Big Bang Discussion (in French)
I just stumbled on this video, on universcience.tv:
I actually enjoyed that discussion! Unlike many (political) debates, this one stages two reasonable individuals, with an almost friendly around a neat scientific subject.
I must however say that the opposition between these two characters seems a bit too caricatural: one of them is way too much into his idea that the big bang is not the answer, while the other one stayed a bit too superficial, in my own opinion (well 30 minutes for the universe… timed debates are useless…). My little remarks, as a scientist (but neither physicist nor whatever close to an -ist that really comprehend the problem):
- A first point on the aspect of things: M. Désert (the “pro”-Big Bang) behaves a bit too casually in comparison with M. Bonnet-Bidaud, which tends to make the audience more prone to say that the latter is a bit more serious – actually, I felt that his analysis was, mots of the time, a bit better stated, although I thought he seemed, at times, a bit too vehement.
- From what I understood of “A brief history of Time”, by Stephen Hawking, the Big Bang is a necessary consequence of Einstein’s Relativity Theory. Mathematically speaking. Then, of course, if no observation is in accordance with this result, then the theory is wrong (which anyway is something we already know, since it only works for large scale space).
- I believe at some point, M. Bonnet-Bidaud points out that the Big Bang is not a scientific (physic) theory. There might be some truth there: as agreed with the other speaker, it is only one hypothesis, and somehow, the only way we could prove it to be “the” true theory would be to observe how other universes “appeared”… mmh…
- And more when I think about it…