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From: lindley@ut-ngp.UUCP (John L. Templer)
Newsgroups: net.astro
Subject: Re: StarDate: January 19: Expanding Spac
Message-ID: <1288@ut-ngp.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 7-Feb-85 16:41:14 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-ngp.1288
Posted: Thu Feb  7 16:41:14 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 10-Feb-85 04:43:43 EST
References: <1024@utastro.UUCP> <42100004@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Organization: U.Texas Physics Department; Austin, Texas
Lines: 25

> Being an uninformed reader of this net (I find it interesting) and also
> agreeing with the big bang theory, what is to say that space did not exist
> before the bang? What is to say that all matter in our universe was not
> once a giant single rock with great gravity and internal pressures and
> finally exploded, starting the expansion process. The giant ball would
> have been an occupant of the space our universe now exists in, but would
> not have been expanding and time as we know it would not have existed,
> but space would have been there.

According to current opinion, if you extrapolate backwards in time
about 10 to 20 billion years, you reach a point where the universe was
all contained in a "small" region.  The problem is that the density of
the universe at that time would have been so great as to crush the
universe into a point.  So, physicists believe that general and special
relativity may not hold for arbitrarily high densities.  But they don't
have any ideas yet what conditions would be like in that case.

-- 

                                           John L. Templer
                                     University of Texas at Austin

    {allegra,gatech,seismo!ut-sally,vortex}!ut-ngp!lindley

                 "and they called it, yuppy love."