If the big bang happened (which I do not believe for a moment), it itself is a sort of "event," right?

Let's look at conditions. If we can imagine a condition of no big bang having happened, and then a condition where the big bang occurs, or has already occurred, then, from the limited human sensory perspective, a. precedes b. (insofar as we are able to comprehend the term "precedes").

If time is based on the relative motion of objects, particles, etc., then it stands to reason that there would be no "time," per se, prior to the event, assuming that said event brought all these particles and such into existence. There's no actual frame of reference.

But there could still be a condition of pre-bang (for lack of a better term), only understandable as a hypothetical conjecture (because we have no real way of determining what, if anything, was there "before") -- in terms of establishing a "time-frame."

In other words, if the bang occurred 13.7 billion years ago, is it pointless to talk about things from 100 billion years ago? Eric J. Lerner points out that some of the galactic clusters we see today would have taken 100 billion years to form -- one reason he wrote a book called "The Big Bang Never Happened." He advocates Hannes Alfven's plasma cosmology, which has other problems (but eliminates the need for patches such as dark matter and dark energy).

Assuming that one can establish a time-point for the bang to have occurred, I see nothing outrageous in speculating about "time" -- forwards and backwards -- from that marker. In the cyclical model, something very definitely happened before the bang -- I'm not saying it's right, or that we'll ever actually know, but there are a lot of possibilities out there.

What if the universe is just a big snow globe that gets shaken every so often and swirled but we perceive time slowly so it seems like everything spins forever?

i'm sure it "sees" something, i'm just not sure if they interpreted it the right way...even tho they know way more than me on this, i still hold the belief that they may be misinterpreting what they are seeing...

Very interesting.

I will look into Hannes Alfven's plasma cosmology.

I have a hard time believing that the universe is only 13.7 billion years old, unless there are other universes out there.

Like a mamma and papa universe.

I read the 1993 paper you referenced. It has many questions which have since been answered by the WMAP and other date. What were once highly speculative theories about events involved in the big bang, early universal expansion, and the "plasma universe" have since been eliminated by direct observation. Having a theory that "does not need dark energy or dark matter" goes up in smoke when the dark areas and mapped in fine detail and the quantities of dark matter mass are observed and calculated to a high degree of accuracy.

Questions about old star formations that appear to be older than the age of our universe are answered when detailed verification of properties of early expansion are found to meet mathematical models.

There are certainly many questions about what happened before the big bang, but the events between now and when it happened are being answered with great accuracy.

http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/ and my WMAP post

just a quick question... how does anyone know it "is with great accuracy?"

Good question. I don't have that much confidence in today's scientific community. Government is getting too involved.

Comparatively speaking. In most scientific measurements you know how accurate the equipment is. A radar could measure the distance to a ship plus or minus ten feet, a yardstick could measure plus or minus a thirty second of an inch. Or a satellite could measure depth of field on a star to a light year.

I think they measured the age of the universe to plus or minus about .17 billion years. That is great accuracy compared to what they had before.

They have measured the "flatness" of the universe to less than 1 percent. That too is great accuracy but maybe not accurate enough to say it is completely flat.

LISA is even more accurate.

I believe there are too many scientists, who have invested too much time and energy promoting and believing big bang, who are in a position where they feel their careers will be seriously damaged should big bang turn out to be wrong. Hence the series of patches which have been applied.

No one, to my knowledge, has satisfactorily addressed observations by Halton Arp and others re: galaxies with attached quasars which show radically different red-shifting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yTfRy0LTD0&feature=related

I'll be the first to admit I have no idea what the real truth is. I just refuse to automatically accept the standard model simply because it preserves a preferred status quo. That's not science.

Exactly. Not science.

I think those words come into play when one is unsure of their stance...






I one does not know the cause of the "big-bang", how can one dismiss intentional design?
Who says that the big-bang (if true), was not the act of creation?




Being willing to consider new arguments and new evidence, and being willing to change one's mind if those new arguments and evidence warrant doing so.

It does not mean 'being open to other ideas, for the sake of being open to them. Especially when you've already examined those ideas and found them wanting.


But you still haven't thought of a scenario in which a cat could eat a bike, have you?







No comment except for the possibilty that your mind is controlled by squirrels is there...





You forgot about the person who sees that it can be either true and false.






Ahhh, but you failed to define yours in the cat analogy.

So, did you mean a cat ate the bike like a dog would have eaten a couch? Did you mean a cat ate a little plastic toy bike? Or did I pinpoint your meaning with my description?






My bad, I meant to say green is white. Kinda how like mayonaise is eggwhites....





