Misconceptions about the Big Bang

Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong.

The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist. Cold molecular things such as life-forms and terrestrial planets could not have come into existence unless the universe, starting from a hot big bang, had expanded and cooled. The formation of all the structures in the universe, from galaxies and stars to planets and Scientific American articles, has depended on the expansion.

Forty years ago this July, scientists announced the discovery of definitive evidence for the expansion of the universe from a hotter, denser, primordial state. They had found the cool afterglow of the big bang: the cosmic microwave background radiation. Since this discovery, the expansion and cooling of the universe has been the unifying theme of cosmology, much as Darwinian evolution is the unifying theme of biology. Like Darwinian evolution, cosmic expansion provides the context within which simple structures form and develop over time into complex structures. Without evolution and expansion, modern biology and cosmology make little sense.

INFLATING BALLOON is a good analogy for understanding the expansion of the universe. The galaxies on the surface of the balloon are effectively at rest, and yet as the universe expands, the distance between any two galaxies increases. The galaxies themselves do not increase in size.

The expansion of the universe is like Darwinian evolution in another curious way: most scientists think they understand it, but few agree on what it really means. A century and a half after On the Origin of Species, biologists still debate the mechanisms and implications (though not the reality) of Darwinism, while much of the public still flounders in pre-Darwinian cluelessness. Similarly, 75 years after its initial discovery, the expansion of the universe is still widely misunderstood. A prominent cosmologist involved in the interpretation of the cosmic microwave background, James Peebles of Princeton University, wrote in 1993: "The full extent and richness of this picture [the hot big bang model] is not as well understood as I think it ought to be ... even among those making some of the most stimulating contributions to the flow of ideas."

Renowned physicists, authors of astronomy textbooks and prominent popularizers of science have made incorrect, misleading or easily misinterpreted statements about the expansion of the universe. Because expansion is the basis of the big bang model, these misunderstandings are fundamental. Expansion is a beguilingly simple idea, but what exactly does it mean to say the universe is expanding? What does it expand into? Is Earth expanding, too? To add to the befuddlement, the expansion of the universe now seems to be accelerating, a process with truly mind-stretching consequences.

When some familiar object expands, such as a sprained ankle or the Roman Empire or a bomb, it gets bigger by expanding into the space around it. Ankles, empires and bombs have centers and edges. Outside the edges, there is room to expand into. The universe does not seem to have an edge or a center or an outside, so how can it expand?

A good analogy is to imagine that you are an ant living on the surface of an inflating balloon. Your world is two-dimensional; the only directions you know are left, right, forward and backward. You have no idea what "up" and "down" mean. One day you realize that your walk to milk your aphids is taking longer than it used to: five minutes one day, six minutes the next day, seven minutes the next. The time it takes to walk to other familiar places is also increasing. You are sure that you are not walking more slowly and that the aphids are milling around randomly in groups, not systematically crawling away from you.

This is the important point: the distances to the aphids are increasing even though the aphids are not walking away. They are just standing there, at rest with respect to the rubber of the balloon, yet the distances to them and between them are increasing. Noticing these facts, you conclude that the ground beneath your feet is expanding. That is very strange because you have walked around your world and found no edge or "outside" for it to expand into.

The expansion of our universe is much like the inflation of a balloon. The distances to remote galaxies are increasing. Astronomers casually say that distant galaxies are "receding" or "moving away" from us, but the galaxies are not traveling through space away from us. They are not fragments of a big bang bomb. Instead the space between the galaxies and us is expanding. Individual galaxies move around at random within clusters, but the clusters of galaxies are essentially at rest. The term "at rest" can be defined rigorously. The microwave background radiation fills the universe and defines a universal reference frame, analogous to the rubber of the balloon, with respect to which motion can be measured.

