How does the Big Bang explain "How" the dark "stuff" was created?

Originally, the Dark Stuff was just consider a vacuum, an empty void, nothingness etc.

Now we "Know" it is actually "something". So, since the Big Bang Created the whole universe, how did it create the Dark Stuff???

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Hi, Russ. I think that all the big bang theory does is to postulate that the universe was at one time extremely dense and that it has been expanding ever since then. I think we will need other, complementary theories to explain other things (such as anything else). Maybe I'm wrong about this interpretation.

If you are asking me where dark matter and dark energy came from, I think we need to find out what they are before we have a decent shot at figuring out where they came from.

Let me add my agreement and expand on it a bit: so far we know there is something and even how much, but not what it is yet. Once we know what it is and what interactions it has if any besides gravity, then we will be in a position to deduce its origin.

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

And to these I would add that, unlike a religious creation story, the Big Bang model need not explain everything, only a certain set of observations. Copernicus' model of the solar system did not explain why the planets orbit the Sun, yet Galileo's observations confirmed the model nevertheless.

The simplicity of this has finally sunk in for me!!!

This can be moved to ATM if deamed necessary!

The Big Bang took out the 'singularity', but insists that the "ENERGY" is still there to make the whole universe!

However, since E=MC^2...the only thing the energy can make is the Baryonic Matter...Period!!!

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Russ, please consider that the universe is, and has been, and always will be. Why would you need "dark stuff" at all?

I will add as support to this that the consensus model of cosmology has two separate fields responsible for the emergence of mass and gravitational attraction. If mass can only be attributed to matter by its interaction with the Higgs field, and gravitational attraction is mediated by the gravitational field, we have a huge problem. First off, if both of these fields are actually fields, they willl be conditioned in their properties by the mass embedded it them. This poses the largest coincidence problem in the history of astronomy. Galaxies and clusters everywhere we can observer seem to follow the same rules. How can this be true? The universe has (if BBT cosology is to be believed) severely diluted the mass/volume relationship over the 13.7Gy that the BBT contemplates. During this time, gravity seems to have ben behaving the law, though. We should expect to see evolution in the "Higgs field" and the "gravitational field" as the universe expanded and the average mass density reduced, but we see none. Is there an outside chance that the BBT is wrong?

__________________
The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

It's pleasing to see your eureka moment RussT.

However, a clarification or three may be in order:

'energy', 'singularity', 'baryonic matter', and so on have precise meanings in physics, and those meanings do not necessarily correspond with how most folk (non-physicists) understand the terms ('energy' is especially troublesome).

"E = mc^2" comes from Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, which is a special case of a more general theory, General Relativity. In GR, "E = mc^2" is a limit case.

The heart of modern Big Bang theories is General Relativity.

GR is one of the two most successful theories in physics; the other is quantum theory (Quantum Field Theory, Quantum Mechanics), which is at the heart of the Standard Model of particle physics.

However, GR and QFT are mutually incompatible, at many levels.

For just about everything we have observed - either from afar, with telescopes and stuff, or in our labs - the GR/QFT incompatibility is of no consequence; it's far, far, far too small to be detected.

However, if you construct a model of the whole universe, with GR and the Standard Model of particle physics, you find the mutual incompatibility cannot be ignored ... during the Planck era.

This means that your initial statement ("since the Big Bang Created the whole universe") is incorrect, if it was intended as a summary of modern cosmology.

There are attempts - fascinating, exhilarating, frustrating, exhausting attempts - to develop a theory, or theories, which encompasses both GR and QFT (or 'unifies' them) - the most well-known of these, in the popular mind, are String Theory and M-Theory (less well-known is LQG; there are others too).

What does this all mean?

Among other things, it means that there is no contemporary scientific theory which includes the 'creation' of the universe, and which theory has also passed all internal consistency, observational and experimental tests.

So, mainstream (You Gal's) do "NOT" say there was "Infinite Energy" (Or at least 'enough energy' all at once to create the Gamma Radiation that eventually became all the galaxies in the universe)
at 10 ^-43 seconds that began our universe???

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Back when some argued that the Universe was contacting, the answer was a cyclic in and out , but with such wide agreement that it is expanding only, the answer of infinity can not be maintained without the introduction of either parallel or multiple universes which totally redefine the term (universe) in the first place. Even nothing implies a something, so the study of metaphysics remains more essential than even physics for the time being, I think.

Russ. I ditto turbo-1
The universe is
Always has been
And always will be.
Hopefully, in 2013 when the JWST is launched and deployed more will be revealed.

