This looks like an interesting course:
Have you ever wondered: How do various scholarly discourses—cosmology, geology, anthropology, biology, history—fit together?
Big History answers that question by weaving a single story from a variety of scholarly disciplines. Like traditional creation stories told by the world’s great religions and mythologies, Big History provides a map of our place in space and time. But it does so using the insights and knowledge of modern science, as synthesized by a renowned historian.
This is a story scholars have been able to tell only since the middle of the last century, thanks to the development of new dating techniques in the mid-1900s. As Professor Christian explains, this story will continue to grow and change as scientists and historians accumulate new knowledge about our shared past.
I and others actually tried to condense this story down to something that can be told in forty-five minutes or so at the dinner table, which we tell on Moon Day (coming up two weeks from today, on the forty-first anniversary of the lunar landing).
What was really interesting, though (and what mindless stereotypers on the left will find boggling) was that it was a Google ad at National Review…
Sweet!
(Your comment was a bit too short. Please go back and try again.)
‘like dat?
Would it be possible for me to ask a serious question without being ridiculed?
I’ll try anyway.
“At 13.7 billion years ago, the Universe suddenly appears, growing from the size of an atom to the size of a galaxy in a fraction of a second.”
The question is simple: why?
Geez, Cecil, remind me not to get in a debate with you, in case you decide to pull out a difficult question.
Easy, the symmetry of the universe was broken. Like when you go to a round table at a big fancy party and the first guy (probably an engineer) doesn’t know if he should use the glass on his left or right side (it’s symmetrical up to that point) — once he chooses one side (it’s usually the wrong one), the symmetry is broken and everyone has to use that same side (or if they don’t (and they usually don’t) they have pass glasses across the table as more people arrive. Tres gauche…)
“Easy, the symmetry of the universe was broken. ”
OK, my turn to ask: How? What broke that semmetry (and why)?
The answer is simple:
James T Kirk, in an effort to save the universe from the nasty forehead of the week, bounced a particle beam off the main deflector dish which caused a ripple in the time space continuum which broke the universal symmetry.
QED
This is a story scholars have been able to tell only since the middle of the last century, thanks to the development of new dating techniques in the mid-1900s
I wonder if any of these new-fangled dating techniques will help me find a wife. See, I told you I’d be here all week!
I wonder if any of these new-fangled dating techniques will help me find a wife.
How old do you want her to be? Maybe they can cut off a leg and count the rings… 😉
The engineer who didn’t know whether to use the matter or anti-matter wine glass (tradition says anti-matter, but our engineer never went to cotillion – fortunately the horizon problem means other more well-schooled universes will never know). I thought I just answered that one.
What was really interesting, though (and what mindless stereotypers on the left will find boggling) was that it was a Google ad at National Review…
A related question: how, politically, do you think the customers of The Teaching Company (a company which sells cds/dvds of college courses a la carte and not for grades or credit) slant? I’ll bet $5, that they slant to the right. John Derbyshire, for example, is a customer.
From the Big History site:
At 10 billion years ago, hydrogen atoms and helium atoms fuse at the center of a supernova to create the building blocks of the physical world.
I don’t think this date is correct. In fact, the description doesn’t make any sense. Fusion has powered stars since there were stars — and there have been stars since shortly after the Big Bang.
Cecil asks: Why?
There is overwhelming evidence that Nature at its most basic level is probabilistic. Your question “Why?” makes only as much sense as asking why one particular uranium atom in your nearest friendly pitchblende deposit decided to fission spontaneously at 3:11 A.M. CDT this morning, and not the one next to it. Don’t blame physicists — we don’t make the rules, we just write them down.
There is considerable, but not overwhelming, evidence that there is a physical thing called an “inflaton field” whose instability triggered the formation of the universe as we know it. You are welcome to ask why such fields exist, but only if you are similarly willing to ask why electron or quark fields exist. And the truth is we don’t know why there is such a diversity of fields in the Standard Model. But there are people working on it.
bbbeard, thanks for the attempted explanations. But they fail to be comparable to what I am asking. For instance the two atoms, where one fissions spontaneously and the other does not. The example fails because both of the atoms existed at 3:10 CDT. The situation I am questioning concerns “why” one moment there is no universe and then suddenly the next moment “BANG” there is a fledgling universe, rapidly expanding.
If the universe didn’t exist the moment before the “bang” what caused the bang? How does the bang happen when nothing exists to cause it? The most basic laws of physics tell us that events of even an infinitesimal fraction of the magnitude of the “Big Bang” don’t happen without a cause. And likewise if something existed that caused the bang, well the bang isn’t the beginning but rather just another event in a chain of events. And the “whatever” that existed pre-bang that caused the bang, where did it come from? A pre-bang bang?
I find the notion that the universe popped into being 13.7 billion years ago, from nothing, to be ludicrous. Perhaps at that time there was a drastic event that molded what the universe looks like to us now, but it wasn’t a sudden appearance out of nothingness.
Cecil says: The situation I am questioning concerns “why” one moment there is no universe and then suddenly the next moment “BANG” there is a fledgling universe, rapidly expanding.
There are a number of explanations that have been written down to address these (meta?)physical questions. I find two worth mentioning:
(1) The argument from geometry. The basic idea here is that our commonsense notions of time and space don’t work very well in helping us to understand the Big Bang. Your line of reasoning suggests that you think of time as something separate from space, as if there were an independent “God clock” ticking the moments before and after the Big Bang; but spacetime isn’t hooked up like that. Asking what existed before the Big Bang is like asking what is south of the South Pole. The coordinate system we use to describe latitude and longitude, and the coordinate system we use to place distant galaxies and remote times, simply don’t support “elsewhere” questions.
If you’re like me, you still find this unsatisfying. Perhaps you will find a better explanation is
(2) The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe. This concept, also referred to as Chaotic Inflation, was first analyzed by Andrei Linde in the early 1990’s. The idea is that the “Universe”, meaning everything that is and ever was, is infinitely old and extensive, but the 13.7 billion-year-old piece — the universe with a small “u” — that we see in our telescopes arose from an inflationary bubble that gave rise to one branch on a vastly greater tree. That is, the fields that populate the Universe support random inflationary events, that give rise to new universes all the time. This may be going on as undetectable (or barely detectable) processes in our own universe because the new universes are only connected to ours through microscopic wormholes.
Now, from a philosophical standpoint, I find the Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe to be quite satisfying. So far as we know after 20 years of study, the model doesn’t contradict what we know about physics. However, it is very difficult to design scientific tests of this model. So evidence distinguishing this hypothesis from competing models is scant.
The most basic laws of physics tell us that events of even an infinitesimal fraction of the magnitude of the “Big Bang” don’t happen without a cause.
Well, that is not actually true. Random, “causeless” events happen all the time. That’s kind of how quantum mechanics works. Any spontaneous radioactive decay is causeless.
Cecil,
Here’s part 1:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/01/the_greatest_story_ever_told_-.php
Here’s part 10:
http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2010/04/the_greatest_story_ever_told_-_9.php <– substitute the "9" with "1" through "8" for the rest. The complete set of links can also be accessed from part 10. If I recall correctly, part 1 was felt by readers to have the wrong focus to answer your question "why?!" but parts 2 and 3 corrected that problem and might provide you with a satisfactory or at least interesting answer.
The Teaching Company is great. They have a great one on dark matter and dark energy from a professor at Cal Tech that my ex-fiance’s mother got me for Christmas one year. (Far right family, by the way, since that was brought up above; apparently, it was a family tradition to get Teaching Company videos and trade them once everyone was finished.)