This balloon analogy should not be stretched too far. From our point of view outside the balloon, the expansion of the curved two-dimensional rubber is possible only because it is embedded in three-dimensional space. Within the third dimension, the balloon has a center, and its surface expands into the surrounding air as it inflates. One might conclude that the expansion of our three-dimensional space requires the presence of a fourth dimension. But in Einstein's general theory of relativity, the foundation of modern cosmology, space is dynamic. It can expand, shrink and curve without being embedded in a higher-dimensional space.

n this sense, the universe is self-contained. It needs neither a center to expand away from nor empty space on the outside (wherever that is) to expand into. When it expands, it does not claim previously unoccupied space from its surroundings. Some newer theories such as string theory do postulate extra dimensions, but as our three-dimensional universe expands, it does not need these extra dimensions to spread into.

In our universe, as on the surface of the balloon, everything recedes from everything else. Thus, the big bang was not an explosion in space; it was more like an explosion of space. It did not go off at a particular location and spread out from there into some imagined preexisting void. It occurred everywhere at once.

If one imagines running the clock backward in time, any given region of the universe shrinks and all galaxies in it get closer and closer until they smash together in a cosmic traffic jam--the big bang. This traffic-jam analogy might imply local congestion that you could avoid if you listened to the traffic report on the radio. But the big bang was an unavoidable traffic jam. It was like having the surface of Earth and all its highways shrink while cars remained the same size. Eventually the cars will be bumper to bumper on every road. No radio broadcast is going to help you around that kind of traffic jam. The congestion is everywhere.

Similarly, the big bang happened everywhere--in the room in which you are reading this article, in a spot just to the left of Alpha Centauri, everywhere. It was not a bomb going off at a particular spot that we can identify as the center of the explosion. Likewise, in the balloon analogy, there is no special place on the surface of the balloon that is the center of the expansion.

This ubiquity of the big bang holds no matter how big the universe is or even whether it is finite or infinite in size. Cosmologists sometimes state that the universe used to be the size of a grapefruit, but what they mean is that the part of the universe we can now see--our observable universe--used to be the size of a grapefruit.

Observers living in the Andromeda galaxy and beyond have their own observable universes that are different from but overlap with ours. Andromedans can see galaxies we cannot, simply by virtue of being slightly closer to them, and vice versa. Their observable universe also used to be the size of a grapefruit. Thus, we can conceive of the early universe as a pile of overlapping grapefruits that stretches infinitely in all directions. Correspondingly, the idea that the big bang was "small" is misleading. The totality of space could be infinite. Shrink an infinite space by an arbitrary amount, and it is still infinite.

Another set of misconceptions involves the quantitative description of expansion. The rate at which the distance between galaxies increases follows a distinctive pattern discovered by American astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1929: the recession velocity of a galaxy away from us (v) is directly proportional to its distance from us (d), or v = Hd. The proportionality constant, H, is known as the Hubble constant and quantifies how fast space is stretching--not just around us but around any observer in the universe.

Some people get confused by the fact that some galaxies do not obey Hubble's law. Andromeda, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is actually moving toward us, not away. Such exceptions arise because Hubble's law describes only the average behavior of galaxies. Galaxies can also have modest local motions as they mill around and gravitationally pull on one another--as the Milky Way and Andromeda are doing. Distant galaxies also have small local velocities, but from our perspective (at large values of d) these random velocities are swamped by large recession velocities (v). Thus, for those galaxies, Hubble's law holds with good precision.

Notice that, according to Hubble's law, the universe does not expand at a single speed. Some galaxies recede from us at 1,000 kilometers per second, others (those twice as distant) at 2,000 km/s, and so on. In fact, Hubble's law predicts that galaxies beyond a certain distance, known as the Hubble distance, recede faster than the speed of light. For the measured value of the Hubble constant, this distance is about 14 billion light-years.

Does this prediction of faster-than-light galaxies mean that Hubble's law is wrong? Doesn't Einstein's special theory of relativity say that nothing can have a velocity exceeding that of light? This question has confused generations of students. The solution is that special relativity applies only to "normal" velocities--motion through space. The velocity in Hubble's law is a recession velocity caused by the expansion of space, not a motion through space. It is a general relativistic effect and is not bound by the special relativistic limit. Having a recession velocity greater than the speed of light does not violate special relativity. It is still true that nothing ever overtakes a light beam.

