Friendly Atheist

I have A Brief History of Time on my desk next to my monitor… but I read the whole thing, dammit!!!

Anyhoo… Big Bang in the fewest words…

KABOOM! existence.

In a slightly greater amount of words:

Existence as we know it began as an explosion of extremely dense material that is still expanding the universe at an incredible rate, and can therefore be potentially said to be still happening. What existed before the Big Bang is difficult to theorise because of the nature of such an event. Some say that nothing, not even time, existed, but some others believe that the explosion took pre-existing crap from another dimension or another universe and made it our own. It is imperative to realise, however, that since we cannot replicate non-existence and we cannot replicate the Big Bang within the non-existence, we should not trouble ourselves to more than theorise about what was before the explosion. To prove anything conclusively at this time would be impossible. We have evidence of almost everything from a second after the Big Bang and onward through time, but attempts at collecting evidence from before the Big Bang would be a maddening exercise in futility. Since it cannot be tested, we cannot say either way. We do, however, have evidence of the Big Bang itself in that we can see the universe expanding outward from a central location.

Personally, I like my first of the two explanations.

I may make it into a tee shirt.

We are faced with a choice–either we believe in eternal matter (see first comment) or we believe in eternal being (a Creator, as in Genesis).

We don’t know that the matter is eternal. Just that it can’t be destroyed now. And when you factor in antimatter that’s not quite true either. In any case, it’s not a choice between what we think is eternal: it’s a choice between accepting the position supported by evidence (CMB) and ignoring the evidence. And of course I’m sure some people will soon chime in that it’s a false dilemma anyway, since the two (Big Bang and creator god(s)) aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

people who aren’t comedians who have this attitude are highly annoying.

Ouch… I’m an arts student in the humanities (and read Brief History of Time).

@cautions

I’m not quite sure if that comment was directed at Safran, or other people that might ACTUALLY hold the view he’s talking about in that clip. But, just for the record, he is a comedian (of sorts).

@Everyone Else

For us Aussies, we can listen to him on the Radio every Sunday night, but if anyone else is interested, he has a weekly podcast (basically, the Sunday night show without the music breaks).

Matter and energy are not eternal. Matter can be converted to energy and the reverse as well. Remember E=m*c^2? That equation states the amount of energy (E) released by converting a given mass(m) of matter times the speed of light squared.

That’s more a conversion of form. When people say that matter/energy are eternal, they’re usually getting at a conservation principle, like the 1st Law of Thermodynamics.

Big Bang in the fewest words…

Sciencespeak for “Poof – God did it.”