Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

-----

Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Monday, October 18, 2021

Timeline of the Universe AFTER the Big Bang




Hi,

I have put these videos in an order where each will build on the next. However, the most vital video is this first one which speaks to the quantum beginnings of the universe. I consider its content the most important so that when viewing the remaining videos the viewer may understand why something is occurring and/or what is missing in the other presentations. It's short, but filled with important information. Once grasped, it will give the viewer a "grand quantum perspective" of the universe's origins.

Secondly, I'm interested in looking at the cosmos through the lens of Process Philosophy and Theology, ala Alfred North Whitehead. This approach to the postmodern sciences undergirds everything we currently know - and will know - in the foreseeable future. Yes, a bold claim, but the more I get to know about our Process-based cosmos the more I am amazed at its practicality and helpfulness.

Process forms and theory can be found everywhere - from process-evolution, process-based quantum physics, quantum computing, quantum biology, socio-economic constructions, history, literature, religion, even language, psychology, sociology, and ecodynamics. This is why process philosophy is considered a meta- or mega- Integral Theory by which I mean, all else may easily reside as incomplete parts and pieces to the metaphysical and cosmological whole. As such, it has effectively replaced the long lived Platonism of the ages. To know more about process philosophy search the topic index for the several process-related indices on the right side of this website, Relevancy22.

In sum, it cannot do to speak process without understanding how creation operates in a process fashion. The mathematician cum philosopher, Whitehead, a contemporary and fellow academy member with theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, would not have it any other way.

R.E. Slater
October 18, 2021





Origins of the Universe 101 | National Geographic
Mar 1, 2018


National Geographic
How old is the universe, and how did it begin? Throughout history, countless myths and scientific theories have tried to explain the universe's origins. The most widely accepted explanation is the big bang theory. Learn about the explosion that started it all and how the universe grew from the size of an atom to encompass everything in existence today.






TIMELAPSE OF THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE
Mar 9, 2018


melodysheep
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/melodysheep On a cosmic time scale, human history is as brief as the blink of an eye. By compressing all 13.8 billion years of time into a 10 minute scale, this video shows just how young we truly are, and just how ancient and vast our universe is. Starting with the big bang and culminating in the appearance of homo sapiens, this experience follows the unfolding of time at 22 million years per second, adhering closely to current scientific understanding.

Narration by Brian Cox, Carl Sagan, and David Attenborough.





The Beginning of Everything -- The Big Bang
Mar 3, 2014


Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
How did everything get started?
Has the universe a beginning or was it here since forever? Well, evidence suggests that there was indeed a starting point to this universe we are part of right now. But how can this be? How can something come from nothing? And what about time? We don't have all the answers yet so let's talk about what we know.





Explaining The Big Bang One TRILLIONTH Of A Second At A Time
Episode 4 of 5
Apr 21, 2016


The universe is everything we can see and as far as we can see. For years we've been trying to figure out how it all began, but have we finally figured out how everything came to be?





Timeline of Universe (Big Bang to Today)
[a recap of the above... get your notebooks out to take down the dates times]
Oct 2, 2017


Astrogeekz
The Big Bang Theory is one of the most accepted theories that can explain the formation of the Universe. 

You, me, our planet and this entire Universe have evolved from a singularity.

Watch this video to get a brief idea about the past and the beginning of our expanding Universe.





The Early Universe Explained by Neil deGrasse Tyson
Jun 26, 2021


Science Time
Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the early state of our Universe. At the beginning of the universe, ordinary space and time developed out of a primeval state, where all matter and energy of the entire visible universe was contained in a hot, dense point called a gravitational singularity. A billionth the size of a nuclear particle. 

While we can not imagine the entirety of the visible universe being a billion times smaller than a nuclear particle, that shouldn't deter us from wondering about the early state of our universe. However, dealing with such extreme scales is immensely counter-intuitive and our evolved brains and senses have no capacity to grasp the depths of reality in the beginning of cosmic time. Therefore, scientists develop mathematical frameworks to describe the early universe.

