THE BIG BANG THEORY - PILLAR OF ATHEISM

  1. The Big Look
  2. Nuclear Fire and Microseconds
  3. Relativistic Warp
  4. God is Dead

1. The Big Look

The initial research which led to the Big Bang theory was done by Edwin P. Hubble. The famous orbiting telescope is now named after him. He measured the spectra of distant galaxies and noticed that the farther away they were the more their spectrum was shifted toward the red. To understand how a spectrum can be shifted toward the red consider the light from a star run through a prism or even better a diffraction grating that spreads it out according to color. The light from stars has very narrow bright or dark lines at known colors that are caused by the various elements. Each element has its own set of lines with unique spacing. It is possible to recognize the lines even when they have been considerably shifted. This now well known red shift is the signal of a high speed motion away from us. To see how hard his work was let me explain how distance is measured in astronomy.
For a few million close objects the distance can be measured by straight geometry. That means measuring the parallax or angle of the line of sight from two different locations. This is why people have two eyes for depth perception. The trick is to look at a star from two places that are very far apart. We are all stuck on the little planet earth, but fortunately the earth travels in its orbit around the Sun. The star distance is measured by taking a picture at two times, a half year apart, to get the greatest diameter out of the Earth's circular orbit. When the pictures are compared close stars are shifted a lot, nearby stars are displaced a small amount and very distant stars show no displacement at all and thus provide a fixed reference. Try looking at near and far objects while covering one eye with your hand, then switch to the other eye. You will see the same thing as the astronomers. The angle to be measured is very tiny. It is only a few arc seconds. An arc second is 1/3600 of a degree. As one measures more distant stars the angle gets smaller and more difficult to measure precisely. This method is good out to several thousand light years.
Unfortunately most objects are much farther than that. Another yardstick is needed. Fortunately there is a certain class of stars called variable stars. These stars change in brightness. Two groups of variables, the Cephids and the T Tauri variables are very regular. Also there is a relation between the brightness and period of flashing. Once this relation was calibrated using parallax with nearby stars, the search began for more distant variable stars of the same type in neighboring galaxies. This yard stick extended the trustworthy measurement of range out to tens of millions of light years.
Beyond that distance individual stars are hard to distinguish even with a big telescope. So another longer yardstick has to be made to reach out for hundreds of millions of light years. Indeed objects can be seen out to 7 billion light years. Most stars are part of a large gravitationally bound structure called a galaxy. Galaxies come in many different shapes and sizes and often dozens of them are formed into a cluster. The local group which we are in and which includes the Andromeda galaxy has about 40 members. Many nearby galaxies at known range were studied. The study tried to characterize the various types of galaxies according to shape and brightness. By comparing the apparent brightness of many distant galaxies with this brightness standard, the distance to these galaxies was determined at least on average. By measuring the red shift of the galaxies at the same time that the distance was measured, the relation of receding velocity and distance was determined. The process was repeated using groups of galaxies and thus the range of measurement was extended to the farthest objects that can be seen.
This measurement of distance by guessing the brightness of galaxies is not very accurate. It was known in the sixties only within a factor of two either way. Recently a technique for measuring distance based on supernova brightness has been used. The Hubble telescope spent many hours taking pictures in support of this effort. The famous 1987 supernova was the key. It was surrounded by clouds. Since the supernova makes a bright flash the light pulse spreads out in all directions forming a sphere that we see as a ring. We know when the light pulse started out and we can see it reflecting off of the clouds as it moves out. Knowing the time since the bang gives the radius of the brilliant ring. Measuring the angular size of the ring gives the distance accurately. This method is being used by the Hubble telescope on distant galaxies. Then by knowing the distance and red shift the Hubble constant can be calculated. It is between 45 and 100 km/sec/megaparsic. A megaparsic is one million times the distance at which the parallax angle is one arc second. As many galaxies as possible are being measured to make a full sky survey. It appears rather directly from this kind of survey that everything started near here in a big explosion about 14 billion years ago, and has been flying apart ever since. Let me explain this process. You know that in an explosion all the pieces start moving at the same time and from the same place. In the process of flying apart the fastest pieces go the farthest in every direction. Pieces that started at the same speed have gone the same distance. In the vacuum of space there is nothing to interfere with the motion of the pieces. For something as big as the universe there are plenty of pieces to look at to verify what I have described. Many thousands of measurements have been made, and there is a plan to have a computerized system make millions more. The distribution of recession velocities in space is spherically symmetrical. The speed increases linearly with distance. This is exactly what you see after an explosion. Moreover by knowing the speed at any distance you can determine when the explosion happened. The time of the explosion gives the age of the universe.
Now that was the classical way to visualize the universe. There is a nearly equivalent, and more correct, general relativistic way of looking at it. General relativity says that the objects in the universe are not really moving apart. Instead space is being created between them in proportion to the distance between objects. I cannot understand why this is not exactly the same thing I said before using different words but the Astronomers say it is a crucial point. This is still an expansion of sorts but because of the relativistic "warp" it does not have the exact velocity relationships one would expect in an explosion of objects expanding against gravity.
There is an important point to make about this explosion that started right here. There is nothing special about right here. The universe looks the same from every place in it. This is called the cosmological principle and many measurements have been made to check it although it started out as a postulate of relativity. It turns out that every piece of the universe was also right here at the start of the explosion.

