Cosmology insanity

What gives the Universe all the room to have enormous (or infinite)
space? It had to come from somewhere! What is the origin of
all the matter/energy in the universe? It had to come from
somewhere! If the universe has infinite size, does it also
have infinite energy? What created that?

Good grief, I know these are fundamental problems of cosmology but
it still drives me absolutely insane. I have a few cosmology books
here in the house, but they seem to tiptoe around a lot of these
issues and delve into other stuff, such as redshift and different
rehashes of what happened in the first second of the Big Bang.
I guess it wouldn't be proper for these books to speculate,
which is understandable, but I'd at least like to read an
inkling of speculation.

The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

PTM

On 10 Jul 2003 22:19:37 -0700, (Powdered Toast
Man) wrote:

The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

You'll feel much better if you just get over the notion that the Universe has to
be intuitive. It isn't, and why should it be? We live between the very small and
the very large. Things at both ends behave differently then they do here in the
middle. But they still follow a discoverable, consistent, and understandable set
of rules. I'm happy that we apparently live in a well behaved universe.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

(Powdered Toast Man) wrote in message . com...
What gives the Universe all the room to have enormous (or infinite)
space? It had to come from somewhere! What is the origin of
all the matter/energy in the universe? It had to come from
somewhere! If the universe has infinite size, does it also
have infinite energy? What created that?

Good grief, I know these are fundamental problems of cosmology but
it still drives me absolutely insane. I have a few cosmology books
here in the house, but they seem to tiptoe around a lot of these
issues and delve into other stuff, such as redshift and different
rehashes of what happened in the first second of the Big Bang.
I guess it wouldn't be proper for these books to speculate,
which is understandable, but I'd at least like to read an
inkling of speculation.

The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

PTM

God + Powdered Toast = Cosmic Inflation... BIG BANG Big Stinking Bang

(Powdered Toast Man) wrote in message . com...
What gives the Universe all the room to have enormous (or infinite)
space? It had to come from somewhere! What is the origin of
all the matter/energy in the universe? It had to come from
somewhere! If the universe has infinite size, does it also
have infinite energy? What created that?

Good grief, I know these are fundamental problems of cosmology but
it still drives me absolutely insane. I have a few cosmology books
here in the house, but they seem to tiptoe around a lot of these
issues and delve into other stuff, such as redshift and different
rehashes of what happened in the first second of the Big Bang.
I guess it wouldn't be proper for these books to speculate,
which is understandable, but I'd at least like to read an
inkling of speculation.

The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

PTM


Pretty tough thing to contemplate, for sure. Actually, the fact
that even one atom exists is amazing enough to drive a person nuts.
Big Bang, so what? Where did the material come from to start with?

HG

On 11 Jul 2003 04:00:23 -0700, MrGrytt wrote:


Pretty tough thing to contemplate, for sure. Actually, the fact
that even one atom exists is amazing enough to drive a person nuts. Big
Bang, so what? Where did the material come from to start with?

HG


Virtual particles! (?)

Lawrence Sayre

--
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as
a moral being, with his own happiness as the moral
purpose of his life, with productive achievement as
his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Ayn Rand (in the appendix to 'Atlas Shrugged')

Powdered Toast Man wrote:
.........The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

As Allan Sandage said: "Why is there something instead of nothing?"

If you think really hard about this, you will hurt your brain.
Seriously, I am confident that a scientist, or more likely a team of
scientists, will figure this out. In the meantime, have fun observing!

On 11 Jul 2003 12:16:40 GMT, Brian Sturges hotmail.com wrote:

PTM, have you considered the world view described in the Holy Bible?
Years
ago, I found that the Lord is very real and loves to become a part of our
personal lives. This made a lot of things fall into place for me-
including
the creation of the universe.
Of course, Genesis only records the few thousand years of human history
since it only sets out to lay the groundwork for the plan of human
salvation. But the infinite, eternal Creator is very capable of creating
"something from nothing" and modern science does not contradict the
historical and philosophical ideas found in the Bible.

Brian

Your answer introduces a significant level of additional complexities which
also border on (or perhaps more correctly: define) cosmological insanity.
Doesn't your arguement simply shift the topic of this discussion (that
being "Where did everything come from in the first place?") from
"Cosmological Insanity" to "Philosophical (or Religious) Insanity"? Your
answer begs the reduction to the age old question of "Who created the
creator?". It is a very weak arguement to sluff this off by simply
defining your creator as one who has always existed (and has always been
all knowing, all powerfull, etc...), and then attempt to circumvent all of
the current mathematical problems of cosmology [which stem from the
reduction to "infinities", as exist in most of the mathematical solutions,
when pressed to explain the first moments of time, black holes [beyond the
event horizon particularly], etc...) by asserting this "infinity of the
most infinite proportions" (I.E. God, [my definition]) as a mear fact
beyond any question or explanation. In the search for cosmological truth,
the insanity always appears to begin where the "infinities" are to be
found, and this is the basis upon which I stake the first sentence in this
paragraph.