Neil deGrasse Tyson also mentions that our senses are not necessarily the best tools to use in science when uncovering the mysteries of the Universe.

It is interesting to note that in the early Universe, high densities and heterogeneous conditions could have led sufficiently dense regions to undergo gravitational collapse, forming black holes. These types of Primordial black holes are hypothesized to have formed soon after the Big Bang. Going from one mystery to the next, some evidence suggests a possible Link Between Primordial Black Holes and Dark Matter.

In modern physics, antimatter is made up of elementary particles, each of which has the same mass as their corresponding matter counterparts -- protons, neutrons and electrons -- but the opposite charges and magnetic properties.

A collision between any particle and its anti-particle partner leads to their mutual annihilation, giving rise to various proportions of intense photons, gamma rays and neutrinos. The majority of the total energy of annihilation emerges in the form of ionizing radiation. If surrounding matter is present, the energy content of this radiation will be absorbed and converted into other forms of energy, such as heat or light. The amount of energy released is usually proportional to the total mass of the collided matter and antimatter, in accordance with Einstein's mass–energy equivalence equation.

Antimatter particles bind with each other to form antimatter, just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton) can form an anti-hydrogen atom.

While these cosmic quandaries keep astrophysicists up at night, we are more than grateful to be alive in a time where we can even begin to contemplate the mysteries of the universe and our place in it.



click here to enlarge



The Entire History of the Universe in 8 Minutes
[How stars, galaxies, and the solar system began]
Oct 26, 2020

How did the Universe begin? When the Big Bang occurred, for some time, there was nothing but very hot matter flying in all directions at the speed of light. Very shortly, though, the first star appeared. Its name was Methuselah, and for a long time, it confused astronomers who believed it might be older than the Universe itself.

Soon after, on a cosmic scale, of course, the first black holes started forming. Scientists believe they’re what’s left of exploded stars, but that’s not for sure even today. At the same time, cosmic dust and matter began ionizing, helping to form new stars. In the end, it led to thousands and then millions of stars appearing in space. The Universe, left cold after the initial enormous explosion, started heating up again. But how did galaxies form? How were stars born? And why is the Universe still expanding?



click here to enlarge



TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time (4K)
Mar 20, 2019


Support my work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/melodysheep  |  Get the soundtrack: https://bit.ly/2HKl9fi  |   How's it all gonna end?  This experience takes us on a journey to the end of time, trillions of years into the future, to discover what the fate of our planet and our universe may ultimately be. 

We start in 2019 and travel exponentially through time, witnessing the future of Earth, the death of the sun, the end of all stars, proton decay, zombie galaxies, possible future civilizations, exploding black holes, the effects of dark energy, alternate universes, the final fate of the cosmos - to name a few.

This is a picture of the future as painted by modern science - a picture that will surely evolve over time as we dig for more clues to how our story will unfold. Much of the science is very recent - and new puzzle pieces are still waiting to be found.

To me, this overhead view of time gives a profound perspective - that we are living inside the hot flash of the Big Bang, the perfect moment to soak in the sights and sounds of a universe in its glory days, before it all fades away.  Although the end will eventually come, we have a practical infinity of time to play with if we play our cards right. The future may look bleak, but we have enormous potential as a species. 

Featuring the voices of David Attenborough, Craig Childs, Brian Cox, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Michelle Thaller, Lawrence Krauss, Michio Kaku, Mike Rowe, Phil Plait, Janna Levin, Stephen Hawking, Sean Carroll, Alex Filippenko, and Martin Rees.






