Ray Comfort Banana argument owned on YouTube
Offline I just watched this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yArPNtiQDcM posted from an account that at the very least claims to be the Rational Responder's account. I had to comment on the error in it, just for your awareness. It states that the big bang that created the universe was most likely the result of two large objects that collided with each other. I commented in the comments on the YouTube video, but I wanted to say more, and YouTube's comments suck.
I don't know of any widely accepted Big Bang theories which argue that the big bang was caused by a collision. That just leads to more problems. The spiral and bowtie galaxies in the universe don't support this either. The spiral galaxies get their spirals from tidal forces of other galaxies in their vicinity. Gravitation acts over great distances. The bowtie galaxies are most likely the result of recent galactic collisions. The two galaxies dance around each other and the tidal tails look like the bows while the centers of the galaxies merging looks like the knot.
I think the most widely accepted Big Bang cosmology today is the Inflation model, which is the result of quantum vacuum fluctuations. The idea of the Big Bang itself comes from taking the observed expansion of the universe and running it backwards. When we do this we see all of the observable galaxies in the universe merging on a single point. It doesn't take a big leap of logic to conclude that the observed universe came FROM that single point.Another major error in te statement in that video about the big bang is that the Big Bang created the universe. I have had to endure many a long argument with many an ignorant theist about this point. No cosmologist claims that the universe was created by the Big Bang. They might say that the universe before the big bang was nothing to lay people, but they say this for the sake of simplicity. The universe always existed, it is a fundamental axiom of cosmology. Otherwise they have nothing to study. Sure they can study how the universe came into existence just after the big bang, and they do. But the whole purpose otheories like String Theory or Loop Quantum Gravity is to understand the universe BEFORE the big bang. This is because cosmologists believe that the universe always existed. The Big Bang only created the current configuration of the universe, and our physical laws. That's right the four fundamental forces of the universe were unified in the big bang "singularity".
Now the reason why cosmologists will sometimes say to lay people that the universe was created from nothing by the Big Bang is because it's sometimes difficult for lay people to grasp that the universe before the big bang was supermassive, infinitely dense, and had zero volume. People tend to equate Zero Volume in their minds with nothing. However they are ignoring the fact that the singularity was supermassive. What is the mass of nothing? But it's much easier just to say what the lay person will hear than it is to explain that the universe before the big bang occupied so little volume as to have it be none at all. This becomes a rallying point for creationists who like to claim that they reject the Big Bang because you can't get something from nothing. I then like to kindly point out to them that that's actually what creationism is all about. God created the universe from nothing.
Anyway, just thought I'd share, if this site really did post that video I would hope you'd want to correct this error which only serves to give creationists ammunition against the Big Bang.
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I agree. I haven't read of any theory stating that the expansion of the universe began with any kind of collision. What I was led to believe was that the universe used to equally consist of either 8 or 11 dimensions (more likely 11 due to some mathmatical matters that are beyond me) that fractured due to some instability inherent in that arrangement (don't ask me for details
). At that moment 'Time' which was formerly a spatial dimension turned into a linear dimension that we refer to as time. Until the fracture occured time was like height/width/length. Making the question of what happened "before" the Big Bang nonsensical. Those four dimensions expanded where as the others shrank. So the galaxies are not flying away from each other but rather the space between them is expanding.
That sounds correct from what I've read.
Sounds good. I've got no idea what that means when it comes to quantum vacuum fluctuations because I'm a "lay" person when it comes to physics. :P
Did you mean the three spatial dimensions and one linear dimension we now currently exist within? Or am I mixing up gravity, strong/weak nuclear force, etc...?
No, I can understand that much.
Disclaimer: Everything I've mentioned has come from books mainly written back in the 1990's so I'm rather dated and not really up to date with the current theories. However, even back then I considered myself a lay person when it came to it.
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Collision between two Membranes. M Theory stuff.
[Edit: It appears those youtube videos don't exist anymore
]
[Edit2: Nevermind I found the videos ] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/elegant/program.html
Sounds made up...
Agnostic Atheist
No, I am not angry at your imaginary friends or enemies.
I just looked at the video. It's seems to me that while the video is posted in the RRS account it was made by someone else.
Anyway, I think the collision thing is just a red herring. The point is that the bananna did not *poof* down during creation perfect for our consumption but rather that the bananna evolved to the shape and texture we see today.
I'm aware of the brane collision theory, it's biggest problem, though, is that, at least for the time being, it's unfalsifiable. We can neither prove nor disprove the existence of higher dimensions and thus the existence of M-Theory branes of dimension higher than 4. For this reason these branes are an interesting line of scientific inquiry, but are not widely accepted as a scientific explanation for the big bang.