The primary observation that the universe is expanding emerged between 1910 and 1930. Atoms emit and absorb light of specific wavelengths, as measured in laboratory experiments. The same patterns show up in the light from distant galaxies, except that the patterns have been shifted to longer wavelengths. Astronomers say that the galactic light has been redshifted. The explanation is straightforward: As space expands, light waves get stretched. If the universe doubles in size during the waves' journey, their wavelengths double and their energy is halved.

This process can be described in terms of temperature. The photons emitted by a body collectively have a temperature--a certain distribution of energy that reflects how hot the body is. As the photons travel through expanding space, they lose energy and their temperature decreases. In this way, the universe cools as it expands, much as compressed air in a scuba tank cools when it is released and allowed to expand. For example, the microwave background radiation currently has a temperature of about three kelvins, whereas the process that released the radiation occurred at a temperature of about 3,000 kelvins. Since the time of the emission of this radiation, the universe has increased in size by a factor of 1,000, so the temperature of the photons has decreased by the same factor. By observing the gas in distant galaxies, astronomers have directly measured the temperature of the radiation in the distant past. These measurements confirm that the universe has been cooling with time.

Misunderstandings about the relation between redshift and velocity abound. The redshift caused by the expansion is often confused with the more familiar redshift generated by the Doppler effect. The normal Doppler effect causes sound waves to get longer if the source of the sound is moving away--for example, a receding ambulance siren. The same principle also applies to light waves, which get longer if the source of the light is moving through space away from us.

This is similar, but not identical, to what happens to the light from distant galaxies. The cosmological redshift is not a normal Doppler shift. Astronomers frequently refer to it as such, and in doing so they have done their students a serious disservice. The Doppler redshift and the cosmological redshift are governed by two distinct formulas. The first comes from special relativity, which does not take into account the expansion of space, and the second comes from general relativity, which does. The two formulas are nearly the same for nearby galaxies but diverge for distant galaxies.

According to the usual Doppler formula, objects whose velocity through space approaches light speed have redshifts that approach infinity. Their wavelengths become too long to observe. If that were true for galaxies, the most distant visible objects in the sky would be receding at velocities just shy of the speed of light. But the cosmological redshift formula leads to a different conclusion. In the current standard model of cosmology, galaxies with a redshift of about 1.5--that is, whose light has a wavelength 150 percent longer than the laboratory reference value--are receding at the speed of light. Astronomers have observed about 1,000 galaxies with redshifts larger than 1.5. That is, they have observed about 1,000 objects receding from us faster than the speed of light. Equivalently, we are receding from those galaxies faster than the speed of light. The radiation of the cosmic microwave background has traveled even farther and has a redshift of about 1,000. When the hot plasma of the early universe emitted the radiation we now see, it was receding from our location at about 50 times the speed of light.

The idea of seeing faster-than-light galaxies may sound mystical, but it is made possible by changes in the expansion rate. Imagine a light beam that is farther than the Hubble distance of 14 billion light-years and trying to travel in our direction. It is moving toward us at the speed of light with respect to its local space, but its local space is receding from us faster than the speed of light. Although the light beam is traveling toward us at the maximum speed possible, it cannot keep up with the stretching of space. It is a bit like a child trying to run the wrong way on a moving sidewalk. Photons at the Hubble distance are like the Red Queen and Alice, running as fast as they can just to stay in the same place.

One might conclude that the light beyond the Hubble distance would never reach us and that its source would be forever undetectable. But the Hubble distance is not fixed, because the Hubble constant, on which it depends, changes with time. In particular, the constant is proportional to the rate of increase in the distance between two galaxies, divided by that distance. (Any two galaxies can be used for this calculation.) In models of the universe that fit the observational data, the denominator increases faster than the numerator, so the Hubble constant decreases. In this way, the Hubble distance gets larger. As it does, light that was initially just outside the Hubble distance and receding from us can come within the Hubble distance. The photons then find themselves in a region of space that is receding slower than the speed of light. Thereafter they can approach us.

