.
This book was written in 1983. So at what point did scientists postulate that the beg bang was not an explosion, and what led them to this postulation?
Cosmic egg is just a poetic way of referring to the unknown antecedent to our era in the history of the universe.
Here our era is the era when our physics can provide a meaningfully descriptive and predictive model of the forces, particles and distribution of energies in the universe. The closer to the beginning of that era, the more extreme the temperature and energy density. Hence looking ever further back is like watching an explosion played back in reverse. We’ve known this since the early 1960s. Eventually temperature and density becomes so high while distances become so short different parts of physics can no longer agree about what must have been happening. Here physics breaks down. What happened before that was and is as yet unknown.
That mysterious prior state was called by some the cosmic egg, because it is the egg from which our universe hatch’s.
E which through the process of the Big Bang into