2. Nuclear Fire and Microseconds

Today I can only speculate about the very first events associated with the Big Bang. Some of our physics rules surely must have been valid even then, but it is easier to start the story at the time 0.05 seconds. At this age the universe was in thermal equilibrium at 50,000,000,000 degrees Kelvin. The Kelvin temperature scale is very convenient because it has degrees the same size as centigrade (9/5 as big as Fahrenheit) and starts at absolute zero. It is abbreviated K. The density was 40,000,000,000, which means that many times the density of water. The size was maybe a few miles. The universe was thicker than steel and opaque but brighter than any light. It was a mean ball of fire.
Up to this time there had been a complete zoo of nuclear particles colliding with each other constantly and with each collision breaking up or turning into some other particle. Thus there were plenty of every kind. There are about 40 kinds of particles. Most of them decay within a billionth of a second into other particles anyway. The heaviest ones decay the fastest. In order of decreasing mass a partial list is Z, W, neutron, proton, mesons, electron, neutrino, photon and all their antiparticles. The universe was constantly expanding and cooling. The density was steadily decreasing. The proportion of various particles in the fireball depends on their masses with the heavier ones requiring more energy. Energy is the same as collision speed or temperature. By this time the universe had cooled so that the heavier particles became much less numerous. There are only four long lived heavy particles-the proton, neutron and their antiparticles. The particles and their antiparticles tend to annihilate resulting in a miniature explosion with lots of light pieces. Fortunately there was a small excess of matter over antimatter. The matter which was left over accounts for all the matter in the universe today.
After the heavy unstable particles were gone the medium mass unstable particles disappeared in turn. These were the mesons and their disappearance marked this period. The next significant event was at age 0.11 seconds. The temperature was 30,000,000,000 and the density was 30,000,000. The neutrons and protons differ by only a small mass so it was heretofore easy for them to change into each other. Now the protons could no longer get enough energy to change into neutrons and the supply of neutrons dried up. Neutrons are not completely stable. They disintegrate into a proton and an electron and an antineutrino with a half life of 12.5 minutes. That is not very long to you but in the billionth of a second world of nuclear particles a second is considered eternity. There were about two protons to one neutron at this time. Still the neutrons were steadily disappearing and that would be very bad for making atoms that need neutrons. More on this later.
The next event was neutrino decoupling at 1.1 seconds. The temperature was 10,000,000,000 and the density was 380,000. The universe got thinned out enough that neutrinos could no longer find lots of things to hit as they zoomed around at the speed of light. So because most of them have not hit anything since that time, they have kept their speed or temperature and have only appeared cooled by the expansion of the universe. You see because the universe is flying apart the neutrinos are catching up with faster and faster pieces as they move along. This makes the neutrinos look like they are going slower and slower.
At age 14 seconds the temperature was 3,000,000,000 and there was no longer enough energy in the photons to make electron positron pairs. Then the positrons all annihilated with electrons leaving photons. Fortunately there was a slight excess of electrons left over-enough to make all the atoms in the universe sometime later.
At age three minutes the first nuclei other than a proton-deuterium and helium became stable. Deuterium has one proton and one neutron and is stable. Helium has two of each. This meant that there was finally a mechanism by which neutrons could be saved from disintegration. So, like in the popular dance, all the neutrons that found a proton to pair up with were saved. The rest disintegrated and became protons. The universe is still mostly protons. This process accounts accurately for the ratio of neutrons to protons we see today and is considered strong evidence for the Big Bang theory.
The last elementary particle event was the formation of atoms at the age of 100,000 years. The temperature was 3,000 degrees, and below this temperature atoms can retain their electrons. Thus the electrons were captured by nuclei and atoms formed. The atoms were neutral and thus transparent to light. At that time the whole universe became transparent and if you had been there you would have seen a hole appear in the fire starting at your nose and growing at nearly the speed of light. This hole has continued to grow and the red shifted receding wall of fire is the farthest thing that it is possible to see. It is the 3 degree K (-450 degrees F) microwave background radiation that we see today in all directions.
To elementary particle physicists everything important happened by this time. Since then the universe continued to expand and cool. Small nonuniformities in the density of the hydrogen gas were unstable and collapsed under gravitational attraction to form the stars and galaxies we see today. The details of this process are not completely understood and this is considered the weakest point in the theory. If the universe was as uniform as the radiation indicates it is, then there may have been not enough time to form all the things we see today. This radiation is surprisingly uniform in temperature according to recent measurements with the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite. This is an unusual result considering the chaos that must have been present. To explain the uniform temperature the inflationary theory was invented. This little twist to the Big Bang theory says that the all the visible universe was close enough together to be in thermal equilibrium and that initially the expansion was a lot faster than was previously thought. This had the effect of making a large area with a constant temperature. The inflation happened at 10E-30 sec.

