Big bang surpasses speed of light

Originally posted by ThePrankMonkey
iof course i find the very idea that everything came from nothing and before all of this nothing existed to be disturbing to say the least, it all had to come from somewhere...right?

You've just asked the most perplexing question in the universe. Everything that occurs is the result of some other act or cause. We also know that matter cannot create matter. Therefore, the universe could not have created itself. That leaves us searching for the answer. Some call this the "uncaused cause". Obviously, this requires a belief in a Supreme Being or Creator. IMHO, it's the only plausible explanation for our existence and, again, the concept of infused knowledge and instantaneous thought is consistent with the Big Bang.

Originally posted by CommonSense

Originally posted by ThePrankMonkey
iof course i find the very idea that everything came from nothing and before all of this nothing existed to be disturbing to say the least, it all had to come from somewhere...right?

You've just asked the most perplexing question in the universe. Everything that occurs is the result of some other act or cause. We also know that matter cannot create matter. Therefore, the universe could not have created itself. That leaves us searching for the answer. Some call this the "uncaused cause". Obviously, this requires a belief in a Supreme Being or Creator. IMHO, it's the only plausible explanation for our existence and, again, the concept of infused knowledge and instantaneous thought is consistent with the Big Bang.

matter wasnt created. it was just condensed to an infinate amount at the point of the big bang.

Yes. Cause and effect. Something must have caused the big bang and some thing must have caused what caused the big bang to happen to happen. This could go on for infinity.

Theres another possiblity that the universe could be a huge quantum fluctuation.

or a big implotion (the big crunch) happened. the multiverse theory is actually pretty interresting on that account. if one pictures the universe as a bubble, growing to unknown proportions until it bursts and restarting itself. i don't know if this sounds plausible but....who knows.

Quicksilver, I looked in my books a bit and I think I can explain why a black hole isn't formed when something reaches the speed of light.

The stress-energy tensor is derived from the 4-momentum vector and the stress-energy tensor is the source of the curvature. I am not going to use the stress-energy tensor to show that nothing happens, but I'll show that the size of the 4-momentum vector is the same in every (inertial, otherwise I cannot use the Minkowski metric η reference frame. The 4-momentum vector has the following components: p0 = E/c = mc, p1 = px, p2 = py, p3 = pz. Using the convention that γ = 1/(1-v^2/c^2)^1/2 and m = γ*m0, you can write the vector as:

(γ*m0*c, γ*m0*vx, γ*m0*vy, γ*m0*vz)

The size of a vector can be determined by squaring it. The size of the 4-momentum tensor is therefore p^2. We are going to write this in tensor language. In normal geometry the answer is p^2 = d_ab*p^a*p^b. The result of this would be E^2+px^2+py^2+pz^2. However, because we work in spacetime we use the Minkowski metric η ( diag(-1,1,1,1) ) instead of the Kronecker delta d ( diag(1,1,1,1) ). The result is p^2 = η_ab*p^a*p^b = -E^2+px^2+py^2+pz^2. Using the other notation:

p^2 = -(γ*m0*c)^2 + (γ*m0*vx)^2 + (γ*m0*vy)^2 + (γ*m0*vz)^2
p^2 = γ^2*m0^2*(-c^2+vx^2+vy^2+vz^2)
p^2 = m0^2*(-c^2+v^2)/(1-v^2/c^2)
p^2 = -m0^2*c^2*(c^2-v^2)/(c^2-v^2)
p^2 = -m0^2*c^2

And because m0 and c are constants, the size of the four-momentum tensor is always the same.

Of course, BigBang surpassed the speed of light, since it created light!

Also, I heard* that during BigBang when it was around 100000 years old, light was coupled into matter which was very densely packed and thus if it was emitted at all, it couldn't go anywhere. That's the reason why we can't look back at BigBang through light. This fascinates me!

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* - curious.astro.cornell.edu...
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[edit on 18-7-2004 by jp1111]

but i thought that energy could never be anything other than energy, like energy can only be changed into other forms of energy. and that make no sense to me that matter can travel faster than the speed of light even if light is matter, that means we could put so much pressure on ourselves to shrink us down and then travel faster then the speed of light, i think it has to be impossible. there has to be something wrong witht the theories i think

Honestly, i don't think we (humans) have the mental capacity to REALLY realise how large the universe is, or if it even has an end. The Big Bang Theory is simply a way to explane what we can not understand.

The only way we'll really get a grasp on it's size, etc will probably be with outside help.

actually the universe is sort of warped through the 4th dimension so if you set out to find the edge of the universe you would sort of end up where you started, the closest thing is to say if you take someone from a 2 dimensional world and put them on earth and have them find the edge of the world they will eventually (if they travelled a straight line) will come back to where they started, that is the commonly accepted theory

Originally posted by websurfer
I think you have to look at "special relativity," because of the high gravitational force present at the time of the big bang.

do a google on special relativity.

Wasn't it "general relativity" that added gravity to the equation?

I'll try to explain this without getting too complex.

Mass creates gravity.
Gravity "compresses" space-time.
The Big Bang "singularity" had arbitrarily large amount of energy/mass.
The photons created during the "Big Bang" did not travel any faster as they do today.

As the bang began, space literally unfolded as the gravity produced by the "singularity" decreased.

As a limited example, I will demostrate this by focusing on 10 photons.
Each of these dots are traveling at the speed of light away from the point of origin, there speed is constant (the speed of light).
.
became
..........
Because the "area" the mass is distributed over increases the mass at any one point decreased.
This in turn created less gravity. Space unfolded a bit and it became:
. . . . . . . . . .
more area = less mass at any given point, thus it became:
. . . . . . . . . .
which became
. . . . . . . . . .
which became
. . . . . . . . . .

The particles did not change in velocity. Space itself was changing its nature.

(ew, code box)

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