Big bang Definition and 916 Threads

Will the James Webb telescope be able to see beyond the Big Bang in principal? I realize, in reality this is not possible, but I'm curious if it will see as far back as possible, or if the telescope has limits, and eventually we will need a better telescope to truly look deep. Thanks!

Hi, I'm basically wondering why there is any residual angular momentum in the universe left over from the big bang at all. Can this be explained by the Anthropic principle and could statistics surrounding angular momentum tell us anything about the early universe? Cheers, Taylrl

Hello, I have a question: let's say I was standing in nothingness before the Big Bang, then it happened! Would I first feel the pull of the gravity of the growing universe, then see it's light, and then feel the push of the gases. Or see the light, then the pull and the push because space hadn't...

Sorry to have such a broad subject line but I was in a contimplative mood yesterday and the mind was wondering and pondering… From the publication of Sir Isaac Newton,”Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, the science world has been challenging the findings around gravity proposing...

Space and time did not exist during the big bang or before. Are there any theories as to how the continuum was generated?

I'm sure I'm making a plethora of naive assumptions in this question, but I was just thinking that the Big Bang, or the birth of our universe should logically be isotropic if space and time is assumed to be homogenous and infinite in every direction.

After the Big Bang the matter of the universe started to condense and we ended up with matter built up of neutrons, protons and electrons, are there any models that starting from the same BB give a universe made up from totally different building blocks?

Hi Guys, Just finished watching an episode of Through the Wormhole, where they discuss the Big Bang Theory. I must say I am left with a gazillion questions. Can someone please explain this to me as simply as possible? Remember, Einstein supposedly said: "If you can't explain it simply, you...

Does a FRW universe with the equation of state: $$p = -\frac{\rho c^2}{3}$$ have a singularity at the Big Bang? I was looking at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose%E2%80%93Hawking_singularity_theorems and trying to decide if such a Universe obeys the "dominant energy condition"...

I understand that Penny and Sheldon have become close while Leonard has been at sea...something strange happens between Howard and his mother...Raj is still lamenting the fact that his neurotic girlfriend is gone... The season premiere airs at 8 pm ET on CBS, and the second episode of the...

So I'm reading this book called "Origins" by Neil Tyson and in the beginning of the book he was talking about matter and antimatter and said "had this matter over antimatter asymmetry not emerged, the expanding universe would forever be composed of light and nothing he else". Now, I know I'm...

Holographic BB out of prior BH (stringy version of BH bounce) http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1487 Out of the White Hole: A Holographic Origin for the Big Bang Razieh Pourhasan, Niayesh Afshordi, Robert B. Mann (Submitted on 5 Sep 2013) While most of the singularities of General Relativity are...

I am wondering why it is that we can look into Hubble's Deep Field and see galaxies 13.7 billion light years away, and 13.7 billion years ago, yet Big Bang theory tells us that 13.7 billion years ago all matter in the universe was very close together. Shouldn't we be seeing in HST that the...

What is the evidence for Hawking's statement here: "After giving a brief historical background on relativistic physics and cosmology, Hawking discussed the idea of a repeating Big Bang. He noted that in the 1980s, he and physicist Roger Penrose proved the universe could not “bounce” when it...

Time should have not have happened in infinite gravity of the Big bang Singularity. Einsteins General relativity suggest that time could not exist in a gravity field that was infinite. Thus, my question is how did the universe emerge from the Big Bang moment , if time and space did not yet...

In a very simplified, very elementary description: Black holes (AFAIK) suck in huge quantities of light and matter and compresses matter into a singularity. The big bang (AFAIK) was the start of our universe through which huge quantities of energy and matter exploded from a singularity...

Hi all, I'd like to apologise in advance for the layman's terminology in the idea below. I'd be delighted to get any feedback/thoughts on whether CMB observations could be explained in this way. Could the universe have started as a giant black hole that reached a critical mass and collapsed...

Hello everyone: I'm a doctoral student in particle physics, confused about something pretty fundamental and need your help. From what I know, the only evidence we have from the Big Bang is the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (CMB), which showed up around 300k years after the...

What is Big Bang? WHY did it take place? What was BEFORE that?

Following a Big Bang, if the Universe expanded at the speed of light, then the Laws of Physics would have come into play long before the radius of the Universe passed it's own Schwarzschild radius. Does that mean the Universe cannot keep expanding forever ? or maybe that we exist inside a...

So I had a thought earlier regarding the moment just before the big bang, when the universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense, while still maintaining the estimated mass of 1.6 x 1060. Using the formula for gravitational force, my mass (68.2 kg) and the force holding me on Earth...

off the top of my head: - isotropic microwave radiation corresponding to 3.73K blackbody curve - hubble's law - red shift of galaxies - 3:1 ratio between hydrogen and helium, and the relative abundance of them is there any more? and also, can someone explain the hydrogen-helium ratio thing...

I understand the concept used here, but am unsure about how scientists can be so sure of the actual age of our universe. They explain it by saying it's like pressing rewind, based on the speed that galaxies are moving away from our own, but I don't understand how you can press rewind to find...

In this post, I am going to assume the truth of the standard model of cosmology, which says that the universe is expanding as time progresses from some infinitely compressed state. The paradox Has anybody heard anything like this? Any thoughts on how to "solve" it?