And there's the implication of another's sanity again. So, do you think that there's no "sane" or "rational" scenario in which a cat can eat a bike? If no, define your symbols.






Do you know what the odds are that even prokaryotes existed? I'm not talking about evolution from single-cell organisms... I talking about the odds that "life" beat to even become "life".

There are many circumstances where those terms come into play. Young earth creationism - the positive, definite belief that the earth is less than 10k years old - is, quite simply, stupid.

Which is not to say that only stupid people hold this belief.






Who says that the big-bang (if true), was not the act of creation?

That was one of my points.



ID is an ambiguous term.







But you still haven't thought of a scenario in which a cat could eat a bike, have you?

A cat eating a was not the topic. The suggestion was a specific cat eating a specific bike in a specified time frame. The point of that example was to bring the topic of 'sane assessment of probable explanations' out of the complex domain creation and evolution, and into everyday life.

In everyday life, we can all see that it is terribly unlikely that the speaker is speaking literal truth, and sensibly set that explanation aside.





Exactly. You cannot prove that your mind is not controlled by squirrels - and yet it is sensible for you to discount this possibility.



There are actually many, many more approaches. My first listing had 6 entries, and I cut it down to keep the conversation from going to far afield.

One very common and annoying logical fallacy people commit is saying 'it must be either a, b, or c' for no better reason then their failure to imagine more options.

You might think that I fail to imagine a means by which that cat ate that bike in that time period - I don't. I simply assert that its too unlikely to take seriously.









There you go again with 'a' cat and 'a' bike. I am speaking of 'the' cat and 'the' bike.

Scenarios are not rational or irrational - it is our assessments of the probabilities of those scenarios which are (or not).






I agree that its incredible.


But going back in the convo...when a tornado strikes a lumberyard, the natural tendency of every action, every collision, is to create more disorder.

When you have any kind of self-replication chemical machinery - at all - something new and different has entered the equation. There is a tendency towards disorder, and a 2nd law compliant tendency towards more order.

Its really amazing.

Comparing evolution (if that is the comparison being made) of life to this kind of chaos found when a tornado strikes a lumberyard is misleading.

That hasn't been my experience at all (and I work in the field). There are many bureaucrats in the system who fight for the status quo at all costs because they fear change. The scientists, however sit around and dream about their possibility of a new discovery that might change the world view of anything including the big bang. The WMAP data I posted is the work of many scientists and engineers who each had a small part in building a complex piece of equipment the primary purpose of which was to seek hard data, not prove the big bang. Any scientist who used the hard data to try to proved something untrue would be slaughtered instantly by his peers, which is the nature of peer review with hard data as opposed to speculation.

Which leads to M theory. Our standard model of physics doesn't work at the early moments of the big bang some many of the top physicists have studied M theory to find a solution and have been converted that "it is the way to go". It provides "possible" answers to what happened before, during, and after the big bang. So far, it has been hard to prove since measurements of most anything at the string level are difficult ... but not totally impossible. M theory works mathematically and that is a good start.

The "electric universe" or "plasma cosmology" never worked mathematically, physically, or rationally, but it made some people some money preying on those who didn't understand the science.

So, at what point do you not think Young Earth Creationism is stupid? 15k years? 50k years? When they agree with what you believe?







That was one of my points.


Sorry, I thought you were opposed to any type of creationism.






It's only ambiguous if you need to know the source, otherwise it's spot on.







"A" cat or "the" cat... It doesn't matter. Even without a detailed description of your own scenario, I can still sensibly see how that statement could be true.

The likelyhood of that statement is another matter. If however, you wish to bring probability into your assesment of sanity, then you may as well call everyone who believes in any theory about the origins of life crazy too.






It is sensible for me to assess my own state of mind as well as anyone else who would deny being mind-controlled by squirrels.

If you affirm that claim, then it is perfectly sensible for me to assume your mind is controlled by a squirrel, albeit most likely imaginary.






Ok, so probabilty does figure into your assesment of another person's sanity.


And I assert that "life" is too unlikely to have sponaneously appeared, yet here we are...






I think I got ya. It's your assessment of the probabilities that determines whether or not you consider someone rational, right?






Do you agree that no "sane" person could believe in life with the probability involved in all required aspects neccesary to sustain life?




Not evolution of life, evolution of the universe to even be capable of sustaining life....

Misleading? Perhaps... The lumberyard scenario is more probable than life, crazy huh?

I think I told u guys before that's called foreplay, but nobody listened

The ekpyrotic theory hypothesizes that the origin of the observable universe occurred when two parallel branes collided.

(String Theory)

This is what Steinhardt and Turok's book is about. They also refer to is as the Cyclic theory.

