What is Digg?644 Comments
- Vullkan, on 05/18/2008, -7/+450I like it, it's not politics
- Nath4n, on 05/18/2008, -6/+233That's one big ass satallite
- th3heretic, on 05/18/2008, -5/+148Where are the turtles to hold it up?
- chkdg8, on 05/18/2008, -16/+145In the beginning, Quantum Fluctuations was reported live by: http://i27.tinypic.com/15wb91c.jpg
- nagayoshi, on 05/18/2008, -7/+125Dude, I still want to know where the particles that started the big bang came from.
- rocketman42, on 05/18/2008, -6/+98I can see my house!
- DeskFlyer, on 05/18/2008, -2/+63No it's a big ass-satellite.
- SQLserver, on 05/18/2008, -6/+63Congratulations.
You are the only digg troll that I know by name.
There are several elegant theories that describe what happened before the big bang without any flaws.
Of course, it is speculation.
Obviously, what is not speculation is this:
ALL of the TONS of evidence points towards a 13.7 billion years old, or at least billions of years old universe, that started expanding in an explosion about 13.7 billion years ago.
Scientists do not pretend to know what happened before the big bang.
The Big Bang does not violate ANY laws of nature; It simply states that the universe quickly started expanding from an extremely dense singularity around 13.7 billion years ago. - iChaz, on 05/18/2008, -8/+63"first there was nothing... which exploded."
- Bologner, on 05/18/2008, -39/+92HEATHENS! Everyone knows the Earth is 6,000 years old and flat!
- clickx, on 05/18/2008, -3/+50politics.
- o3rat, on 05/18/2008, -7/+46Whats that black stuff around the universe?
- TacticalPenguin, on 05/18/2008, -3/+38Sigh. Because some people still don't get it, I'll add it on for him:
/sarcasm - inactive, on 05/18/2008, -2/+36exactly, i get that there was a small ball of dense energy and it exploded, but i want to know
1. where it came from
2. what happened before it went Kaboom! - Derelict267, on 05/18/2008, -4/+36If you look closely enough you can see the monolith.
- SQLserver, on 05/18/2008, -1/+32Joking, right?
right? - DropTheOxygen, on 05/18/2008, -1/+30Wtf is with his head, it may be the position the picture was taken in, but wow...
- Buckeye17, on 05/18/2008, -0/+28What is the stuff outside the universe?
- DYNAMICENTRYYY, on 05/18/2008, -5/+28Epoch fail.
- nicksauce, on 05/18/2008, -0/+22Jimmy please don't try to pretend that you're a physicist, or even that you know ***** all about the subject. If you did you would know that there is nothing in the laws of physics that prevents space from expanding faster than the speed of light. There is nothing in relativity that says space can't expand faster than the speed of light, it merely says that information can't travel faster than the speed of light.
Look what you can find in two minutes by doing a google search:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_s ...
"The metric expansion leads naturally to recession speeds which exceed the "speed of light" c and to distances which exceed c times the age of the universe, which is a frequent source of confusion among amateurs and even professional physicists.[1] The speed c has no special significance at cosmological scales." - tschau, on 05/18/2008, -1/+23The graph is of a progression of time though, and chronology lends itself rather well to directional linearity. I'm hoping not many people took this to be the shape of the universe, as it obviously wasn't the intent.
- Jabertsohn, on 05/18/2008, -0/+21This is a graph showing the expansion of the universe against time. It does not depict the actual shape of the universe.
- Apocalypse321, on 05/18/2008, -4/+24One of the theories is that it goes in cycles, that the universe expands to a point and then starts shrinking and then reaches a critical point that is unstable and explodes causing the universe to start expanding again. But still, the question remains how did it start. And that theory is pessimistic because it means that even if humans conquer the universe and we don't destroy ourselves, we are ultimately doomed when it collapses again. Also what is it expanding into? Are there more independent universes? What happens when they touch?
Universal theories hurt to think about because they are a never ending path where most answers are likely impossible to find unless we figure out a way to leave the universe and look at it from outside.
Ponder that while I go find some aspirin. - TremorX, on 05/18/2008, -1/+20The Outerverse.
Oh yeah. - thallium205, on 05/18/2008, -2/+20Where did the quantum fluctuations come from?
- Brainmodder, on 05/18/2008, -1/+19Nope, stuff comes into and out of existence constantly on the subatomic scale. It is in fact possible for a football to materialize out of nothing, it's just highly improbable. It gets even spookier when you consider Boltzmann Brains.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzman_brain) Quantum mechanics will freak you out!
- mrm3x1can, on 05/18/2008, -1/+18i usually hate when people write this but i literally LOL'ed XD
- 68024, on 05/18/2008, -0/+16This graphic is also referenced in Brian Cox' TED talk on the LHC: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/253
- riskybeats, on 05/18/2008, -0/+16Damn, with this kind of skepticism and a broader approach, you could actually make leyweigh in a scientific based community. I had never heard of this problem until I looked it up. I'm serious.
But here's my problem: You make it sound like since that is a scientific issue, and that it doesn't obey certain theories/standards we have right now, that it will be insolvable, thus your argument wins by default. It's not like scientists don't realize this is a problem, except unlike you, they are actually working on it. All you can do is poke at certain problems they have until they figure them all out.
When you say you have to suspend traditional ideas of time and space, they do. It's called quantam physics, which works in the framework they have to explain the beginning and much of the expansion of the big bang. - MasterThief117, on 05/18/2008, -1/+17or about digg.
