Universes Popping into Existence?

One of the little benefits of being self-employed and semi-retired, is that one sometimes gets a bit of time to ponder on the great mysteries of life - like whether the universe actually began with a BIG bang (it must have been a really big one) or not. If it did, the BIGness of the bang has to be marveled at - it must have been such a hell of a big bang that the enormous gravitational forces holding whatever was there immediately before the bang were rendered powerless in the face of it.

I mean think about it - a milli-infinitesimally small nanosecond before the big bang, there was a black hole - of such  enormous magnitude that all of the material of the universe-to-be was crammed into it. And it was a black hole because the gravitational forces were so mind-bogglingly huge that not even light could escape it (which is the case with all black holes).

So now - that kinda puts it all into perspective, doesn't it? Gravitation so huge not even light can escape - and yet we have a bang that is big enough to blow out all of the material of the soon-to-be-announced universal forthcoming attraction (if you get my drift). Why weren't the gravitational forces big enough to cause the black hole to implode back on itself again? Surely the velocity of the explosion could not be faster than the speed of  light (which light itself can't escape a black hole)?


Then we have the scientists postulating that actually things didn't really obey all the scientific rules that naturally exist, for a convenient period of time after the Big Bang. So there was really no gravity at all, and therefore no problem for the Big Bang to actually BANG instead of kind of "plop" and re-collapse on itself. So having BANG'ed properly, after a convenient few seconds, there was suddenly gravity as we know it. But in order to believe this, we now have to have a new postulation : a hitherto unknown particle which when combined with the exploded massless matter allows the creation of normal mass with gravitation, as we know it today. And that's where the Higgs Bosun particle came from - also called the "God Particle". No wonder it's being called the "elusive Higgs Bosun" - it's going to be elusive for one hell of a long time. Gimme a break.

Has anyone thought that if there was a bunch of massless matter in existence up to 3 seconds or so after the big bang (i.e. there was supposedly no gravity problem before this as the scientists would have us believe), then what was holding the enormous black hole together in order for there to be a Big Bang in the first place? A black hole without gravity would not be a black hole, would it? And why would all of the matter which was to become the future universe have collected at this point in the first place, if there was no "proper" gravity?

And then we have the problem of the size of the universe and its age : The universe is said to be around 28 billion light years across, and is supposed to be around 14 billion years old (that is - assuming we here on Earth are located conveniently close to the centre of where the Big Bang is supposed to have occurred). If in fact we take into account that we are likely not in the middle of the universe at all (don't we just love to think we're always in the middle of everything?), we don't really have a clue how big the universe is - we just know how far we can see the edge of it to be. But what does all this size and age hooha have to do with the Big Bang?

Simple - if we ARE slap bang (if you'll excuse the pun) right in the middle of where the universe started out, then the edge of our range of "vision" is around 13-14bn light years away (the furthest object that has been seen by Hubble) and this was estimated to have come into existence when the universe was approximately 750m years old. The problem is that when we see the edge of the universe 13bn light years away, we are seeing it as it was 13 billion years ago, and where it was - 13 billion light years from Earth. And if that came into existence when the universe was 750m years old and it was formed in the Big Bang, it would have had to move from the centre of the Big Bang to where it is now, in only 750m years. Now since nothing moves faster than light, and light has taken 13bn years to get to us from that farthest bit of universe, I'm at a loss to understand how the Big Bang could have blown that bit of edge of universe so far, so fast! Imagine - it's travelled 13bn light years (the distance light has travelled in 13bn years) in only 750m years! Wow - it was moving 17 times faster than light! Not!

So there the scientists are - furiously accelerating sub atomic particles around the Large Hadron Collider (LHD) (at below the speed of light, I might add!) and smashing them together in the vain chance of actually finding a particle that is invisible, has no mass and is therefore essentially undetectable! What will they come up with next : "What we have in this test tube looks like nothing! But guess what? Yes folks - it's a test tube filled with Higgs Bosuns! " Can you see the problem here? How do you know when you have found something?

And we have all the other things that cast doubt on the Big Bang - like the absence of heavy metals in Population II stars, or the size of the event horizon of the singularity that was the Big Bang, or the equilibrium of the heat-distribution across the observed universe, or the presence of rotation of heavenly bodies in the universe (and I'm not talking about Teazer's) etc.  

Like much of my experience, when the initial thinking is incorrect, we tend to go further out on the limb and try and postulate lots of other fanciful things to support the original contention; and in the process we wrap ourselves up in ever-tighter knots. If we were to instead admit we were wrong and went back to basics, we might get some decent answers sooner.

We saw it in the original church with the universe going round the Earth debacle and we're seeing it again now, with Higgs Bosuns and Big Bangs.