The Big Bang Theory states there is no single point at which the universe was created. Since at the beginning of space and time there were heavily oscillating waves. The waves then began to expand after the Big Bang. That is why the theory states that since these waves expanded, the oscillation expands, therefore one heavily oscillatiing spatial point, now becomes expanding waves of space. Hense, the universe was created everywhere. At every point on that wave.

The problem is, if you were to circle the point of the oscillation, that is a specific point. As the waves grow, they outgrow the original boundary of the oscillation. But wouldn't that original point of heavy oscillation be some sort of relative point?

That's not how I interperet the meaning of "there is no center to the universe."
If the skin of a baloon were used to represent all spatial dimensions, i.e. the model is missing 2 dimensions, then where is the center? In the nothing of the baloon, not even in the universe...
The big bang happened everywhere at once.

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

TravisM wrote
The big bang happened everywhere at once.

Cyrek reply
That everywhere was nothing so I guess you are right that that nothing could be everywhere at once.

By the way, why do you not use the 'raisin bread analogy' which is 3 dimentional rather than the 2 dimentional balloon?

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aka Michael Cyrek

Around 14-15 billion years ago, the entirety of our universe was compressed into the confines of an atomic nucleus. This singularity is the moment before creation when space and time did not exist.

Quantum theory suggests that moments after the explosion at 10 to the minus 43 second, the four forces of nature; strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic and gravity were combined as a single "super force".
During this creation and annihilation of particles the universe was undergoing a rate of expansion many times the speed of light. Known as the inflationary period, the universe in less than one thousandth of a second doubled in size at least one hundred times, from an atomic nucleus to 1035 meters in width.

So, what do you mean by no single poînt? Agree with cyrek1.

How this compressed "material" came into existence in the first place?

This singularity...
is the moment before the transformation of a pre existing "something"

Do you mean than there was not even space for -something -compressed into the confines of an atomic nucleus?

cyrek:
Travis didn't use the rasin bread analogy because it's really difficult to demonstrate the lack of centre in something which clearly has a centre. He's obviously chosen to assume that the universe has n>4 dimensions. That's not an assumption I personally feel comfortable which at this point in my education, but he's using the proper analogy to demonstrate it.

Star Pilot:
Well, if you assume all of the "something" started out as energy, which doesn't take up volume, per se, then this compression is trivial.

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"I'm making wheatloaf. It's like meatloaf, only with wheat"
"Isn't that just...bread?"

I don't think so. I think the theory suggests that everything in the universe was at a single point when the universe was created. So everything WAS at the "center", and still is.
I'm... not following you here.

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

That's not really a question you can answer. Not now anyway. It is also essentially irrelevant to the mechanism that drove it to "bang" anyway. We know it was there because we are here, but we don't have to know why it was there to know what happened to it afterwards. That doesn't mean the "why" isn't imporant, it's just not important to the discussion of what happened after.

Thanks UT. I prefer to think of gravity as a manifestation of a physical fourth dimension. It works to explain things in my mind easiest. And, exactly what I was thinking, a rasin bread has an edge, in the pan, in your oven. There's already volume in that bread analogy.
You have to imagine that NOTHING exists except the balloon (..be the balloon ) Air, in the balloon analogy, is nothing, not even volume for things to exist in, and really the spherical shape is just to help with the expansion, it could be any shape.
Now, the 3 dimensional skin of this balloon represents a cross-section of a 4th dimensional sphere (balloons aren't spherical either, but let's try not to talk about the little knotted part... imagine it as spherical.)
For the experiment's sake, let's say we're suppressing the Z dimension, so we have only X and Y across the surface of the balloon, warped through the 'W' dimension, i.e.: positive curvature. A slight depression in the W dimension (such as we would get if we put a penny on the surface of the balloon) could represent the type of distortion gravity might make.
This balloon universe, upon creation, was just a fleck of rubber. This rubber fleck was/is all of the material/energy that will ever be in this universe. As it expanded, it carried energy along for the ride. As energy levels were spread over more volume a threshold was crossed and matter condensed out of this energy into this space...
That our universe appears to have expanded from more of a cube is another story...
[edit to add]
The important part, duh Trav... #-o
The important part remains, no point in space now is any closer to the 'center' than any other point. Every point was the center at one time and still is. Expansion is a term used irresposibly, it's more like, the fabrication of volume, that has everyone's perception twisted on this issue...

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Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

Bigga Wha?

There is another theoretical problem with a sudden expansion of space within nanoseconds from the 'day before there was a yesterday', which surprisingly was not noticed by Lemaitre and company: Since we measure all time from ourselves backwards as we look into space, as distant cosmic light reaches us, means we are on the edge of the Big Bang; then everywhere we look we are looking into its origin, so every point on the 360' sphere at the farthest distance is [towards]* its center. But this creates an irreconcilable paradox: How can we be on the edge of the Big Bang and at the center of the universe, since all points in the universe are its center, at the same time? Anyone, anyone...?

I like this pix of Hoyle's bad boy smirk, he did not believe in BBT either.
Flash, Big Bang, Wallop! What a picture!
:^o

*(in response to later post)

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

The words "irreconcilable paradox" have been used since the dawn of science as the precursory statement to all mannor of pseudoscience claims. It's born from the desire to want a nice.. neat.. intuitive explaination for all things. Well I'm sorry but somtimes you just have to wrap your brain around a problem and bear the headaches that come as a consiquence.

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"Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time... and your government when it deserves it." - Mark Twain

Not a 'pseudscience' claim, but a question of logic. Since when is science exempt from reason? Where is it written that absurd notions are science, and that to question aburdities tosses the question into the trash bin of pseudoscience? Are we back to the 'what is science' question? Why bother to use our minds, when we can invent fantasies and cloak ourselves in wrapping our brains around the irrational?