From http://www.spacedaily.com/news/cosmology-02c.html

Adding Trillions Of Years To The Life Of The Universe

A new theory of the universe suggests that space and time may not have begun in a big bang, but may have always existed in an endless cycle of expansion and rebirth.

Princeton physicist Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok of Cambridge University described their proposed theory in an article published April 25 in an online edition of Science.

The theory proposes that, in each cycle, the universe refills with hot, dense matter and radiation, which begins a period of expansion and cooling like the one of the standard big bang picture.

After 14 billion years, the expansion of the universe accelerates, as astronomers have recently observed. After trillions of years, the matter and radiation are almost completely dissipated and the expansion stalls. An energy field that pervades the universe then creates new matter and radiation, which restarts the cycle.

The new theory provides possible answers to several longstanding problems with the big bang model, which has dominated the field of cosmology for decades. It addresses, for example, the nagging question of what might have triggered or come "before" the beginning of time.

The idea also reproduces all the successful explanations provided by standard picture, but there is no direct evidence to say which is correct, said Steinhardt, a professor of physics.

"I do not eliminate either of them at this stage," he said. "To me, what's interesting is that we now have a second possibility that is poles apart from the standard picture in many respects, and we may have the capability to distinguish them experimentally during the coming years."

The big bang model of the universe, originally suggested over 60 years ago, has been developed to explain a wide range of observations about the cosmos. A major element of the current model, added in the 1980s, is the theory of "inflation," a period of hyperfast expansion that occurred within the first second after the big bang.

This inflationary period is critical for explaining the tremendous "smoothness" and homogeneity of the universe observed by astronomers, as well as for explaining tiny ripples in space that led to the formation galaxies.

Scientists also have been forced to augment the standard theory with a component called "dark energy" to account for the recent discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

The new model replaces inflation and dark energy with a single energy field that oscillates in such a way as to sometimes cause expansion and sometimes cause stagnation. At the same time, it continues to explain all the currently observed phenomena of the cosmos in the same detail as the big bang theory.

Because the new theory requires fewer components, and builds them in from the start, it is more "economical," said Steinhardt, who was one of the leaders in establishing the theory of inflation.

Another advantage of the new theory is that it automatically includes a prediction of the future course of the universe, because it goes through definite repeating cycles lasting perhaps trillions of years each.

The big bang/inflation model has no built-in prediction about the long-term future; in the same way that inflation and dark energy arose unpredictably, another effect could emerge that would alter the current course of expansion.

The cyclic model entails many new concepts that Turok and Steinhardt developed over the last few years with Justin Khoury, a graduate student at Princeton, Burt Ovrut of the University of Pennsylvania and Nathan Seiberg of the Institute for Advanced Study.

"This work by Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok is extraordinarily exciting and represents the first new big idea in cosmology in over two decades," said Jeremiah Ostriker, professor of astrophysics at Princeton and the Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at Cambridge.

"They have found a simple explanation for the observed fact the universe on large scales looks the same to us left and right, up and down -- a seemingly obvious and natural condition -- that in fact has defied explanation for decades."

Sir Martin Rees, Royal Society Research Fellow at Cambridge, noted that the physics concerning key properties of the expanding universe remain "conjectural, and still not rooted in experiment or observation."

"There have been many ideas over the last 20 years," said Rees.

"Steinhardt and Turok have injected an imaginative new speculation.

Their work emphasizes the extent to which we may need to jettison common sense concepts, and transcend normal ideas of space and time, in order to make real progress.

"This work adds to the growing body of speculative research which intimates that physical reality could encompass far more than just the aftermath of 'our' big bang."

The cyclic universe theory represents a combination of standard physical concepts and ideas from the emerging fields of string theory and M-theory, which are ambitious efforts to develop a unified theory of all physical forces and particles. Although these theories are rooted in complex mathematics, they offer a compelling graphic picture of the cyclic universe theory.

Under these theories, the universe would exist as two infinitely large parallel sheets, like two sheets of paper separated by a microscopic distance. This distance is a extra, or fifth dimension, that is not apparent us.

At our current phase in the history of the universe, the sheets are expanding in all directions, gradually spreading out and dispersing all the matter and energy they contain. After trillions of years, when they become essentially empty, they enter a "stagnant" period in which they stop stretching and, instead, begin to move toward each other as the fifth dimension undergoes a collapse.

The sheets meet and "bounce" off each other. The impact causes the sheets to be charged with the extraordinarily hot and dense matter that is commonly associated with the big bang. After the sheets move apart, they resume their expansion, spreading out the matter, which cools and coalesces into stars and galaxies as in our present universe.

