These posts are to capture my thoughts over the last 36 years on what I believe existence is, the meaning of life, light, energy, time and all those other questions each of us thinks about and generally unable to dig much further as we're too busy in our daily lives.
I'm not in any way trying to assert that my thoughts are correct, merely sharing my reasoning's and offering something that can provoke conversations and potentially stimulate new views on how to tackle the unanswered questions around us.
My conclusions are my own views, please don't belittle them, I'm sharing to inspire others, if you don't agree please feel free to constructively share why but avoid ridiculing as that doesn't help anyone and takes the fun out of trying to explore the unanswered.
If these ideas help inspire my children, my family, my friends or anyone else who likes playing the 'what if' games I will be a very happy person. Some of the topics are heavy and the more I delve into this the more I realize the point of it all is to enjoy what limited time we have here and help each other enjoy life as much as possible.
Thanks,
Stu Radforth
Friday 5 April 2013
Friday 22 March 2013
Why the Bigbang happened 13.8 billion years ago for a reason!
Everyone asks the question, what happened all that time ago that started the bigbang? Actually if you think about it the question itself is not as difficult to answer as we're led to believe when rephrased.
TL;DR : It's taken this long to get here and that's why it's precisely X years ago which we've calculated to be 13.8 billion years. If intruiged I'd recommend reading this explanation, it's slightly shorter than 13.8 billion years.. just.
Rephrased Question
Firstly lets ask "why didn't the bigbang happen just a minute ago?" This is an easy one! A minute ago you stumbled across this blog entry and decided you'd give this a read. You remember it and is part of how you're here now analysing and asking this question.
Ok but in order to have stumbled on this blog entry I'd have had to write it which took time before that too so we know the existence couldn't have started just before that too. So 'what if the bigbang happened just before I started writing this blog entry?', again I'd need to have been born to have existed to write this. What about just before Stu Radforth was born? Well my mother would have had to give birth to me and she'd have had to be born and so on and so on... until we're now at the stage where we're going through all of human evolution.
Evolution
What about at the start of human's existence point? Well that's interesting because that is funnily enough where many religions jump in and say it all began. If we are to believe we're fundamentally made differently to animals it would be a very sensible starting point and is probably a good way of highlighting I'm not the first to have played this 'rephrase the question and extrapolate' game.
For those who believe in evolution we can go back further to how humans evolved. There is compelling evidence around us for evolution hence what I believe is true but as you'll see from my later posts this isn't the full story as perception is incredibly important. I'm cautious to remain agnostic as this latter point may even keep some religious people happy through it's implications although the answer is probably weirder than any historical literature book will ever propose.
Ok, still with me? I think we were still working back through the stages of evolution and at some point even some eyes came into existence and now we want to go back even further. We can see the whole tree of living organisms on the planet deriving back from mammals to tetrapods to Eukaryote and can keep tracking it back until we even get to the prokaryotes (single cell organisms without a nucleus). Now this is where science is trying to figure out where they came from and luckily we don't need to know this to continue asking our rephrased question. The fact of the matter is that we know this single cell organisms are made only with molecules and therefore we know given that combination of atoms will make the molecules hence the lifeform can exist... we may not understand that process whereby the combination of factors will give rise to this genesis molecule(s) but nearly every scientist believes it is possible. So what is that process?
We may not know but we do know that it took nearly a billion years to happen as we can see from our fossil records and carbon dating. Given all the atoms and natural forces occurring all around the vast universe it seems obvious that if this combination could ever happen, it will happen somewhere and this will have started the 'life' process.
We know when life started via carbon dating and other mechanisms so we are now back 1 billion years from today so just 12.8 billion to explain before the start.
Fission and Fusion
Before this 'start of life event' occurred we know our sun had to come into existence and has been worked out based on the size and mass and output that the sun started around ~5 billion years ago so now we've only got ~8 billion years to explain.
With that simple hydrogen atoms can 'fuse' together to become one new atom to make some heavier elements like Helium. Helium can then be fused with Hydrogen to make Lithium (I think) or Helium with Helium to make Beryllium and so on which makes most of or more elements, these may decay and or fuse together to make new atoms up until no energy is given out from fusing. (Apologies to particle physicists for totally over simplifying and making grand sweeping statements like this but just trying to convey the principal)
The more massive elements than iron that we find on our planet such gold, lead, uranium require more energy to create than the sum of their parts so show they could not have come from fusion in stars but instead from a vast burst of energy and supernova's are the easiest source of generating these colossal energies. A supernova is merely a large enough star running out of fusible fuel which normally prevents it's collapse under gravity. When this fuel runs too low it goes supernova and collapses, it's so energy intensive it is understood to create these other elements.