Yes I am aware that the main point of the video was to address the atheist's worst nightmare. But creationists will not limit their objections to the video's main point. They'll ignore everything valid in the video, in fact, and attack whatever is in it that they feel they can tear down. This video essntially sets up a straw man argument for creationists to tear down in its statement that the big bang that created the universe was most likely caused by the collision of two massive objects. And that was the point of my post.
For the time being and based on available evidence, all theories that require the existence of extra dimensions are untestable. They're based entirely in the realm of mathematics, which is fine. Mathematics is the basis of theoretical physics, however mathematics is actually a philosophical discipline itself, and is allowed to assume things as axioms which are in no way based on observable phenomenon or anything we know about the real world.
It's possible that some day we could observe or in some other way scientifically proove the existence of dimensions higher than tha 4 we know from experience, but for the time being explanations that require such dimensions are not currently accepted as scientific models for the origins of the universe.
This isn't to say that scientists aren't excited about them. String Theory is a popular field and it describes a universe with up to 11 dimensions maybe even more, but last I read it was just 11. Many scientists believe that String Theory will ultimately explain the universe, this is possible, but String Theory's biggest draw back is that, at least for the time being, it is unfalsifiable. It makes a lot of very interesting statements about the universe which are mainly based on mathematics and an observed correlation between the math and reality, but, at least for now, its statements are untestable. The same goes for Loop Quantum Gravity which is another theory which attempts to explain the origin of the universe by understanding what happened before the big bang and immediately afterward. It makes many fundamentally different statements about the universe which also are so far entirely math based and also correlate with observed phenomena, and often the same observed phenomena as String Theory. But Loop Quantum Gravity, at least for the most part, works in the 4 observable dimensions of the universe.
And mathematically our experience of time could be explained as a linear succession of three dimension cross sections of four dimensional space.
Gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces were one big superforce until between 10^-43 to 10^-35 seconds after the big bang when gravity began to seperate from the other three forces. This is known as the grand unification epoch. Gravity split off first and is now observed as the weakest of the four fundamental forces.
Sounds made up...
Agnostic Atheist
No, I am not angry at your imaginary friends or enemies.
Mathematics is philosophical? That is an odd statement to me. Do not a lot of fields of science/engineering/etc. use mathematics to determine the exactly correct way to do things? I've never found a useful way that Philosophy is used. I thought math was a concrete way of representing reality that is used because it works. (I'm not being argumentative here. I'm actually quite interested to learn what you mean.)
This is an interesting aspect of gravity to me. I've read a few theories but just in passing. Why do you think that gravity is so weak compared to the other 3 forces?
"I am an atheist, thank God." -Oriana Fallaci
Mathematics is a form of philosophy mainly because mathematics doesn't restrict assumptions or lines of inquiry to what can be verified by observation of reality. Indeed mathematics isn't required to conform to reality in any way whatsoever. The fact that mathematics can be used to describe the world we live in is interesting, but is very likely an emergent result of the fact that the universe very consistently follows a set of rational processes. By that I mean processes which we are capable of understanding rationally, I don't mean to anthropomorphize nature. If this weren't the case, then very likely consciousness wouldn't be possible. If it were it would be no form of consciousness we could comprehend.
People who major in mathematics and only mathematics are not considered scientists, basically. The reason why mathematics is so useful in science, however, is because science is a form or subset of philosophy. Philosophy will allow any question and you can assume any premise, this is logically allowed. So long as the assumed premises aren't definitely false. So in philosophy and logic it is perfectly acceptable to assume true that which cannot be proven or disproven. As an example the existence of a god or deity is an acceptable assumption in philosophy and it is logically valid even though it can never be proven logically sound, so long as you reason from this assumption validly. This is acceptable in general philosophy. But in the philosophical subset of science only questions which can conceivably be proven false are allowable. The reason being that only these questions can we have any hope of ever coming to the truth of. So in science the question of whether or not there is a God is not allowed because the existence of God cannot be proven or disproven.
As for the question of why gravity is so much weaker than the other forces, this is an interesting question, and if we currently knew the answer to this question we would be well on our way to unifying gravity with the other fundamental forces. Granted we have so far only succeeded in uniting two of the four, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force into the electroweak force. These are still encouraging results for Grand Unification as they validate the search for a theory that unifies all four.
Some proposed reasons for the weakness of the gravitational force is:
If the universe has more than 4 dimensions, and gravity split off before the expansion and the symmetry breaking which lead to the seperation of the other three forces, the gravitational force may not be constrained to act in the 4 dimensions of space that the other 3 forces are. So part of the gravitational force may be leaking into higher spatial dimensions. A test has been proposed to determine if this is or is not the case. It may also prove the existence of dimensions higher than 4 in our universe.
There may be other proposed reasons, but this is the only one I've come across so far. Just throwing one out there, maybe when the gravitational force broke off it took the least of the energy with it, which is why it's so weak. In any event it's a very interesting question.