Turbo- 1 And roland1996@googlemail.com Junior Member

Sorry Guys, I'm not saying the Chandra Report of a decelerating universe becoming a faster expanding universe is wrong!

What I am saying is the Big Bang couldn't have made the whole universe because the only thing "Energy" can make is Mass/Matter...so it could "NOT" have made the Dark Stuff!!!

Which simply means that the universe starting off with pure energy that turns into 95% Dark Stuff (Now that we know it is "SOMETHING") is nonsense.
"Inflation" does nothing to answer this!

This kind of nit-picky denial is becoming tiring when you know exactly what it means!

If the "ASSUMED" Energy and the "ASSUMED" Inflation did not make our universe starting at 10 ^-43 seconds, according to the Big Bang, then somebody has been lying!

Fr. Wayne
Senior Member

I definitely agree that the "M" Theory multiverse concept will be the answer, however, it "MUST" shed it's Sci-Fi anologies and just concentrate on the processes in nature that will determine the "jobs" of everything and what is "produced" in the process!

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

It seems my response was unclear or incomplete; let me try again.

The narrative that you construct from the (mathematical) models of the universe you build, based on the best physics you have, are always inaccurate and misleading in some ways. These inaccuracies etc have many causes - the interpretation that folk make of simple words ('energy', 'matter', 'space', 'expansion', for example), the imprecision of conveying the 'meaning' of equations (and the underlying maths - differential geometry, for example) using ordinary words, and so on.

When it comes to applying GR to the universe, it quickly becomes obvious that you need to make some choices (see Sean Carroll's Lecture Notes on General Relativity, for example Section 8); for the universe we can see, those choices seem pretty straight-forward (e.g. the equation of state, "dust" as the 'cosmological fluid'), with the evidence of the CMBR in hand (together with the Hubble expansion), choices for an earlier period also seem obvious (e.g. "radiation" as the 'cosmological fluid'). The earlier you go, the further from 'lab-tested physics' you get ... if you want to limit your statements from applying GR to the universe to only those regimes in which the energy density (crudely, 'temperature') has been examined in our labs, then you need to stop well before the Planck era.

So, to your latest question, which I'll rephrase as "is there a solution to GR equations applied to the universe as a whole that is consistent with all the best astronomical observations and high energy physics experiments, leaving out the Planck era?" The answer to this question is "yes".

Your question also seems to ask about energy, but I am quite unclear what you are asking; would you mind clarifying please? In your clarification, please indicate how familiar you are with GR, and especially the meaning of 'energy' in GR (it may be that your understanding of 'energy' and what's in GR are misaligned).

FYI, here's an interesting discussion of expansion and relativity.

I can't be 100% sure, but turbo-1 here seems to be referring to an extraordinarily huge apparent inconsistency between QFT and observation - 120 orders of magnitude huge!

In QFT, a 'vacuum' is not empty; it contains a seething froth of virtual particle-antiparticle pairs that are popping into existence then self-annihilating out of existence again. A straight-forward estimate ('naive') of what the energy density of the (universal) vacuum should be (it's actually very difficult to work out) gives an answer of ~10^94 kg/m³ (see here for more details).

Both inflation and (some approaches to) the cosmological constant incorporate vacuum energy density, as does the Higgs mechanism; all three are areas of intense research currently.

GR and QFT have very different structures; specifically GR does not have a 'field' in the sense of QFT, so turbo-1's comments above about gravitational fields are either incorrect or highly misleading.

When you say "dark stuff" do you mean dark matter, dark energy, or both? For the former, dark matter has mass, and there's no particular reason why energy couldn't form dark matter the same way it can form baryonic matter. I'm not certain what would have led you to think otherwise. We don't know much about dark energy, but best guesses suggest that it's an intrinsic property of space. If that turns out to be true, why would it need to form out of energy? It would simply be present anywhere there's space.

Finally, who said that the universe had to start as just "energy"? I'm not even certain what that means, exactly. We've established on other threads talking about "pure energy" that there doesn't seem to be any such thing. A photon isn't "pure energy"; it has other properties like spin and polarization needed to describe it. Certainly a given photon possesses a certain amount of energy, but then, so do particles with mass.

You seem to be taking a misinterpretation of big bang theories, and applying it to an unfounded assumption to arrive at a contradiction.

