From The Big Bang To Stars And Galaxies: Fill & Download for Free

In the Big Bang, it was space that exploded. Here is a poem I wrote about it. (My favorite paragraph is the last one—but don’t skip ahead.)If someone would like to format this better for Quora, I’d be happy to accept the help. Most of the lines should be single spaced, and the whole poem should be indented. Stanzas should be double spaced, but not lines.——————————-The Creationa scientist’s mythby Richard A. MullerAt firstthere was nothingno earth, no sunno space, no timenothing.Time beganand the vacuum exploded, eruptedfrom nothing, filled with fireeverywherefuriously hot and bright.Fast as light, space grew,and the firestorm grewweaker. Crystals appeareddropletsof the very first matter. Strange matterfragile bitsa billionth of the universeoverwhelmed in turbulenceof no importancethey seemas they waitfor the violence to subside.The universe cooled and the crystals shatteredand shattered again,and again and againuntil they could shatter no more. Fragmentselectrons, gluons, quarks,grasped at each other, but were burned back apartby the blue-white heat, still far too hotfor atoms to endureSpace grew, and the fire diminishedto white to red to infraredto darkness.A million year holocaust had passed.Particles huddle in the cold and bind themselvesinto atoms -- hydrogen, helium, simple atomsfrom which all else is made.Drawn by gravity, the atoms gatherand divideand form clouds of all sizesstars and galaxiesof stars, clusters of galaxies. In the voidsthere is empty spacefor the first time.In a small star cloud, a clump of cool mattercompresses and heatsand ignitesand once again there is light.Deep within a star, nucleiare fuel and food, burning and cookingfor billions of years, fusingto carbon and oxygen and iron, matter of lifeand intelligence, born slowly, buriedtrappeddeep within a star.Burned and burdened, a giant star’s heartcollapses. Convulses. A flash. In secondsenergy from gravity, thrown outoverheats, explodes, ejectsthe shell of the star. Supernova! Growing brighterthan a thousand stars. Still brighter, brighterthan a million stars, a billion stars, brighterthan a galaxy of stars. Cinders of carbon, oxygen, ironexpelled into spaceescapefree! They cool and hardento dust, the ashes of a starthe substance of lifeIn Milky Way galaxy at the edge of Virgo Cluster(named five billion years later, for a mother),the dust divides and gathers and begins to forma new star. Nearby a smudge of dust begins to forma planet. The young suncompresses, and heatsand ignitesand warms the infant earth

This is a problem for all thinking people, not just scientists. It's known as the "infinite regress" problem or the "turtles all the way down" problem, based on this story, as recounted Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time":A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.”The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?”“You’re very clever, young man, very clever”, said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”The secular version of the problem is "If the Big Bang caused everything, what caused the Big Bang?"The religious version is, "If God caused everything, what caused God?"It's always been odd to me that both atheists and theists use this exact same problem to point out that the "other side" is irrational. But there's an easy answer: "I don't know.""I don't know" is not an irrational stance. It's an intellectually honest one that anyone, regardless of his beliefs, can give.Let's say I'm a detective, investigating a locked room mystery. I find a dead man on the floor of a room that was locked from the inside. Next to him, also on the floor, there's a revolver, and I can see the victim has a gunshot wound in his head.An autopsy proves that the lethal bullet came from the revolver, and, furthermore, that (going by the angle of the wound), the victim couldn't have shot himself.I say, "I think we can conclude that the revolver was the murder weapon."The chief of police asks, "Okay, but how did the killer get in?"I say, "I don't know."Does it follow from this that my conclusion about the revolver is irrational? Doesn't it make more sense to say that I know some things about the crime scene but not all things?If you have accepted Science as a vehicle for knowing, you are perfectly consistent when you say, "Mountains of evidence point to the Big Bang being the cause of everything we see and can detect, but I don't know what caused it or if it even had a cause."A theist can be equally rational when he says, "My faith..." (or my scripture/revelation/tradition/reasoning/etc) "...proves to me that God created the Universe, but I don't know what (if anything) created God."A theist can claim that God is eternal.An atheist (or a person with a secular view of Nature) can claim that the matter and energy involved in the Big Bang is eternal.In fact, there are five ways to deal with the infinite-regress problem:1. There was no first cause: the current state of the Universe is eternal.2. There was a first cause, which was, itself, uncaused, having existed forever.3. There's an infinity of causes. (Turtles all the way down.)4. The Universe just winked into being, uncaused.5. I don't know.The problem is any solution is going to involve something existing eternally, many things existing eternally (turtles all the way down), or something coming from nothing. And these are all ideas that don't sit well with human intuition. Any of them could be true, but our senses and brains didn't evolve to understand infinity or something-from-nothing.There also may be systems of thought that, for some people, "solve" the problem by helping them not think about it. I've talked to a couple of theists who have said, "Well, you're right. We don't know what caused God, but He's so awesome. He fills the mind, and so we don't need to think about anything prior. God, as a cause, is good-enough for me."There are physicists who say, "All we can even know happened after the Big Bang. We have no way of detecting anything that came before it, so it's a waste of time wondering about it."These strategies may sound like intellectual cop outs, but we all do this, all the time. "I don't care why you stole that car! Stealing is wrong and you're going to jail." Most of the time, we don't try to follow a causal chain all the way to its end. We don't need to for most purposes.A theist can pray to God without knowing where God came from or just trusting that He's eternal. The work of prayers and worship can get done in the face of mystery—in the face of "I don't know."And a physicist can do his job—can study Nature and learn all sorts of specific things about gravity, quarks, photons, etc.—without knowing the cause of the Big Bang.Luckily for all humans, we can get lots of useful work done without knowing the answers to all questions.

No.You would find yourself among stars and galaxies just like here, except that those stars and galaxies happen to have been made from the very primordial hydrogen and helium gas that, 13.8 billion years ago, emitted light which we here on the Earth are today detecting as cosmic microwave background radiation.But while you are there, 45 billion light years from here, and if you had access to a radio telescope that you turned in the direction of the Milky Way, you would be detecting cosmic microwave background radiation, emitted about 13.8 billion years ago by the very matter from which we, the Earth, the Milky Way are made.