Hello everyone!
I am making notes from an old soviet book from 1960. It struck me, that they refer to the Big Bang theory as “Neo-Thomism,” “fideism,” and bourgeois idealism.
This is the text from the book itself:
“…Catholicism and science were created for one another.” They seek to exploit every difficulty and unresolved question in science to serve the interests of church dogma. Proponents of Catholic philosophy often cite the theory of the “expanding universe” as a favorite argument for the creation of the world. In 1919, scientists discovered the so-called “redshift,” a phenomenon in which spectral lines from radiation reaching us from distant star systems and galaxies shift toward the red end of the spectrum. Science has not yet conclusively determined the cause of this phenomenon. The most likely explanation is the rapid recession of galaxies from our solar system in various directions; idealist philosophers immediately concluded from this that all the matter and energy in the universe was once concentrated in a single “primeval atom” created by God. This conclusion lacks any scientific basis, if only because we have no right to extrapolate findings observed at a specific time and within a limited region of the universe to the entire infinite universe or to timeframes spanning billions of years. Nevertheless, Pius XII… Citing this and other similar “theories,” Pope Pius XII declared in a speech delivered on November 22, 1951, titled “The Proof of God’s Existence in Light of Modern Science”: "Creation took place in time; therefore, there is a Creator; therefore, there is God—these are the words we demand of science; these are the words our generation expects from it.
I tried asking Qwen what the soviet alternative used to be and what is currently being taught in China, but I am not satisfied, nor done with the matter.
Can someone give me an explanation on what the Big Bang has as an alternative or if there is an alternative at all and how I should look at this excerpt and at the approach it has against the Big Bang theory.
I am simply looking to have a better understanding over the matter, not looking to cause trouble.
You can imagine and you may agree, that access to astrophisics in english is limited. Brian Cox, Stephen Hawking, Neil deGrasse Tyson, etc. are the scientist most people see nowadays. Not exactly principled Marxist-Leninists. I try to analyze them to the best of my abilities, but I am kinda struck now, looking for help!
Thank you in advance!
The Big Bang theory has nothing to do with the “creation of the universe.” This is just popsci misrepresentation.
The Big Bang theory is based on the observational fact that the further galaxies are away from us, the faster they recede from us, due to the universe’s expansion. That’s called Hubble’s law, v=Hd, where v is the recessional velocity, H is Hubble’s parameter, and d is distance.
Velocity is just distance over time, so we can substitute this with d/t=Hd. Then, we can divide both sides by d to give us 1/t=H. Now, just flip it around and take the reciprocal of both sides, and you get t=1/H.
What does t mean in this case? Well, if things are moving away from each other as time goes forward, if time goes backwards, then everything will eventually be in the same place, and that t is how long ago that was. Hubble’s parameter is usually given a very fancy unit, that being 73 km/s/Mpc, but look at the definition, it is 1/t, so really km/s/Mpc can be converted to hertz, and it works out to about 2.33e-18 hertz, flip that number over and it’s 429184549356223170 seconds, a bit less than 14 billion years.
Looking out into space is looking backwards in time. A galaxy 1 million light years away we see it as it was 1 million years ago. Hence, if everything was in the same place, which would be really hot and dense, 14 billion years ago, then we would expect to see a wall of light that acts as the background to everything else, which we cannot see beyond, about 14 billion light years out in every direction.
And we see exactly that, it’s called the cosmic microwave background. It is just redshifted so much it’s in the microwave spectrum, but you can see it in every direction if you point a microwave telescope at the sky.
Note that, again, nothing about the Big Bang is a “creation” story. It’s just an observable fact that the universe is expanding, so if you run the clock backwards, everything would all be in the same place, and if you look far enough into outer space, you can even see it. Well, technically what you see see the last scattering surface, which was the last time the universe was opaque, about 0.00038 billion years after the Big Bang.
None of that says: “this was when the universe was created.” Physical models stop being able to extrapolate beyond that point, reaching singularities and breaking down. People often see the word “singularity” and interpret it to be a physical feature of the world, like there’s some magic ball of “singularity” at the Big Bang or inside black holes.
But, in the equations for fluid dynamics, you also reach a singularity when a droplet pinches off from a water spout. That’s because fluid dynamics is continuous but real water is discrete made up of discrete H2O molecules, and the singularity just arises from not taking that into account.
A singularity just means “the theory no longer can be extrapolated beyond this point.” It doesn’t represent a real physical thing, as if there is some physical “singularity” where the universe was “created from.”
Idealism is definitely rather rampant in physics departments but not in the Big Bang. Mostly around quantum mechanics, due to the influence of the positivists around its early development, it has literally become controversial in academia to admit that objective reality exists independently of the observer, for no other reason than the positivists said objective reality is an “unnecessary metaphysical abstraction.” As a result you end up with a bunch of quantum woo and mysticism (Copenhagen, Many Worlds, QBism, etc) that are not even logically coherent or mathematically consistent, but you’re supposed to pretend they are serious proposals.
The most likely explanation is the rapid recession of galaxies from our solar system in various directions; idealist philosophers immediately concluded from this that all the matter and energy in the universe was once concentrated in a single “primeval atom” created by God.
This seems to me to be a misapprehension of the Big Bang theory because it doesn’t presuppose or extrapolate a singularity point origin of the universe at all. Our knowledge of the theory in 1960 was much less developed than today and therefore this passage is not egregious for its time and context. But the Big Bang theory, as we now know, is almost certainly wrong but it serves as a useful approximative model for the early universe and the period of cosmic inflation (developed in the 1970s by notable Russian/Soviet cosmologists like Andrei Linde and Alexei Starobinsky as well as the American cosmologist Alan Guth). Perhaps someone else can expand further on how early universe cosmology is taught in China or Russia but I just wanted to briefly clear up this misconception.
The cannon creation story is that god one day got really horny and he decided to jerk it off seven times to relieve himself, and hence we got the universe.
In actuality no one knows though the most likely story is that of the big bang theory.
Hot take: I don’t think humans nor anyone else will ever know why anything exists at all. We can describe the world we observe, we can develop theories about it, and sometimes—but not always—we can test those theories. That’s all we can do, and I don’t think that can ever explain why there is something instead of nothing.