So I haven't made any new insights or crazy interpretations, if anything I'm probably just re-churning highshool biology, physics and astronomy so would like to believe I'm capturing in a few paragraphs several billion years accurately.
The Extrapolated Answer
So extrapolating the rephrased question, just how we could explain it was not made 5 minutes ago, it has taken at least this period for the universe to create all the ingredients and mix together to create what you see around you at the moment and to be able to ask this question.
So what happens if it was made a day before? Using this same thought process it merely means it would be tomorrow and you would have read this article yesterday. All the events from the very start of the universe to now occurred to get to this very precise moment in time now where you are reading this. We can only measure time in perception of what has changed and the 'start of the universe' can only be calculated back from this point where you're able to observe it.
Now if you see where I'm coming from you'll understand why it happened 13.8 billion years ago and why it wasn't 14 billion years and also why it's nonsense talking about before this date.
It may also help answer another conundrum... quantum effects.
There is an oddity that creates the fields of quantum physics where by particles interact as waves until observed. Once observed they behave as particles and the wave is considered to have 'collapsed'. Young's slit experiment is the best simple experiment.
We deal with this oddity by just saying they behave like waves until observed at which point the wave function 'collapses' so that one discrete state is found rather than it being a probability cloud where all states exist at once. Now if we go with the assumption that things only come into existence when observed, we're not talking about coming into existence at that moment in time more generally comes into existence at some point in the universe's history to allow you to be able to exist, it starts to make sense why see quantum mechanics happen... or more to the point why everything is just a wave and 'particles' come to exist to make our reality.
TL;DR : It's taken this long to get here and that's why it's precisely X years ago which we've calculated to be 13.8 billion years. If intruiged I'd recommend reading this explanation, it's slightly shorter than 13.8 billion years.. just.
Rephrased Question
Firstly lets ask "why didn't the bigbang happen just a minute ago?" This is an easy one! A minute ago you stumbled across this blog entry and decided you'd give this a read. You remember it and is part of how you're here now analysing and asking this question.
Ok but in order to have stumbled on this blog entry I'd have had to write it which took time before that too so we know the existence couldn't have started just before that too. So 'what if the bigbang happened just before I started writing this blog entry?', again I'd need to have been born to have existed to write this. What about just before Stu Radforth was born? Well my mother would have had to give birth to me and she'd have had to be born and so on and so on... until we're now at the stage where we're going through all of human evolution.
Evolution
What about at the start of human's existence point? Well that's interesting because that is funnily enough where many religions jump in and say it all began. If we are to believe we're fundamentally made differently to animals it would be a very sensible starting point and is probably a good way of highlighting I'm not the first to have played this 'rephrase the question and extrapolate' game.
For those who believe in evolution we can go back further to how humans evolved. There is compelling evidence around us for evolution hence what I believe is true but as you'll see from my later posts this isn't the full story as perception is incredibly important. I'm cautious to remain agnostic as this latter point may even keep some religious people happy through it's implications although the answer is probably weirder than any historical literature book will ever propose.
Ok, still with me? I think we were still working back through the stages of evolution and at some point even some eyes came into existence and now we want to go back even further. We can see the whole tree of living organisms on the planet deriving back from mammals to tetrapods to Eukaryote and can keep tracking it back until we even get to the prokaryotes (single cell organisms without a nucleus). Now this is where science is trying to figure out where they came from and luckily we don't need to know this to continue asking our rephrased question. The fact of the matter is that we know this single cell organisms are made only with molecules and therefore we know given that combination of atoms will make the molecules hence the lifeform can exist... we may not understand that process whereby the combination of factors will give rise to this genesis molecule(s) but nearly every scientist believes it is possible. So what is that process?
We may not know but we do know that it took nearly a billion years to happen as we can see from our fossil records and carbon dating. Given all the atoms and natural forces occurring all around the vast universe it seems obvious that if this combination could ever happen, it will happen somewhere and this will have started the 'life' process.
We know when life started via carbon dating and other mechanisms so we are now back 1 billion years from today so just 12.8 billion to explain before the start.