Much of todays expansion of knowledge in the realm of cosmological
beginnings is happening (or will happen) because mathematical theories are
arrising (such as Superstrings and the M-Theory") which will not reduce to
the level of "infinity" (absurdity if you like) for any solution which can
be dervied from them, and which satisfy all of the known criteria with
which they can be tested. When the understanding which we will ultimately
derive from the mathematics of Superstring and/or the M-Theory (or
something more fumdimental) begins to filter down to our level of practical
existence (as was the case in the not too distant past when general
relativity and quantum mechanics resulted in such things as nuclear energy,
lasers, microwave ovens, X-Rays, CT Scanners, MRI, etc...) one can only
imagine (or to be more true to this point in our understanding, can not yet
imagine at all) the wonders of discovery, and the benefits to mankind that
will certainly blossom forth as a result! However, when one mires in the
knowledge of myth as fact, the benefit that results generally tends to be a
bit less by comparison. An interesting challenge indeed would be to list
the practical benefits to mankind that have been derived (solely) from an
intimate relationship with a god.

Lawrence Sayre

--
My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as
a moral being, with his own happiness as the moral
purpose of his life, with productive achievement as
his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.

Ayn Rand (in the appendix to 'Atlas Shrugged')

bwhiting wrote:
hey Toast,
look at it this way, and I realize I am trying to be practical
but not necessarily scientific. We know that the vaccuum has
an awful lot of 'potential' energy; in science class, have you
ever seen the two iron hemi-spheres placed together, then the
air removed from them with an air pump? 4 sets of horses on
each end cannot pull the two hemispheres apart with a vacuum inside
them. Kind of proving here that a perfect vaccuum must have a lot
of potential energy.

Sorry, but the vacuum itself has no potential energy. It's potential is
zero, it is the air pressure outside (i.e. at a higher potential) that
produces the potential energy. The PE level is [Patm-Pvac(=0)]*volume.
The force capacity is only one element of the potential energy. One could
generate the same force with almost zero potenital energy (e.g. two nearly
flat disks with a good edge seal). Take your vacuum sphere into space and
it couldn't stop a fly (assuming a fly could fly in space) ;-)

Bryan


So, picture a Perfect Void which existed prior to the Big Bang, loaded
with lots of potential energy....this Void was not the normal
space-time continuum that we live in today....it was a Perfect Vacuum.

(Our normal space today is not a perfect vaccuum...radio waves,
neutrino's flitting about, x-rays, gamma rays, hydrogen atoms, dust, etc)

And in my mind, it was an unstable Perfect Vaccuum, needing only the
slightest quantum fluctuation on the sub-microscopic level,
to unleash all that potential energy.
We have no idea what the 'structure' of this Perfect Void was, but
somehow, evidently, a major quantum fluctuation occurred that released
all that pent up energy from the Perfect Void, and that quantum
fluctuation, or the results of it, we call the Big Bang.
So in this humble layman's view, you are not really getting something
from nothing, you are simply converting potential energy to kinetic energy.
Lots of it.
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting





Powdered Toast Man wrote:
What gives the Universe all the room to have enormous (or infinite)
space? It had to come from somewhere! What is the origin of
all the matter/energy in the universe? It had to come from
somewhere! If the universe has infinite size, does it also
have infinite energy? What created that?

Good grief, I know these are fundamental problems of cosmology but
it still drives me absolutely insane. I have a few cosmology books
here in the house, but they seem to tiptoe around a lot of these
issues and delve into other stuff, such as redshift and different
rehashes of what happened in the first second of the Big Bang.
I guess it wouldn't be proper for these books to speculate,
which is understandable, but I'd at least like to read an
inkling of speculation.

The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

PTM

On 11 Jul 2003 12:16:40 GMT, "Brian Sturges"
wrote:

PTM, have you considered the world view described in the Holy Bible?

Why trade one totally non-intuitive and fantastical viewpoint for another? At
least there is tangible evidence for the cosmological theories under discussion
here.

_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com

To quote one of my professors: "if it was simple then any fool could
understand it"!

Del Johnson



"Powdered Toast Man" wrote in message
om...
What gives the Universe all the room to have enormous (or infinite)
space? It had to come from somewhere! What is the origin of
all the matter/energy in the universe? It had to come from
somewhere! If the universe has infinite size, does it also
have infinite energy? What created that?

Good grief, I know these are fundamental problems of cosmology but
it still drives me absolutely insane. I have a few cosmology books
here in the house, but they seem to tiptoe around a lot of these
issues and delve into other stuff, such as redshift and different
rehashes of what happened in the first second of the Big Bang.
I guess it wouldn't be proper for these books to speculate,
which is understandable, but I'd at least like to read an
inkling of speculation.

The idea of ANYTHING growing out of an absolute vacuum, no
matter what the circumstances are, is so counterintuitive it
is insane. The Universe shouldn't even exist! Aghh!!
More fodder to contemplate during my next observing night.

PTM