Janna Levin, a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, narrates this two-minute video about The Big Bang. Watch it in high definition here.
Short video about Big Bang
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Barnard College is not "of" Columbia University -- it's a separate but affiliated entity.
Well, that clears that up.
Please come to my place and share in some boxed wine while we discuss hot spaces further.
Great pace, slick graphics, concise explanation-- onward with an entire series, already.
“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
-Terry Pratchett
Gee, all that, just to create ... ME.
(or maybe you, if you insist)
I prefer the term "Horrendous Space Kablooie" obviously from Calvin and Hobbes, I was unable to find the comic on gocomics.com but I found it somewhere else, The wikipedia article claims it was done Sunday June 21 1992 but that's another comic on gocomics...
I took a class about science once. The first step of the scientific method is "Observe something."
--Terrence McKenna, 1994
Created from nothing, or as we catholics say, ex nihilo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
"its nothing but the potential to exist" -
and - multiple universes - megaverse:
that rings some bells what some famous Cabbalists
were writing... Hundreds years ago ...
What's up with the heaving bosom at 1:07-1:08? Sheesh.
buddy66:
Buddy, see, cosmology shows galaxies, stars, planets, us, the weather
All that be, far as we see, is Big Bang screamin' out away forever
When we were wee, old John the Beatle, LSD assisted, said it better:
"I am he as you are he as you are me as we are all together."
This video seems very inacurate and almost nothing to do with science. Since when can you create matter out of nothing and since when did time not exist?
Ummm, that was pretty basic. I mean, nice graphics and all, but you should be on top of all that when you're 10 or 11 (assuming you have some interest in it).
Also, space and time were "created"? For that to happen, we need a "Creator", do we not?
Jewels said:
I'm assuming you're trying to suggest the theory is fundamentally flawed because the big bang cannot be directly observed.
In fact we are able to observe a great deal to corroborate this theory, from background radiation first discovered in the mid twentieth century through to hubble's deep space images from shortly after the event is expected to have occurred.
Given how remote this event is from us in time, space and scale, the fact that we can observe so much about our origin is a great tribute to our intellect and the scope of our thirst for knowledge.
Since prior to the existence of time and space.
This is going to be a long day, isn't it.
If a "year" is one trip of our Earth around our Sun, what does 14 million of them have to do with anything related to time before our galaxy even existed?
So... she just described god.
Come on, everyone knows that God did it...
Yay, an accurate link to cosmology on bb!
#14, #16: please be aware that your preconceptions about science are almost certainly totally wrong. One of the troubles about popular science getting slicker and easier to understand is that, without the intervening period of disequilibrium normal to learning a new subject, you just stack the new information on top of your old misconception.
Thus your comments `this is totally obvious WAIT doesn't it fundamentally disagree with my understanding?'
#14
How about some modesty? Surely you understand that this is a public lecture, and therefore does not present the math & theoretical frameworks that inform our understanding of how the universe began?
#15
No, that's exactly the point. We don't. Doesn't mean there wasn't one, mind you.
@Chorske
I think if something is "created", then there has to be a creator. My point is that given the nature of philosophical debate about this subject, it is a poor choice of words.
I'd suggest "spontaneously came into existence".
@teufelsdroch,
I have no idea how your comments relate to what I wrote @ #16. Can you expand a little?*
*Actually, thats an hilarious pun.
how can you give a time line to an event that invented time as we know it? VIA THE SUN? Isn't time dependent also on gravity? or space? Wait how can you have either in the creation of both?
Ahh, good to see that at the end there's still some gaps for god left to hide in.
wonder if we get the short end of the stick wrt teh anthropic principle. like, it says there's gotta be life for that life to observe it, but doesn't say anything about the quality of that life?
like maybe the parameters of this universe are only marginally favorable, and there's like way more optimal settings in some other universes in the megaverse. like some plants growing in a piece of ground that's always in the shade or something.
anyways, so much for the misanthropic principle. but I stubbed my toe, so plancks constant is blatanly off somewhere.
nice vid, zomg, it's full of stars, etc.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_J5rBxeTIk
Anonymous,
All that formatting that you put in nuked your YouTube links. Just put in simple URLs with no html.
