/sci/ - Science & Math

>>2280872

>>WTF is this word salad supposed to mean?

In nearly every religion thread, it seems like there's at least one or two people whose lingering religious beliefs depend on the apparent inexplicability of the Big Bang. But actually a great deal is known about the big bang, and although it's fairly young as far as theories go, one candidate for the causal mechanism called "particle pair separation" leads the rest.

Here's a little thought experiment: combine 1 and -1, and you get zero, right? Likewise, if you carry out this operation in reverse, you can separate 1 and -1 out of zero. Something from nothing? Not exactly. Something and "anti-something" from nothing. Specifically, particles and their anti-particle equivalents dividing out of a state of nothingness science calls quantum potential. This has been directly observed in particle colliders and is known to happen spontaneously, a sort of quantum 'static' at the smallest scales, particle pairs splitting off from one another and then annihilating shortly after. (Better known to most as Hawking radiation).

One of the more recent experimental confirmations of the big bang, by the by, has been the discovery that the total negative gravitational energy in the universe is precisely balanced out by ordinary matter and energy. The result is that the "total energy state" of the universe works out to be zero, meaning it can easily have come from nothing without violating the law of conservation. The universe isn't a "something" that popped into existence out of "nothing" in other words, it's a state of imbalance that collapsed from a more balanced state by way of entropy.

In nearly every religion thread, it seems like there's at least one or two people whose lingering religious beliefs depend on the apparent inexplicability of the Big Bang. But actually a great deal is known about the big bang, and although it's fairly young as far as theories go, one candidate for the causal mechanism called "particle pair separation" leads the rest.

Here's a little thought experiment: combine 1 and -1, and you get zero, right? Likewise, if you carry out this operation in reverse, you can separate 1 and -1 out of zero. Something from nothing? Not exactly. Something and "anti-something" from nothing. Specifically, particles and their anti-particle equivalents dividing out of a state of nothingness science calls quantum potential. This has been directly observed in particle colliders and is known to happen spontaneously, a sort of quantum 'static' at the smallest scales, particle pairs splitting off from one another and then annihilating shortly after. (Better known to most as Hawking radiation).

One of the more recent experimental confirmations of the big bang, by the by, has been the discovery that the total negative gravitational energy in the universe is precisely balanced out by ordinary matter and energy. The result is that the "total energy state" of the universe works out to be zero, meaning it can easily have come from nothing without violating the law of conservation. The universe isn't a "something" that popped into existence out of "nothing" in other words, it's a state of imbalance that collapsed from a more balanced state by way of entropy.

So where did that perfectly balanced state come from? It didn't. That's nothingness. At least, the scientific understanding of it. As it turns out the philosophical/mathematical concept of nothing may not exist outside of either discipline.