- da_bradler, on 05/18/2008, -0/+16thinking of it as an explosion is actually the first mistake. the big bang wasn't actually a bang, it was a rapid expansion, nothing technically exploded.
There are a lot of theories as to what was before the big bang, my favorite is that the universe acts in cycles, so everything expands out to a point then falls back in on itself due to gravity. This compresses the universe in a tiny tiny spec then it expands again. so the "big bang" happens over and over again and has no beginning and no end. - nicksauce, on 05/18/2008, -2/+18There are something like ten million million million million million million million million million million million million million million (1 with eighty [five] zeroes after it) particles in the region of the universe that we can observe. Where did they all come from? The answer is that, in quantum theory, particles can be created out of energy in the form of particle/antiparticle pairs. But that just raises the question of where the energy came from. The answer is that the total energy of the universe is exactly zero. The matter in the universe is made out of positive energy. However, the matter is all attracting itself by gravity. Two pieces of matter that are close to each other have less energy than the same two pieces a long way apart, because you have to expend energy to separate them against the gravitational force that is pulling them together. Thus, in a sense, the gravitational field has negative energy. In the case of a universe that is approximately uniform in space, one can show that this negative gravitational energy exactly cancels the positive energy represented by the matter. So the total energy of the universe is zero.
- Stepehen Hawking, a man much smarter than you - Doomxeen, on 05/18/2008, -1/+16So you're simply positing that the theory of evolution and the big bang ASSERT how life and the universe were "created"???
You do realize that is completely flawed, yes?
Neither of them attempts to describe how anything was created, simply how things progress.
Just sad to see a 47 year old with less of an ability to reason than a lot of 10 year-olds. - MasterThief117, on 05/18/2008, -0/+15So, the Internet is a series of universes?
- EntropyFan, on 05/18/2008, -0/+15Linear time, or time itself for that matter, exist within the universe, from the moment of fractured symmetry to now. Concepts like 'before' or 'after' exist only once within the universe.
Stephen Hawking asked an interesting question. Imagine you go to the North Pole. Exactly. Right over the very spot. Where is 5 miles North of your location?
The question itself is meaningless. 'before' time started? If there isn't time, how do you have before?
how did nothing first explode? Define 'something', without using 'nothing'.
- evilesttoast, on 05/18/2008, -5/+20america, ***** yeah
- tschau, on 05/18/2008, -0/+15dude... you can't try to talk about the most abstract physics concepts possible and use language like "goin on b4". It's just not right.
- StuTheMeatMan, on 05/18/2008, -0/+15Yeah I guess the "Science >> Space" category shouldn't have any stories about the creation of the universe. Thanks for telling us that.
- Acidwire, on 05/18/2008, -1/+14That is a very large "if."
This is how you sound to everyone else:
No. But if science reveals that natural laws would not allow for the appearance of presents under the Christmas tree, then the only alternative would be Santa or some other supernatural gift-giver.
That statement is technically correct, but it doesn't make for a very effective argument. - MacSuxWindozSux, on 05/18/2008, -1/+14He was already married 4 times by that time.
/Larry King Joke - ByteGuerilla, on 05/18/2008, -1/+13Everywhere.
You can see them when you look out your window, or turn on your tv. You can feel them them when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes. - DanSheldon, on 05/18/2008, -0/+12Who defines the natural laws you are so fond of?
Things that seem natural to us, without the application of science, fail under different circumstances. What temperature does water boil at at sea level? How about on top of Everest? Is that in defiance to natural order?
We observe, study, and learn, constantly adapting what we may have at one point considered to be true according to new information. We work with theory, with ideas, some of which seem crazy and some of which are proven to be as such. But, we also find those that are shown to contain at least a glimmer of truth. We are in a constant effort to find out just what happened so many years ago. We take it one chunk at a time. If tomorrow we had all the information to show exactly what happened at the Big Bang we would move on to what happened before that and then before that and then before that.
What we consider natural order now, may very well change over the coming years. This is not bad, this is good. This would be evidence that we had learned and grown. In just the same way that illness caused once by demons and spirits were eventually found to be caused by bacteria, viruses and other observable things.
You are welcomed to believe in god. However, for one so concerned with the natural order, I would question the idea of an entity that creates natural order to just disrupt it (aka miracles, divine intervention). - arobicha, on 05/18/2008, -0/+12Religion, gas... what's the difference?
- Dimensio, on 05/18/2008, -0/+12"So, you're cool with matter and energy popping in and out of existence WITHOUT cause...but the idea of God who is without a cause is illogical, unverifiable, and unsupportable, huh?"
Quantum particles have evidentiary support. Can a similar statement be truthfully stated for a "God"? Please define this "God". Please state the specific properties of this "God" and explain the objective and repeatable observations used to infer the existence of this "God". - Vector713, on 05/18/2008, -0/+12IDK if you're being funny or serious.
- Exbzurq, on 05/18/2008, -1/+13Its a nibblonian satellite. When the big bang occurred their civilization was already 17 years old.
- nicksauce, on 05/18/2008, -4/+16Furthermore, do you care to explain how god creating the universe from nothing doesn't violate 'every law of nature'? Oh wait, standard logic doesn't apply when discussing religion. Forgive me.
- imightbewrong, on 05/18/2008, -0/+12in terms of time it is
-
Show 51 - 100 of 655 discussions
The Digg Toolbar for Firefox lets you Digg, submit content, and keep track of Digg even when you're not on the Digg site. Download the official 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is 