Saturday, March 16, 2019

The Big Bang: Are We Missing Crucial Pieces?

In the last three blog posts I have discussed some of the details still being investigated about the big bang and subsequent development of the universe and our solar system. Some of these issues are used by young earth creationists who claim the universe is only a few thousand years old in an attempt to discredit the big bang. I have addressed (1) poor strategies used to cast doubt on certain scientific discoveries, (2) issues with the formation of our solar system, and (3) fine tuning observations that are addressed by cosmic inflation. These particular subjects were brought up by a reader of this blog who asked about them and directed me to a few videos by young earth creationists. The list of questions asked by this reader have all been answered except for two: what about the missing antimatter, and what about the missing population III stars? Let's try to determine whether these are truly missing and, if so, what does their absence say about our understanding of the origin of the universe.

Saturday, March 9, 2019

Some "Problems" with the Big Bang

In 1936 Albert Einstein wrote, "One may say 'the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.' ...The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle."1 This remark is often paraphrased as, "The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible." Of course I agree with this statement made by one of the smartest human beings who ever lived. Like Einstein, I find it quite remarkable that our universe is comprehensible and that we can discover and explain how it works and then precisely describe its workings using the language of mathematics. One of the most amazing facts that has been discovered by observing the universe has to do with its very origin and subsequent development. It is unlikely that any scientist who lived when Einstein was born in 1879 would have predicted that our universe would provide unambiguous insight about its history almost all the way back to its very beginning. Yet that is exactly what has occurred. From Edwin Hubble's 1929 discovery that all galaxies are moving apart from each other with a relative speed that is linearly dependent on their separation distance, to Arno Penzias' and Robert Wilson's 1964 discovery of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation which is the residual heat from the infancy of our universe, to the accurate measurements of the CMB spectrum made by the Planck satellite in 2010, the universe has provided an amazing, accurate, and remarkable story of its beginning. All of the observational evidence and theoretical calculations tell a consistent story about the big bang origin of our universe: that all of space, time, matter, and energy came into existence nearly 14 billion years ago.

Over the decades starting in the early twentieth century, the scientific evidence that supports the big bang origin has become stronger and stronger. As described in a previous post, scientists were reluctant to accept the big bang partially because of its philosophical implications. If our universe had a beginning then it may have had a beginner. But because of the overwhelming evidence, scientists now agree about the origin of the universe and its development from about a trillionth of a second after its origin until now, although there is much discussion about what may have happened before that time since we have little observational evidence concerning the first trillionth of a second of our universe.