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

That first second was a whopper. Inflation theories are the place to be to deal with the Big Bang problems.


According to mainstream, light could not radiate freely until about 380,000 years ATB. The universe was probably much larger than this in terms of light years at this point in time (recombination). There is no reason to claim we are seeing a "center".

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

I know what Lunatik's is saying. In the HUDF (not to bring it up for debate) , we were looking back pretty close to the 'edge of space.' When we do, if we do, see that nothing that would represent the time before stars, then we would be pushing to look beyond that to the surface of last scattering and further still... At some angular resolution at some distance we would see the 'edge' wich would be the "center" back then...
And Lunatik, on paper for fun, start with a point and some where next to it a circle of unit size 1.
If you try to pick an arbitrary location on the point (which represents the infant universe), you're pretty much constrained to it's coordinates, it's edge is the center.
On the circle (which represents the universe after some growth) you could pick any point along its circumference, but only where you drew the circle. That 2D line that arcs around, that is the entire universe. Any point you pick on that circle was the point you drew earlier.
If, of course, that point expanded into the circle on your page... #-o I wish i had graphics on here...
Trav

__________________

Feynman
>~~~~<
Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.

Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt.

Try this...

Pick out a random hydrogen atom in your body. Mentally, go back in time to around 380,000 yrs. ATB and find that atom. Draw a circle around this point about 13.2 billion lyrs. in radius. Now draw a huge circle with a random center where your first circle is enclosed within the larger.

The smaller circle perimeter, with your hydrogen atom center, represents the region we are now observing we call the CMB. It has taken this light this long to reach us and from all directions (as the circle is really a sphere).

The center of the larger circle is erroneous as there is no center but it helps establish the bigger picture, I think.

Is this a fair representation?

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

Yeah, I think you and TravisM pretty much see how it is. What concerns me most is that there is no way to see the universe in any direction within these spheres of space that is outside of us being on the tail end. What I mean is that we can only see into the past, but not sidelaterally into the present. This means we are forever stuck looking backwards in time as we gaze into space, which puts us of necessity on the tail end, or the edge, of the universe's expansion.

Now, this does not have to be this way, because if there was no BB and space is not expanding, then we are merely looking at the universe as it is, except that everything we see is old, since time is defined by lightspeed c, thus it takes time for c to get to us. If I took an arc of space, say 20', in any direction, along that expanding cone of space I would be looking back through time until I got back to one of two things: 1. either the light fades out so it is no longer visible, though the 20' arc now covers a very wide area, whether or not BB happened; or 2. there are no more stars and galaxies because they had not yet come into existence, since 380,000 ATB, so that BB did happen. For now, we cannot answer with certainty which it is, though I have my issues with the latter.

The issue is primarily a philosophical one, that the 'tail end' is also the 'center' of the universe, at the same time, since all points in the universe are considered to be its center. This is the paradox. And here is the difficulty with that: within the universe we see, we cannot possibly know which 20' arc area covering the limit of visibility, the outer area of what we see, is the location where the BB happened. Did it happen on the north side, or the south? Are the galaxies seen in one 20' arc the same as the galaxies seen in the opposite 180' direction? Now for the killer paradox: If we proceed with this reasoning further, so that per BB we are actually 'seeing' the very beginning of the universe's creation, though it is now dark, which 20' arc is that point of space where it all began? Is it north of south, or...? Not easy, but it cannot be 'all of the above'!

Now you see why I refuse to wrap myself in a cloak of counterintuitiveness to accept what appears to be a BB. [-( Perhaps it is not what it appears to be, so that BB is not science, but a strange kind of 'pseudoscience' instead?

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

"Never say never". We don't fully understand spacetime yet. Particle entanglement seems to defy time and space, for instance.


In the case of "1.", it may make a difference whether or not BB happened. Since you can only see light coming your way, and if the universe were ageless and infinite, you should see light everywhere if the universe had somewhat even distribution of galaxies. You already know about this paradox. [This reminds me of...."if we had some ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had some eggs". ]

In case "2.", you will see light in the form of microwaves - the CMB. Redshift is a key factor but there are others as well. The evidence favors BB.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.

George, this is a very interesting point, about the CMB. Taking it one step further, if we continue to examine the greatest possible distances with progressively longer wavelengths, even beyond the microwave range, what will we see? Since redshift (which may or may not be space-expanding-Doppler related) will continue to stretch wavenlength with distance, it would stand that the further we look the longer will be the necessary wavelength to image anything there. Assuming we have the technological capability to do this, we should either see more galaxies beyond our current viewing threshold, or if BB is true, then we should see nothing. But if we do image beyond the theorized ABT and more and more galaxies show up, no matter how fuzzy, then the whole idea of BB is thrown into doubt. This will be the key experimental evidence for the future to determine whether BBT is true or not. Of course, this would mean we would have to break the 'CMB barrier'. I can't wait!

Cheers, Ivan

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Caveat Lector. Experimentum summus judex...

Unfortunately, we have to allow time for that light to reach us. Viewing objects more than 13 or so billion years ago would mean we would have to enter a stargate and go somewhere else to see it ( :wink: ), or wait till it gets here. At some point in our future, the redshift would be so great that the photons would be undetectable. This is speculation on my part as I see redshift as primarily Doppler.

I think it is likely that there are galaxies beyond our light cone. However, I am much better with ice cream cones than light cones.

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Lighten up! This is a stellar board! Author: duh.

"The Sun, with all the planets revolving around it, and depending on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as though it had nothing else in the universe to do..." Author: Galileo supposedly.