Ask the Dreadlocked Science Geek

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Linus

Since we've been discussing certain things in the Religion thread and I can't remember it being asked here...

Before the "Big Bang" what was there? Do we know if something else existed or was it truly ... well... nothingness?

This is actually what is called an 'ill-formed problem'. By that I mean that it is a question that we most likely do not fully comprehend.

To understand why, it's necessary to go back to the moment go over why the Big Bang theory came into existence and what it says about the early universe.

The Big Bang is one of those necessary theories. The Universe is expanding, this much is very clear because objects far from us are moving *away* from us. Since gravity is *always* attractive this requires an explanation. The prior model--the Steady State model--cannot explain an expanding Universe. Since we know, because we do it everyday, that gravity can be overcome by a sufficient force there must have been SOME force that began the expansion of the Universe. This initial event would have to be strong enough to overcome the long-term tendency of matter to attract. Now, here is where we get into the necessary part. If the Universe is expanding (and it is) then it is possible to say that the current state of the Universe (N) is derived from some earlier state of the Universe N-1. N-1 is derived from an even earlier (less expanded) state N-2 and so on. Eventually you get to a state of the Universe that is VERY compact--this is the Universe just at the moment of the Big Bang.

One of the great quests in contemporary physics is a theory that allows us to model the state of the Universe at the moment of the Big Bang. What we need is a theory that can account for an exceedingly small (smaller than the nucleus of an atom) object that is VERY massive. Right now we have two separate and disagreeing theories to deal with objects--special relativity deals with very massive objects (thus explaining gravity, black holes, etc.) and quantum mechanics to deal with very small objects (thus explaining what is happening inside an atom). The problem is that these two theories lead non-sensical (infinities) answers when you try to use them at the same time. This is not to say either theory is wrong--both SR and QM are confirmed to a truly amazing degree of accuracy. QM has been tested to such a degree and confirmed to a level of accuracy such that it would be like measuring the distance between a sign saying "Welcome to Los Angeles" and another sign saying "Welcome to New York City" and being accurate to within the width of a single human hair. SR has been confirmed time and time again in the last 100 years (well, 96 years to be accurate). So both theories are as robust as any you'll find in science.

There's some part of the picture we are missing and so, right now, I don't think we can ask a *meaningful* question about 'what happened before the Big Bang' because I don't think we understand what that question actually means.

Btw. when I said that it’s a necessary theory I meant it in this sense. I KNOW that you had a mother and a father and you were born a baby. I know this because you are alive and therefore, by definition, you got half your genes from one parent and half your genes from another parent and since no human woman could survive giving birth to a full-grown adult you must have been born a baby. We can derive, from your current state, that at some point you were smaller than you are now. The same applies to the Universe, given the current expanded state of the Universe and given the ongoing expansion, there MUST--by necessity--be a point when the Universe was in a much smaller state than it is now.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Melissa

What are some limits of science?

Melissa

Science cannot 'prove' a theory. All you can do is falsify (disprove) or fail to falsify a theory. Science cannot disprove any deeply held belief. In fact, most deeply held beliefs are almost perfectly impervious to scientific inquiry. If I assert that an invisible pink unicorn waters the garden and makes the plants grow, there is NO scientific evidence you can present that will dissuade me from my belief. I will simply reject anything you say and there's nothing that can be done about that.

Science cannot tell us how we should WANT to live. It can tell us useful things about human nature but science is not a moral system. It can tell us why, for instance, women everywhere resist rape but it cannot tell us "rape is wrong". We can take what science tells us about, for instance, why human beings make war and use that as a means to prevent war but science cannot tell us "don't make war".

Cheers
Aj

[LeftWriteFemme]

Originally Posted by Linus

Since we've been discussing certain things in the Religion thread and I can't remember it being asked here...

Before the "Big Bang" what was there? Do we know if something else existed or was it truly ... well... nothingness?

Doesn't the law of conservation mean that before the "Big Bang" there was everything we have now simply in a different form?

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by LeftWriteFemme

Doesn't the law of conservation mean that before the "Big Bang" there was everything we have now simply in a different form?

Not exactly. There are a number of conservation laws:

Energy is conserved---meaning that in an isolated system the total energy in that system remains steady over time.

Mass is conserved--meaning that in an isolated system, the total mass of the system remains constant.