What Was The Universe Like IMMEDIATELY After The Big Bang?
[The Science behind the Big Bang]
Apr 30, 2021




click here to enlarge



Friday, October 15, 2021

Timeline of the Universe BEFORE the Big Bang - OF PRIMORDIAL UNIVERSES (Creatio Continua)





Let's establish a few basic ideas and move from the time AFTER the Big Bang to the "non-time"  BEFORE the Big Bang. And if I have time (pun intended) I'll tie this post in with a second post at some later date discussing "The Science of Time" from both a quantum & process-based understanding.
- re slater


SOME BASICS
SOME BASICS
SOME BASICS

What Came Before the Big Bang?
Feb 16, 2018
Since Relevancy22 is a "God" site, the vid begins with a dig at religious belief showing God as a cow. Now perhaps that's where the phrase, "HOLY COW!" came from. Or, perhaps not. But thank God for cows, milk, beef, and the blessing to farm and ranch God's green earth as humanity hopefully someday turns to the seeding and growing of cosmoecological civilizations. - res






THE PLANCK EPOCH
THE PLANCK EPOCH
THE PLANCK EPOCH

Brian Greene - What Was There Before The Big Bang?
Jun 12, 2021

Science Time - The Planck Epoch

The American theoretical physicist, Brian Greene explains various hypotheses about the causation of the big bang. Brian Greene is an excellent science communicator and he makes complex cosmological concepts more easy to understand. 

The Big Bang explains the evolution of the universe from a starting density and temperature that is currently well beyond humanity's capability to replicate. Thus the most extreme conditions and earliest times of the universe are speculative and any explanation for what caused the big bang should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless that shouldn't stop us to ask questions like what was there before the big bang.

Brian Greene mentions the possibility that time itself may have originated with the birth of the cosmos about 13.8 billion years ago.

To understand how the Universe came to be, scientists combine mathematical models with observations and develop workable theories which explain the evolution of the cosmos. The Big Bang theory, which is built upon the equations of classical general relativity, indicates a singularity at the origin of cosmic time. 

However, the physical theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics as currently realized are not applicable before the Planck epoch, which is the earliest period of time in the history of the universe, and correcting this will require the development of a correct treatment of quantum gravity.

Certain quantum gravity treatments imply that time itself could be an emergent property. Which leads some physicists to conclude that time did not exist before the Big Bang. While others are open to the possibility of time preceding the big bang.

One of the common misconceptions about the Big Bang model is that it fully explains the origin of the universe. However, the Big Bang model does not describe how energy, time, and space were caused, but rather it describes the emergence of the present universe from an ultra-dense and high-temperature initial state. It is misleading to visualize the Big Bang by comparing its size to everyday objects. When the size of the universe at Big Bang is described, it refers to the size of the observable universe, and not the entire universe.

 





SOME BASICS
SOME BASICS
SOME BASICS

What Was Happening Before the Big Bang?
w/Brian Greene | Joe Rogan
Feb 19, 2020


//////// space + time are not constants ////////

//////// space + time are fluid or relative to relationships ////////

//////// the speed of light is a constant ////////

//////// gravity both attracts by pulling inwards + repulses outwards ////////

//////// the energy of the inflaton scalar field repulses everything outwards ////////
(inflaton scalar fields explained in pbs video below)

//////// dark energy pushes outwards --> thus, an inflationary universe: Big Rip ////////
//////// dark matter pulls inwards --> thus, a compacting universe: Big Crunch ////////



Theological / Scientific Terms
Theological / Scientific Terms
Theological / Scientific Terms

creatio ex nihilo - creation of something from nothing.
creatio continua - the reordering or process creation of something which always was, is and will continue to be in whatever manner or forms of energy it is or will become.
In the vacuum of space there is no void. The vacuum of space has continuous exotic activity in the form of anti-mater particles+forces instantaneously annihilating with non-anti-matter particles+forces with the tiniest of fractions of matter particles+forces surviving to give to the universe it's quantum densities and structure which it has today.

Conclusion. The Hebraic idea of void though correctly imagined and unseen is actually the vaduumous activity of space which is filled with unseen force energies. The God who created, did not create from nothing. There was always something there... even before the "voids" of space. This there which was there is the primodial energy forces which existed before the Big Bang before time and before matter.
What was there? Energy in it is purest potential states inhabiting a 1 dimensional space of "liquid" plasma in the severest heats of radiation with no irregularities to give it its start. Moreover, God and these states of potentiality always existed. Neither is older than the other with the philosophical difference that God is the first and primary process before all other process forces. Sic, Process Philosophy, Theology, and Theorectical Physics.
Thus and thus, the process relational system of panentheism (not pantheism, not classic theism). God sang the universes into existence. God breathed upon the "there" there and it became - and will always be becoming.   - re slater

 


What came before the Big Bang? Quantum creation.
How to get a Universe from nothing
Apr 19, 2019

Arvin Ash

Quantum Creation – what came before the big bang - the mechanism of a universe out of NO-thing - no matter, no space, and no time. Ancient Greek cosmologist Parmenides said “Nothing comes from nothing.”  He was likely referring to the law of conservation of energy, that no new energy can be created.  This is true and is a scientific fact even today. So how could the Universe come from nothing?
 
