Did the Big Bang happen?
April 27, 2022 at 3:55 pm
(This post was last modified: April 27, 2022 at 3:56 pm by JairCrawford.)
No, this is not a creationist or ID gotcha thread. Just gonna clear that part up straight from the get go.
My knowledge of physics is limited. I opted to take Ecology instead of Physics in high school, so, my knowledge is very limited. I’m not good at math. That’s what informed that decision. Still I find physical and cosmological topics to be super interesting and I was on a YouTube rabbit hole of videos discussing how the Big Bang theory might not be quite as set in stone as we think…
Now my first thought was, are they saying this because of religious apologetics? What’s their motivation here? Some commenters on said videos did have a clear religious bias. But others… were the opposite. I actually came across one commenter who accused the establishment of holding onto the Big Bang theory because “people are not ready to let go of the idea that the universe was ‘created’”. I thought that was very interesting, but I also doubt that commenter is a top physicist or cosmologist either. Of course neither are we (that I know of), but discussing is still fun.
So, what I’m wondering is… Is it possible that there was no Big Bang and that the universe simply always existed?
We seem to have a lot of evidence of the universe expanding. We also have evidence of cosmic background radiation from when the universe was hot. But do we have evidence that these things started from a singularity? Is that part of all of it truly known fact? How can this even happen since in order for such an event to happen it would have to be “outside” time, because it would be before the expansion of the space time fabric?
My knowledge of physics is limited. I opted to take Ecology instead of Physics in high school, so, my knowledge is very limited. I’m not good at math. That’s what informed that decision. Still I find physical and cosmological topics to be super interesting and I was on a YouTube rabbit hole of videos discussing how the Big Bang theory might not be quite as set in stone as we think…
Now my first thought was, are they saying this because of religious apologetics? What’s their motivation here? Some commenters on said videos did have a clear religious bias. But others… were the opposite. I actually came across one commenter who accused the establishment of holding onto the Big Bang theory because “people are not ready to let go of the idea that the universe was ‘created’”. I thought that was very interesting, but I also doubt that commenter is a top physicist or cosmologist either. Of course neither are we (that I know of), but discussing is still fun.
So, what I’m wondering is… Is it possible that there was no Big Bang and that the universe simply always existed?
We seem to have a lot of evidence of the universe expanding. We also have evidence of cosmic background radiation from when the universe was hot. But do we have evidence that these things started from a singularity? Is that part of all of it truly known fact? How can this even happen since in order for such an event to happen it would have to be “outside” time, because it would be before the expansion of the space time fabric?
