> Norman Samish wrote: >> And where did this mysterious Big Bang come from? A "quantum >> fluctuation of virtual particles" I'm told. > On Mon, 6 Jun 2005, Jesse Mazer wrote: > Whoever told you that was passing off speculation as fact--in fact there > is no agreed-upon answer to the question of what, if anything, came before > the Big Bang or "caused" it. >
Patrick Leahy wrote: Maybe Norman is confusing the rather more legit idea that the "fluctuations" in the Big Bang, that explain why the universe is not completely uniform, come from quantum fluctuations amplified by inflation. This is currently the leading theory for the origin of structure, in that it has quite a lot of successful predictions to its credit. Norman Samish writes: Perhaps I didn't express myself well. What I was referring to is at http://www.astronomycafe.net/cosm/planck.html, where Sten Odenwald hypothesizes that random fluctuations in "nothing at all" led to the Big Bang. "This process has been described by the physicist Frank Wilczyk at the University of California, Santa Barbara by saying, 'The reason that there is something instead of nothing is that nothing is unstable.' ". . . "Physicist Edward Tryon expresses this best by saying that 'Our universe is simply one of those things that happens from time to time.' "
