How are we here..?

Zaehet Strife

Well-Known Member
I don't really care as to why we are here. That in my opinion is a far less important question, I want to know how we are here.


Something can not come from nothing... So how are we here, how is anything here..?
If we know that something could never come from nothing... would it not be safe to assume that "something" has always existed? To me, it would seem most reasonable that something came from something... rather than nothing. Just an idea, throw it around a bit, but never hang on too tightly, if you squeeze too tight that idea may turn into the dreaded...BELIEF! DUN DUN DUUUUNNNN!
 

Shannon Alexander

Well-Known Member
I don't understand tho how something can have always existed... If that is the case then one of the biggest arguments that I've heard people use against the possibility of there being A God or Gods etc... is false...
 

ginjawarrior

Well-Known Member
I don't understand tho how something can have always existed... If that is the case then one of the biggest arguments that I've heard people use against the possibility of there being A God or Gods etc... is false...
What argument is that?

if you apply the same questions to gods origins you have the same problamtic answers
 

olylifter420

Well-Known Member
Assuming things is never a good idea.

Just sayin



If we know that something could never come from nothing... would it not be safe to assume that "something" has always existed? To me, it would seem most reasonable that something came from something... rather than nothing. Just an idea, throw it around a bit, but never hang on too tightly, if you squeeze too tight that idea may turn into the dreaded...BELIEF! DUN DUN DUUUUNNNN!
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
So what brought about dimensionality?
Not trying to be facile, but .... the Big Bang.
"Before" the BB, our timespace simply didn't exist. No 'then" and no "there". The moment the hot dense dot of here&now "precipitated" from [indescribable], "here" and "now" assumed meaning. This is the best of my understanding of a difficult concept. cn
 

olylifter420

Well-Known Member
Noted. How sure are they that the bb brought this dimensionality and not something else? How are they sure it is dimensionality that was sprung from the bb, not something different?

Im just curious to know



Not trying to be facile, but .... the Big Bang.
"Before" the BB, our timespace simply didn't exist. No 'then" and no "there". The moment the hot dense dot of here&now "precipitated" from [indescribable], "here" and "now" assumed meaning. This is the best of my understanding of a difficult concept. cn
 

cannabineer

Ursus marijanus
Noted. How sure are they that the bb brought this dimensionality and not something else? How are they sure it is dimensionality that was sprung from the bb, not something different?

Im just curious to know
I'd have to say part of it lies in how we define things. The Big Bang is both deduced and defined to be the first moment. The math (or rather, the simplifications that I can understand) is about conditionality: you need a Big Bang to create timespace, and we can only understand it from within our native timespace. There can be no "before" or "outside" without introducing fundamentally incomprehensible space/time/?? continua of "other" dimensionality.
The difference between Big Bang theory and any other mythos of creation, however, is in the fine print: "We're open to being proven wrong about this." I respect that. cn
 

olylifter420

Well-Known Member
Cool, in some ways we seem to be on the same wave neer...


I'd have to say part of it lies in how we define things. The Big Bang is both deduced and defined to be the first moment. The math (or rather, the simplifications that I can understand) is about conditionality: you need a Big Bang to create timespace, and we can only understand it from within our native timespace. There can be no "before" or "outside" without introducing fundamentally incomprehensible space/time/?? continua of "other" dimensionality.
The difference between Big Bang theory and any other mythos of creation, however, is in the fine print: "We're open to being proven wrong about this." I respect that. cn
 

Padawanbater2

Well-Known Member
How did we get here..

This is one of my favorite things to ponder..

This is what we know for sure, anything beyond it is speculation. When I say 'for sure', I mean information corroborated by thousands of different scientists over thousands of years.