3. Relativistic Warp

I have been trying to visualize the geometry of the early universe. My speculation is that we are living in a 3 dimensional surface on a four dimensional sphere. The fourth dimension is the time since the Big Bang. Space was much more curved in the first few seconds than it is now. Imagine that you were there when the universe was three feet in diameter. If you put your eye at one pole of this hypothetical sphere and your finger at the other, you would be able to see your finger in all directions. If you had pushed your hands out in opposite directions they would have met because they traversed completely around the universe. If you were so fat and round that you occupied nearly all the volume in the universe you could have taken a deep breath and occupied the rest pushing out against yourself in all directions. Thus there is a finite volume in the universe and no edge. As for the actual cause of all this, what is called the singularity, it appears that time space and matter all originated in the same event. Time and space exist only in our universe. It has been speculated that all the positive mass and energy in the universe is exactly canceled by the negative universal gravitational attraction. This neatly explains the universe coming from nothing. Today the structure of the universe is nothing but information which possibly in the fullness of astronomical time can be erased.

4. God is Dead

The Cosmic Background Explorer satellite (COBE) was launched specifically to check details of the Big Bang theory which is now universally accepted. In all this as in all science there is not a single piece of evidence for an intelligent creator. Finally I want to call attention to certain so-called scientists who support religion by periodically announcing that they have found evidence of a creator. These individuals unlike the general public know science and its rules. They know that there is not a single piece of evidence that requires a departure from the atheistic view of the universe. Indeed there is not sufficient evidence to require modification of the present wholly materialistic theory in any area or it would be done. They know how science is done and that they are breaking the rules. They know but refuse to admit that religion is entirely fabricated. Thus they know that the statements they are making in support of religion are false. These statements are made only to appease the religious powers. There is only one thing to call them - liars.

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