Men have long been awed by the big blue sky be it night or day, and what lies within and beyond, to feast their eyes upon in an inevitable abyss of wonderment. Amongst the endless questions that never failed to come to mind is "how did it all began?"
According to God, in Surah al Anbiyaa Ayah 30;
The Arabic words, 'ratqa' means 'something that is gathered, sticking together and contracted' whilst 'fataq' means 'open, split, ripped apart'. Fast forward a few decades later, the Big Bang Theory emerged. For those who have a misconception that "big bang" have got something to do with films like "Amme-get-it-On", "Forrest Hump", "Tales of Two Siti-s" (not Siti Norhaliza, I hear she sues people for defamation) , "Pussy in Boots...only Boots" (okay you get the picture), please do everyone a favor by clicking here to get an idea what the rest of the world is talking about when they talk about the Big Bang Theory.
From the basis of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity ( not to be mistaken for the Special Theory of Relativity, or STR), formulated by Alexander Friedmann, The Big Bang The Big Bang generally refers to the idea that the universe was initially in a dense and primordial hot condition that gradually expanded at some finite time in the past and resume to expand hitherto.
Imagine the raisins on the bread, baked in the oven, expanding. Get the picture?
Before I resume, let me make it clear what theory means. A theory is good if it satisfies two criterion
It must accurately describe a large class of observations on a basis of a model that contains only a few arbitrary elements and
2. it must make definite predictions about the results of the future observations.
An easy example would be, Newton's theory of gravity. It was based on a simple model in which bodies attracted each other with a force was proportional to a quantity called their mass and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. And it is able to predict the motion of the sun, the moon and the planets to a high degree of accuracy.
Base on this; it is safe to assume that “Theory of the Doom of Barisan National” is a good theory. (Just checking whether you're still with me)
Now,back to the big bang, the observed velocities of distant galaxies, taken together with the cosmological principle appeared to show that the Universe was expanding in a manner consistent with the Friedmann-Lemaître model of general relativity . Edwin Powell Hubble later discovered that the degree of redshift observed in light coming from galaxy increased in proportion to the distance of that galaxy from Milky Way, help establishing that the universe is, in fact, expanding, and this was later known as Hubble's Law.
Putting aside the scientific jargon, it simply means that when Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever we look, distant galaxies are moving rapidly away from us, ergo, we can say that the universe is expanding. This means, during the earlier times, object were closely adjacent to each other. Hubbles' observation suggested that there was a time, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense, before the explosion,sometime 12 to 14 billion years ago,hence the term "big bang", followed by expansion and cooling of the particles resulting in the celestrial bodies in the vast universe
In 2001, cosmologists celebrated as NASA launched a satellite mission from Cape Carnival to investigate a think dark layer of space at the outermost edge of the visible universe. The mission was called WMAP (pronounced as W-Map) short for Wilkinson microwave Anisotrophy Probe. (hmmm....I wonder if medical line can come up with a similar but obviously smaller microwave probe to shove up some of the politician's asses, to confirm the suspician that their brains are actually herniation of the gut that poured into the skull hence the shitty ideas on tax payers' expenses....not to mention the shitty answers that are used to account for them). What is the significance of this probe? (Honey, I'm talkin' about the WMAP now). Read on my friends...for those not interested, kindly jump to the next two paragraphs.
For further reading on WMAP click here. WMAP has highly sensitive detectors designed to gather some of the ancient light emitted from the dark layer nearly 14 billion years ago, at the time when the first atoms were just beginning to form. Every 2.2 minutes, the satellite spins once around it's axis and every hour the axis itself traces out a circle.From the combination of motions, light from a narrow ring on the sky is collected.Over the course of six months, the entire satellite keeps shifting until the detectors have covered the entire sky. The sequence will be repeated to make a detailed portrait of the infant universe. Are you still with me or have you entered cuckoo land? Nineteen months later, in February 2003, WMAP was able to confirm the scientists suspicion on the big bang theory, and beyond. (For those who are interested in the latest WMAP reading, showing composition of the universe, click here.)
For those of you who are lazy to click there, I took the liberty to copy and paste this from our dear friend, Mr Wikipedia;
"WMAP measures a remnant of the early universe - its oldest light. The conditions of the early times are imprinted on this light. It is the result of what happened earlier, and a back light for the later development of the universe. This light lost energy as the universe expanded over 13.7 billion years, so WMAP now sees the light as microwaves. By making accurate measurements of microwave patterns, WMAP has answered many longstanding questions about the universe's age, composition and development."
Anyway, WMAP came back with this atlas of the universe below. Dig that, because I cannot comprehend shit how this eggnog got interpreted into the stuff wrote below. That is why I am not a cosmologist.
What is the significance of WMAP ? (Derived from the book "Endless Universe" authors are the cosmologists partly responsible of the initial building of WMAP)
1. the big bang itself is not explained. it is simply imagined that space and time emerged somehow.
2. just after the ban, a small region of the universe underwent a dramatic process called inflation, during which it expanded a googol or more within a billionth of a billionth of a trillionth of a second.(gee..I'm still struggling to comprehend Malaysian time. Imagine God saying "You're a trillionth of a second late, which butt do you want me to whack? right or left?...). Once this period of inflation ended, the energy causing the inflation was transformed into a dense gas of hot radiation. The gas cooled and the expansion slowed, allowing atoms and molecules to clump into galaxies and stars.
3. 9 billion years after the Big Ban, (sorry, I meant the Big Bang. Got confused with the Avril Lavigne's concert ban in Malaysia. Well, the mentality of the banners that seem to coincide with people from the ages of 9 billions years ago had triggered my thought. My bad..), a mysterious force called dark energy took over and started to accelerate the expansion again. in the standard picture, the expansion of the universe will accelerate forever, turning all of space into a vast and nearly perfect vacuum.
In az-Zariyat Ayah 47; God said; (Translation by Edip Yuksel)
The #2 significance of WMAP result is the energy causing the expansion was transformed into a dense gas of hot radiation that later cooled resulting in the slowing down of expansion allowing atoms and molecules to clump into galaxies and stars. This statement is consistent with the verse 11 of Surah Fussilat, when God said;
1. the hot big bang theory - developed in the early twentieth century
2. the inflation mechanism, introduced in the 1980s
3. the dark energy hypothesis - added in the 1990s
with the mention of them in the Quran, I have to add that currently, scientists have gone way beyond the big bang. If you can recall the WMAP findings stated above, finding is without any evidence associated with the earliest instant of the expansion, the Big Bang Theory cannot and does not provide any explanation for such an initial condition; rather it describes and explains the general evolution of the universe since that instance.
According to Paul J Steinhardt and Neil Turok, authors of the book I mentioned earlier,
"Scientists now believe, that the big bang is not the beginning of space and time, but rather an event that is , in principle , fully describable using physical laws. Nor does the big bang happen only once. Instead, the universe undergoes cycles of evolution. In each cycle, a a big bang creates hot matter and radiation which expand and cool to form the galaxies and stars observed today. Then the expansion of the universe speeds up, causing the matter to become so spread out that space approaches a nearly perfect vacuum. Finally after a trillion years or so, a new big bang occurs and the cycle begins anew. The events that created the large- scale structure of the universe today occurred a full cycle ago, before the last big bang."
Wow....a vicious cycle of big bangs....I'm dumbfounded and awed by the universe, even more so by it's Creator.
When the world turn their back on you, you show your butt to them...
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