Both linear and angular momentum are conserved--meaning that provided that an object is not effected by another force, it will remain moving in the direction it is going (linear momentum) or spinning as it does (angular momentum).

Now, it is true that ALL of the mass of the Universe (less the anti-matter which was annihilated) was in the singularity at the moment just prior to the Big Bang. No energy or mass has been created since that time. The reason I say 'not really' is that matter--as we understand it--didn't even begin to exist until quite a bit AFTER the Big Bang. (around 250,000 years give or take) Before that, the Universe was too hot for atoms to form.

After things settled down, sub-atomic particles could live long enough which is why we see, for instance, the CMBR (cosmic microwave background radiation).

Cheers
Aj

[betenoire]

(I couldn't resist)

(Favourite line = they froze their asses off)

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by June

For me, the Big Bang theory is the most compelling reason to believe in a creator.

When I was a kid, I would sneak out at night and look up at the stars and think what was there before this? Who made this? How did this happen?

I still don't believe in a creator, but I am always awed by the fact that we're here and the chain of events, whatever they were that caused the imperfect Storm of Humanity (and everything else) to happen.

See, to me, the Big Bang theory--or more accurately, some of the fingerprints left behind by the Big Bang--are pretty serious nails in the coffin of ANY model of origins involving a creator. Why? Because I like economical theories. By economical I mean not requiring any more moving pieces than is necessary. Invoking a deity, in order to get a rapid expansion of the Universe which left a fingerprint in the form of a pervasive microwave radiation at a fairly uniform temperature no matter where one chooses to look*, seems extravagant to me. Because now there are TWO complex things to explain--first one has to explain the Universe expanding and then one has to explain the nature of a deity that could bring such a thing about and do so in a manner that almost *perfectly* disguises its presence.

Like you, I'm in awe of the fact that we're here. I'm even more in awe of the fact that our little species, which has no reason to be able to understand pretty much *anything* that has happened in science since the early 19th century, is able to understand so much.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Melissa

Why are scientists having problems curing viruses like the common cold virus and AIDS?

Melissa

The simple, one-word answer is evolution. For the purposes of this discussion, let's stipulate that viruses are living things (depending upon where you draw the line they either are or are not living). In the last four billion years or so, living things have developed a couple of macro-strategies for ensuring that their genes are passed on. Large, multi-cellular things like us go for the 'be big, complex but at the cost of speed of evolution'. Small, single-cell things like bacteria go for the 'be small, simple and retain the ability to evolve on a dime'. Viruses are even more simple than bacteria.

Pretty much the only way to 'kill' a virus is to give it no place to take hold. This is how scientists scored the one victory we've achieved over a virus--smallpox. To beat that, we simply vaccinated every single person on the planet who *could* be vaccinated. With no place to take hold, the virus died out. It still exists--in freezers in two labs, one in Russia and the other at Ft. Detrick in Maryland.

The problem is that certain viruses evolve REALLY fast. Both HIV and the rhinovirus (a class of viruses responsible for the common cold) are very fast at accumulating changes. Since every copy of every single thing that has lived since that very first replicating gizmo billions of years ago has been *slightly* different than the thing it was copied from, there's a great deal of genetic variation in all living things. What this means is that, for instance, even if we kill off 99% of the HIV viral load in an infected person there will still be 1% that is immune to whatever cocktail of drugs we've thrown at it. (And the reason why, for instance, HIV treatments are a cocktail is *because* without it, we were simply selecting for more robust strains of the virus. This way we're hitting it with too much for it to adapt to at once but that's still not enough to kill it off.) So while we might get rid of almost all the viral load in a body, we can't get rid of 100% of the load and that 1% that has survived will begin replicating, making copies that are almost but not precisely like itself--one consequence being that whatever made it immune to the drug-cocktail will be passe on.

With the common cold all of the same things apply but unlike HIV--where there isn't a reservoir in close proximity--both the influenza and rhinoviruses have non-human reservoirs where they can happily evolve for long periods of time and then, with a mutation, jump over to us. The two most common reservoirs are pigs and birds. In fact that's where all our influenza viruses come from--they are originally pig or bird viruses that have crossed-over. So we have the problem that we saw with HIV but more-so. At least with HIV, there's a way to box the virus in. With flu and the common cold we can't box it in. We'd have to pretty much STOP living in close proximity to ducks, chickens and pigs in order to give it no place to go.

