Solid Evidence for Big Bang...ON FOX NEWS?Follow

Your a moran.

I figured you had misspelled "your" for humor. I just didn't find it to be humorous.

As far as the topic is concerned, I thought the "Big Bang" had already been proven to the point of the Catholic Church acknowledging its plausibility?

I thought a Theory is by definiton unable to be proven. If it was proven, wouldn't it be a Law?

There is no such thing as scientific proof. Only a preponderance of scientific evidence.

A law is just a theory with loads of evidence behind it. In science nothing can be proven correct, only proven wrong (by finding results to the contrary).

In reality, most laws - Newton's Laws, Kepler's Laws, the ideal gas law - are all only valid within certain limits. Newton's laws, for example, and quite good for sizable particles (stuff observable with the visible spectra of light (even under a high powered visible light microscope)) if these particles aren't going too fast (near the speed of light). By contrast, the ideal gas "law" sucks ***. In principle, it is true for totally non-interacting particles - but find me a truely totally non-interacting particle, and I've got a bridge to sell you*. (Even Helium, the sort of "most ideal-esque" gas doesn't even come close to following the ideal gas law over a sizable range of temperatures and pressures). The van der Waal equation is vastly superior - but it is not a "law".

In practice, people used to name things laws and around 1900 or the late 1800's simply stopped. Maxwell's equations are not called "laws" (at least not all four of them - some have other names). Eintein's theories of relativity - just called theories even though they actually *reduce to Newton's laws* at low velocity (and thus are more accurate).


The "best" law (or theory) is simply known as quantum electrodynamics, and is not routinely referred to as either a law or a theory.

As far as I know, the most accurate measurement (e.g. most significant digits) in history is this "g" factor which has to do with the magnetic moment and angular momentum of an electron (in practice, g is a number quite close to the integer, 2). This measurement is consistent with quantum electrodynamics to some huge number of significant digits (something like 12, as I recall, vastly more then virtually any other quantity such as the mass or charge of an electron or proton has ever been measured).

In conclusion, right now the designations of "law" or "thoery" or "model" in science don't necessairly correlate with (decresing) certainty. If you want absolute certainty, go find some mathematical thoerms. Lastly (again) there is no such thing as scientific "truth". There are only well regarded "theories". They are all approximations - the better ones we know their limits.
___
* Note: it is a simple and enlightening exercise to derive the ideal gas law from basic thermal physics (the equipartition of energy)

I thought the Big Bang theory was not really about the actual bang at all, but more the aftereffects of the bang. Inflation theory picks up where Big Bang leaves off (going backwards in time).

In other words, the Big Bang theory accounts nicely for the expansion of the observable Universe both now and going back in time, but only back until shortly after the "explosion." Inflation theory then accounts for what was going on "near the beginning," both in terms of a rough sketch of the universe's structure (of incomprehensibly small size) and also the properties and processes of the super-rapid expansion.

As a side note, I find it interesting that some have theorized that because the known universe was at one point condensed into such a small size (or at least the precursers were), and everthing was all smashed up together, everything was (or became) causally connected.

After inflation and the continued expansion of the known universe, you can't help but think that perhaps the fundamental elements are still causally connected despite the vast distances that can separate them. Of course I'm getting at the whole "spooky action at a distance" sort of thing here...