big bang, schmig bang: everything's just shrinking

DrChinese

Your thinking is seriously flawed.

Gravity is accounted for by GR as you know. The "serious" flaws you try to describe in the BB - mass of particles, strength of gravity, etc. - are really issues of the respective theories (GR, QM) and not the BB itself. Most physicists to not consider these flaws anyway - those theories treat them as free parameters not requiring a specific value. Failure to explain the value itself is not a flaw at all.

Theory evolves, and perhaps one day an answer to those questions will be discovered. In fact, it is no different than evolution not being able to explain why it took 4 billion years for intelligent life to develop on earth (versus 1 billion or 10 billion). Or perhaps you haven't bought into that yet either.

I don't agree that you are being picky with your science. The standard model is quite picky. You viewpoint is purely retro. However, I would be willing to meet you at the local watering hole to discuss ;)

Nereid

DrChinese addressed your points well, I feel. However, I'd like to expand on one point: the scope, or domain, of a scientific theory.

In economics, there's a thing called the theory of comparative advantage, and it's pretty good in its domain of applicability (industries which countries engaged in free trade should concentrate on in order to maximise the economic benefits to each country). However, it's useless for accounting for the photosynthetic pathways in plants, or the spectrum of hydrogen. And biologists, physicists and economists are quite relaxed about this.

Similarly, in physics there's a thing called general relativity (GR), and it's pretty good in its domain. .... you get the picture I'm sure.

So, wrt the Big Bang theories (there's more than one), its domain of applicability is the large-scale structure (and some small scale structure) and evolution of the universe, at least from the time of radiation-(ordinary) matter decoupling if not from ~Planck time.

Then there's how 'fundamental' a theory is. Crudely, ecology is 'just' biology, which in turn is 'just' chemistry, ... until you get to GR and the QM/QFT/SM (Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, the Standard Model); these two are the most fundamental theories we have. And, as has been noted many times in PF, there are regimes in which predictions of each are in serious conflict. The BBT is 'just' a theory built on GR and the SM, it does not supercede either, nor does it set out to. Some of its predictions may turn out to be very good tests of either GR or the SM ... let's see. Some of its components have strange new things - dark energy for example - but they are not things which 'overthrow' GR or the SM.

Your question about 'recession' is a good one; I'll address it in another post.

russ_watters

So what do you pick as an alternative?

jcsd

How does big bang theory not account for gravity? it comes from what could be seen as a theory of gravity (GR) and gravity plays key roles in nearly all of it's equations.

Jack Martinelli

Nothing yet.

Until someone derives the 26(http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/constants.html) fundamental constants from a fundamental idea, I won't accept anything.

The fundamentally correct idea, I think is: For every change there is an equal but opposite change.

Nereid

Why a binary world? Why not "for every change there are 10¹⁰⁰ equal and opposite changes"?

Jack Martinelli

Its not symetric. I don't know that the universe is actually symetric, but I think its a pretty good guess.

DrChinese

Well, the obvious answer to that is that GR essentially preceded the modern theory of the Big Bang. It is not dependent on it any way. Rather, the BB leads to predicted evolution of the universe according to GR. GR could be valid and the BB not be, because of the independence of the two.

Yet they both fit neatly with observations.

Quantum-lept

Okay, am i looking for redshift or redshit???!!!..Cosmology is so confusing!!

Vanadium 50

This is a six year old thread.