Just a thought: does anyone else listen to Christmas music at this time of year. Perhaps I just miss the snow. I’ve been living in the United States for some time now and there aren’t any mountains in my region to go ski on and needless to say no snow right now. Bother. Anyway about the big bang, I figure we can start with the assumptions that are behind the theory. To quote Wikipedia, “The Big Bang theory depends on two major assumptions: the universality of physical laws, and the Cosmological Principle.” So let’s break this up. Basically, we assume that the universe holds to the laws of physics everywhere and that they don’t change anywhere or at any time. If this were not true then, for example, in the Andromeda galaxy, our closest galactic neighbor, Einstein’s theory of relativity wouldn’t work or Newton’s first law, F=ma, wouldn’t hold. As for the second on, the Cosmological principle states that universe as a whole is isotropic and homogonous. Homogonous means that stuff is uniformly spread throughout the universe. Obviously on our scale matter/energy isn’t uniformly distributed. But one a really really REALLY grand scale things are. The picture I’ve included shows a model of the grandest scale of the universe. It’s pretty homogonous, but I don’t know it doesn’t seem quite as homogonous as I would like it to be…you know to sleep well at night. Isotropic means basically the same thing. It just means that if you look one way you see the same thing as when you look another way. Which is fairly true as far as observations go. So it seems like a logical and sound assumption. But we know what assuming does.
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