• Question: how do yopu know how the universe was made when you wernt there

    Asked by jasonisabeast to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 19 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan

      Aoife O'Shaughnessy-Kirwan answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      Hi jasonisabeast,
      You’re right of course, none of us were there! The main ways we’ve learned about the universe are thru observing it and also thru making mathematical models of what might have happened. For example if someone puts a model forward and we see huge amounts of evidence to support that model over all others then we can be pretty certain that this is probably what happened. Does this answer your question? : )

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      That is very much true but as Aoife says we have models which have shown how the universe has expanded over time and these models fit with the observable data we have. However the models are being changed and refined as new data becomes available so I don’t think we have the definitive answer just yet. This is because there are things that we don’t yet understand like dark matter and dark energy. Plus the two best theories that we have to describe the universe, general relativity and quantum theory don’t work together at small scales, so this is a problem that very clever physicists need to solve. Thankfully as a biologist my problems aren’t quite so complicated!

    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 19 Nov 2013:

      The others are right about the models that scientists can use to try to work out how the universe first formed, but personally I can’t understand those models. Really that means that I can’t actually know how the universe was made or even understand how scientists think the universe was made. My personal understanding of this is almost entirely based on my expectation that the large numbers of physicists who study the start of the universe are very smart people and have done a lot of work, so probably what they say is true or at least very close to being true.

      All of science is based on the experiments that other scientists have done before us, so we have to think that the work they have done is good unless we get results from our own experiments that prove old theories wrong. This means that unless we can disprove theories from other scientists, we should probably accept what they say. This only works because theories are built and accepted by large numbers of scientists working all over the world for many many years. A theory is only accepted to be right if it is supported by work by many scientists working today and work by scientists in the past. I don’t know anything about the universe, but a lot of scientists claim to know something about it and I believe what they tell me.

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