Dear all, I just read something in a book by Lawrence Krauss which I don't understand. I hope you can answer my question: Kraus makes the argument that if you take quantum mechanics and gravity, something is more energetically favorable than nothing. Hence if you take nothing, at some point...

Hello everybody! This is my first post! I was wondering about the fact that we have measure our universe to be flat very accurately. This means that it is also infinite and if it is infinite now it was infinite from the beginning! This means that at bb the time collapses but not the space...

Is this true? Because if it were infinite, how would it start at a small singularity? I mean it didn't start out at a finite size then grow to infinity right?

Hello, as the title states I'm looking for some help understanding some things about the Big Bang that I'm sure the people here would know. I apologise if this is posted in the wrong section -- I wasn't quite sure where to make it. It's said that the Universe, immediately after the big bang...

For my physics teacher I had to reaserch and wriet about parrallel universes. I understand the many big bng theory and the many worlds interpretation for universes. However, i don't understand how a big bang can allow an infinate universe. If there was a starting point at the universe...

I'm new to this forum, so I apologize if this has been raised/discussed before, or if this does not make much sense... I've been watching numerous debates about the Big Bang and the origins of the universe, and I can't help but think that Big Bang is not a good term for describing the early...

Ok so, I'm no astrophysicist (I'm only a High School senior, but I have a decent knowledge of Physics and I plan on studying Physics at Purdue University starting in the fall), but let me start... The Big Bang theory says that the universe began as a singularity (or close enough to one if it...

Hello, I'm sure you all have heard these before. I'm just curious what your answers are to these, thanks. (1) Quasars with very large red shifts seem to be attached to (or interacting with) galaxies with much smaller redshifts. (2) Light Element Abundances predict contradictory...

If the universe was at or near a singularity in the past, why is it not a black hole now? How can part of the universe become a black hole, and not the whole universe?

I am reading Cycles of Time by Penrose, page 71-72. Could someone explain if the universe started out with at a state of extraordinarily tiny entropy or a state of maximum entropy and what proof or theories do we have to justify this choice. I find the explanation in the book confusing...

Positing the Big Bang as a "definitive theory". What is the best way to go about countering the supposition that since the Big Bang used to be competing with other models to explain the origin of the Universe, that the Big Bang itself is like a placeholder of our era, as malleable and subject...

In this FAQ at the Baez website, the big bang singularity is contrasted with a black and white hole as a possible beginning of our universe. Is the Big Bang a black hole? http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/Relativity/BlackHoles/universe.html [I'm not interested in answering the title...

Model describes universe with no big bang, no beginning, and no end http://phys.org/news199591806.html << complete quote of linked article deleted... please don't do that! >> http://arxiv.org/pdf/1007.1750v1.pdf

It is thought that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old (soon) and that all matter came from a singularity (big bang). But even if we assume that all matter moved at the speed of light at some point, there simply wasnt enough time for the matter to spread over the area it is today in...

I have a question that is probably un answerable. At the exact moment the Big Bang was sent into Motion, it is assumed that all the mass-energy was condensed into a very powerful singularity. At that moment, the mass and gravity should have been so instance that an explosion would be...

One speaks of the Big Bang initial condition as a singularity possessing an extremely low entropy (to explain the growth of entropy throughout time to our present stage of the universe). If that singularity truly possesses infinite density, that would make perfect sense, since what would become...

You sometimes see statements regarding so-many-minutes after the big bang. Or 10^-23 seconds after the big bang. But this exactly is the event this is measuring from? How is it defined? I presume it has some definition from within the framework of general relativity.

I have a question you might have a good answer to. I hear astronomers keep saying that the universe as we know it was created by a big bang. One single point that exploded. If every known matter was flying off from the same point, how can it happen that there are stars, meteors, planets...

I'm certainly no scientist, but I've always had an interest in Physics & Astronomy, so I read a bit here and there, watch primarily science shows on TV etc...Just an interest. I was wondering though, and figured on a site called "Physics Forums" there may be a physicist or two running around...

Interesting theory for consideration: Cosmology with torsion: An alternative to cosmic inflation http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.0587Nikodem J. Poplawski (Submitted on 4 Jul 2010 (v1), last revised 2 Nov 2010 (this version, v2)) In this work, we considered the ECKS theory of gravity which is the...

Several articles I've read describing one theory of how everything could have started from nothing. State that all the energy of nothing equals zero as gravity is negative energy. One of those articles was written by Stephen Hawkings. He also stated that quantum fluctations will always exist...

With which character do you identify most closely? For me it is Leonard, while I do have some of Sheldon's traits, I am not nearly as eccentric (or asexual (Tmi)) as he is.

I get the impression from the following material that LQG models have 'resolved' the divergent big bang singularity into a finite big crunch... If so, what changed and is this a generally accepted 'new start' at the front end of the FLRW model which follows?? I may have missed some discussions...

Cosmologists say that in theory, it should be possible to see Big Bang, with a sufficiently large telescope. The idea is that when we look at distant objects with a telescope, we see them, not as they are now, but how the were when the light from them was sent. If we could look sufficiently far...

Can Stephen Hawking really claim that there was no time at all before the Big Bang when a black hole can have an outside observer on normal time? And what about other Universes in relation to our Universe? Don't they have a normal time at the time of our Big Bang?

What is the difference between the Big Bang and the exact same energy mass of the universe being released right now in our current universe in a tiny packet that resembles that initial mass/energy? I guess I'm trying to figure out what is meant with the notion 'it created time/space' when such a...