For those who take the explosion out of nothing as impossible since nothing is created from nothing and therefore that it implies the existence of God, where does God came from then?
Also, saying that it came out of nothing is just a way to say that it did not come out of the dimensions we know (just as in 2-dimension a third is irrelevant). But then that only pushes the issue of whether ex-nihilo or whether preexistence origin further back!
You know, there is a middle ground between religious fundamentalism and scientific reductionism. It's called philosophy. The esoteric branches of virtually every religion believe that consciousness is the fundamental principle from which time, space, matter and energy devolve.
Is there a scientific consensus on the state of the universe at T=0? From Hawking I thought all the matter and energy in our universe was condensed into zero space, making it infinitely dense. Somewhere later I was given that it was just super-duper dense, about the size of a period. More recently I read that our presently observable universe was that small, but that dense mass actually extended infinitely. Now this lady says there was no energy or matter at all. Of course there was no "before" the big bang, but what was initial condition?
No. Which is why there are a lot of very speculative, counter-intuitive theories around to describe how it might have occurred (like the infinitely expanding / contracting universe, or energy transferred from another dimension).
The point is, we have evidence strongly supporting the idea that the universe is expanding from a singularity. We've been able to make predictions based on this assumption, and observe results confirming these predictions.
Just because our consistent application of good science has led us to a paradox, it does not follow that we have to panic, hastily abandon scientific reason, and grab any diety that happens to be at hand. It may simply indicate we are grappling with a question at the threshold of our powers of comprehension.
Such questions are the best ones.
This makes me ask: how can such smart people embrace such wild speculation and hope and hypothesis, and still dismiss idea of God as absurd, or even merely improbable?
The simple version is that as we go back in time towards a t=0, everything gets closer together.
The simple extrapolation is that at time=0, everything was infinitely dense.
The big idea of relativity is that space itself is getting bigger. Stuff didn't just expand into a pre-existing space.
The problem is that at t= 10^-43 seconds the standard physics theories (general relativity and quantum theory) stop working.
That's why we end up with all these theories about whether there were string/branes interacting in a higher dimension or whether there was a big bounce or whether a black hole in another universe crapped out our universe.
The truth is we don't know what happened, but we do know that time 'before the big bang' is either a meaningless concept (like north of the north pole) or else 'negative time' remains useful mathematically but beomes something very different from out current everyday understanding of time (like a square with a negative area).
We do know that space wasn't hanging around doing nothing waiting for a big explosion.
Also, in response to #8. We did. It was called the cosmic microwave background, it showed the expansion. At first we though it was pidgeon poo on the telescope, but that's another (true!) story.
Ice cream headache!
Concerning T=0:
The problem that we run into here (in layman's terms) is the stronger a gravitational field is, the slower time moves relative to a lesser gravitational field. With gravitational strength reaching infinity (due to the massiveness and density of the ENTIRE UNIVERSE condensed to a point), time basically stops. well, we dont know WHAT it does, but maybe you might guess it "didn't exist yet."
What keeps creeping to the front of my thoughts is this: If time becomes infinitely slow relative to what must be infinitely fast, one wonders if such "singularities" (and black hole phenomena) are triggered when "infinitely slow time" comes to an end, long after time has ended(?) in the relatively fast remaining space(nothingness?). I realize there is no point of view (in modern theories) to compare "singularity time" to, since all of space and time is condensed into one point, but the nagging still remains.
Geez, i need to finish "The Elegant Universe" quickly. This stuff is killing my brain.
To comment #1: You are incorrect. "Barnard College of Columbia University" is 100% true. At Columbia University there are 4 undergraduate colleges, Columbia College (CC), Barnard College (BC), the School of General Studies (GS) and the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS). Check the diplomas: the women of Barnard graduate from "Barnard College of Columbia University" just as the men and women of CC graduate from "Columbia College of Columbia University"