/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5665744
pic related

What caused the big bang?
I find it hard to believe that something came from nothing.

>>5665758

Not only can things come into being from empty space, empty space can also rise from nothing. Nothing is unstable, something arising is inevitable.

>>5665758
It's not an answer to your question, but i believe personally that the universe is a cycle of big bangs and big crunches, the universe expands up to a point, and then condenses until another big bang occurs.

If the dynamic Casimir effect is real, then photons are emitted from a plate moving at a high enough speed due to quantum effects, but what is this speed relative to? Does vacuum have a velocity?

>>5665758
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZiXC8Yh4T0

Get comfy.

>>5665847
thanks

>>5665758
We don't know yet.

Contrary to how it's popularly described - the Big Bang Theory is NOT a model describing the creation of the Universe. Rather, it describes how the Universe evolved from being very small, very dense, and very hot to how it is today - "The History of the Universe" so to speak.

Which is not to say we don't know anything about what the early Universe was like... while we can't model the very moment the Universe came into being we can get very very very VERY close. We can experimentally replicate conditions similar to what the Universe might have been like as far as something like 10^-30 seconds after the Universe was created and our theoretical models are relatively good up through something like 10^-40 seconds. But the closer and closer to the creation of the Universe and the temperatures and energy densities keep skyrocketing, the more difficult it becomes to develop a model that can describe what's going on.

Particle colliders can replicate conditions similar to the very early Universe, but they're not powerful enough to replicate the conditions of the very early Universe, and there also isn't really a good cosmological model for the creation of the Universe yet either (at least not one that simply complicates matters further - ex M-theory suggests our universe was the result of a collision between mutli-dimensional branes... okay but where do the branes come from?)

>Nothing is unstable

priceless

>>5665964
Constructive contribution. Please share more of your wisdom.

>>5665984

"In the chapter, "Nothing Is Unstable" Krauss explains that quantum fluctuations imply that nothing always produces something. The very notion that nothing is unstable suggests that it would appear impossible for nothing to occur forever and this leads to the idea that something is always eternal even if there are moments of nothingness. This gives a ying-yang interpretation of reality where nothingness always coincides with something. Although Krauss doesn't mention Georg Cantor, Cantor mathematically proved there can be an infinite number of possibilities (somethings) but also an infinite number of non-possibilities (nothings). If nothing is unstable then nothingness eventually leads to something and that something eventually decays into nothing. Even a universe can decay into nothing (as Krauss explains about the future of the universe as space expands while eventually even the protons and neutrons will decay into nothingness)."