Since the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, we have discovered a flaw in this argument that allows the creation of something from truly nothing. The Universe indeed had a beginning about 13.8 billion years ago, with the Big Bang.  But what was there before the Big Bang?  How did the universe come about from nothing. The flaw that we have uncovered in Parmenides original argument of “nothing comes from nothing” is that gravity has negative energy.  And matter has positive energy.  

In a closed universe, a spontaneous splitting of 0 energy into an equal amount of positive energy and negative energy would not violate any conservation laws, because no new energy would have been created.  And in quantum mechanics, anything that is not forbidden by conservation laws has a non-zero probability of occurring.  

But then we did not start with nothing. We started with the vacuum of physics, which has virtual particles that come in and out of existence, over very short periods of time. it has a weight and can be scientifically measured. So this is not nothing.

So a more fundamental question is can a universe really be created with truly nothing – that means no-thing – no space, no matter, no time, no nothing?  To answer this question, let’s work our way back from where we are now.  

If you solve Einstein’s equations for a universe like ours, you discover that it describes a universe that is either contracting or expanding. At the beginning of the big bang, it has a finite size, below which you cannot go any smaller. How does an explosion like the big bang occur from this finite size universe? In late 1979, a Stanford physics postdoc named Alan Guth offered an explanation for this bang or explosion. He showed that using the theories in particle physics, at extremely high energies — much higher than we could ever create in a lab — a special state of matter turns gravity upside down, causing it to be repulsive rather than an attractive force.

A patch of space that contains even a tiny bit of this unusual matter, much smaller than the size of an atom, could repel itself so violently that it would blow up.  And expand to a huge size.  This would have happened for a very short time, a tiny fraction of a second, because this repulsive force quickly decays into the attractive force of gravity we see today.  But this short period of time is enough to cause the “bang” in the big bang.  
   
So now we are at the Big Bang.  We have a finite size universe with extremely high energy density that exploded in a brief inflationary period, and caused the big bang. Now, let’s go back further…the question now is how did a zero-size universe (a nothing) become Guth’s finite size universe.    

Physicist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University published a paper in 1984 that showed how this was possible using currently known laws of quantum mechanics. And he originated the idea of something called Quantum Creation. He showed that there is some energy barrier that the zero-size universe had to overcome in order to become finite size.  This is where a phenomenon called quantum tunneling comes into play. It turns out that there is a probability, not very large, but a non-zero probability.

Quantum tunneling is a real phenomenon that can be measured and is known to exist. Quantum mechanics shows that particles are waves of probabilities – and these waves have a non-zero probability of showing up spontaneously outside a barrier. This is how for example, an electron, or even atom, behind a barrier has a small probability of showing up on the other side of the barrier.  Our "zero-size" universe can, through the process of quantum tunneling, become a finite size universe.  

And once it does that, then Guth’s cosmic inflation occurs, triggering the Big Bang. Then Einstein’s laws take over, and the universe’s expanding journey begins. And 13.8 billion years later, we observe the universe as we do today. So quantum mechanics gets you from zero size to a finite size, and then to the Big Bang. And then general relativity can get you from there to where we are today.  