__________________
Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.

This does not make a scintilla of sense at all. There is absolutely no physical, scientific, or conceptual problem with "energy" making all of the "dark stuff" you can imagine and more. That's because, in the classical universe at least, space, time, matter and energy constitute absolutely everything that does or can exist. All of the "dark stuff" you talk about is either energy or matter, no doubt or question about that. All we need to do is figure out how to detect and/or measure it.

Then there is the larger question of what big bang cosmology really is or really isn't, and it is the norm that people who don't like big bang cosmology, don't actually know what it is anyway.

A common misconception is that the big bang provides a theory of cosmic origins. It doesn’t. The big bang is a theory, partly described in the last two chapters, that delineates cosmic evolution from a split second after whatever happened to bring the universe into existence, but it says nothing at all about time zero itself. And since, according to the big bang theory, the bang is what is supposed to have happened at the beginning, the big bang leaves out the bang. It tells us nothing about what banged, why it banged, how it banged, or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all.
Brian Green, The Fabric of the Cosmos, Vantage Books, 2004.

So, there are two big points here. First, if you talk about the "bang" at all, then you are not talking big bang cosmology, as paradoxical as that may seem. Secondly, "... or, frankly, whether it ever really banged at all." The bang in big bang cosmology is a metaphysical event, not a physical event. It is a "placeholder" for something else, the true nature of which is in every conceivable sense totally unknown.

But one should not make the drastic mistake of assuming that "unknown" and "unknowable" are in some way synonymous. Enter, quantum gravity or string theory. These extensions of cosmology away from classical theory may provide an answer, a description of what the "bang" might be. There are lots of possibilities, like Steinhardt's colliding branes, or even eternal inflation. There's a huge, wide open, unconstrained industry called "pre big bang cosmology", which really opened up with string theory, and may allow a theoretical description of the universe before the bang, to infinity and beyond.

__________________
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

[dark matter has mass,]

Grey, with respect, Right here is why I think otherwise.

Consider this...the reason there is the "Need" for Dark Matter is because of the rotational curves in the galaxies and the galaxies not flying away in the clusters. Both of these are "Pure Gravity" problems! In other words, if there were more gravity there, it would answer those problems, right? Sure, so the only way (currently), to show how more gravity could be there, is to say...there "Must" be more Mass there than we can see (they believe they have accounted for all the Baryonic MACHOS and gas and dust)...so it must be nonbaryonic Dark Matter/Mass...But, that is not the answer, all they are really looking for is the "GRAVITY". So, IMHO, the "Extra Gravity" Can be found in "M" Theory, Michael Duff's 11 dimensional Super Gravity.
Dark Energy and the Hubble Expansion, deceleration, and faster expansion senerio is a bit more complicated, but the answer to that, is also IMHO found in "M" Theory.

This sounds like you are suggesting that "Space" "The Dark Stuff" that we now know "Is Something" (So it had to be created out of some process), was already here in "The Beginning", and when the "Energy" "Inflated" and spread out enough that the "Space" was just there?

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

Tim;

With all due respect, If every time we say the Big Bang made the whole universe, there is a whatever of denial and long explanations of how we don't "Understand", then it is difficult to even have a conversation about how the universe has come to be the way it is today.

[The big bang is a theory, partly described in the last two chapters, that delineates cosmic evolution from a split second after whatever happened to bring the universe into existence,]

Brian Green even says... cosmic evolution from a split second after whatever happened to bring the universe into existence,]

I was "Stunned" to see that the 'singularity' was actually taken out of the Big Bang Theory last October when I first came to baut., but you are still talking about the same "Energy" at 10 ^-43 seconds and with "Inflation" the "explosion" was taken out, But it's been called the Big Bang for how long now?

I am patiently (I think) trying to show how String "M" Theory can apply to some of these questions, but it would appear that many people are more interested in nit-picking each word and line and format, rather than trying to get the whole picture and determine if some of these things deserve at least "More Consideration".

We are all looking for answers, YES?

I definitely agree that String "M" Theory has answers, and if you would kindly read my Universe A, C, B, you would possibly understand at least what I am suggesting.

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

No, I am not addressing the apparent 120 OOM inconsistency between the assumed expansive force of the vacuum and the observed cosmological constant, nor the apparent 120 OOM inconsistency between the assumed gravitational equivalence of the vacuum energy and the observed attraction.

I am pointing out that if mass and gravitation arise from matter's interaction with two separate fields, then the two fields must be absolutely, perfectly congruent over all space and time, or the Universe would not look the same everywhere we look. You cannot possibly have an isotropic Universe if the Higgs field conveys more mass "there" or the gravitational field is stronger "over there". This is a coincidence (paradox!) of the highest order, and nobody ever talks about it.