The galaxy they came from, though, may continue to recede superluminally. Thus, we can observe light from galaxies that have always been and will always be receding faster than the speed of light. Another way to put it is that the Hubble distance is not fixed and does not mark the edge of the observable universe.

What does mark the edge of observable space? Here again there has been confusion. If space were not expanding, the most distant object we could see would now be about 14 billion light-years away from us, the distance light could have traveled in the 14 billion years since the big bang. But because the universe is expanding, the space traversed by a photon expands behind it during the voyage. Consequently, the current distance to the most distant object we can see is about three times farther, or 46 billion light-years.

The recent discovery that the rate of cosmic expansion is accelerating makes things even more interesting. Previously, cosmologists thought that we lived in a decelerating universe and that ever more galaxies would come into view. In an accelerating universe, however, we are surrounded by a boundary beyond which occur events we will never see--a cosmic event horizon. If light from galaxies receding faster than light is to reach us, the Hubble distance has to increase, but in an accelerating universe, it stops increasing. Distant events may send out light beams aimed in our direction, but this light is trapped beyond the Hubble distance by the acceleration of the expansion.

An accelerating universe, then, resembles a black hole in that it has an event horizon, an edge beyond which we cannot see. The current distance to our cosmic event horizon is 16 billion light-years, well within our observable range. Light emitted from galaxies that are now beyond the event horizon will never be able to reach us; the distance that currently corresponds to 16 billion light-years will expand too quickly. We will still be able to see events that took place in those galaxies before they crossed the horizon, but subsequent events will be forever beyond our view.

In Annie Hall, the movie character played by the young Woody Allen explains to his doctor and mother why he can't do his homework. "The universe is expanding.… The universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!" But his mother knows better: "You're here in Brooklyn. Brooklyn is not expanding!"

His mother is right. Brooklyn is not expanding. People often assume that as space expands, everything in it expands as well. But this is not true. Expansion by itself--that is, a coasting expansion neither accelerating nor decelerating--produces no force. Photon wavelengths expand with the universe because, unlike atoms and cities, photons are not coherent objects whose size has been set by a compromise among forces. A changing rate of expansion does add a new force to the mix, but even this new force does not make objects expand or contract.

For example, if gravity got stronger, your spinal cord would compress until the electrons in your vertebrae reached a new equilibrium slightly closer together. You would be a shorter person, but you would not continue to shrink. In the same way, if we lived in a universe dominated by the attractive force of gravity, as most cosmologists thought until a few years ago, the expansion would decelerate, putting a gentle squeeze on bodies in the universe, making them reach a smaller equilibrium size. Having done so, they would not keep shrinking.

In fact, in our universe the expansion is accelerating, and that exerts a gentle outward force on bodies. Consequently, bound objects are slightly larger than they would be in a nonaccelerating universe, because the equilibrium among forces is reached at a slightly larger size. At Earth's surface, the outward acceleration away from the planet's center equals a tiny fraction (10^–30) of the normal inward gravitational acceleration. If this acceleration is constant, it does not make Earth expand; rather the planet simply settles into a static equilibrium size slightly larger than the size it would have attained.

This reasoning changes if acceleration is not constant, as some cosmologists have speculated. If the acceleration itself increased, it could eventually grow strong enough to tear apart all structures, leading to a "big rip." But this rip would occur not because of expansion or acceleration per se but because of an accelerating acceleration.

The big bang model is based on observations of expansion, the cosmic microwave background, the chemical composition of the universe and the clumping of matter. Like all scientific ideas, the model may one day be superseded. But it fits the current data better than any other model we have. As new precise measurements enable cosmologists to understand expansion and acceleration better, they can ask even more fundamental questions about the earliest times and largest scales of the universe. What caused the expansion? Many cosmologists attribute it to a process known as inflation, a type of accelerating expansion. But that can only be a partial answer, because it seems that to start inflating, the universe already had to be expanding. And what about the largest scales, beyond what we can see? Do different parts of the universe expand by different amounts, such that our universe is a single inflationary bubble of a much larger multiverse? Nobody knows. Although many questions remain, increasingly precise observations suggest that the universe will expand forever. We hope, though, the confusion about the expansion will shrink.