And what triggered all this? In quantum physics, events do not necessarily have a cause, just some probability. So there is some probability for the universe to pop out of “nothing. If it is true, our existence had the humblest beginning of all - from nothingness itself. But you are still not starting with nothing, because you have to start with the laws of quantum mechanics.  Where did these laws come from? [Hint: "Not from nothing."] - Arvin Ash



THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE
THE QUANTUM UNIVERSE

INFLATON MULTIVERSES
INFLATON MULTIVERSES
INFLATON MULTIVERSES

What Happened Before the Big Bang?
Aug 19, 2019

 ~ ends around 10 minutes; plus,
graphical Q&A after commercials (skip 5 secs)  are worth watching ~

PBS Space Time

We actually have a pretty good idea of what might have happened before the Big Bang. That is, as long as we define the Big Bang as the extremely hot, dense, rapidly expanding universe that is described by Einstein’s equations. That picture of the universe is very solid down to about a trillionth of a second after the supposed beginning of time. We can make good guesses down to about 10^-30th of a second. But before that?

 


MORE PBS VIDEOS HERE
MORE PBS VIDEOS HERE
MORE PBS VIDEOS HERE

https://www.pbsspacetime.com/






Wednesday, October 13, 2021

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore


The modern cosmic picture of our universe’s history begins not with a singularity that we identify with the Big Bang, but rather with a period of cosmic inflation that stretches the universe to enormous scales, with uniform properties and spatial flatness. The end of inflation signifies the onset of the hot Big Bang. (Credit: Nicole Rager Fuller/National Science Foundation)


Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning
of the universe anymore

by Ethan Siegel
October 13, 2021


We used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from
a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we're not so sure.


Key Takeaways

  • The Big Bang teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past.
  • However, extrapolating all the way back to a singularity leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe.
  • Instead, cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever.

Where did all this come from? In every direction we care to observe, we find stars, galaxies, clouds of gas and dust, tenuous plasmas, and radiation spanning the gamut of wavelengths: from radio to infrared to visible light to gamma rays. No matter where or how we look at the universe, it’s full of matter and energy absolutely everywhere and at all times. And yet, it’s only natural to assume that it all came from somewhere. If you want to know the answer to the biggest question of all — the question of our cosmic origins — you have to pose the question to the universe itself, and listen to what it tells you.

Today, the universe as we see it is expanding, rarifying (getting less dense), and cooling. Although it’s tempting to simply extrapolate forward in time, when things will be even larger, less dense, and cooler, the laws of physics allow us to extrapolate backward just as easily. Long ago, the universe was smaller, denser, and hotter. How far back can we take this extrapolation? Mathematically, it’s tempting to go as far as possible: all the way back to infinitesimal sizes and infinite densities and temperatures, or what we know as a singularity. This idea, of a singular beginning to space, time, and the universe, was long known as the Big Bang.

But physically, when we looked closely enough, we found that the universe told a different story. Here’s how we know the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore.

Countless scientific tests of Einstein’s general theory of relativity have been performed, subjecting the idea to some of the most stringent constraints ever obtained by humanity. Einstein’s first solution was for the weak-field limit around a single mass, like the Sun; he applied these results to our Solar System with dramatic success. Very quickly, a handful of exact solutions were found thereafter. (Credit: LIGO scientific collaboration, T. Pyle, Caltech/MIT)

Like most stories in science, the origin of the Big Bang has its roots in both theoretical and experimental/observational realms. On the theory side, Einstein put forth his general theory of relativity in 1915: a novel theory of gravity that sought to overthrow Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Although Einstein’s theory was far more intricate and complicated, it wasn’t long before the first exact solutions were found.

  • In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild found the solution for a pointlike mass, which describes a nonrotating black hole.
  • In 1917, Willem de Sitter found the solution for an empty universe with a cosmological constant, which describes an exponentially expanding universe.
  • From 1916 to 1921, the Reissner-Nordström solution, found independently by four researchers, described the spacetime for a charged, spherically symmetric mass.
  • In 1921, Edward Kasner found a solution that described a matter-and-radiation-free universe that’s anisotropic: different in different directions.
  • In 1922, Alexander Friedmann discovered the solution for an isotropic (same in all directions) and homogeneous (same at all locations) universe, where any and all types of energy, including matter and radiation, were present.


