I’ll just add that there’s more to reality than simply a model that fits observations. String Theory and Holographic Theory (both of which treat our Space-Time as reflections of higher dimensions) may perfectly describe our physics with mathematical preciseness, but that doesn’t make it real. Existence. It’s just a math model. Brian Cox addresses this with several promising theories. They may describe something (and therefore predict it) well, but it isn’t necessarily observably real.

Otherwise I wrote something similar as you — it’s not a question of “believing” or “faith” in facts.

I don't think anybody "believes" in the Big Bang. It's just tons upon tons of evidence that lead to the conclusion. And besides even if we do discover one day that the Big Bang is indeed absolute fact, the next big question would be "what made it?"

For all we know we could literally be in a rabbit hole of nesting universes, each with their own completely independent laws of physics.

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In general, the more religious people are, the more their beliefs are in opposition to science.

The most fundamental Christians, believe that the Earth is only a few thousand years old and that God put dinosaur bones underground to fuck with us.

They also believe that the cosmic background radiation was placed there by God to mess with atheists and scientists.

What an oddly specific generalization.

It wasn’t “nothing”… it just wasn’t normal matter (that came about later). But it was a unified state of forces and energy and time under extreme conditions that our current laws of quantum physics cannot describe.

Michio Kaku would be a good place to start. He gives amazingly concise lectures. Look for other astrophysicists takes as well. It’s an incredibly interesting topic.

Pius XII who was pope from 1939-58 was pretty positive about it.

Thank you for taking the time and commenting I'll take a look at it.

Hi that is a separate nebula complex call the Dragon's Egg. It has two designations, NGC6164 for the inner area and NGC6165 for the outer bubble. The star at the center created everything. Known as the Dragon's Egg, this star -- a rare, hot, luminous O-type star some 40 times as massive as the Sun -- created not only the complex nebula (NGC 6164) that immediately surrounds it, but also the encompassing blue halo. Its name is derived, in part, from the region's proximity to the picturesque NGC 6188, known as the fighting Dragons of Ara. In another three to four million years the massive star will likely end its life in a supernova explosion.

Basically the star goes through periods where it blows its outer shell off into space. It looks far better in normal light. This website shows a far better image of it in the visible light spectrum https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140522.html

Makes more sense than god doing it. (Who started god?)

I'm new to this so sorry but what's the construct in white in the lower right corner of the blue spear almost appears as a half dome?

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>We live in a universe where space time appears to be a thing so what's it matter what happens outside of it?

Why do we do science at all?

It’s still the accepted theory among the majority of astronomers & physicists. Some of the big questions that remain are dark energy and dark matter

I dont think you can compare the Big Bang to “faith” and “belief”. It’s pretty well proven, at least down to 10^-42 seconds of it. It’s only that first Planck Time where the conditions were so extreme and all forces and energy and time were unified that we cannot extrapolate, and thus we call it the “singularity” where our understood laws of physics break down.

There is a lot of proof for the Big Bang. From the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation to the red shift of distant galaxies. We can measure the expansion and (since space and time are intricately woven) we can see the intense energy signature cooled down to mere radio frequencies.

It’s natural to wonder and question, and I’m sure as we (humanity) have a greater understanding of the quantum nature of gravity we’ll understand even more of the Big Bang. But just because we don’t know that initial fraction of a fraction of a fraction…. of a fraction of a second, that doesn’t invalidate all we do know.

In summary, it’s not belief. It’s observable and measurable and consistent with the laws of physics we know all the way to the singularity.

As an example (by analogy) we don’t know what goes in at the singularity of a black hole (where conditions also are so extreme that our current laws of physics cannot describe it) but we know they exist. We’ve even (recently) imaged our own. Not to mention observing their lensing. They are unquestionably real. And even though we don’t know what goes on at the infinitesimal point (or 1D line of a rotating black hole) called the “singularity”, they still exist and are provable and observable.

It’s not a question of “believing” in black holes while admitting there’s still more to learn.

It’s not a question of “believing” in the Big Bang while admitting there’s still more to learn.