The sheets, or branes, as physicists call them, are not parallel universes, but rather are facets of the same universe, with one containing all the ordinary matter we know and the other containing "we know not what," said Steinhardt.

It is conceivable, he said, that a material called dark matter, which is widely believed to make up a significant part of the universe, resides on this other brane. The two sheets interact only by gravity, with massive objects in one sheet exerting a tug on matter in the other, which is what dark matter does to ordinary matter.

The movements and properties of these sheets all arise naturally from the underlying mathematics of the model, noted Steinhardt. That is in contrast to the big bang model, in which dark energy has been added simply to explain current observations.

Steinhardt and Turok continue to refine the theory and are looking for theoretical or experimental ideas that might favor one idea over the other.

"These paradigms are as far apart as you can imagine in terms of the nature of time," said Steinhardt. "On the other hand, in terms of what they predict about the universe, they are as close as you can be up to what you can measure so far.

"Yet, we also know that, with more precise observations that may be possible in the next decade or so, you can distinguish them. That is the fascinating situation we find ourselves in. It's fun to debate which ones you like better, but I really think nature will be the final arbiter here."

I've personally never hear someone who believed in young earth creationism who gave a time span greater than 12k years, and most seem to settle around 6k.

As far as the point at which their beliefs stop being stupid: it happens when the person who holds the position can base their position on evidence and reason, rather than clinging to a forgone conclusion and doing everything they can to rationalize away contrary evidence.

For example, every one of the scores of people I've met in my life who believes in young earth creationism and argues loudly about the limitations of carbon dating has been either an idiot or so isolated from the facts or any semblance of logic that their thought process was idiotic. Examining and then completely dismissing their beliefs is not 'close minded', its sane and reasonable.

I feel similarly about people who argue, with all seriousness, that the earth was carefully and deliberately built by God to appear to be older than 6,000 years especially as a challenge to their faith. Because in their mind, God wants them to swallow the beliefs of others as foregone conclusions, rather than actually be honest and think for themselves. This just seems lame and pathetically irrational to me. Like the squirrel example - it doesn't matter that its possible. When you invoke imaginary, invisible, omnipotent pranksters, then you can pretty much argue that anything is possibly true. You might as well believe that the Matrix movies are documentaries.

The time frame is important, but the point is not exactly about the time frame, its about the thought process behind the belief. I maintain that there is no intelligent, well informed thought process that could lead the 6k year conclusion. You threw out two other time frames, and I feel same way about those given. Bumping it up to some other arbitrary level which is not fully consistent with the current dominate conclusions raises the question "Why?" and I'd have to hear that persons thoughts on why before forming and opinions... but that would not be young earth creationism.






That was one of my points.



I don't know if you are being sincere here. It does appear to me that you have misunderstood the nuances of my position, my motive, and my point at several places in this thread, creating unnecessary tangential debates and strawmanning my arguments.

I am opposed to stupidity in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. As far as I know, there is no 'contrary evidence' when it comes to questions like 'did the big bang have a cause' (assuming it happened) and 'what caused the big bang'. There is a vacuum of evidence.



ID is also used as the positive assertion that that a supernatural force must have involved itself in the guidance of the evolution of life on this planet - that without ongoing guidance, life would not have evolved as we know it.

In my experience, 'evolution', 'creation', and 'ID' are all terms used to describe families of beliefs, rather than specific beliefs. Its important to pay attention to granularity, and precisely what a word meant in the context that it was used.

Maybe you were using ID only to refer to the most essential elements of ID - those which are shared by the majority of uses of the term - which would be.... that some kind of intelligence was in some way involved in the creation of life. Just because two people agree on this necessary essential quality for the meaning of ID doesn't mean they use 'ID' in sufficiently similar ways to draw logical conclusions or correlations. We immediately have equivocation fallacies. The same thing happens when people debate about evolution, democracy, capitalism, love, the list goes on.




No, that doesn't actually follow, at all. I just wrote a paragraph explaining this, but its getting tiresome. Do you see why? Do you see the difference between 'bringing probability into an assessment of sanity' in general, and calling anyone who believes in any improbably theory crazy? Do you see the difference between (a) theories of mind-controlling squirrels, bicycle-eating cats and (b) theories of the origin of life?

Thanks Lex!

Very interesting.

I find it easier to believe than the 14 billion old single universe idea.

Infinity calls for much more. Even more than trillions of years.

Infinity is infinite. No beginning and no end.

even tho i have never heard of this, this is what i've been thinking the last few years, and to me, this makes the most sense and logical timeline of events. thanks lex, i would like to read more about this theory.