Thread: Could the Big Bang be a local event?

I made this contention in the religion section, but am not so sure if it is actually correct.

Is there any way for us to know if the big bang is a local event in an infinite expanse? If the universe is small enough, we might be able to observe duplicate images of the most distant objects, but what if we don't observe such images?

Does the characteristics of the CMBR preclude an infinite universe as described above?

I don't believe min the big bang idea. The CMB could be the haze of distance since it is the same temperature as local space (2.7K) and not 3,270.K as predicted.

Where I live, I can see for miles and some mornings, while it is perfectly clear where I am, maybe a mile away there is an impenetrable haze. The mist is where I am too but is invisible close up. We have tens of billions of trillions of stars putting out microwave energy for billions of years. Where does it go? Space is filled with it. It could be extreme distance that lends it visibility.

The recent WMAP survey mistakenly measured hundreds of sources in our own galaxy which were believed to be in the CMB at the edge of the observable universe:


http://www.wired.com/science/space/n...07/11/big_bang


Who knows how big the universe is beyond the curtain of haze that makes up the CMB? Anything is possible. Since I believe that what we call space (a lack of anything which EMR, gravity, etc can travel through) existed even before the universe, then space can in theory go on forever. It is nonsense that the big bang idea which talks of a vacuum which can expand and was contained somehow in the speck which became the whole universe. How do you have a vacuum in a super-densely packed ball of material? Doh!

The Catholic priest to whom we owe Big Bang was Jesuit educated. Jesuits make sport of constructing logically valid nonsense - logic is their specialty. I don't think he was dishonest though. He just found a way to reconcile certain existential premises into a package both logical and resonant to most physicists and astronomers.

That doesn't make it wrong. :?

If the multiverse hypothesis is right then our universe might indeed be a locality among many others. Ever since I read about universes budding off from other universes I can't help thinking of the whole shooting match as a pile of Jerusalem artichoke roots.

http://planetgreen.discovery.com/foo...-artichoke.jpg

I doubt if the multiverse hypothesis can ever be proved but the LHC might provide some support for the idea, perhaps.

I like the OP's idea.

There's no guaruntee that the universe has boundaries. It could be totally infinite. The big bang could be something that's happening only here, while other areas of the universe are contracting. Maybe our area will contract again when theirs reach some critical point and begin to expand.

See this thread for a similar discussion.

Such an event within an already existing universe could have happened in two different ways:

1. The remainder of the previous universe is a black hole singularity without a size. This wouldn't be any different from the standard Big Bang paradigm.

2. The recent universe still had some measurable size before the second Big Bang happended. In order to be consistent with the observations, a Big Bang within an already existing universe with a size larger than zero would have had the following properties:

a) hot explosion
Reason: The cosmic microwave background (CMB) tells us that the universe must have been very hot at some time, even so hot that all matter was ionised and the universe was fully opaque.

b) liberation of "dark energy" to restart expansion
Reason: Current research attributes the expansion of the universe the properties of the miraculous "Dark Energy" that has a repelling character. It is NOT driven by an explosion. The "explosion" is the visible effect of the driving force.

c) had to happen everywhere at the same time
Reason: The CMB is fairly isotropic. If it had happened at one single spot are in a confined area, the CMB should possess a clear gradient.

d) a trigger with an infinite velocity of interaction
Reason: Anything that is able to cause an event across a non-zero extent must interact instantly everywhere. This implies that the propagation of such a cause must have an infinite velocity which contradicts everything we know today.

Ok, cool.

So then what would the inside of a black hole be like? Someone on another forum worked out that a dense cloud of gas (very dense I guess) with about an AU radius would have an event horison at that radius. At the event horison, space is curved inwards, so that a beam of light would follow space in a straight line from its own perspective, but from our conceptual outside perspective we know that it is following a curved path relative to the outside. So in a very large black hole, space would be curved in a similar way, but would it not work exactly as we imagine the big bang universe to work? That is, would traveling in a straight line from your own perspective in a huge black hole not have you end up where you started? Mind you, I am thinking of a "gas cloud" type black hole. How badly am I talking nonsense?

As for the infinte trigger thing:

Why would it need such a trigger? I am not sure I understand. Couldn't an initial chain reaction simply start off inflation? Do we even have an idea how inflation works? For instance, do we know what caused the first acceleration to FTL speeds?