The Evidence For The Big Bang In 10 Little Minutes

Yes, I dumbed-down, but sometimes that helps people understand...

...AND it's the only way I know. :)

Recommended reading:

"In Search Of The Big Bang" by John Gribbin.
"The Alchemy Of The Heavens" by Ken Croswell.
"The Whole Shebang" by Timothy Ferris.
"Big Bang" by Simon Singh.
"The First Three Minutes" by Steven Weinberg.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• big
• bang
• evidence
• cosmology
• astrophysics
• atheism
• atheist
• bible
• christianity
• jesus
• qur'an
• islam

[puncheex]

Got to take you on one thing, though, Phil. In the intro you say, "The theory does NOT say the universe comes from nothing...". In fact, that begs the title of the physicist Lawrence Krauss' new book, "A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing". The Lambda_CDM theory starts with an empty universe (no space, no time, just the omnipresent quantum foam).

[philhellenes]

@puncheex "...just the omnipresent quantum foam." That is not "nothing". :)

[penngbwoiG]

Thank you, I didnt know much about the big bang and I can now say I belive in it. Although that feeling of realisation didnt give me the pre-mentioned euphoria you mentioned =p .

[philhellenes]

@penngbwoiG You must be young. ;)

It's impossible for a 10 minute video to take you from "I didn't know much" to being almost certain. You shouldn't be convinced about ANYTHING by a ten-minute video. It took me several books to get there, several different concepts and the way they inter-relate (you need some atomic understanding too).

Try some books listed in the notes section under the video. I can't guarantee it will "hit" you if you do, but I doubt it can if you don't.

[uniteordie1]

@MrLive2praise It is so funny when religious people make vain attempts to sound intelligent. They make fools of themselves and provide entertainment for the truly informed and intelligent.

[Bruno53ification]

I am no scientist. And scientific terms can be difficult for me to understand. But it makes sense, But you still going to have morons, and USA is full of them, "denying" the evidence for the Big Bang. Am I right, Mr Rick Perry of Texas? Am I right, Mr Rush Limbaugh, fat idiot?

[waslambla]

Wait....whos lukes father?

[puncheex]

@philhellenes: True enough. Yet is is neither matter or energy; it is the substrate that quantum interaction happens against, and I don't know enough to talk about it. Perhaps after I get a copy of Krauss' book. Cheers.

[puncheex]

... I had just noticed that line; funny how things sometimes just don't register.

[puncheex]

@PRJking: String theorists have some ideas, but that is all they are, is ideas based on requirements of their theory about matter. Very, very tentative.

[puncheex]

@mikebaxtersc5: I'm not sure there is a method for determining the age of white dwarfs. In particular, they can spend a long, long time as dwarfs, slowly cooling off.

As for the CMBR, that temperature is directly measurable; in fact, that is exactly what the WMAP satellite does, determining microwave levels and using a black body radiation model to determine the temperatures; it does that very precisely for many, many points in the celestial sphere around it.

[cuckoonest168]

@mikebaxtersc5 ok its quite complicated but if you really want to learn - look up Hubble's Law. It involves looking at how much stars and galaxies are red-shifted.

[keythief]

@philhellenes So I'm just thinking out loud here...but if white dwarfs are 'burned out stars' , that is, stars that have lived their life, how can they only be as old as the universe....don't stars live long lives ? ....like billions of years. Seems to me that the age of the universe must be at least the number of years of a stars life (it's age).. 'before' it became a white dwarf plus the age of the white dwarf.