[clintonmcqueen]

Well, now to my question/s, i'm doing a large
essay on the theories on how the universe evolved and was wondering if
you could tell me all the theories that scientists have proposed over
the centuries. I know of the Big Bang theory as well as the Steady State
theory, but was wondering if there were anymore? No matter how bizarre
the theory/ies are please tell me asap.

[Tormod]

Just to pitch in while I should be doing other things at work -

here are a couple of other theories off the top of my head:

- the inflationary theory (in many variations)
- the ether theory (the universe consists of a material through which light and everything else moves)
- superstrings, M-theory
- supersymmetry (standard model)
- the big crunch (how will it end)
- multiverse theory (ours is just one of many parallell universe)
- many worlds theory (whenever a quantum decision is made, the universe splits into two, in which one possible outcome happens in each)
- that the universe was crafted by intelligent (non-god) beings (just read that in Marcus Chown's [i]

The Universe Next Door
The Universe Next Door

[i])

When it comes to theories about the evolution of the universe, I think you also have to consider theories about many of the parts that constitute it. For example, what is dark matter, what is antimatter, how did life evolve, why did life evolve on Earth at the moment it did, how did stars evolve, etc.

I recommend reading

[i]The Origin of the Universe[i]
[i]The Origin of the Universe[i]

by John D. Barrow, and perhaps Stephen Hawking's latest,

[i]The Universe in a Nutshell[i]
[i]The Universe in a Nutshell[i]

.

Just my initial 2c, will try to add more later.

[clintonmcqueen]

Gee thanx for all the info, but im only 15 and was looking for more general theories like easy to understand lol but thanx heaps n e ways!!! I'm more interested in how the universe physically evolved/created. The theories i've found so far are; the Big Bang, the Steady-State, Oscillating Universe, Inflationary Universe and i might talk about the Creation one.

Tormod's answer is very good,I am not sure I can give you a better one.Anyway try this very interesting site:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/univ...html/univ.html.
I think it's exactly what you need.
Additionally you must read Guth's presentation,on the same site,of his 'multiverse' inflationary theory,one of the most 'en vogue' theories,lately,among cosmologists.I think it's the most straightforward approach I've seen so far regarding this theory:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/myst...ml/guth_1.html
Hope that helps.

The exact address is:
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/hawking/univ...html/univ.html (there is no final dot of course).

[Noah]

I think Tormod and Metacristi have got it pretty well covered. However, if you live in the U.S. and are doing this for a school project, you might want to leave out the creation theory. Sadly, over here in the U.S. they don't allow any thing about God, Creation, or anything else like that in schools. Yet some of our schools after 9/11 were making the kids dress up as Islamic people and pray to Allah, and even have mock Jihads. Very sad indeed. You might want to go to the local library and try to find a book on the Universe. On top of teh ones already mentioned, I would suggest "Einsteins Greatest Blunder" By Donald Goldsmith.

Noah

[Noah]

Oh, one more I do not believe has been mentioned. The Cyclic theory. Here is a link to the article on Astronomy.com
The Cyclic Theory

Noah

[energy_lad]

it may sound a bit unbeliveable at first, yet more often these days, scientists have discovered evidence leading towards Creationism as opposed to any form of evolution..... refereces (Darwin's black box [Behe], Case for Faith [Lee Strobel])

In most high schools and university campuses today, students are taught that the primitive earth was covered with pools of chemicals and had an atmosphere conducive to the formation of life. With energy supplied by lightning, chemicals in this “prebiotic soup” linked together and life was formed. From there, evolution took over and life mutated into the various plant and animal life we know today. Stanley Miller of the University of Chicago decided to test this theory experimentally. Miller recreated the ‘primitive earth’ in a laboratory and then shot electricity through it to simulate the lightning. After experimenting for some time, he found that amino acids – the building blocks of life – had been created. This was a major breakthrough for evolution at the time. However there was also a major problem with the experiment that invalidated the results. The atmosphere of Miller’s ‘primitive earth’ was composed of ammonia, methane and hydrogen. Miller and his partner, Oparin, wanted to get a chemical reaction that would be favorable, and they both knew that nitrogen and carbon dioxide wouldn't react, so they proposed that the atmosphere of primitive earth was rich in methane, hydrogen and ammonia. Essentially, the experiment was stacked in advance in order to get good results. This makes the Miller’s revolutionary evolutionary experiment little more than a scientist mixing known chemicals together, to acquire a known result. From 1980 and on (post Miller experiment), NASA scientists have shown that the primitive earth never had any methane, ammonia or hydrogen to amount to anything. Instead, the earth was composed of water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen. One will definitely NOT get the same experimental results from this mixture. More recent experiments have confirmed this to be the case.
Therefore, one must decide whether or not life can have been formed purely by unguided chemical reaction. To do this, the difference between a living and a non-living system must be decided. A living system must essentially do three things: process energy, store information and replicate. All living systems, from human beings to bacteria organisms, do these three things. Darwin undoubtedly thought that it would not be very difficult to create life from non-life because during his time, there was not scientific means to see the great gap between the two. In 1905 Ernst Haeckel describes living cells as simply, “homogenous globules of plasm.” In those days they did not have any means of seeing the complexity that exists in a single cell. The truth, as we know today, is that a single cell is far more complex than anything humans have ever made, designed, or recreated - even through supercomputers.
So fundamentally what goes into creating a living organism? Essentially, one starts with amino acids. The come in eighty different types, but only twenty of them are found in living organisms. If the amino acids were created from lighting on primitive earth, there would be no telling which type of acid would be created. Probabilities have just dropped to one in four. The trick is to isolate the correct type of amino acids. Then the correct amino acids have to be linked together in the correct sequence to produce protein molecules. Imagine how difficult this would be by unguided chemical reactions. It would be simple if one were using their intelligence to solve the problem and purposefully selecting and reassembling the amino acids one at a time. But one must remember that this is unguided evolution, and no outside help is available. In addition to this, there are other complicating factors in the equation, such as additional reactions within the sequence. Other molecules tend to react more readily with amino acids than amino acids react with themselves. As a result, there is the problem of getting

