Cosmologic philosophy: science resisted the Big Bang theory (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, May 15, 2018, 17:41 (2384 days ago) @ dhw

QUOTE: Lemaître, on the other hand, remained humble and equivocal about the Big Bang throughout his life.
"This scientific saga demonstrates that entrenched beliefs affect the nonreligious as well as the religious. In the end, bias should always bow to evidence."

DAVID’s comment: it does look like the creation story in Genesis. It is obvious the universe started from something very small, but the math theorists cannot describe a past before the Big Bang.

dhw: Good for Lemaître, who remained equivocal about his theory. So do I, not that my opinion counts for anything, but it is obvious to me that if there is no consensus among scientists, and there are so many unanswered (possibly unanswerable) questions, even what appears to be evidence cannot be sufficient to justify any entrenched belief. I’m afraid it is not obvious to me that the universe started from something very small, precisely because even if the Big Bang did take place (unproven theory), nobody – as you so rightly observe – can possibly know what happened before it.

The theory about something small is that the universe is expanding from the beginning, so the beginning must be something small. The theory about the 'something' itself is where some of the problem exists. The idea of a singularity is from Einstein's general relativity theory which seems to be proven, but may not be entirely correct at those small sizes. His theory covers the huge universe well, but only that size.