Order is a slippery concept, it can mean several different things depending on what you're talking about. Because its meaning can be subtle, the term is often misused. I hope in this article to shed a bit of light on how we can understand what order is in physics, and whether it can be applied coherently to the universe as a whole.
Here is one of my recent articles in a nice, condensed visual form. While baryon asymmetry is an intriguing unsolved problem in modern cosmology, it does not endanger the Big Bang theory in any significant way.
While it's always healthy to be sceptical about things and to re-examine the evidence supporting your science, it seems a worrying number of people are taking this far too far. The bottom line is that there is a wealth of evidence that supports the Big Bang theory which no other known theory can explain.
Symmetry may be very familiar and intuitive to us, but how can we talk about symmetry mathematically? We know that triangles and spheres both possess kinds of symmetry, but how are they related? The mathematics of symmetry can be described by "Group Theory".
It's a phrase you'll often hear if you try and press physicists for answers to the most difficult questions. "What happens at the center of a black hole?", "What happened in the first moments of the Big Bang?" Modern physics is currently not advanced enough to be able to give answers to these questions.
It feels about time that age-old question "why is there something rather than nothing?" should notice it's old age and finally die off. While the question seemed all-important and pertinent to the ancients, what we now know about the nature of the universe renders it obsolete.
The universe in colour! ...or not. The object I'm focusing on today is almost completely black, it gives off virtually no radiation of any sort.
It is not difficult to find online forums and blog posts that proclaim facts and arguments as if they were certain. People of all philosophical alignments will do this. Theists will proclaim what they believe to be indisputable facts like: "Something must have caused the Big Bang", and atheists are often guilty of prophetically declaring their favourite origin story for the universe: "Quantum fluctuations produced the universe" or "Many-worlds explains fine-tuning".
There is a split in the philosophical community with regards to this issue. By and large, the majority of philosophers of physics claim that space and time are real and important entities, but there is a small faction who maintain that space and time are just useful theoretical constructs that don't have the independent existence we sometimes attribute to them.
We can get most of the way to deriving the constancy of the speed of light just from the Principle of Relativity alone. In other words, the speed of light being constant is just a consequence of the laws of physics being the same in all inertial frames.
The Platonic Realm 