Before the Big Bang

[McCulloch]

The Big Bang is not an explosion of matter moving outward to fill empty space. Instead, space itself expands with time. Because of relativity, space and time are linked together in a way analogous to the way that matter and energy are. There is no time without space. There is no space without time. The Big Bang may have been the beginning point of the spacetime continuum. There is no theoretical before the big bang. Even if there are space-like and time-like dimensions outside of the universe, like before the big bang, we are necessarily ignorant of them. The have no meaning to us.

Thats what i mean by stating in another thread that cosmology without God forces us to ridiculous conclusion... and you dont seem the sort to make such a statement as "there was no before the big bang"... I know the definition, I followed Hawking closely... and there was obviously a "before it happened"

Is it meaningful to speak of a time before the Big Bang? Is the obvious answer necessarily correct?

[ThePainefulTruth]

And why would time start after the first Planck length?

Not literally after. I put it in scare quotes. "After."

OK, why would time start at the end of the first Planck Length (the Planck Epoch), with 10 to-43 sec. having passed, instead of at the beginning or start of that PL?

That would mean that light and space started then too.

Yes.

IOW, they started after the first PL, during which time the universe expanded from zero dimensions to 10 to -38 m. X 10 to -38 m. X 10 to -38m.

And that would mean that nothing happened during the Planck Epoch.

Right. The Planck Epoch didn't (according to this theory) happen, so nothing happened in it.

Ah, according to what theory? Are you saying it went from the singularity to what, another singularity?

I object to that on both reasoned and intuitive grounds, because it would make time 10 to-43 sec into time zero,

No, it makes time zero 10 to the -43 seconds later than the relativity people put it.

Neither group thinks that time started after time started. That would be nonsense.

Again, what other group are you talking about? Something else vs. the Big Bang Theory? I know of no serious scientific criticism of it; and in fact, the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), has provided evidence that shows support for the Planck Epoch, I'm told.

I'll speculate no further until I've got a grip on what you're referring to. What you're saying now is equivalent to, it didn't start until after it started.

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 167 by ThePainefulTruth]

Are you suggesting we cannot use logic to eliminate possibilities?
That impossibilities may have occurred?

We can't identify impossibilities, we can only identify them.

We can definitely say that if spacetime begun with the big bang, there was no "before the big bang" and no "infinite void" or such conceptualisations, given the law of excluded middle.
That mutually exclusive properties (like time and no time) cannot exist in simultaneity.

"No time" could have preceded time. We don't know if no space preceded it, a different kind of space preceded it or the same kind of space preexisted.

No, precedence is temporal by definition.
You can't precede without time.
You can't be "before" without time.

To reiterate; if there is a beginning of time nothing can temporally precede it as if it could then that other thing would then be the beginning of time (if time begun). But "before" means temporal precedence. Therefore nothing can be before the big bang.

Big Bang, time begins. Big expansion, Big contraction, Big Crunch, universe disappears into a singularity, time stops, Big Bang, spacetime begins (again)...... That's just one of maybe an infinite number of scenarios.

"Big Bang, Time Begins" if time begins in sync with the big bang that is a possibility. There wouldn't be a before the big bang.
There can't be an interval because that would require time. They have to occur at the same time, or spacetime must begin first by the definition of beginning.

Big expansion - that is the big bang?
Big Crunch/singularity - if you mean the cycle scenario then this wouldn't have time beginning
Time stops - implies time literally flows, not sure of relevance to beginning of time
Big Bang, spacetime begins - same as top.

None of these have time beginning.

It is analogous to saying you are winning a track race when the track doesn't even exist.

It's saying you can be ahead of someone else when there's no such thing as being "ahead". You refer to a dimension that does not exist and then compare your co-ordinates in that dimension, it's absurd.[/quote]

[ThePainefulTruth]

[Replying to post 167 by ThePainefulTruth]

Are you suggesting we cannot use logic to eliminate possibilities?
That impossibilities may have occurred?

We can't identify impossibilities, we can only identify them.

I meant to say, we can't eliminate impossibilities (they being impossible), we can only identify them.

And if/since time in our universe began at the singularity, we can talk about what existed or didn't exist prior to its beginning. We are simply unable to say anything about the nature of what preceded it. It could be timelessness, time like ours or a different form, or a magic either or whatever. If there was nothing before it began, then there was nothing. You're trying to insinuate timelessness on to our time--which did have a beginning. And since it had a beginning, there was a before, even if that before was nothing.

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 167 by ThePainefulTruth]

Are you suggesting we cannot use logic to eliminate possibilities?
That impossibilities may have occurred?

We can't identify impossibilities, we can only identify them.

I meant to say, we can't eliminate impossibilities (they being impossible), we can only identify them.

So you are suggesting logically contradictory occurrences may have happened?

And if/since time in our universe began at the singularity, we can talk about what existed or didn't exist prior to its beginning.