An illustration of our cosmic history, from the Big Bang until the present, within the context of the expanding universe. The first Friedmann equation describes all of these epochs, from inflation to the Big Bang to the present and far into the future, perfectly accurately, even today. (Credit: NASA/WMAP science team)

That last one was very compelling for two reasons. One is that it appeared to describe our universe on the largest scales, where things appear similar, on average, everywhere and in all directions. And two, if you solved the governing equations for this solution — the Friedmann equations — you’d find that the universe it describes cannot be static, but must either expand or contract.

This latter fact was recognized by many, including Einstein, but it wasn’t taken particularly seriously until the observational evidence began to support it. In the 1910s, astronomer Vesto Slipher started observing certain nebulae, which some argued might be galaxies outside of our Milky Way, and found that they were moving fast: far faster than any other objects within our galaxy. Moreover, the majority of them were moving away from us, with fainter, smaller nebulae generally appearing to move faster.

Then, in the 1920s, Edwin Hubble began measuring individual stars in these nebulae and eventually determined the distances to them. Not only were they much farther away than anything else in the galaxy, but the ones at the greater distances were moving away faster than the closer ones. As Lemaître, Robertson, Hubble, and others swiftly put together, the universe was expanding.

Edwin Hubble’s original plot of galaxy distances versus redshift (left), establishing the expanding universe, versus a more modern counterpart from approximately 70 years later (right). In agreement with both observation and theory, the universe is expanding. (Credit: E. Hubble; R. Kirshner, PNAS, 2004)

Georges Lemaître was the first, in 1927, to recognize this. Upon discovering the expansion, he extrapolated backward, theorizing — as any competent mathematician might — that you could go as far back as you wanted: to what he called the primeval atom. In the beginning, he realized, the universe was a hot, dense, and rapidly expanding collection of matter and radiation, and everything around us emerged from this primordial state.

This idea was later developed by others to make a set of additional predictions:

  • The universe, as we see it today, is more evolved than it was in the past. The farther back we look in space, the farther back we’re also looking in time. So, the objects we see back then should be younger, less gravitationally clumpy, less massive, with fewer heavy elements, and with less-evolved structure. There should even be a point beyond which no stars or galaxies were present.
  • At some point, the radiation was so hot that neutral atoms couldn’t stably form, because radiation would reliably kick any electrons off of the nuclei they were attempting to bind to, and so there should be a leftover — now cold and sparse — bath of cosmic radiation from this time.
  • At some extremely early time it would have been so hot that even atomic nuclei would be blasted apart, implying there was an early, pre-stellar phase where nuclear fusion would have occurred: Big Bang nucleosynthesis. From that, we expect there to have been at least a population of light elements and their isotopes spread throughout the universe before any stars formed.

A visual history of the expanding universe includes the hot, dense state known as the Big Bang and the growth and formation of structure subsequently. The full suite of data, including the observations of the light elements and the cosmic microwave background, leaves only the Big Bang as a valid explanation for all we see. (Credit: NASA/CXC/M. Weiss)

In conjunction with the expanding universe, these four points would become the cornerstone of the Big Bang. The growth and evolution of the large-scale structure of the universe, of individual galaxies, and of the stellar populations found within those galaxies all validates the Big Bang’s predictions. The discovery of a bath of radiation just ~3 K above absolute zero — combined with its blackbody spectrum and temperature imperfections at microkelvin levels of tens to hundreds — was the key evidence that validated the Big Bang and eliminated many of its most popular alternatives. And the discovery and measurement of the light elements and their ratios — including hydrogen, deuterium, helium-3, helium-4, and lithium-7 — revealed not only which type of nuclear fusion occurred prior to the formation of stars, but also the total amount of normal matter that exists in the universe.

Extrapolating back to as far as your evidence can take you is a tremendous success for science. The physics that took place during the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang imprinted itself onto the universe, enabling us to test our models, theories, and understanding of the universe from that time. The earliest observable imprint, in fact, is the cosmic neutrino background, whose effects show up in both the cosmic microwave background (the Big Bang’s leftover radiation) and the universe’s large-scale structure. This neutrino background comes to us, remarkably, from just ~1 second into the hot Big Bang.

