Cosmology Question

[FortunaMaximus]

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If you accept the big bang theory, than every occurence from that point of origin is a reaction to that initial action.

Y/N?

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read a book about quantum mechanics.

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Ummm...reading a book on quantum mechanics would be pretty useless for someone without the fundamentals. Unless it's a hand wavy book that gives you nothing but a basically useless surface knowledge totally devoid of any semblance of rigour.

The popular literature is great entertainment, but it is pretty much useless if you actually want to understand something. And you can't actually understand something without having a vast knowledge of fundamental physics (classical mechanics, classical thermodynamics, electromagnetism, optics, etc.)

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Ooookay. You realize, of course, OP wasn't asking this question necessarily 'cause he didn't know the accepted answers? [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]

[Metric]

You could specify a moment right after the big bang in which to express information on the full state of the universe (all past and future), but you do not need to. You could equally well pick a Cauchy surface at a later time -- say, right now.

Theories that incorporate general covariance (and the universe appears to be described by one of these) have a somewhat different notion of "state" and "evolution" than what you are used to. States do not evolve one to another in time -- the covariant notion of "state" already contains in it all past, present, and future. I.E. aside from the breakdown of the classical field equations (presumably this problem is cured in the correct quantum theory), there really is nothing "special" about the big bang.

[FortunaMaximus]

No, not particularly. It's just a singularity. I'm interested in how big or infodense a singularity has to get before it self-triggers its own Big Bang. It's fairly obvious that ours (galactic center) isn't nearly dense enough. Would it be an accurate guess to consider that in this Universe, there's simply no way to re-trigger the original singularity, as Hawking radiation is its own entropy, effectively placing the Universe in a steady state?

Just curious. My depth of knowledge whereas practical equations, etc. are fairly basic, but I've been able to initutively grasp most of the underlying theorems postulated for the Universe.