We can, and the answers are nothing and anything respectively.
If it is the beginning of time then nothing temporally precedes it, else the time of that occurrence would then be the beginning of time.

We are simply unable to say anything about the nature of what preceded it. It could be timelessness, time like ours or a different form, or a magic either or whatever.

Other dimensions are not relevant, time-like or otherwise, to the word "before". Before explicitly refers to this time dimension.
When you say there was a preceding state, you implicitly demand the existence of time. You can't precede without time.
At best you make this preceding state the real beginning of time, and the previous one a false conclusion.

If there was nothing before it began, then there was nothing. You're trying to insinuate timelessness on to our time--which did have a beginning. And since it had a beginning, there was a before, even if that before was nothing.

How am I insinuating timelessness? What does that even mean?
Here's an analogy to one of the problems of time before time:


There's a clock. It never ticks because there's no time.
It's currently at 3:40 PM.
You're saying "At 4:00 PM, it'll start ticking - time will begin". That the clock is "currently" "before the beginning".

The very fact that there are two states with a temporal difference - the fact that one state is BEFORE the other - means there is, by definition, time.

Another analogy - if we were points in the EXACT same place, what sense does it make for me to say "I'm to your left" or "I'm to your right"

[wiploc]

And why would time start after the first Planck length?

Not literally after. I put it in scare quotes. "After."

OK, why would time start at the end of the first Planck Length (the Planck Epoch), with 10 to-43 sec. having passed, instead of at the beginning or start of that PL?

If you can't have anything smaller than a plank length, then there can't have been anything before the universe's diameter was a plank length.

That would mean that light and space started then too.

Yes.

IOW, they started after the first PL, during which time the universe expanded from zero dimensions to 10 to -38 m. X 10 to -38 m. X 10 to -38m.

Time can't have started after anything. There was nothing before time.

If the universe (including time, space, and light) began with a plank length diameter, then it did not expand to that diameter.

And that would mean that nothing happened during the Planck Epoch.

Right. The Planck Epoch didn't (according to this theory) happen, so nothing happened in it.

Ah, according to what theory?

Well, in my layman's ignorance, I'll name them the quantum theory and the relativistic theory. According to the relativistic theory, time goes all the way back to the singularity. According to the quantum theory, time doesn't go back beyond when the universe was as big as a Plank length.

Are you saying it went from the singularity to what, another singularity?

In the quantum theory, there was no singularity. The universe went from the size of a Plank length to bigger than a Plank length.

I object to that on both reasoned and intuitive grounds,

You object to quantum theory on intuitive grounds?

because it would make time 10 to-43 sec into time zero,

No, according to quantum theory, that 10 to the -43 seconds never happened.

No, it makes time zero 10 to the -43 seconds later than the relativity people put it.

Neither group thinks that time started after time started. That would be nonsense.

Again, what other group are you talking about?

I don't know any names. Some people don't think anything can exist smaller than a Plank Length.

Something else vs. the Big Bang Theory?

Certainly not. We live in the same universe regardless of whether it started at the singularity or the Plank length.

I know of no serious scientific criticism of it;

I don't imagine there will ever be serious criticism of the big bang theory.

and in fact, the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP), has provided evidence that shows support for the Planck Epoch, I'm told.

Cool!

I'll speculate no further until I've got a grip on what you're referring to. What you're saying now is equivalent to, it didn't start until after it started.

I didn't say that.

[ThePainefulTruth]

[Replying to post 175 by wiploc]

This is from the Wiki article on the Planck Epoch:

As there presently exists no widely accepted framework for how to combine quantum mechanics with relativistic gravity, science is not currently able to make predictions about events occurring over intervals shorter than the Planck time or distances shorter than one Planck length, the distance light travels in one Planck time—about 1.616 × 10−35 meters. Without an understanding of quantum gravity, a theory unifying quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity, the physics of the Planck epoch are unclear, and the exact manner in which the fundamental forces were unified, and how they came to be separate entities, is still poorly understood. Three of the four forces have been successfully integrated in a common framework, but gravity remains problematic. If quantum effects are ignored, the universe starts from a singularity with an infinite density. This conclusion could change when quantum gravity is taken into account.

There are models that when combining relativistic gravity and quantum mechanics that show a limit (beginning) of time. It eliminates the need for a singularity, but everything would still start begin at time zero. Some are making the assumption that time did not exist before, but there's no foundation for such an assumption.

In my truly humble opinion, I don't think they're ever going to be able to find such a unified theory until they seriously look at and adopt the Transactional Interpretation (TI) of quantum mechanics which explains all quantum weirdness with the manipulation of time. Time, after all, is the bugaboo in the unified theory ointment...I think. They could call it the TI-Bugaboo Constant.

[Jashwell]

[Replying to post 176 by ThePainefulTruth]

"There are models that when combining relativistic gravity and quantum mechanics that show a limit (beginning) of time. It eliminates the need for a singularity, but everything would still start begin at time zero. Some are making the assumption that time did not exist before, but there's no foundation for such an assumption. "

I sincerely doubt that, which scientists are assuming that there's a beginning of time to demonstrate that there's a beginning of time?