If there were no oscillations due to matter interacting with radiation in the universe, there would be no scale-dependent wiggles seen in galaxy clustering. The wiggles themselves, shown with the non-wiggly part subtracted out (bottom), is dependent on the impact of the cosmic neutrinos theorized to be present by the Big Bang. Standard Big Bang cosmology corresponds to β=1. (Credit: D. Baumann et al., Nature Physics, 2019)

But extrapolating beyond the limits of your measurable evidence is a dangerous, albeit tempting, game to play. After all, if we can trace the hot Big Bang back some 13.8 billion years, all the way to when the universe was less than 1 second old, what’s the harm in going all the way back just one additional second: to the singularity predicted to exist when the universe was 0 seconds old?

The answer, surprisingly, is that there’s a tremendous amount of harm — if you’re like me in considering “making unfounded, incorrect assumptions about reality” to be harmful. The reason this is problematic is because beginning at a singularity — at arbitrarily high temperatures, arbitrarily high densities, and arbitrarily small volumes — will have consequences for our universe that aren’t necessarily supported by observations.

For example, if the universe began from a singularity, then it must have sprung into existence with exactly the right balance of “stuff” in it — matter and energy combined — to precisely balance the expansion rate. If there were just a tiny bit more matter, the initially expanding universe would have already recollapsed by now. And if there were a tiny bit less, things would have expanded so quickly that the universe would be much larger than it is today.

If the universe had just a slightly higher density (red), it would have recollapsed already; if it had just a slightly lower density, it would have expanded much faster and become much larger. The Big Bang, on its own, offers no explanation as to why the initial expansion rate at the moment of the universe’s birth balances the total energy density so perfectly, leaving no room for spatial curvature at all. (Credit: Ned Wright’s cosmology tutorial)

And yet, instead, what we’re observing is that the universe’s initial expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy within it balance as perfectly as we can measure.

Why?

If the Big Bang began from a singularity, we have no explanation; we simply have to assert “the universe was born this way,” or, as physicists ignorant of Lady Gaga call it, “initial conditions.”

Similarly, a universe that reached arbitrarily high temperatures would be expected to possess leftover high-energy relics, like magnetic monopoles, but we don’t observe any. The universe would also be expected to be different temperatures in regions that are causally disconnected from one another — i.e., are in opposite directions in space at our observational limits — and yet the universe is observed to have equal temperatures everywhere to 99.99%+ precision.

We’re always free to appeal to initial conditions as the explanation for anything, and say, “well, the universe was born this way, and that’s that.” But we’re always far more interested, as scientists, if we can come up with an explanation for the properties we observe.

In the top panel, our modern universe has the same properties (including temperature) everywhere because they originated from a region possessing the same properties. In the middle panel, the space that could have had any arbitrary curvature is inflated to the point where we cannot observe any curvature today, solving the flatness problem. And in the bottom panel, pre-existing high-energy relics are inflated away, providing a solution to the high-energy relic problem. This is how inflation solves the three great puzzles that the Big Bang cannot account for on its own. (Credit: E. Siegel/Beyond the Galaxy)

That’s precisely what cosmic inflation gives us, plus more. Inflation says, sure, extrapolate the hot Big Bang back to a very early, very hot, very dense, very uniform state, but stop yourself before you go all the way back to a singularity. If you want the universe to have the expansion rate and the total amount of matter and energy in it balance, you’ll need some way to set it up in that fashion. The same applies for a universe with the same temperatures everywhere. On a slightly different note, if you want to avoid high-energy relics, you need some way to both get rid of any preexisting ones, and then avoid creating new ones by forbidding your universe from getting too hot once again.

Inflation accomplishes this by postulating a period, prior to the hot Big Bang, where the universe was dominated by a large cosmological constant (or something that behaves similarly): the same solution found by de Sitter way back in 1917. This phase stretches the universe flat, gives it the same properties everywhere, gets rid of any pre-existing high-energy relics, and prevents us from generating new ones by capping the maximum temperature reached after inflation ends and the hot Big Bang ensues. Furthermore, by assuming there were quantum fluctuations generated and stretched across the universe during inflation, it makes new predictions for what types of imperfections the universe would begin with.