__________________
The ether of general relativity therefore differs from that of classical mechanics or the special theory of relativity respectively, in so far as it is not 'absolute', but is determined in its locally variable properties by ponderable matter.

Albert Einstein, "On the Ether", 1924

Thanks for the clarification.

Can we please continue discussion of this question in the thread which turbo-1 started, here in Q&A, on this topic? (Fine-tuning problem (the one nobody talks about!))

Hey Russ. It's true that energy can be converted into matter. It's also true that the matter is in different forms. Hadrons feel the strong force. They consist of mesons (a bunch of them)...and baryons (proton, neutron and heavier)...Leptons are also created...electron, neutrino...etc. So, more than just baryons are involved.
Usually detectors see the particles/antiparticles occur in pairs....conjugated production. But, in all fairness, the algorithms are programmed to assume conservation law accounting. However, no archived cloud chamber photograph, or bubble chamber photograph shows an asymmetry in particle production over anti-particle production (that I know of yet...). So, the mystery of the baryon count (protons, neutrons) being what it is....and the associated exact asymmetry in leptons to match, remains just that. For some ~10⁸⁰ protons...there just happens to be an equal number of electrons. Not one extra, not one shy.(I'm ignoring neutrons here) That is one big mystery that nobody has the answer to.
Progress should be made in cosmology as these issues are resolved, one by one....or all in a fell swoop. Ciao.Pete.

__________________
A third rate theory forbids.
A second rate theory explains after the fact.
A first rate theory predicts.
A. Lomonosov

Well, one alternative would be to have a conversation that includes lots of shorthand (words and phrases would stand for 'long explanations', multiple layers of complicated caveats, etc). Another would be to ignore all the complexities of what doing science always involves. A third would be to say that the topic is inherently difficult, full of traps for the unwary.

The first is, of course, just what we all do every day anyway (there's a linguistics term for the different 'language' we use in our everyday conversation and the specialist language of particular social settings - such as peer-reviewed cosmology journals - even though the words look the same).

But perhaps the resolution is for us all to recognise and accept that a scientific discussion of 'how the universe has come to be the way it is today' inevitably involves recognising there is a lot we simply don't know yet.A good thing then that you decided to come here?I believe that it was Fred Hoyle who coined the term. He meant it as a term of derision, to contrast it with his (and co-authors') own Steady State theory. One of the ironies is that the term was taken up by the popular press with alacrity, and only much later became accepted in technical journals.There are hundreds if not thousands of papers, full of daunting math, which also seek to show, each in their own small way, that String Theory/M Theory can unify QFT and GR and expand the domain of explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe.

As of today, these theories, and competing ToEs ("theories of everything" - another ironic phrase which has become standard) such as LQG (strictly that's 'only' a theory of quantum gravity)) have no observational or experimental basis, other than the same observations and experiments which (separately) support QFT and GR. Hence, the degree to which you accept these as scientific explanations comes down to your tolerance of untested theory - how speculative do you wish to go?The 'nit-picking' is an essential part of the 'doing' of science; 'twas ever thus.

Don't forget gravitational lensing!It's better to approach this via the theory (or theories) which underlie the terms, than to try to graft some intuitive idea onto the problems.

The theory is GR, the entry in the relevant GR equations which gives rise to lensing, etc is mass (well, it's more complicated than this, but 'mass' is a good shorthand).yes, or that the theory of General Relativity needs modifyingThe conclusion that it must be non-baryonic matter comes at the end of a different, and very long, chain of reasoning, backed up by thousands of good observations and experiments. To give you a flavour:

*observations suggest there is {insert value derived from rotation curves, lensing, etc here}. How good are the observations?
*the amount of light/radio/X-rays/etc detected suggests there is only {insert value derived from detection, imaging, spectra etc here}. How good are the models which underlie these estimates?
*in what form could the kind of matter we know about be distributed (atomic to galactic scales), be not detected (in images, spectra, etc), and amount to the difference between the two sets of observations? How good are these answers?
*From the last point, what could we do to test the idea that any of these forms of 'known' matter is really there? What do observations and experiments designed to do this testing show? How good are they?You may very well be right.