[Tormod]

energy_lad,

I very much appreciate your input in this forum, but considering this thread is about the origin of the Universe, your response is out of place. You have mixed theories about the origin of the Universe with the Origin of life. Although they may in many cases be interesting to discuss as one and the same topic (as for example under the guise of the Anthropic Principle), this thread is not the place.

You are of course welcome to start a thread on creationism. (The "life in a glass jar" experiment, for example, is well worth a discussion - but be careful with stating absolute truths in these forums...because there are very few of those).

You are not correct in stating that Big Bang theory came about in the 1960s - rather, the discovery of the background radiation was seen as proof of the Big Bang theories which had been developed over many decades. Actually, one of the first to suggest that the Big Bang had happened was a Belgian Priest nack in 1927.
(Big Bang Theory - a _very_ brief history)

Here is a great account of the history of Big Bang theory:
Creation of a Cosmology: Big Bang


Sincerely,
Tormod

[msafrin]

When Branes Collide: Science News Online, Sept. 22, 2001
A Brief Introduction to the Ekpyrotic Universe
Paul J. Steinhardt
Princeton University
What is the Big Bang model?
To the public, the model means that the universe began from a single point, underwent an explosion, and has been flying apart ever since.






However, the big bang is not an explosion at all. This is an unfortunate misnomer that cosmologists would like to correct. But the bad name has stuck.
The big bang is the expansion or stretching of space. It is not that things are flying out from a point. Rather, all things are moving away from each other. It is like having an infinite rubber sheet with people sitting on it. Stretch the rubber sheet, and all the people move away from one another. Each things they are at the center of an explosion. It is an optical illusion - everybody moves away from everybody else and there is no center.
Run the story going back and time and the sheet was more and more unstretched and the people were closer together. When everybody is so close they are on top of one another, that is is the beginning of the big bang picture - the cosmic singularity. At that time, the universe has nearly infinite density and temperature.
Does the new theory contradict the Big Bang model?
Here we must be careful. There are some skeptics who have written "the Big Bang never happened", by which they mean that the universe is not exapnding today and it never has been. They say this despite overwhelming evidence in favor of expansion and cooling today and for the last 15 billion years. Our model does nothing to contradict this story. That is, the universe has been expanding for the past 15 billion years.
What our model does is amend the earliest moments of the story. Instead of beginning with nearly infinite temperature and density, the universe began in a very different state - cold and nearly vacuous. The hot expanding universe we know came as a result of collision that brought the universe up to a large but finite temperature and density. The rest of the story is as the Big Bang model would have it, but the beginning is different.
Why do we need to replace the beginning of the story?
Because the Big bang model, with no amendments, would tend to produce a universe that is highly inhomogeneous, with a warped and curved space, and no natural mechanism for making stars, galaxies and larger scale structures in the universe. Cosmologists have been trying to correct these deficiencies by amending the early history of the universe - within the first billionth billionth billionths of s second or less. One proposal is the "inflationary theory" of the universe, which proposes that the universe began hot and dense, and underwent a period of hyperexpansion. The ekpyrotic model is a new alternative, which is, in many ways, a more radical departure from the Big Bang concept.
What is the Ekpyrotic proposal?
The model is based on the idea that our hot big bang universe was created from the collision of two three-dimensianal worlds moving along a hidden, extra dimension. The two three-dimensional worlds collide and ``stick," the kinetic energy in the collision is converted the quarks, electrons, photons, etc., that are confined to move along three dimensions. The resulting temperature is finite, so the hot big bang phase begins without a singularity. The universe is homogeneous because the collision and initiation of the big bang phase occurs nearly simultaneously everywhere. The energetically preferred geometry for the two worlds is flat, so their collision produces a flat big bang universe. According to Einstein´s equations, this means that the total energy density of the Universe is equal to the critical density. Massive magnetic monopoles, which are overabundantly produced in the standard big bang theory, are not produced at all in this scenario because the temperature after collision is far too small to produce any of these massive particles.
Quantum effects cause the incomin