Question for the smart people.

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Bigdave
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Question for the smart people.

Post by Bigdave » Thu Jan 12, 2012 2:10 am

Hi everyone,

Average joe Aussie bogan here, i love all this quantum mechanics and finding new things in the world and space.

I have one question that has me boggled, the LHC is on a quest to find the higgs boson....
And that is by smashing the building blocks of atoms together to find the building blocks of us which in turn we think is what happened at .0000000000001 seconds after the big bang.

I understand this and think yes it's where and when we have to look.

What i want to ask is who or why was it decided that the big bang was caused by atoms smashing together?

I mean how do we not know that it was caused by previous matter compressing down to a minute point and then exploding?



I hope someone can settle my mind on this.


Dave

Kasuha
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Re: Question for the smart people.

Post by Kasuha » Thu Jan 12, 2012 12:04 pm

Nobody has decided about Big Bang and nobody knows for sure how it had all really started.
Main assumption here is that laws of physics as we observe them today didn't change in the past.
Another thing is that we don't even know all the details of laws of physics. Such things like neutrino fine structure are not very important today but might have played key roles in the early universe.
And there were many other hypotheses about how the universe was in the past. The only thing is that almost all of them were proven to lead to today's universe different from what we observe. So the Big Bang theory is not something someone decided, it's rather something that survived the scrutiny.
And the Big Bang theory on itself is just a frame of a whole lot of hypotheses which differ in details and change with each physics discovery.

Bigdave
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Re: Question for the smart people.

Post by Bigdave » Thu Jan 12, 2012 3:54 pm

hmmm just stumps me about how much power it takes to get these atoms to smash together yet for all we know there was nothing before OR the universe hit it's maximum and came back in again.

Thank you for the reply, as cloudy as the subject is it has cleared it up.

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tswsl1989
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Re: Question for the smart people.

Post by tswsl1989 » Wed Feb 29, 2012 9:52 am

Bigdave wrote: ...which in turn we think is what happened at .0000000000001 seconds after the big bang.
When people make comparisons to the big bang, they normally mean in terms of the amount of energy involved - I'm not aware of anyone trying to claim that the big bang was started by colliding particles together.
As we understand it, the universe has been cooling since the big bang occurred. There are several processes that the universe went through before becoming the cold and mostly empty entity that we know and love today. The quick and simple explanation is that as the universe cooled, the attraction between particles became important - think of steam condensing back to the fine mist of water droplets as it comes out of the kettle.

High energy particle collisions provide us with the best method of approximating the conditions of the early universe so that we can test our understanding of particle physics - much as water doesn't spontaneously boil if you leave it outside on a cold winters day, the processes and particles the LHC are trying to observe require conditions that aren't otherwise available.

Hope that's more helpful than confusing, and welcome to the forum!

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chriwi
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Re: Question for the smart people.

Post by chriwi » Thu Mar 01, 2012 5:50 am

Evenso tswsl1989 already said the same thing I want to put it in simpler even simpler words omce more:

1. Nobody belives that colissions of Protons were involved in the early big bang.
2. the protons and the colissions of them are rater a tool which allos us the first time with the tecnical means available to us to concentrate such high energys in small space and thereby create conditions like they probably existed very short after the still unknown "Big Bang".

once more the protons and their collisions are part of the observing instrument LHC and not part of the scenario of concentrated high energy scinetists want to observe with the LHC.

the protons are rather the vehicles to cary and concentrate thees high energys but as little as possible involved in the effects of this high energy scintists try to observe.
bye

chriwi

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