P.S. yes, our universe as we know it began at the Big Bang 13.8B years ago. Time and 3D space, space-time, were unified (along with all the forces) so that is why there is no concept of a “before” that moment. However you wish to philosophize about it — some speculate multiverses and others turtles upon turtles 🐢 — it doesn’t matter because that was beyond our 4 dimensional space-time reality.

I'm non-denominational Christian and accept the Big Bang theory. I accept that God exists. I will accept that God doesn't exist, as well. My religious viewpoint is loosely based around string theory's 10th dimension, which scientifically (and mathematically) says all things are possible. And if all things are, then even the opposite is true; everything exists, and nothing exists.

Right! It’s actually not that the Big Bang theory is the problem itself - it’s the best framework we have so far that makes sense of all the observations (e.g. the expanding universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, etc). The features that you’re referring to are dark energy and dark matter. We still don’t understand what those really are, and if we want to understand our entire universe and its expansion we need to get a handle on those two. And that’s where JWST will hopefully come in. I’m excited to see what we find out!

Anything on that level of science I just accept as “based off what we’ve learned so far and our astronomically low understanding of space this is our best guess 🤷🏻‍♂️”

At least as far as physics, cosmology, other space sciences, etc, are concerned, if the answer to "can we do science about it?" is No, then ... yeah. By definition the question cannot be answered by science so science isn't going to worry about it.

It was, in fact, hugely popular with catholics when it came to public light. The popular theory before expansion was steady state, which posited an eternal essentially unchanging universe. Many religious institutions were early advocates for the big bang because it looks much more like an act of creation than any theory that came before.

Read the book, “A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking.

Hi, this is a false colour image taken using narrowband filters.

The nebula is called an emission nebula. An emission nebula is a nebula formed of ionized gases that emit light of various wavelengths. The most common source of ionization is high-energy ultraviolet photons emitted from a nearby hot star. The common wavelengths that astronomers like to capture are those from ionised Sulphur (Sii), Hydrogen (Ha) and Oxygen (Oiii). I use a monochromatic camera and then use filters to capture the light. For this image I used filters that are called narrowband filters because they only capture a very narrow part of the light spectrum. The ones I used capture Sii, Ha and Oiii. I then assign each of these filters to a colour to produce the final image. The Hubble Palette was developed by NASA and it basically maps Sii data to red, Ha to green and Oiii to blue.

This video has a really good explanation on narrowband astrophotography. https://youtu.be/0Fp2SlhlprU

The idea of the big bang comes from Hubble Time, where we extrapolate the age of the universe using Hubble’s constant(the rate of expansion of the universe). We assume Hubble’s constant to be constant(spoilers it isn’t) and work backwards to see how long ago the universe would be contained within a singularity. That’s the basic idea of the big bang, however the physics behind it all gets very hazy as we get closer and closer to it. I’m talking 10^-20 seconds after the big bang close

It's not that the Big Bang isn't the presiding theory, it's that the Big Bang theory is an observational theory rather than an explanatory theory. That is, it's a model of WHAT we see when we look into space with our telescopes, not WHY we see it. That observation hasn't changed in 60 years - everything we've seen only confirms that the Big Bang happened.

What you're talking about was noticed pretty much as soon as the Big Bang itself was discovered. Basically the observed behavior of the early universe's expansion doesn't follow the known laws of physics as we understand them. The basic analogy is that the Big Bang should have exploded like a grenade, but instead it inflated like a balloon. This obviously had major consequences for the composition of our current universe, and scientists would certainly like to understand why things played out like this. So either our understanding of physics is flawed in some way (almost certainly true, but how specifically?), or something happened during The Big Bang to constrain expansion that we have yet to identify. It could also be a combination of the two.

It's one of the great mysteries cosmology is trying to solve. No matter what happens we'll eventually get a new theory that encompasses the Big Bang plus explains why it happened. The Big Bang itself will always be a good model for what it actually describes, just like Newton's Laws of Motion are still good models for specific scenarios of Einstein's Relativity.