Well, I don't know you and I haven't followed your postings, so I don't know in detail what you believe.

Part of the issue is that many creationists (and I don't know if you are among them) deny the Big Bang explanation of the Universe as contrary to the Biblical interpretation of creation.

Part of the issue is that many creationists (and I don't know if you are among them) accuse scientists of being anti-God because we subscribe to the scientific explanations. I happen to be a Christian and this really is offensive to me.

Part of the issue is that many creationists (and I suspect you are among them) simply do not have a working knowledge of science or the definition of science. Ultimately, we talk past one another because the definitions we use for words and concepts are different.

Those of us who know what science is, and indeed are practicing researchers, know:

1. Science is not about truth. It is about fact. Science is defined not by outcome, but by process.

2. Science is minimalist. It does not try to explain what it does not have observation or first principle to address.

The fundamental argument I hear from the creationists and IDers is (my interpretation): "Evolution (or Big Bang) is a theory that is not completely correct and has problems. Moreover, scientits keep changing their view of it. Therefore, it is only a theory that they happen to believe; it is not truth. Creation is a belief supported by the bible and perhaps a few observations but it is something I believe. Well, the only difference is that we believe different things. There is no essential difference between Evolution (also Big Bang) and Creationism (or ID)."

The argument made by scientists is: "Big Bang and Evolution are science and I take them as science. Creationism and ID are not science, they are faith."

Note that the semantics of the two positions are different. We are talking different things. Creationists want to talk truth, scientists want to talk the scientific process. Evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories because they were developed by the scientific method. Creationism and ID are not science because they were not developed by that method. Truth has nothing to do with it.

Scientists don't claim to know the "truth", that is the province of faith. We do claim to know "facts", which are different than truth and which can be observed. Moreover, science is a process which includes as essential elements an unbiased estimation and a minimalist explanation of existing observatations. Sciece flat out does not answer "why?"

So, consider the Big Bang. The Big Bang is a scientific theory. It is consistent with a raft of observation that includes astronomy, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, gravitation,...the list goes on. The Big Bang theory will change as we learn more. It will evolve. Parts of it will be found to be incorrect. That, indeed, is the process of science.

However, it is a beautiful theory.

The Big Bang theory does not attempt to explain how or why the initial explosion originally took place. We simply don't know and can't possibly find out. Science doesn't address this question. It is the result of working backwards in time from present observations. The science stops when we can no longer extrapolate from existing physics or observations.

How did the Big Bang happen? That is not a question for science because science cannot answer it. It is a question of faith. As a matter of MY faith, separate from MY intellectual understanding of science, I happen to believe thatt the Big Bang was God's creation. But, that is a belief based on faith, not science.

As a matter of science, Big Bang and Evolution are science and Creationism and ID are not. As a matter of FAITH, not science, I happen to believe that Creationism and ID are bad faith as well. In my opinion, as a matter of Faith, God's creation is much more magnificent as described by the Big Bang and Evolution than it is in the Biblican description or ID.

As allegory, I would argue that when you and the other creationists and IDers go to heaven, and I believe you will because you are probably good people, God will say: " Welcome to Heaven, sirchtruth. You were a good person. However, that Creationism thing? Did you really believe that was the best I could do????"

The Big Bang theory does not attempt to explain how or why the initial explosion originally took place. We simply don't know and can't possibly find out. Science doesn't address this question.

I have no problems with your statement generally, however there are some things you are referring too that don't really address my point, but I think are a good attempt and a decent explaination of the difference between science and CR/ID.

Just so you know, I think that "The Creation" happened exactly like Genesis describes it, literally...there is no metaphors, similies, or figurative language.