Fission and Fusion
Before this 'start of life event' occurred we know our sun had to come into existence and has been worked out based on the size and mass and output that the sun started around ~5 billion years ago so now we've only got ~8 billion years to explain.
Now the next step, where did these atoms come from? Well they are made from energy which allows for the basic elements inside the atom to be made (see the LHR for a more accurate description that I could even attempt to explain), the different atoms in our atomic table however are made via a process of fusion and fission.
With that simple hydrogen atoms can 'fuse' together to become one new atom to make some heavier elements like Helium. Helium can then be fused with Hydrogen to make Lithium (I think) or Helium with Helium to make Beryllium and so on which makes most of or more elements, these may decay and or fuse together to make new atoms up until no energy is given out from fusing. (Apologies to particle physicists for totally over simplifying and making grand sweeping statements like this but just trying to convey the principal)
The more massive elements than iron that we find on our planet such gold, lead, uranium require more energy to create than the sum of their parts so show they could not have come from fusion in stars but instead from a vast burst of energy and supernova's are the easiest source of generating these colossal energies. A supernova is merely a large enough star running out of fusible fuel which normally prevents it's collapse under gravity. When this fuel runs too low it goes supernova and collapses, it's so energy intensive it is understood to create these other elements.
We clearly have on our rocky planet these heavy elements (i.e. heavier than iron) so we can expect a supernova must have happened before to have created these materials to form our planet.
Given this supernova process only occurs after a sun has used it's fusible fuel we can make the assumption that it happened at least once and probably before our sun existed. We have calculated a sun may take 5 billion years to burn its fuel before being able to go supernova so that takes us back to 2 billion years before the given bigbang date.
There will be time taken for the hydrogen gas to clump together to even make a star and 2 billion years seems a reasonable amount of time for what must be a vast process... In fact it raises an interesting question, how are there so many galaxies with planets that have heavy elements on them if this process is true? I've probably just not fully understood this process correctly or perhaps planets are formed after the sun's creation by attracting stray material. Not totally convinced on that just yet as I'd expect we'd have far more meteorites / year than we do but who knows! Let me know if you have a good explanation as I'd really like to make this as accurate as possible.
Back to the question
So whilst I'd love to know the answer I digress, the question is why did it happen 13.8 billion years ago?
There will be time taken for the hydrogen gas to clump together to even make a star and 2 billion years seems a reasonable amount of time for what must be a vast process... In fact it raises an interesting question, how are there so many galaxies with planets that have heavy elements on them if this process is true? I've probably just not fully understood this process correctly or perhaps planets are formed after the sun's creation by attracting stray material. Not totally convinced on that just yet as I'd expect we'd have far more meteorites / year than we do but who knows! Let me know if you have a good explanation as I'd really like to make this as accurate as possible.
Back to the question
So whilst I'd love to know the answer I digress, the question is why did it happen 13.8 billion years ago?
So I haven't made any new insights or crazy interpretations, if anything I'm probably just re-churning highshool biology, physics and astronomy so would like to believe I'm capturing in a few paragraphs several billion years accurately.
The Extrapolated Answer
So extrapolating the rephrased question, just how we could explain it was not made 5 minutes ago, it has taken at least this period for the universe to create all the ingredients and mix together to create what you see around you at the moment and to be able to ask this question.
So what happens if it was made a day before? Using this same thought process it merely means it would be tomorrow and you would have read this article yesterday. All the events from the very start of the universe to now occurred to get to this very precise moment in time now where you are reading this. We can only measure time in perception of what has changed and the 'start of the universe' can only be calculated back from this point where you're able to observe it.
Now if you see where I'm coming from you'll understand why it happened 13.8 billion years ago and why it wasn't 14 billion years and also why it's nonsense talking about before this date.
It may also help answer another conundrum... quantum effects.
There is an oddity that creates the fields of quantum physics where by particles interact as waves until observed. Once observed they behave as particles and the wave is considered to have 'collapsed'. Young's slit experiment is the best simple experiment.
We deal with this oddity by just saying they behave like waves until observed at which point the wave function 'collapses' so that one discrete state is found rather than it being a probability cloud where all states exist at once. Now if we go with the assumption that things only come into existence when observed, we're not talking about coming into existence at that moment in time more generally comes into existence at some point in the universe's history to allow you to be able to exist, it starts to make sense why see quantum mechanics happen... or more to the point why everything is just a wave and 'particles' come to exist to make our reality.
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