Part 1 - Physics


-1922-1923 - the big bang - Edwin Hubble discovers objects outside the Milky Way Galaxy fundamentally changing our perception of the universe

-1927 - Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian Catholic priest and physicist publishes a paper in an obscure Belgian journal, Annales de la Societe Scientifique de Bruxelles, describing redshift and how it applies to moving objects in the universe and how it supports a model of an expanding universe based on Einsteins theory of general relativity. Redshift was the first observational support for the big bang theory

-what is known of the very early universe is mostly speculation as we don't have tools to confirm anything relatively difinitively

-these moments of speculation include;


-the Plank epoch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_epoch
-the Grand unification epoch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_unification_epoch
-the Electroweak epoch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroweak_epoch
-the Inflationary epoch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflationary_epoch
-Baryogenesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryogenesis

-from this point onward, the physics of the early universe is better understood, and less speculative

-Quark epoch -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_epoch

-In electroweak symmetry breaking, at the end of the electroweak epoch, all the fundamental particles are believed to acquire a mass via the Higgs mechanism in which the Higgs boson acquires a vacuum expectation value. The fundamental interactions of gravitation, electromagnetism, the strong interaction and the weak interaction have now taken their present forms, but the temperature of the universe is still too high to allow quarks to bind together to form hadrons.

-Hadron epoch -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadron_epoch

-the quark-gluon plasma that composes the universe cools until hadrons, including baryons such as protons and neutrons, can form. At approximately 1 second after the big bang, neutrinos decouple and begin traveling freely through space. This cosmic neutrino background, while unlikely to ever be observed in detail, is analogous to the cosmic microwave background that was emitted much later.

-Lepton epoch -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lepton_epoch

-
The majority of hadrons and anti-hadrons annihilate each other at the end of the hadron epoch, leaving leptons and anti-leptons dominating the mass of the universe. Approximately 10 seconds after the Big Bang the temperature of the universe falls to the point at which new lepton/anti-lepton pairs are no longer created and most leptons and anti-leptons are eliminated in annihilation reactions, leaving a small residue of leptons.


-Photon epoch - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon_epoch

-
After most leptons and anti-leptons are annihilated at the end of the lepton epoch the energy of the universe is dominated by photons. These photons are still interacting frequently with charged protons, electrons and (eventually) nuclei, and continue to do so for the next 380,000 years.


-Nucleosynthesis - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_nucleosynthesis

-
During the photon epoch the temperature of the universe falls to the point where atomic nuclei can begin to form. Protons (hydrogen ions) and neutrons begin to combine into atomic nuclei in the process of nuclear fusion. Free neutrons combine with protons to form deuterium. Deuterium rapidly fuses into helium-4. Nucleosynthesis only lasts for about seventeen minutes, since the temperature and density of the universe has fallen to the point where nuclear fusion cannot continue. By this time, all neutrons have been incorporated into helium nuclei. This leaves about three times more hydrogen than helium-4 (by mass) and only trace quantities of other nuclei.


-Matter domination -

-
At this time, the densities of non-relativistic matter (atomic nuclei) and relativistic radiation (photons) are equal. The Jeans length, which determines the smallest structures that can form (due to competition between gravitational attraction and pressure effects), begins to fall and perturbations, instead of being wiped out by free-streaming radiation, can begin to grow in amplitude.

-According to ΛCDM, at this stage, cold dark matter dominates, paving the way for gravitational collapse to amplify the tiny inhomogeneities left by cosmic inflation, making dense regions denser and rarefied regions more rarefied. However, because present theories as to the nature of dark matter are inconclusive, there is as yet no consensus as to its origin at earlier times, as currently exist for baryonic matter.


-Recombination -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombination_(cosmology)

-
Hydrogen and helium atoms begin to form as the density of the universe falls. This is thought to have occurred about 377,000 years after the Big Bang. Hydrogen and helium are at the beginning ionized, i.e., no electrons are bound to the nuclei, which (containing positively charged protons) are therefore electrically charged (+1 and +2 respectively). As the universe cools down, the electrons get captured by the ions, forming electrically neutral atoms. This process is relatively fast (actually faster for the helium than for the hydrogen) and is known as recombination. At the end of recombination, most of the protons in the universe are bound up in neutral atoms. Therefore, the photons' mean free path becomes effectively infinite and the photons can now travel freely (see Thomson scattering): the universe has become transparent. This cosmic event is usually referred to as decoupling. The photons present at the time of decoupling and are the same photons that we see in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, after being greatly cooled by the expansion of the Universe. Therefore the CMB is a picture of the universe at the end of this epoch including the tiny fluctuations generated during inflation.