My only problem is that evolution, for the most case, is taught as fact. Not that there are not facts to lead one to conclude evolution, but evolution itself is taught as fact, and that is just not so. I could not make the argument better than this:

So, consider the Big Bang. The Big Bang is a scientific theory. It is consistent with a raft of observation that includes astronomy, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, atomic physics, gravitation,...the list goes on. The Big Bang theory will change as we learn more. It will evolve. Parts of it will be found to be incorrect. That, indeed, is the process of science.

That's a great explaination, I think. However, being "consistant" with something does NOT make it factual. That's where the problem comes in, the scientific evidence might be consistance with theory, but the lot of evidence does not make the THEORY fact.

That's my only contention.

What does that mean specifically? Do you believe it was a literal 24 hr day or an indefinite period? Both are literal translations.

Well, this is a great question! A "Day" is basically described in scripture as 24 hours by two ways I know of:

Ten Commandments - Observe Shabbat
Daniel 9:25 is an exact to the day phrophecy. There are other ways in scriptue I believe describe a literal day as being 24 hours, but those are two I can think of at the moment.

Do you believe firmament is an expanse between two types of water layers or the boundaries of the universe?

From what I know I believe WATERS.

Do you believe God created heavens and Earth or do you believe He sired the universe?

I'm not sure about this, where is "sired the universe?"

Let me make this point, when someone in the bible was reading the bible, they ALWAYS took the verse(s) literally.

I am not saying there isn't any figurative language in scripture, but I do believe there is much less than what people point as figurative. I know because of SCIENCE I have been proven wrong MANY times when I thought scripture was figurative and science showed the way it could happen litterally.

That is not an entirely unreasonable concern. Indeed, Evolution is taught as fact at the high school level. Well, Evolution as an observation is fact. Evolution as a process, namely the mechanism for Evolution is a theory. However, at the high school level it is taught as TRUTH. At the college level and certainly at the graduate school level, it is taught as all science is, as simply the best explanation of the facts that we have. The anticipation, and it is EXPLICIT, is that much of it is wrong and it is the job of scientists to fix that.

I suspect that you might not find it so problematic at that level.

However, at the high school level, it is taught as fact. However, in defense of high school, they have a different educational objective than college or graduate school. They are trying to make students conversant in a subject. They need to be simply conversant before they can study principle or concept.

I have no problem with the approach of qualifying that Evolution is theory. Indeed, that would apply to all science. Consider, we teach physics at the high school level and they teach Newton's laws of motion. Those are not correct either (except in the limit of zero velocity and zero gravitation and ignoring quantum effects). However, I still think it is the right way to go. Students need to be conversant in concepts such as energy, momentum, and angular momentum as a precursor to understanding more complicated issues.

What I was getting at is that to translate the Bible literally, you must go from the Hebrew not the English.

In Hebrew, day can be translated either a regular day or an indefinite period. If you look at Gen 2.:4 you will see, even in the English, that all the "day"s in in creation must be translated as an indefinite period. Also, since the Sun was not formed until the fourth day, it is impossible for the first three days to be 24 hrs. unless you do some interpretive tap dance.

Firmament literally means "beginning of the boundaries of the universe". You get this from the word sentence composed by the letters of the word "rakia" translated as firmament in the KJV. So, it is improbable that "waters"
can be taken literally, especially since the Hebrew word is not really a plural as it is translated in English. It just looks like a plural. So, the KJV mistranslated water and did not take the Hebrew in a literal sense, at all. In fact, no one really knows what firmament means.

The best and most literal translation of the first sentence of the Bible from the Hebrew is, "In the first instant, God sires the universe." Creates is not wrong at all, but it is not literal either.

So, if you want to take the Bible literally, you really need to understand the literal meaning of the Hebrew. The English translations are too remote from the original to draw any conclusions about literal translations. At best, you can only get an interpretive take from the English.

It is the ridiculous position that you must take the literal translation of the English that warps meaning and makes a real student of the Bible reject creationism as nonsense. If the English non-literal translation is the basis for your "literal" belief in the Bible, you need to reconsider your whole basis for what you think the Bible means.

If that's the case, I have no problem either considering ID is taught as well just as a valid theory.

Alas, I thought I explained this.