Now, this does not mean that we'll never cure these viruses. I don't think we'll make the advances in nanotechnology in my lifetime but I think in my son's lifetime and almost certainly in my granddaughter's lifetime we will. Imagine, if you will, a very tiny machine about the size of a single bacteria that is inserted into your body at birth. This thing goes through your body, taking a catalogue of your genome, the genome of any commensal bacteria (for example, the Escheria coli in your gut that allows you to digest things) and then saying that anything matching that genome is 'you'. Anything else is 'not you'. (This is, effectively, what your immune system is doing) So whenever something is detected that has a genome that is not 'you', this little gizmo goes about systematically *dismembering it atom by atom*. It literally takes the virus apart.

This is something that I doubt even viruses could evolve fast enough to outwit since it's not really a chemical attack (which is what our drugs do) but taking the thing apart at a much more fundamental level. At present there's no reason why such an application of nanotechnology wouldn't work but that's pure blue-sky thinking right now.

Cheers
Aj

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by Melissa

I've always been curious....

Does "Electroweak Breaking" Affect the Macroscopic World?

Yes and no. To understand why will require some deep discussion.

The electroweak force is what you get when the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces get together. There are four fundamental forces (also known as fundamental interactions) in the Universe they are (in descending order of strength) :

Strong nuclear force
Electromagnetism
Weak nuclear force
Gravity

The strong force is what holds the nucleus of an atom together.
The electromagnetic force is the other force we're most familiar with--light, magnetism, radio, microwaves are all manifestations of the same thing--electromagnetism.
The weak nuclear force is responsible for atomic (beta) decay.
Gravity is, well, the warping of space-time by the presence of mass. (Yes,you actually warp space-time a very tiny bit)

At VERY high energies, not seen in over 12 billion years, the electromagnetic and weak forces unify into the electroweak force.

The reason why we don't SEE effects of electroweak breaking is because the universe has cooled down so much that the symmetry has already been broken. If the universe were MUCH hotter (100 GeV--Giga electron-volts) then we would observe the electromagnetic and weak forces as one electroweak force.

So does it affect the macroscopic world? Yes, in the sense that without it there would be fewer forces. But can we observe it affecting the macroscopic world now? No, because the Universe is too cold a place for it to happen except in VERY high-energy particle accelerators (the LHC at CERN being the one that can probe at those energies)


Cheers
Aj

[socialjustice_fsu]

Aj ~
I understand we are to experience a 'supermoon' the night of March 19, 2011.
I know this means the moon will be roughly 221,000 miles away from the earth plus it will be a full moon. I know this occurs every 18 years. Can you explain this event and it's impact, if any, upon our planet?
Signed,
The One Who Slept Through Astronomy

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by socialjustice_fsu

Aj ~
I understand we are to experience a 'supermoon' the night of March 19, 2011.
I know this means the moon will be roughly 221,000 miles away from the earth plus it will be a full moon. I know this occurs every 18 years. Can you explain this event and it's impact, if any, upon our planet?
Signed,
The One Who Slept Through Astronomy

Sorry that I missed answering this during my hiatus. I know the event has passed but here is the response even though it is late:

Orbits are stable but they are not perfect, which means that they are not precisely circular. Our orbit around the Sun is an elipsis and the Moon's orbit around Earth is also an elipsis. This means that there are points of the orbit where the smaller (less massive) object will be closer to the larger (more massive) object and points where it will farther away. The 'supermoon' is simply an artifact of orbits being elliptical.

Normally, the Moon orbits the Earth at ~250,000 miles. At its closest this distance closes to ~220,000 miles which is about 10% of the total distance. So what effects occur? As you know now, not a lot happened and this is what we should expect. Why? Well, even as the Earth's mass pulls on the Moon the Moon's mass pulls on the water. The reason this happens is that while most of the mass of the Earth is stationary, the waters are constantly in motion. This means that the Earth's center of gravitational mass has a slightly less firm hold on the water than on other objects. Because gravity is a field and all fields fall off in strength as an inverse of the square of the distance* from the source of that field the closer the Earth and the Moon are to one another, the more intense the tides will be on Earth.

