Philosophy Now Forum

Why did it become so famous?

Assuming you're talking about the Big Bang, there are two reasons I can think of:

1) It gives an explanation as to how the universe started
2) It's controversial, e.g. it was posited as starting off from the size of a pinhead which isn't very believable

What do you think of the BBT?

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote:Assuming you're talking about the Big Bang, there are two reasons I can think of:

1) It gives an explanation as to how the universe started
2) It's controversial, e.g. it was posited as starting off from the size of a pinhead which isn't very believable

What do you think of the BBT?

How come you are now speaking in rational terms?

HexHammer wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:Assuming you're talking about the Big Bang, there are two reasons I can think of:

1) It gives an explanation as to how the universe started
2) It's controversial, e.g. it was posited as starting off from the size of a pinhead which isn't very believable

What do you think of the BBT?

How come you are now speaking in rational terms?

Define "rational terms."

Question for you. Why didn't you try to answer the OP's question?

PhilX

Philosophy Explorer wrote:

HexHammer wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:Assuming you're talking about the Big Bang, there are two reasons I can think of:

1) It gives an explanation as to how the universe started
2) It's controversial, e.g. it was posited as starting off from the size of a pinhead which isn't very believable

What do you think of the BBT?

How come you are now speaking in rational terms?

Define "rational terms."

Question for you. Why didn't you try to answer the OP's question?

PhilX

Don't get into the snake pit with HexHammer. The minute you ask for him to clarify, he'll just make his usual insults, so it's just not worth it.

Philosophy Explorer wrote:

HexHammer wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:Assuming you're talking about the Big Bang, there are two reasons I can think of:

1) It gives an explanation as to how the universe started
2) It's controversial, e.g. it was posited as starting off from the size of a pinhead which isn't very believable

What do you think of the BBT?

How come you are now speaking in rational terms?

Define "rational terms."

Question for you. Why didn't you try to answer the OP's question?

Rational is opposit of nonsense and babble, and OP is quite irrelevant, but that requires intellect to see that.

HexHammer wrote:

Philosophy Explorer wrote:Assuming you're talking about the Big Bang, there are two reasons I can think of:

1) It gives an explanation as to how the universe started
2) It's controversial, e.g. it was posited as starting off from the size of a pinhead which isn't very believable

What do you think of the BBT?

How come you are now speaking in rational terms?

Define "rational terms."

Question for you. Why didn't you try to answer the OP's question?[/quote]Rational is opposit of nonsense and babble, and OP is quite irrelevant, but that requires intellect to see that.[/quote]

The OP lacks philosophy so it may have been better placed in the Lounge area where it would be a relevant discussion there to the OP (in other words, there's no such thing as an irrelevant discussion so I hope you have the intellect to see that).

PhilX

Questionmark wrote:Why did it become so famous?

Well, the irony is that the Big Bang theory got it's name from one of it's most vocal critics. The idea that the universe started out very small was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre; he called the original tiny universe the 'cosmic egg'. What led to the theory was the observed red shift of distant galaxies, first noted by Vesto Slipher, but made famous by Edwin Hubble. The red shift is almost certainly due to the Doppler effect, although naysayers and loonies make stuff up like tired photons, so the distant galaxies are (almost certainly)moving away. By reversing the process, there is no obvious point to stop and say the universe began this big; so you keep going until it has no size at all.
The guy who called the 'explosion' of the tiny universe the Big Bang was a British astronomer called Fred Hoyle, typically described as gruff. He was an atheist and didn't like the idea that the universe had a moment of 'creation'; the fact that Georges Lemaitre was a catholic priest didn't help.
Red shift, Doppler, expanding universe is all the sort of stuff that will be included in my blog. You can get a taster of it here: https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogI ... c=postname

Philosophy Explorer wrote:The OP lacks philosophy so it may have been better placed in the Lounge area where it would be a relevant discussion there to the OP (in other words, there's no such thing as an irrelevant discussion so I hope you have the intellect to see that).

PhilX

You didn't answer my question.

HexHammer wrote:You didn't answer my question.

You don't answer mine; no point crying about it.

Oh! I thought the OP meant Big Brother.

Questionmark wrote:Why did it become so famous?

Well, why would it have done otherwise than rapidly spill beyond Glasgow? I mean, was there anything else like BB at the time it was founded in 1883? Later, on the other side of the pond around the turn of the century, the need for something similar [BS] arose due to a shifting of the population from rural communities to larger metropolitan areas. Thus there developed a concern about migrating young boys losing the skills, traditions, discipline, and character associated with farming / small-town life.

That initial era also lacked computer games for BB to compete with and today's extra scores of molesters / sex-trade kidnappers lurking about the streets to snatch "yutes" away for daring to have fun and training outdoors. [Those fat, either jolly or stern members of the clergy trying to glom a feel of a young lad was the primary threat to dodge in that department, excluding the occasional drunken father or older brother wanting to play hide the salami.]

And I presume the religious element of BB wasn't taken as uncool, naive weirdness or whatever turn-off yet. The average kid still thought primitive activities like kicking a can around were great stuff. Early exposure to cynicism and sophisticated forms of ridicule which 20th-century entertainment media incubated and easily dispensed on a widespread scale were still on the horizon. By then BB had acquired too much momentum to be completely derailed / dis-illusionized as a popular institution.

So BB is either Big Bang or baseball. But wait - it could be Big Brother (I mean the reality TV show rather than the never-seen omnipotent, omniscient dictator in 1984).

uwot wrote:

Questionmark wrote:Why did it become so famous?

Well, the irony is that the Big Bang theory got it's name from one of it's most vocal critics. The idea that the universe started out very small was first proposed by Georges Lemaitre; he called the original tiny universe the 'cosmic egg'. What led to the theory was the observed red shift of distant galaxies, first noted by Vesto Slipher, but made famous by Edwin Hubble. The red shift is almost certainly due to the Doppler effect, although naysayers and loonies make stuff up like tired photons, so the distant galaxies are (almost certainly)moving away. By reversing the process, there is no obvious point to stop and say the universe began this big; so you keep going until it has no size at all.
The guy who called the 'explosion' of the tiny universe the Big Bang was a British astronomer called Fred Hoyle, typically described as gruff. He was an atheist and didn't like the idea that the universe had a moment of 'creation'; the fact that Georges Lemaitre was a catholic priest didn't help.

When I was a physics undergraduate at UMIST in the mid 1980s, our astrophysics lecturer was a believer in Hoyle's steady state theory of the universe. I think he was one of the last, possibly - but even so, it shows that the dominance of the Big Bang theory is still relatively recent.

And that you're really old.