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Boosting this quality contribution up in the Hot Listing - declared quality by Boise_Lib.

....why didnt the big bang need a cause?

>> ^charliem:

....why didnt the big bang need a cause?

The theoretical physicist who most recently takes this question head on is Lawrence Krauss, you can see him do a lecture on this topic here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
He has also written a book about this subject since the video drew a lot of attention: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothing-Lawrence-M-Krauss/dp/145162445X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337434114&sr=1-1

Well that was a great deal of speculation, rather than facts.

>> ^Bhruic:

Well that was a great deal of speculation, rather than facts.


No.

That was facts. As far as I could make out, every one of these claims are well-documented with mountains of evidence and hard science to back them up.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:


No.
That was facts. As far as I could make out, every one of these claims are well-documented with mountains of evidence and hard science to back them up.


We have no idea how many planets there are in the galaxy. We haven't discovered enough of them to determine any sort of pattern. So claiming that we "know" there are 1.6 planets per star is indeed speculation. Similarily, suggesting that "The Big Bang did not need a cause" is speculation. We don't have nearly enough information about how it happened, or under what conditions it happened to be able to do anything more than theorize at this point.

There are other examples, but I'm too lazy to go through them all. Claiming certainty about things for which we have insufficient evidence to make such claims is poor science.

Fact 1: An estimated (the number may be higher) 1.6 planets per star in our galaxy
http://www.space.com/14200-160-billion-alien-planets-milky-galaxy.html

Fact 2: 100 billion galaxies:
We know there are that many, because we've seen them. The hubble space telescope was pointed at a tiny , random black spot in the sky (where no stars from our own galaxy was blocking the field of view) and found 10000 galaxies in that tiny spot about 1/12millionth of the sky. Extrapolating that out, we get that there are atleast 100 billion galaxies, and each of them contains hundreds of millions of stars.

Fact 3:The moon has its own gravity.
Well duh...

Fact 4: 8 Planets in our solar system.
This is of course very well documented. You can see several of them on any given night. One of them , Venus will infact pass directly in front of the sun in a few days, on the 6th of June! That also happened in 2004, but the next one wont be for another 105 years! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus

Fact 5: There were galaxies in the early universe. These have been seen by the Hubble telescope and other observatories:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution

Fact 6:The earths tilted axis causes seasons: http://www.khanacademy.org/science/cosmology-and-astronomy/v/how-earth-s-tilt-causes-seasons

More later..

Fact 7: Distance between stars so great that no stars will touch in a galaxy-galaxy collision: We can measure the distance to "nearby" stars (up to 400 light years) by triangulating using earths different position as it orbits the sun. Stars further away is measured by their brightness. We can also obviously just see how far the stars are apart from eachother. So thats how we know the density, or lack thereof, of our galaxy.

>> ^Bhruic:

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

No.
That was facts. As far as I could make out, every one of these claims are well-documented with mountains of evidence and hard science to back them up.

We have no idea how many planets there are in the galaxy. We haven't discovered enough of them to determine any sort of pattern. So claiming that we "know" there are 1.6 planets per star is indeed speculation. Similarily, suggesting that "The Big Bang did not need a cause" is speculation. We don't have nearly enough information about how it happened, or under what conditions it happened to be able to do anything more than theorize at this point.
There are other examples, but I'm too lazy to go through them all. Claiming certainty about things for which we have insufficient evidence to make such claims is poor science.


He doesnt say "we know there are 1.6 planets" he specifically says "an ESTIMATED 1.6 planets" so its an estimate based on the available evidence, which is that we've discovered 770 and counting planets, and we know that its currently very hard to detect planets, yet we find lots. From this we can extrapolate, and the 1.6 ratio is probably at the low end of an estimate.

I wont pretend to understand how the big bang didnt need a cause, but the lawrence Krauss talk I linked to explains this in some detail. Notice that he does NOT say "the big bang didnt HAVE a cause", he says it didnt NEED one. In other words, physicists have worked out ways the big bang could have happened without a cause. That doesnt nescessarily mean that it didnt actually have a cause. Its like saying "Cats dont need owners" It doesnt mean that noone owns a cat.

>> ^BicycleRepairMan:

>> ^charliem:
....why didnt the big bang need a cause?

The theoretical physicist who most recently takes this question head on is Lawrence Krauss, you can see him do a lecture on this topic here
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ImvlS8PLIo
He has also written a book about this subject since the video drew a lot of attention: http://ww
w.amazon.co.uk/Universe-Nothing-Lawrence-M-Krauss/dp/145162445X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1337434114&sr=1-1


Quantum mechanics is still a cause, even if the universe itself was born from a quantum strangeness, its still SOMETHING. This is vastly different from no cause at all.

Krauss' talk is to lamen understanding of nothing....ie apparently empty space with still yet something there (the laws of nature have particles and anti particles popping in and out trillions of times a second!!!) This is still not nothing.

Still havnt explained it well enough to qualify that as saying - there was no need for a cause. QED is still a cause.