Hi Russell Standish OK. So something happened and the physical universe expanded out of that. Or there were even a series of such explosions, which is Penrose's contention. Fine, as long as they explain the facts.
The more interesting question is how the physical universe could have been created out of the nonphysical, which I take to be intelligence. [Roger Clough], [rclo...@verizon.net] 11/16/2012 "Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen ----- Receiving the following content ----- From: Russell Standish Receiver: everything-list Time: 2012-11-15, 15:55:10 Subject: Re: Re: 14 billion years ago there was a huge explosion On Thu, Nov 15, 2012 at 05:20:14AM -0600, Roger Clough wrote: > Hi Bruno and Russell, > > The evidence of a Big Bang is enormous. See, for example: > Of course, but the big bang is not the same thing as the beginning of the universe. Also, the cosmic microwave background, which is the direct observational evidence of the big bang comes from the last scattering, when electrons and nuclei combined for the last time into atomic matter and stayed that way. Red shift surveys can only give information about the age of the last scattering, and even then, interpreting it as a certain number of years can only occur within a specific model of the universe - the Friedmann model is often used because of its simplicity - even though we now know the universe evolved quite differently from the Friedmann model due to things like dark energy, which introduces far too much uncertainty to claim that the inverse of an accurate Hubble constant is "the age of the universe" The big bang theory gives an account of the evolution of the universe from a quark-gluon soup to the last scattering, and gives quite a good account of the 300,000 years before the last scattering. Accounts of what happened prior to the quark-gluon plasma are highly speculative, including inflation theory, and are likely to be revised as science progresses. In some of those speculations, the actual beginning of the universe occurred much earlier, or in the infinite past. Actually, according to Wikipedia: Though the universe might in theory have a longer history, the International Astronomical Union [4] presently use "age of the universe" to mean the duration of the Lambda-CDM expansion, or equivalently the elapsed time since the Big Bang in the current observable universe. Lambda-CDM is apparently the most widely accepted model of how the universe expanded since the big bang. I didn't realise the IAU has defined an "age of the universe", but its anything but. Cheers -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile) Principal, High Performance Coders Visiting Professor of Mathematics hpco...@hpcoders.com.au University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