Evolution is a scientific theory because it meets the definition of science.

ID is not a scientific theory because it does not meet the definition of science.

The distinction is important. All science is ultimately a theory. Newton's laws of motion is a theory, so is Special Relativity, General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Quantum ElectroDynamics, Statistical Mechanics, Electromagnetic Field Theory, and everything else. All have limitations. All have regions where they are no longer valid (although there have been no corrections yet found to any of the Quantum theories).

The notion that anything else that is a "theory" is also a scientific theory is rhetoric, not logic. The proof comes from simple logic: it is called reductio ab absurdiam. (reduction to absurdity).

Let's postulate your perspective that because Evolution (and the rest of science) is a theory and because ID is also a theory, then ID should be equally valid as a scientific theory. (Equally valid means it should also be taught in school). Note, we are making no distinction between Evolution as a theory and ID as a theory. (i.e. we ignore that one meets the definition of science and the other does not). Well.... OK.

Well then, I am going to propose a new theory to replace Newton's Law of Motion. It is called the "Little Pink Polka-dot Men" theory. In the LPPDM theory, little pink polka-dot men, moving too quickly for the eye to see, run around moving objects in such a way that they nearly approximate Newton's laws. So, when you break a car for a stop light, it is not friction at work, it is little pink polka-dot men. OK, now, we have Newton's theory and the LPPDM theory, and get this: BOTH ARE THEORIES. NEITHER IS ABSOLUTELY CORRECT, BUT BOTH FIT THE AVAILABLE DATA. THEREFORE, the LPPDM theory is just as good as Newton's laws. We should now insist that high school physics teach LPPDM as well as Newton. (This is the Creationist / ID rehtoric at work).

Well, hell, why stop there. Palmistry is a theory. Tarot card reading is a theory. Witchcraft is a theory. (Well, some people think so). The daily horoscope is a theory. 1-900-Psychic-Hotline is a theory. Astrology is a theory. Think I am being unreasonable?? I bet there are more people that believe in Astrology than in the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Since they are all "theories" and the rest of science is all "theories", let's teach all of them.

Have to, to be consistent with the Creationist / ID rationale.

And this result is absurd. There is indeed, sirchtruth, a difference between Quantum Mechanics and Astrology. There is also a difference between Evolution and ID. That difference is the same in both cases.

I suppose the only solution is that everything should be taught in the schools. Well....OK. However, I would like to suggest that Evolution, Cosmology, Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology are taught in one class. And Creationism, ID, Astrology, Palmistry, Witchcraft, Tarot Card Reading, and Pyschic Phenomena are taught in another. Then we make each an elective. Let's see which kids get into college.

Then we make each an elective. Let's see which kids get into college.

Exactly.

We've had this same argument so many times on FR that it makes my head spin just thinking about it. IF we decide to let every competing "theory" (but not scientific) into the classroom, there won't be time to teach much of anything that is meaningfully connected to reality.

It means adding the following courses to the already crowded curriculum:

Numerology in addition to math classes

Astrology in addition to Astronomy

Alchemy in addition to Chemistry

Homeopathy and Chiropractic in addition to Allopathic medicine

Augery in place of history

and so on...

There's no end to all the postentially "competing" non-scientific theories that can be shoe-horned into the curriculum.

The proper test is whether or not they are scientific, and additionally, in the context of primary and secondary schools, whether or not the theory is widely embraced by the scientists in the respective field of study.

So virtual particles are a function of (t)?

Well... Yes. At least the time that they exist. Larger, more massive particles exist for shorter periods of time, for example.

The very elegant experimental proof of the presence of this "froth" in the vacuum field as Feynman described it was to shoot particles from an accelerator through a vacuum. Occasionally, when the "virtual" particles came into existance and were real for a brief instant, they were collided into by one of the accelerator particles. Since the virtual particles exist for a very short period of time, this collision does not occur often. But it does occur. And once it occurs, one of the particle / anti-particle particles is knocked away by the collision. Energy from the collision has to go back into the vacuum field. But the collision is real and can be observed by a particle detector.

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