Science - sit and listen

[wanabe]

According to big bang theory, you are correct Santini.

http://www.big-bang-theory.com/

I meant that being able to create mater from nothing would make the theory more valid.

also from that site:

Big Bang Theory - The Only Plausible Theory?
Is the standard Big Bang theory the only model consistent with these evidences? No, it's just the most popular one. Internationally renown Astrophysicist George F. R. Ellis explains: "People need to be aware that there is a range of models that could explain the observations….For instance, I can construct you a spherically symmetrical universe with Earth at its center, and you cannot disprove it based on observations….You can only exclude it on philosophical grounds. In my view there is absolutely nothing wrong in that. What I want to bring into the open is the fact that we are using philosophical criteria in choosing our models. A lot of cosmology tries to hide that."4

I still however stand by post #9

[Keith Russell]

I think I've posted a link to this article at least once in this forum already, but it seems relevant here, as well:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2 ... -exist-bef ore-the-big-bang.html?full=true

Basically, it argues that there is scientific evidence of an eternal universe.

[Santini]

Anything there that you can sum up in a short paragraph or two?

I'll try to watch the video later but prior to watching it I will say that I don't see how it's possible to have "evidence" either for or against an eternal universe.

[Belinda]

Yes, please KR, sum it up in a short paragraph if possible !I watched the video but computations too difficult for me. I am only a speculative philosopher.

[Keith Russell]

I haven't watched the video, either. I've just read the article, which begins:

"ABHAY ASHTEKAR remembers his reaction the first time he saw the universe bounce. "I was taken aback," he says. He was watching a simulation of the universe rewind towards the big bang. Mostly the universe behaved as expected, becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged. But then, instead of reaching the big bang "singularity", the universe bounced and started expanding again. What on earth was happening?

Ashtekar wanted to be sure of what he was seeing, so he asked his colleagues to sit on the result for six months before publishing it in 2006. And no wonder. The theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (LQC), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe - something even Einstein's general theory of relativity fails to do.

Einstein's relativity fails to explain the very birth of the universe
LQC has been tantalising physicists since 2003 with the idea that our universe could conceivably have emerged from the collapse of a previous universe. Now the theory is poised to make predictions we can actually test. If they are verified, the big bang will give way to a big bounce and we will finally know the quantum structure of space-time. Instead of a universe that emerged from a point of infinite density, we will have one that recycles, possibly through an eternal series of expansions and contractions, with no beginning and no end.

LQC is in fact the first tangible application of another theory called loop quantum gravity, which cunningly combines Einstein's theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. We need theories like this to work out what happens when microscopic volumes experience an extreme gravitational force, as happened near the big bang, for example. In the mid 1980s, Ashtekar rewrote the equations of general relativity in a quantum-mechanical framework. Together with theoretical physicists Lee Smolin and Carlo Rovelli, Ashtekar later used this framework to show that the fabric of space-time is woven from loops of gravitational field lines. Zoom out far enough and space appears smooth and unbroken, but a closer look reveals that space comes in indivisible chunks, or quanta, 10-35 square metres in size."