However, as of today, no such explanation has been published (that I'm aware of) ... that claims to account for the relevant, good observational and experimental results.Grey concisely and accurately summed up the current status - the term 'dark energy' is a placeholder, a shorthand of a summary of a gap between good observations and a set of models. There is still debate about whether DE is 'real' (i.e. maybe it's 'just' our faulty understanding of 1a SNe/a set of unnoticed, subtle systematic effects/whatever).

Not at all! It's easy. The whole point is that once you get about a Planck time away from the "bang", the universe will evolve predictably, in accord with the classical laws of physics. Of course, we don't necessarily know all of the laws of physics, nor are we familiar with all of the complicated interactions. Hence, lots of people are trying lots of different ways to solve the problem. More on that shortly. Meanwhile, it seems you are all hung up on the "bang", and as a result seem to be very confused about what cosmology really is, in the general sense, let alone the specific case of the big bang. Cosmology has classically been restricted to the study of the evolution of the universe, and not its origin, which was orignially the province of cosmogony. It is only "recently", and especially in the popular press, that the origin itself has become a major topic in cosmology (especially due to the pre big bang insights available from string theory).

That moniker was invented in the 1950s by Fred Hoyle, who intended it to be an insult (he too was hung up on the bang, and was the long time champion of steady state cosmology). But the "insult" was cute, so to insult Hoyle in return, the name stuck. But it was never descriptively proper.

All that means is that you have never seriously studied cosmology, which is something of a drawback if you are going to try to make some realistic, but radical new suggestion in that field. The "bang" has never been a part of big bang cosmology, except in popular level descriptions where the real details are too arduous to present.

I did read it, but don't know quite what to say. It's hardly an original idea, and may well be older than you are. The idea that gravity can propagate across the extra dimensions is as old as the work of Kaluza & Klein in the 1920's (indeed, string theory is in the general sense, a Kaluza-Klein theory).

I don't see that you are suggesting anything that is significantly different from what is already being done by cosmologists, and has been done for 70 years. When I said "more about that shortly" a few lines up, this is what I was talking about. There are a lot of possible explanations for dark matter & dark energy, including the one where they don't exist, and if you think cosmologists are ignoring them, then you are miles off the mark. Maybe we just have the formula for gravity wrong, and if we use the right equations, then it will all go away. That's the point of MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, or MOND theory, which is the focus of considerable research. The idea that gravity might propagate through extra dimensions is called Kaluza Klein gravity, and is another of the possibilities that has been around for a long time.

But you are overlooking an obvious point, and the main reason why all of these remain interesting, but for the time being, minority viewpoints. What do we actually know about gravity? That is comes from mass. So what is the simplest, obvious answer to the question "where does extra gravity come from?" How about "it comes from extra mass"? That answer has to be either verified, or falsified, before anyone can sensibly assume that the answer lies elsewhere. Why should anyone bother with extra dimensions when extra mass works just fine? If you are "stunned", I am equally "stunned" that such a simple, obvious thing as "extra mass" is decried as unreasonable with such ferocity. I will never understand where such misguided thinking comes from.

And another, final note. The "non baryonic" nature of dark matter is required by the expanding universe intrpretation of the observed acoustic spectrum of the CMB. It comes from the difference in height between the 1st & 2nd acoustic peaks, which is fixed by the scattering of photons off of the matter particles. There is a lot more mass than the scattering indicates, so there must be a lot of mass that does not scatter photons, and that means non-baryonic mass. So even if you do come up with some alternative like MOND of Kaluza-Klein gravity, there is still the nagging problem of the difference between mass & scattring in the CMB that needs an answer.

__________________
The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. -- Bertrand Russell

Russ and Everyone,

Actually, I think that the fact there is a lot we don't understand is one of the most exciting aspects of astrophysics and cosmology right now. We know enough to have some theories and some verification, but the field is still vibrant with the possibility of imminent major discoveries.

There is not much discussion of bar magnets or fire or acid-base reactions on this site - not that there aren't any open questions, but we seem to know a lot of the fundamental underpinnings of those areas. That makes these subjects less intriguing.

I'm just having a lot of fun watching our understanding of cosmology unfold - theory by theory, discovery by discovery.

I'm not sure I understand this point, wouldn't alternative gravities allow you to get by with less mass, so less scattering matter as well?

Tim Thompson;

Tim, I know you are definitely smart enough to realize that my Universe A, C, B is saying more than just...the 'extra gravity' is getting here from some place else!

Let me ask you this, if I may... on the 5 String Theories, that supposedly, 'individually' described the universe, and then Ed Whitten realized that they were all different manifestations of one overall 11 dimesional Theory.