The quantum fluctuations that occur during inflation get stretched across the universe, and when inflation ends, they become density fluctuations. This leads, over time, to the large-scale structure in the universe today, as well as the fluctuations in temperature observed in the CMB. New predictions like these are essential for demonstrating the validity of a proposed fine-tuning mechanism. (Credit: E. Siegel; ESA/Planck and the DOE/NASA/NSF Interagency Task Force on CMB research)

Since it was hypothesized back in the 1980s, inflation has been tested in a variety of ways against the alternative: a universe that began from a singularity. When we stack up the scorecard, we find the following:

  • Inflation reproduces all of the successes of the hot Big Bang; there’s nothing that the hot Big Bang accounts for that inflation can’t also account for.
  • Inflation offers successful explanations for the puzzles that we simply have to say “initial conditions” for in the hot Big Bang.
  • Of the predictions where inflation and a hot Big Bang without inflation differ, four of them have been tested to sufficient precision to discriminate between the two. On those four fronts, inflation is 4-for-4, while the hot Big Bang is 0-for-4.

But things get really interesting if we look back at our idea of “the beginning.” Whereas a universe with matter and/or radiation — what we get with the hot Big Bang — can always be extrapolated back to a singularity, an inflationary universe cannot. Due to its exponential nature, even if you run the clock back an infinite amount of time, space will only approach infinitesimal sizes and infinite temperatures and densities; it will never reach it. This means, rather than inevitably leading to a singularity, inflation absolutely cannot get you to one by itself. The idea that “the universe began from a singularity, and that’s what the Big Bang was,” needed to be jettisoned the moment we recognized that an inflationary phase preceded the hot, dense, and matter-and-radiation-filled one we inhabit today.


Blue and red lines represent a “traditional” Big Bang scenario, where everything starts at time t=0, including spacetime itself. But in an inflationary scenario (yellow), we never reach a singularity, where space goes to a singular state; instead, it can only get arbitrarily small in the past, while time continues to go backwards forever. Only the last minuscule fraction of a second, from the end of inflation, imprints itself on our observable universe today. (Credit: E. Siegel)

This new picture gives us three important pieces of information about the beginning of the universe that run counter to the traditional story that most of us learned. First, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, and small singularity — and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since — is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.

Second, observations have well established the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang: cosmic inflation. Before the hot Big Bang, the early universe underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any preexisting components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation ended, the universe reheated to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, and expanding universe that grew into what we inhabit today.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak with any sort of knowledge or confidence as to how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other nonsingular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity. Until the day comes where we discover how to extract more information from the universe than presently seems possible, we have no choice but to face our ignorance. The Big Bang still happened a very long time ago, but it wasn’t the beginning we once supposed it to be.


Love is the center of all bible readings and doctrines

 


Literal, grammatical, historical, contextual... all good approaches except one. Drop the literal reading of the bible where we read our belief sets, cultural mores, and prejudices into the bible. It misinforms and leads to bad theology.

But the last three approaches well informs the Hebraic or Greek Hellenistic beliefs of that day. Not so the literal reading of those ancient cultures.

Which means a good hermenuetic is redactive to the text per the rules (beliefs) of those ancient societal eras.

Which is also why theology is so full of interpretive meanings for different sects and denominations.

The best hermenuetic I have found is this:

"God is love regardless of what religious man thought of God in the OT and NT."

To underscore my point, the Abrahamic Covenant is the same as the New Covenant. God sacrifices Himself in order to enforce and assure His covenant with mankind through Abraham (saved by faith as response to divine act) and later at the Cross through Christ in the New Covenant.

In sum, the best hermenuetic is "Love = Jesus". Put it at the center of all bible readings and not the "bible" per se.

God's Love informs our reading, our faith, our doctrines, our judgments, our actions, our responses, and our worship. Putting any other doctrine in the center removes Love, making God something other than He is.

R.E. Slater
October 13, 2021