Norman Samish wrote:
>
>
> > Norman Samish wrote:
> >> And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A "quantum
> >> fluctuation of virtual particles" I'm told.
> >
>On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote:
> > Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there
> > is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came
>before
> > the Big Bang or "caused" it.
> >
>
>Patrick Leahy wrote:
>Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the
>"fluctuations"
>in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform,
>come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently
>the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot
>of successful predictions to its credit.
>
>Norman Samish writes:
>Perhaps I didn't express myself well. What I was referring to is at
>http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/planck.html, where Sten Odenwald
>hypothesizes that random fluctuations in "nothing at all" led to the Big
>Bang. "This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at
>the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, 'The reason that
>there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable.' ". . .
>"Physicist Edward Tryon expresses this best by saying that 'Our universe is
>simply one of those things that happens from time to time.' "
>
But as I said, this idea is pure speculation, there isn't any evidence for
it and we'd probably need a fully worked-out theory of quantum gravity to
see if the idea even makes sense.
Jesse
Received on Mon Jun 06 2005 - 13:56:03 PDT