HOW DID THE BIG BANG HAPPEN???

Have you ever driven in a “pea soup” fog? I have . . . twice. You creep along, and as one center line dash disappears from sight the next one emerges from the fog. Even fog lights are useless. They can’t penetrate the fog. You may be on a mountain road, as in one of my experiences. You are tense, fearing you might miss that next curve, or it might be sharper than expected. Science can be like that. Your mind creeps along from one idea to another, trying to make sense of the whole. You may finally have a “eureka moment” and the fog disappears, but you are still not really sure how you got there. 

Back to that mountain road, a car suddenly appeared behind me, passed me, and disappeared into the fog. It was as if I were parked. I proceeded down the mountain, expecting to find the car crushed against a tree or a broken guard rail where it had gone over a cliff. There was nothing. The diver had obviously driven the road many times and knew every curve. Scientifically, Stephen Hawking is like that driver. His “fog” is his non-functioning muscles. He has nothing to do but think, and he has become very proficient at thinking. His brain has become comparable to the muscles of a world champion body builder.

Among many problems, Dr. Hawking has directed his brain into the “curves” of the Big Bang theory.  Carefully considering every “curve,” he concluded that this occurred into nothingness – no time, no space, no mass – simply nothing. It was not even comparable to a vacuum, because a vacuum implies space! In reality, this is basically in agreement with the Judeo-Christian explanation of our beginnings. But how can this be? Logic says it shouldn’t happen. Thermodynamics calculations say it can’t happen. Yet it did. Something had to be present, and it had to be in a unique form never attained since. 

My brain power does not approach that of even one a small lobe of Dr. Hawking’s, but allow me to at least consider the possible conditions leading to the Big Bang. 

First, there is a thermodynamic temperature scale, only used by scientists, called the Kelvin (K) scale. Zero Kelvin is considered “absolute zero,” at point at which everything should be frozen; 0^o K = −273.15°C = −459.67°F. Scientists have been able to cool systems close to absolute zero, but it is not even theoretically possible to reach the zero point. Were this possible, a system at absolute zero would still have mass. Therefore, whatever the Big Bang was, it probably occurred within a system at a temperature even below the thermodynamic absolute zero.

Second, in another blog I pointed to Einstein's equation, mass equals energy divided by the speed of light squared (M=E/C², or he stated it as E=MC²).  In other words, all mass is nothing more and nothing less than organized energy. The atom bomb and the subsequent hydrogen bomb supported this theory as being true. Modern research is also supporting the theory. Going back to conditions prior to the Big Bang, if there was no space and no mass, whatever initiated the university had to be energy only. Furthermore, all of the energy had to be potential energy only. The presence of kinetic energy would mean something was moving, which would imply the presence of space. 

If nothing was moving, then even electrons and their components could not be moving. For that matter, electrons or their components could not have even existed because, no matter how small, they would have occupied space – which was non-existent. This leaves with one and only one possibility: immediately prior to the Big Bang event there could be nothing present but some potential energy. How can this be? 

Given that we now have some potential energy floating in nothingness, expansion into a universe means that some kind of spark had to cause a small packet of potential energy to transfer into kinetic energy. This packet would have nudged another small packet of potential energy, and a minute amount of heat would have resulted. Suddenly we have a chain reaction and the potential energy transfers to kinetic energy and space is created. The packets of energy organize into hydrogen atoms, and off we go!

Assuming this is what happened, we still have unanswered questions. Where did the original energy come from? Can energy exist separate from mass? Where did the initial spark come from? Can we ever know? Some physicists hypothesize prior universes and that ours somehow originated from them. That just begs the question, because we would then have to ask how any "parent" universe(s) originated. Jews and Christians have the answer: God did it. But that, in turn, raises another question. Where did God come from? All this is meaningless, because the origin questions are unanswerable.

OK, theoretical physicists, where am I wrong? Or am I just repeating conclusions that you drew long ago?