And it continues to this day; William Lane Craig is a particularly egregious case, he continues to deliberately misrepresent contemporary cosmology as providing support for his Kalam cosmological argument, specifically the premise that the world/universe began to exist (and no doubt other apologists/theologians follow his lead here).
Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. No accepted or established scientific theory tells us anything either way. — Seppo
Great! So, I've been wrong all this time — TheMadFool
Any ideas why space would need to expand? — TheMadFool
Great! So, I've been wrong all this time
— TheMadFool
Strangely enough you didnt accept that when I told you that — Prishon
↪TheMadFool in the case of Craig, I think its quite clearly deliberate, not a good faith misunderstanding. He goes to great lengths to misconstrue contemporary science, despite having received responses from the very scientists he's misquoting/misrepresenting asking him to stop mischaracterizing their work (this happened with his misuse of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem).
But I don't think this is generally true. Many people just hear the popular science TV shows or Youtube channels refer to the Big Bang as the "beginning of the universe" and so just assume that must be true. But Craig knows better, and does it anyway — Seppo
What bothers me is why did cosmologists stop the extrapolation at, to quote Wikipedia, "...hot dense state..." They could've simply drawn the trajectories of all the galaxies back to a point just as William Lane Craig and I thought. It's not that there was a law against it, right? — TheMadFool
What bothers me is why did cosmologists stop the extrapolation at, to quote Wikipedia, "...hot dense state..." They could've simply drawn the trajectories of all the galaxies back to a point just as William Lane Craig and I thought. It's not that there was a law against it, right?
we need a quantum theory of gravity to describe what is happening... which we don't have. So we can't rewind any further, as we have no description of how physics works in those extreme conditions. — Seppo
So the Universe - as we understand it to be, via our models - is this classical realm dominated by its Euclidean flatness. We then look a little closer and have to come up with further models like GR and QFT that introduce some curvature and uncertainty. — apokrisis
QG might be regarded as a project that restores linearity to the physics in a way that will let us punch right on through the Planckscale event horizon and see what lies "beyond" ... as some extrapolatable continuation of a spacetime extent and its energy density content. But as with the Hartle–Hawking imaginary time proposal, everything we know and love as the metaphysically taken-for-granted might just curve into each other and thus vanish up its own collective arse.
They've actually looked to see if the universe shows overall curvature, and it doesn't. — frank
That's the prevailing view in physics right now. No singularity. — frank
So there are three generalised curvatures the Universe could have had - closed and hyperspheric, flat and Euclidean, and open and hyperbolic. The surprise is that it looks to be hyperbolic a — apokrisis
Well singularity is a technical term in maths for some kind of radical break or discontinuity in the smooth continuity of a function. So it can take many shapes. — apokrisis
, what you're saying is the backwards extrapolation of matter and energy in the universe approaches a single point but never really reaches it (asymptote). :ok: — TheMadFool
But I do object to the suggestion that there's anything "dogmatic" about pointing out that the parts of the BBT which are widely-accepted and observationally-corroborated don't include any beginning or origin of the universe. — Seppo
My only purpose is to counter the familiar and misleading talking point (found mostly in popular-level content on cosmology/BBT) that this is a generally accepted or observationally well-established part of the standard cosmological model accepted by most cosmologists, or that the BBT is primarily a theory of the origin of the universe (rather than of its development). It just isn't. — Seppo
No, it's flat and Euclidean. — frank
As I said, the prevailing view now is that there was no singularity of any kind. Big bangs happen from time to time in a greater universe that could be without limits. — frank
most of that dust has coalesced to form planets and other objects in the universe...including you and me. — Michael Zwingli
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