Why the Big Bang Definitely Happened | Space Time | PBS Digital Studios
This is just a follow up that touches on parts of the theory not fully understood.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...everything shifts because of how we're looking at it, or what we are looking at. As soon as people could SEE moons orbiting Jupiter (through Galileo's telescope), our concept of "what's out there" radically changed, from viewing planets as something "other"--something different from earth--to viewing earth as a planet, and not unique, but rather a planet among planets.
Big, BIG change of perspective.
When I hear scientists--like this one--tell us with a straight face that everything that is--this truly immense "visible universe," full of hundreds of thousands of spectacular galaxies, each with hundreds of thousands of suns and zillions of planets, and a lot else besides that (immense gas clouds; "dark matter"; black holes)--was once compressed to the size of a grain of sand, I really, really get that "Galileo moment" feeling, that we are looking at this the wrong way, or looking at the wrong thing.
That "time = zero," pre-Big Bang point at which, according to Big Bang theory, that teensy weensy "grain of sand" that contained the entire "visible universe"...exploded?...may have no more reality than the Lord God Jupiter as a human-like deity in the sky. Who knows why humans thought up gods in the sky and then believed in them with all their hearts? There are a lot of theories about that.
Is this "time = zero" point not similarly fanciful--and just an artifact of how much we know now? And where would this "time = zero" point be located? That is a very big problem at least with describing the "Big Bang" as a bang. Where is the center of this expansion (or explosion)? There is no "center," from what I've read. It's just all expanding...but from what? Then there's the "balloon" thing. It's all expanding as if everything exists on the surface of a balloon. But even a balloon has a center. No center.
I just shake my head. It's as if the entire midsection of a complex jigsaw puzzle is missing--the part that contains the main image. Of course, mathematicians and physicists surely have a very hard time coming up with metaphors that adequately describe what they are really thinking and discovering. And I have near zero literacy in their fields. I have to depend on what they say, in words, or illustrate with diagrams. But I've read extensively in the popular literature and what is VERY clear from that literature, is that cosmology (mathematics, physics and astronomy) is currently in tremendous flux--very like the Renaissance era, during which Galileo lived (and got banned for his ideas), but which led to the Enlightenment, in the following century, and a tremendous expansion of learning in mathematics, physics and astronomy (cosmology), among other things.
Galileo had unblinded human beings when they looked at the sky. We now began to look for our commonality with other planets, and the commonality of suns, and for the physical laws that governed all, rather than looking at sky-gods and what the sky-gods portended for us. This change in what we perceived ourselves to be looking at led to revolutionary discoveries, such as Hubble's discovery of other galaxies and of the accelerating expansion of galaxies away from each other.
Hubble was similar to Galileo in unblinding human beings as to what we were looking at. The "fuzzy nebulas" in the sky weren't clouds--they were entire other galaxies full of stars similar to our galaxy, which we had previously thought was all there was to the universe!
What we perceive ourselves to be looking at, and how we are looking at it, may be relevant again, in this era, which has seen the most fantastic expansion of knowledge that has ever occurred. Our brains are just about exploding with knowledge, there is so much of it. The utterly amazing telescopes that we now have roaming the heavens are sending back so many images that astronomers can't keep up. The detection of a "gravitational wave"--which many thought would be impossible--has now occurred. And the microcosmic end of the things (the very small) is also yielding a spectacular amount a new knowledge--the decoding of our genes and the genes of every other living thing (that we know of), the detection of the Higgs-Boson particle (the binding particle that holds everything together)--and this not to mention the discovery of thousands of planets around other suns, the discovery of water in various forms all over our solar system, and more, and more.
The Age of Data. Volumes and volumes and volumes of data. Clouds of data. Universes of data. And so much of it sumptuous data, deletable data, data scientists of other eras would have died to obtain, that we really can't comprehend what we are in the middle of.
And I guess that's my point: We can't comprehend what we are in the middle of. This may be why some of us have reverted to "know-nothingism"--for instance, those who are into global warming denial (not the ones who profit from fossil fuels, but just ordinary people). Some of us just can't handle it. We never had to worry about any place but our home, our town, at most our region or country. Now we have to worry about every damned place on earth and all the oceans and everything under the oceans--the coral reefs, the fish! It's too much for some of us! All this new data coming in, from all over, pointing to catastrophe, by-passes rational thought and turns some of us back into amoeba, who just want to live and NOT KNOW.
What are cosmologists missing? I sometimes think it is the human brain itself--whose neural networks so resemble the stringy clustering of shiny matter in the Universe around great bubbles of darkness--that they are not considering, when they posit "T = zero." Was it ever true that "T = zero"? How can we possibly know? We can't know. It's an absurdity. Our brains are now up against absurdity. Is the Universe laughing at us? The joke's on us! "T = zero"!
