How could hundreds of thousands of astronomers and astrophysicists working over the last century, not to mention the tens of thousands currently publishing research, all be held back from revealing the truth?

Especially when they're actually fighting over each other trying to be the one to make such a revolutionary discovery. And picking apart everyone else's work for flaws, so that they can still be the ones to make that discovery for real.

And also the spirit of discovery and all that.

Can't we just say that they are all right? :) Then there would be no more fighting and they could drink tea together instead.

They are all wrong, and we'll never know the right one

I am the best astronomer because I say so. And I owned a telescope at some point, but some emotionally unstable fuckwad probably bashed it against a tree or something while he was camping.

Was the big bang actually that big? I mean, at the time there was nothing else around, so it probably just seemed big because there was nothing else to compare it to, and no other noises to drown it out.
I'm probably the first person who's thought about that. Look, I'm questioning science!

The phrase 'big bang' originally started life as a pejorative quip by a scientist in favour of the Steady State theory.

Also, the BB contained all the universe. Therefore all of space. Therefore all of time.

In short, it contained everything.

So yeah, it was pretty big.

Yeah, but maybe it wasn't so much a "BOOM!" as it was more of a "WHOOSH", there's no way to know.

The noise of all creation coming into being from a singularity is probably beyond the scope of human hearing.

If you were to make onomatopoeia of it, I would suggest copious uses of punctuation, changing colour a few times, bold text, cryllic font and changing to pictograms halfway through.

The Big Bang was tiny compared to Inflation.

I know. Milk is so much more expensive these days.

Oh, and the Big Bang was also minuscule when compared to the current size of the Universe. Obviously. Unless you believe in blue shift over red shift I guess....that's a scary thought. The universe is getting smaller.

There's alot of different theories on how the human population was formed, who knows?

This sentence must make perfect sense in your head. And that's all right.

An inflated balloon is larger than an uninflated balloon, but is still a balloon.

But it always has the same mass.

Mass and size are not the same.

But the Big Bang was an event, and the current universe is a state. It's like saying burning a tree is nothing compared to a forest fire. The former contains an transferel of almost nothing to something, and the latter is just a continuous state of somethings.

There's probably better chemist language for this BUT I DROPPED CHEMISTRY WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN BITE ME

You can argue the current universe is also an event, but there was nothing in STM's post to hint at that.

Technically the state of the current universe is still the Big Bang in progress, sort of. If the Big Bang was a huge explosion that hurled everything outward, then the universe expanding is a direct result from that. Until gravity starts to overtake the explosive force, at which point it will shrink again until we are all crunched to death and the entire process begins again.

You haven't understood expansion. Gravity will never overtake the explosive force, because the universe's expansion is accelerating. Due to Dark Energy (translation: "We don't really know why, yet. But we're working on it."), the universe is spreading itself out faster and faster.

Oh, so we'll get ripped apart. That's fun too, I guess.

What?

I mean seriously what?

Just let Havoc have his own little world. Whatever makes him happy.

There's multiple theories. If the universe would shrink it would all condense in a big pile of energy. If it forever expands then eventually (in billions and billions of years) stuff would start to disintegrate.

I'm no scientist, I'm just saying some of the stuff I happened to have read.

If it forever expands, the most likely explanation is the heat death of the universe via entropy.

Not

The universe tearing itself in two

How does that even work?

I think Havoc meant that if the Universe shrunk, we'd be ripped to shreds by the resultant force.

Don't get too hung up on poetic language versus descriptive language is science (says BM, the master of getting hung up on that).

In a few more eons (I don't know the actual time frame) most of the universe will have sped beyond the extent of the visible universe when the space between us is expanding faster than light can traverse it. If we existed in that period, it would be impossible to know about the big bang and most of cosmology, because all the evidence will have been erased.

I figured matter disintegrating on an atomic level. Atoms getting ripped from one another by faster and faster expansion.

That was the mainstream opinion until recently, when an article was published that suggested that the universe's expansion is accelerating fast enough that the rip will happen before heat death. I don't know if that's widely accepted yet or not, though.




It's not that the universe would tear in two. It's that everything would be too far apart for gravity to hold it together. Each star would split apart from the rest of their galaxy, the planets would fly away from their stars and, eventually, the stars and planets and all matter would fall apart.

That's kinda sad :(

Well it's been proven that in a vacuum of absolutely nothing, certain particles/atoms appear. Out of literally NOTHING.
... And yeah. That's all I got. The absolute beginning of everything.
Maybe all these little particles and stuff very slowly got bigger and bigger, forming gasses and then solids, and with all that pressure it eventually caused the big bang?
... Who knows. I really wish we had the answers though.

Yes, but then they instantly disappear in to nothingness. Both sides of that equation must be true for Quantum Theory to hold.

Jesus had the answers, but we killed him.

The Prometheans are so going to make us pay for that.

Ah, thanks for that. I didn't know about them vanishing, but it makes sense.

What shape is the universe? If it is ever expanding, then it isn't yet infinite because in order to be still expanding there needs to be room for it to expand.
So what happens when you get to the edge? Is it spherical so you just go round and round?
Does one get to the end and then there's nothing but black?
What's the definition of the universe? Are there things outside of it?

Sorry if I'm asking dumbass questions, I love space but I'm not well versed in the subject.

No-one knows if the universe is finite or infinite. No-one knows what shape it would be on the outside. That's because all we're aware about in the universe is that range of it that is visible to us, and that is limited by the speed of light and the age of the universe. The universe is about 13.75 billion years old, and we can only see those parts of the universe that were close enough for light to have reached us in that time.

In terms of expansion, it's not necessarily the universe itself that is expanding (although that might be happening too), but rather that everything in it is spreading apart.

Engineers, not Prometheans.

Prometheans are the new badguys in Halo 4: The Quest for Holographic Pussy.

D: I though he meant those Halo 4 guys!notrly Give my rep back

WHATEVER IT'S STUPID NO MATTER WHAT YOU CALL THEM.

So, how exactly do atoms appear out of nowhere? And why just in that particular spot?

Here you go.

Good luck.