Who all do you read? I recently got into this and am about a third of the way through "Big Bang" by Simon Singh. I'm going to attempt George Gamow's Mr. Thompkins series next
You name an author, and I've probably read some or all of their stuff. Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, Dick, Le Guin, Bradbury, Anderson, Ballard, Zelazny, Silverburg, Delany, Burgess, Aldiss, Haldeman, Varley, Adams, Sheckley, Vonnegut, and Herbert, to name a few.
For general but interested audiences, I like A Brief History of Time, and even a lesser-known book called The End of Physics (by Lightman, I think). Inflation is super-confusing to me, actually, and it's rare (in my experience) to find a good explanation. (I'm more of a plumbing and wiring physicist than the super-brainy kind anyway, as if that wasn't obvious by now.) The idea came about in the early 1980's (from Linde, as in the video, and also Guth) to possibly solve a bunch of riddles that confronted cosmology in the decades following Hubble's amazing discoveries and ideas. Why was the bang so symmetric? How do you go from pure energy at 10^ (-43) seconds to having a universe with all these different forces and fundamental particles? Things like that. "Inflation" was supposed to help solve a lot of those riddles. To me it always seemed kind of crazy, as if some God had to breath into the universe at this early key time, just to keep it going. But apparently these new measurements really do point to the model being closer to truth than just a useful fiction.
That becomes a religious or philosophical question. Physics has to give up when we back it up to the Planck time (incredible small fundamental demarcation of time).
all this stuff pretty much goes right over my head but i always thought the idea of a big bang went against science because i was always taught that one of the basic principles of physics is you can't make something from nothing.
That last bit is actually a philosophical statement and not a physics one. The big bang is uniformly embraced as the leading theory for the history of the universe because if you simply take everything we see now and follow the evidence logically backwards, it suggests everything was much smaller and hotter in the distant past. So much so that the universe appears to have expanded abruptly from a singularity (single point). Mind-bending conceptually, we have to admit. But the current universe is behaving just like the after-effects of a great explosion, 13 billion + years ago (or whatever the exact number is now).
Gravitational energy is negative, and it cancels out the positive energy found throughout our universe. Thus the 1st law of Thermo isn't violated. The total energy of the universe is zero. The magnificent thing about the BICEP data is that the idea of a universe spontaneously being created from the interaction of the particles/non-particles in a vacuum (based on QFT) and STILL being a zero-energy universe at creation... this likely happened with our universe. Of course this leads to more questions lol. I'm just wowed at how precise the instruments in this study were, and the ability of humans to look so, so, so far back in time at VERY tiny amount of time. For more technical information, I highly recommend people read the Nature journal.
OK, B-Bob, how does this new finding fit with the theory that our universe is the result of a black hole forming in some other universe? http://www.insidescience.org/content/every-black-hole-contains-new-universe/566
I find it most interesting the at least theoretically the selective bending of space/time is possible. Only problem now is that we have only witnessed it as a result of the most powerful expulsion of energy we know.
I don't recognize any of those names unfortunately - are some of them science writers or mainly sci-fi? I'm headed more in the physics direction. Appreciate it! Brief History of Time - my grandfather gave me that when I was 14 but I was too immature to be able to follow it let alone be interested in it. I'll definitely give it another go soon. Thanks for the reminder! I'll try the other recommendation too. B-Bob I might ask you for more suggestions later when I make good headway into some of these books. It's incredible how people come up with these models without experimental evidence until many years later. It's obviously not a shot in the dark but it must really take some excellent judgment and clarity of thinking to come up with a theory like inflation or LeMaitre's big bang, or even something less widely known like Goodricke and figuring out that Algol is actually two stars circling each other. So impressive.
rimrocker question #1: I don't even know. That's not necessarily wrong but I wouldn't call it mainstream as an idea though (???). rimrocker question #2: If inflation needed to move the boundaries of the universe faster than the speed of light, that doesn't necessarily bother me, but it's very possible I'm missing something there. (Again, *not* an astrophysicist by any means). The speed limit applied by special relativity really applies to an object (or information transmitted by an object) moving no faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Neither of those things really overlaps to the idea of what a boundary to the universe does. Maybe that's a cop out -- I haven't thought too much about it. It looks like I am more or less correct in my interpretation of these relativity questions: http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=383475
because the theory of special relativity is just that; a theory. we're already blasting subatomic particles into each other at 99.999% the speed of light (if i recall from chemistry, 2.9 x 10^8 m/s) in such places like the LHC. I'm sure in time, Einstein's theory will be disproved. Hell, for our sake I hope so. Otherwise it's going to take us a damn long time to physically explore our Galaxy/Universe.
While I'm thinking about it, if you make your way through those more general treatments and still want more details, it might be fun to consider something like an undergraduate textbook with all the trimmings. I really like The New Cosmos: An Introduction to Astronomy and Astrophysics by Unsöld and Baschek. It has a little bit of everything and especially the history of thoughts and discoveries on these problems. I am still amazed that: the idea that something other than our galaxy existed at all is still barely 100 years old (!) So all of this is so freaking new.
Speaking of expanding, can the pic of that zombie w**** be big enough now? It seems bigger every time it's posted, and it's already scary enough. Like a starving animal straining to reach food or something.
I'm not a scientist, but to me the only thing that could have produced the big bang is the end of a previous big bang. Energy can't be created or destroyed, just transformed. The end of one universe, is the beginning of the next.
