"I mean if you believe that the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant from an blah blah blah"

That should imply that the matter which composes the known universe has always existed in some form or another.

I just can't agree with your miracle. There is a reason it is called a "theory", Nothing can be 100% proven.

A negation of time itself.

A better question is: why?

I just can't agree with your miracle.

There is a reason it is called a "theory", Nothing can be 100% proven.

What I find most fascinating about space expanding at an ever-increasing rate is that it means at some point there won't be any way for future societies to surmise that the Big Bang ever happened. Space will eventually expand at a rate faster than light can cross it, meaning future societies won't be able to see distant galaxies (or in the really long run, other stars). If you can't see distant points of light, then you can't measure their movement. If you can't measure the movement of distant points of light because you can't see them, then you won't know that everything in the universe is moving away from you. If you don't know that, then you can't reason backwards that at the beginning everything was much more compact. Meanwhile, the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang will eventually fade and redshift to the point where it is indistinguishable from every other background source of radiation. Without those two pieces of observational evidence (microwave background and galaxies receding in all directions), there will be no reason to have a Big Bang theory. We're basically living in the only time period where it is even possible to know how it all started.


It also means future societies---no matter how technologically advanced they become---will never be able to have a working knowledge of the size and scope of the universe beyond ours circa 1750 or so. That was when astronomers and philosophers first theorized that some of the nebulae in the sky were in fact other Milky Way's (and I don't think there was any consensus in favor of this theory until the 1930's).

A better question is: why?

I just can't agree with your miracle. There is a reason it is called a "theory", Nothing can be 100% proven.

You mean a reason why the universe exists? There is no "why". There is only "how".

There's a startling lack of scientists/engineers in here!

Many would disagree. Why are you trying to exclude an avenue of inquiry?

There's a startling lack of scientists/engineers in here!

Heat death does not refer to some sort of fiery termination point but a state of maximum entropy whereby no transfer of energy will occur due to the even dispersal of matter throughout the universe(thermodynamic equilibrium).

Nah, there are plenty on the board. They just get very tired of going through this once every two months, and seeing the Jesus freaks leave the thread just as Jesus freaky as when they came in. You can't fix missing brain.

:lol: Well yes in human terms, but arguably not in the context of the lifespan of a universe. I don't know, I can't remember when those two things (CMBR fading to nothing and space between galaxies expanding faster than light can cross it) are projected to happen, but potentially there could be a long period afterwards between the above scenario and heat death.

I've understood that gravity will hold certain things together, and it's the distance between these things which grows. I remember seeing something like that on a very large scale, matter (galaxy groups / clusters) forms thin strings, and that the strings are surrounded by vast bubbles of expanding void.