Here is the question...didn't 'each' of those start with the "Energy" at
10 ^-43 seconds (except maybe Supersymetry, because I think it eliminated the 'singularity')?

In other words, as far as I know, when they came up with the first, they thought that might be a TOE, and then they found another, and then came up with 5, right?

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

First, the question I asked why why you would think that dark matter, some hypothetical particles with mass, could not form in particle-antiparticle pairs from energy, just like other particles with mass. You haven't provided a reason for that.

It's true that one could solve the "dark matter problem" by instead positing a different theory of gravity, but so far, such attempts have not been as successful as dark matter based theories in matching observations. I'd encourage proponents of such theories to keep trying, but I don't really expect them to be successful, based on current data. And as Nereid points out, the idea that it's non-baryonic comes from a different line of argument, as well as being suggested from an alternate direction, big bang nucleosynthesis.

You know, I know Michael Duff, and I've taken a course on general relativity from him. He's definitely one of the brightest string theorists I know, and believes it has a lot of promise, but I don't think he expects that it will explain dark matter. Can you provide a reference where he supports the idea of a modified theory of gravity as an explanation for dark matter?

Got any suggestions on how M Theory addresses these questions? As for what I'm suggesting, I think Nereid said it best. Right now, "dark energy" is a placeholder term for somethign that we know we don't really understand. One possibility that looks promising is that it's an intrinsic property of space (the vacuum has an energy associated with it), but there are plenty of other theories. Hopefully further observations will help constrain which are possible.

As for how it was created, or what was there in "The Beginning", remember that big bang theories are really about the evolution of the universe from a very early point, but don't really have anything to say about what happened to create the universe.

__________________
Conserve energy. Commute with the Hamiltonian.

Grey
Senior Member

With all due respect, mainsteam can deny as much as they want to, that since they took the 'singularity' out of the picture, that they are no longer talking about the "Beginning", or 'what made' our universe, but when you are starting at 10 ^-43 seconds and then start "Inflation" at 10 ^-35 seconds? you are still talking about the Big Bang Theory bringing our universe into existence, just as Mr. Green said above.

IMHO, the reason that String/"M" Theory, and Michael Duff and Ed Whitten have not been able to show that it can work, is their adherence to the "singularity" creating the whole universe at once! Their adherence to the Big Bang! This makes their theory 'background dependent', which Lee Smolin says is the main drawback to all the String Theories!

Sometimes I think I understand how hard it is for mainstream scientists to think of the universe in different terms than they are used to, but then I realize, if I had thought for a LONG TIME that a "HOT" beginning was the only way, based on current thinking, and I no longer even questioned "Inflation" (which to me is as outlandish a concept as any ATM concept), it would be hard for me too.

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!

no offence, but when the 'mainstream' has a 'theory' that means 'they' dont 'know' 'everything'. 'theories' 'change' as people 'understand' more of the 'universe'.

Have you gotten the hint about the quotes yet?

Seriously tho, Yes, the BBT is a kluged theory. It came out of the shocking realization that most of the universe was redshifted. then is had the shocking realization that there is a extraodinarlily homogenous background radiation, then it had the shocking realization that we couldnt see most of the mass of the universe, now there is the shocking data that the universe may be accelerating.

so Yes, the BBT gets modded every time we see more of the universe. not suprising, cause we havent seen much of the universe and dont know much. Dark matter and dark energy have those names cause we dont have the foggiest notion of what they really are to give a proper name to them.

The BBT has had some success. redshift, CMB and nucleosynthesis are well explained.

The BBT has some problems, dark matter and dark energy are the big two, but you could add the structure of the universe to that also.

The fact that they theory changed to take out the singularity dosent mean there is a huge conspiracy to keep the string down, all it means is that one person made an assumption, another ran the numbers and the first was wrong.

If you think you have a better theory, please explain it in small words so that we can understand. You have to explain how your theory accounts for all the major features of the universe. please, no quotes and no assuming the mainstream is full of idiots who.

I even agree with 2 of the three, it's the middle one that is off somehow.

I did not say there was a conspiracy to keep String/"M" Theory from being correct, I simply said that all the String/"M" Theorists have adhered to the Big Bang Starting the universe and that is why they remain background dependent.

But, this is Q&A and I just recieved a nice note from Nereid, and shouldn't answer your last request here.

To see how, IMHO, it does work go to ATM> The Universe A, C, B.

__________________
RussT
________________________________
Everything is, as it should be, otherwise, it wouldn't be!