Human senses and brains are well adapted to understanding objects of sizes between a dust mote and a planet, and time scales between a second and a millennium. When it comes to scales of size, time and energy many, many orders of magnitude above or below those we are familiar with, our brains struggle. Lessons learned in childhood have to be cast aside. Wholly novel concepts have to be grasped. Approximations and analogies have to be pressed into service, inadequate as they are. Still, Prof al-Khalili is doing pretty well under the circumstances, isn't he?
The "before" thing is interesting. You can imagine matter being very dense. This means it doesn't take up any space, or not much. In a singularity such as the Big Bang (or a black hole), it is infinitely dense and thus takes up no space. That is kind of mind-boggling (how could the universe take up no space?) but you could sort of understand the idea. Time is a fourth dimension. At a singularity, there would be no time. As with space, it would come into being at that moment. Time's arrow, in this universe, only goes in one direction. If you follow that direction backwards, it arrives at zero - no time. It is therefore pointless to say "what came before?" as that implies that time was not zero. The answer is simply - there was no time, and therefore, no before. The universe came into being, with its space, matter and time all at once. That, as I understand it, is the Big Bang. You can't separate time from this event. Before, there were no events - no time, no before. Some people have postulated a bouncing universe - contracting to a Big Bang before expanding as we observe our current universe. Who knows? No one, actually.
Was the singularity the size of one neutrino or the size of a billion galaxies? Perhaps it amounts to the same thing.
I don't think you're getting it, are you! Science is not about proving things don't exist, it's about proving things do exist. In fact, I actually think you're trolling now.
No it doesn't, it absolutely obeys the laws of physics, it is anomalous due to hydrogen bonding between molecules of H2O You are right that we wouldn't be here without this effect, but that doesn't alter the we're here because we're here argument. If our world was not conducive to life there would be no life on it.
All of the evidence points towards there having been a big bang. We can almost see it today in the Cosmic Background Radiation that exists in every direction we look.
I though the latest observations suggested that the expansion of the universe was such that it would not slow down and eventually contract, infact that the rate of expansion was increasing ?
Sceince proves how things work, and occasionally why, rarley where it came from. Broken record I know but hey, balanced views as a concept is something many on here struggle with
Size is size. Small (or infinitely small) is not the size of a billion galaxies, but should contain the same amount of matter. No. I can't see what this could look like either. It defies comprehension. But as you yourself eloquently put it, we just aren't geared up to have a real understanding of stuff that small and that dense. Doesn't mean it can't be so, though.
The theories come and go. As I said "some people". Not sure if they are the latest people, the most credible people, or the most followed people.
I am happy that such an interesting thread should run to 20 pages and counting without being too stupid, or mentioning Scotland. Oh no. I've done it now.
At the moment of the big bang there was only energy and shortly after that energy coalesced into matter. I am led to believe