As far as the full-moon, this has no effect because of why there are phases of the moon in the first place. The reason why there are phases is that the moon is tidally locked with the Earth. What this means is that the rotation of the moon on its access, is in synchronization with its rotation around the Earth. This means that the same face of the moon always points toward us. Since the same part of the Moon always faces Earth, when the moon is new it means that all of the solar light striking the surface of the moon is hitting the side pointed away from us and when the moon is full the solar light is hitting the part pointed toward us. To see how this works you can do a very simple experiment with you and two other people.

Have one person stand stationary at a single point in the center of the room with a flashlight--that person represents the sun. Now, you and one other person stand facing one another and move in sync in a circle around the person holding the flashlight. If you are the person in the position of the Earth you will always be looking at the face of the person opposite you. However, when the "moon" person has their face pointed toward the flashlight, you will see their face--this is a full moon when their face is pointed away from the moon you will not see their face. Obviously to get the best effect this should take place in a darkened room. Since the only difference between a full moon and a new moon is which face is getting the light there's no effects of a full or new moon on Earth because gravitationally they have not changed in relationship to one another.


Hope this helps.

cheers
Aj

*The inverse square law is a physical law that says that as the distance from a field increases the strength of the field decreases as a function of the square of the distance. So at twice the distance the field has fallen off not two times but *four* times the distance. At four times the distance from the source the strength of the field has fallen off to sixteen times the intensity which can be found at its source. This applies to all fields in all mediums. This means that it applies to gravity, sound and electromagnetic fields. So let's say that there is a field that, just for the sake of ease, we will say has a strength of '16' at its source. Every ten feet the strength of the field will decrease. This means that at 10 feet from the source it has a strength of four, at 20 a strength of 2, at 30 a strength of 1.4, at 40 feet a strength of 1.2, at 50 feet a strength of 1.1, etc. (I've rounded up just to make it easy) The next time you are driving and you hear a siren, pay attention to how quickly the sound becomes intense as the siren comes toward you and how quickly it falls off as the sound moves away from you. This is the inverse square law in action, the very same thing happens with light or any other field. Dropping a rock into still water will also give you the same effect.

[mariamma]

Dear Dreadgeek,
Thank you so much for starting this thread. It's so very exciting to read nerdy science answers written by an educated skeptic who doesn't break out in hives to the word deist. I have no questions for you but I hope someone throws a good juicy one out there.
OH! And I love that I'm not the only one who believes in the possibility of creation being the creator. I thought that was just my weird belief. Now I see that I'm not alone
Mariamma

[*Anya*]

I just wanted to say that it is great to see you posting again! Missed your objective, informed and critical-thinking abilities!

Happy holidays to you and yours.

[mariamma]

OK, I lied dreadgeek. I do have a query.
Sound waves travel through matter. Is there a formula for how sound waves penetrate matter? Are there densitiies that they cannot go through? When sound passes through the human body, will certain frequencies pass quicker than others? Is there a scientific reason for why the heart beat will tune to the drum line of music, such as certain molecular structures being more absorbant/or resistant to sound waves? And what is the difference between a wave and a vibration?

[The JD]

Dear Dreaded Science Geek,

Why do bugs die on their backs? Or maybe more accurately, why do I always find dead bugs on their back, legs in the air, and never belly down, like maybe they're just taking a little nap?

Confused in Atlanta

[uniquetobeme]

Dear Dreadgeek,
This is SO cool! I have done a little bit of self study in Astronomy, probably just enough to confuse myself...I've learned that in order for a theory to be viable it has to be able to make a prediction. From the little that I've learned, the estimate of the temperature at the time the universe was created, the idea that the universe will keep expanding, the fact that the universe started out as a place of extreme density...I tend to think we are actually inside a black a hole in a larger universe. The temperature and density inside a black hole seem quite similar to the start of our universe. Mathematically, black holes have the same (I believe) properties to the edge of our universe. What I think really sells me on the idea is the dark matter and dark energy. Inside a black hole, the universe that the black hole resides in would not be able to detect what is going on inside the black hole, but inside the black hole, I would imagine the universe outside of it would be detectable. This dark matter, could it be a universe outside of our universe? I get frustrated because I hear scientist are interested in the topic, but I haven't found much on scientist really exploring the topic. I guess, in my mind, a point of infinite density doesn't seem possible. Mathematically, that is what happens, but it doesn't seem logical...It seems like something would give. Like the matter would convert into energy or it would invert itself and start expanding infinitely apart. Hope this made sense.
Anyway, just curious of your thoughts...