-Dark ages - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_line

-
Before decoupling occurs most of the photons in the universe are interacting with electrons and protons in the photon–baryon fluid. The universe is opaque or "foggy" as a result. There is light but not light we could observe through telescopes. The baryonic matter in the universe consisted of ionized plasma, and it only became neutral when it gained free electrons during "recombination," thereby releasing the photons creating the CMB. When the photons were released (or decoupled) the universe became transparent. At this point the only radiation emitted is the 21 cm spin line of neutral hydrogen. There is currently an observational effort underway to detect this faint radiation, as it is in principle an even more powerful tool than the cosmic microwave background for studying the early universe. The Dark Ages are currently thought to have lasted between 150 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang. The recent (October 2010) discovery of UDFy-38135539, the first observed galaxy to have existed during the following reionization epoch, gives us a window into these times. There was a report in January 2011 of yet another more than 13 billion years old that existed a mere 480 million years after the Big Bang.

Structure Formation -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_structure_of_the_cosmos#Large-scale_structure

-Structure formation in the big bang model proceeds hierarchically, with smaller structures forming before larger ones. The first structures to form are quasars, which are thought to be bright, early active galaxies, and population III stars. Before this epoch, the evolution of the universe could be understood through linear cosmological perturbation theory: that is, all structures could be understood as small deviations from a perfect homogeneous universe. This is computationally relatively easy to study. At this point non-linear structures begin to form, and the computational problem becomes much more difficult, involving, for example, N-body simulations with billions of particles.

-Reionization -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reionization

-
The first stars and quasars from gravitational collapse. The intense radiation they emit reionizes the surrounding universe. From this point on, most of the universe is composed of plasma.

-Formation of stars -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_formation

-
The first stars, most likely Population III stars, form and start the process of turning the light elements that were formed in the Big Bang (hydrogen, helium and lithium) into heavier elements. However, as of yet there have been no observed Population III stars, and understanding of them is currently based on computational models of their formation and evolution.

-Formation of galaxies -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_formation_and_evolution

-
On July 11, 2007, using the 10-metre Keck II telescope on Mauna Kea, Richard Ellis of the California Institute of Technology at Pasadena and his team found six star forming galaxies about 13.2 billion light years away and therefore created when the universe was only 500 million years old. Only about 10 of these extremely early objects are currently known.
-The Hubble Ultra Deep Field shows a number of small galaxies merging to form larger ones, at 13 billion light years, when the Universe was only 5% its current age.

-Based upon the emerging science of nucleocosmochronology, the Galactic thin disk of the Milky Way is estimated to have been formed 8.8 ± 1.7 billion years ago.

-Formation of groups, clusters and superclusters -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large-scale_structure_of_the_cosmos#Large-scale_structure

-
Gravitational attraction pulls galaxies towards each other to form groups, clusters and superclusters.

-Formation of the solar system -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formation_and_evolution_of_the_Solar_System

-
The solar system began forming about 4.6 billion years ago, or about 9 billion years after the Big Bang. A molecular cloud made mostly of hydrogen and traces of other elements began to collapse, forming a large sphere in the center which would become the Sun, as well as a surrounding disk. The surrounding accretion disk would coalesce into a multitude of smaller objects that would become planets, asteroids, and comets. The Sun is a late-generation star, and the Solar System incorporates matter created by previous generations of stars.



Part 2 will touch on Biology, explaining human evolution starting from a single cell.

All of this information comes from Wikipedia



 
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