TI being another interpretation of QT does not appear to add anything to reach a unified theory. This is total speculation on your part. There aren't any given experiments to falsify TI or other interpretations, and certainly isn't any evidence.
Your belief in TI is little more than faith based.

[wiploc]

[Replying to post 175 by wiploc]

This is from the Wiki article on the Planck Epoch:

As there presently exists no widely accepted framework for how to combine quantum mechanics with relativistic gravity, science is not currently able to make predictions about events occurring over intervals shorter than the Planck time or distances shorter than one Planck length, the distance light travels in one Planck time—about 1.616 × 10−35 meters. Without an understanding of quantum gravity, a theory unifying quantum mechanics and relativistic gravity, the physics of the Planck epoch are unclear, and the exact manner in which the fundamental forces were unified, and how they came to be separate entities, is still poorly understood. Three of the four forces have been successfully integrated in a common framework, but gravity remains problematic. If quantum effects are ignored, the universe starts from a singularity with an infinite density. This conclusion could change when quantum gravity is taken into account.

There are models that when combining relativistic gravity and quantum mechanics that show a limit (beginning) of time. It eliminates the need for a singularity, but everything would still start begin at time zero. Some are making the assumption that time did not exist before, but there's no foundation for such an assumption.

In my truly humble opinion, I don't think they're ever going to be able to find such a unified theory until they seriously look at and adopt the Transactional Interpretation (TI) of quantum mechanics which explains all quantum weirdness with the manipulation of time. Time, after all, is the bugaboo in the unified theory ointment...I think. They could call it the TI-Bugaboo Constant.

Good post. Nothing in there for me to disagree with.

[ThePainefulTruth]

[Replying to post 178 by wiploc]

Good post. Nothing in there for me to disagree with.

So it looks like it's 2-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 etc. Hey, progress n'est pas?

[wiploc]

Assuming I don't screw this up, Inigo Montoya wrote single and tripple depth quotations, and wiploc wrote double-depth quotes.

The singularity, if it existed, was the universe.

And if the singularity didn't exist, what does that mean for the universe?

It means the universe is negligibly (10 to the -43 seconds) younger than otherwise, and that it started (if the big bang was the start) very very tiny, as opposed to with a diameter of zero.

What is the difference between a singularity that doesn't occupy space or time and one that doesn't exist?

That's a good point.

But this singularity, if it existed, was not off the grid. It was all of space and the beginning of time.

If the singularity existed, all 'grids' are contained within, no?

Um, okay.

If the singularity isn't off the grid, where is it?

It was everywhere. That is, every location that exists was once squoze down to a single point. To repeat an analogy that I like: Every cell in your body has an equal claim to being the first one, and every place in the universe has an equal claim to being the first location.

Again I hope you can find some way to address the spirit of the question and not the pitfalls I create using words for concepts I'm retarded about.

No problem. You're asking good questions.

In the absence of ''exist,'' what is the difference between said singularity and ''nothing?''

It was everything, and it was at a specific time.

Nothing to say here except to relay to you my brain was cackling wildly and screaming ''WHAT TIME WAS IT??''

If there was no time before the big bang, then we can definitely identify the time of the big bang as the beginning, the first moment. Otherwise, all we can say is that it was somewhere around fourteen billion years ago.

Listening to your own and Jashwell's exchanges, I swear I'm reading that something can precede or happen before the big bang in theory as long as it's not time, which is gobbledygook to mine ears,

You have good ears. If we said there was something before time, we would indeed be talking gibberish. So, if the big bang was in fact the beginning of time, then nothing existed before that.

but even that is being argued. Are you an academic in this field or just insanely well-read?

Thanks. I'm a layman, with no math.

In my own searching on the internet, there is plenty of reference to a singularity but very little about what the hell it might be,

The first thing to do is to distinguish singularities from black holes. Black holes aren't necessarily singularities.

It doesn't look like the universe is ever going to collapse back down to a "big crunch"; but, if it is going to, then the entire universe is a black hole (nothing can escape from it, not even light). But the universe clearly is not a singularity.

Singularities are dimensionless objects. They have mass but no diameter. Imagine a star so big that the pressure at the core collapsed the electrons right into the nuclei. That would give us a neutronium, a neutron star. But now imagine even more mass, and so much pressure that the atoms collapse against each other, no space between them. At that point, the star would just keep on collapsing. There isn't any physical force that could check the collapse. And, of course, the closer the bits get to each other, the stronger the gravitational attraction. Since there is nothing to counter the gravity, the mass all moves to the same exact place. The star (or, in the case of the big bang, the universe) has as much mass as it ever had, but it has no size at all. It is a single point, a singularity.

or how it relates to a ''before.'' Maybe you have a 'For Dummies' spiel I could digest?

Asimov and Hawking wrote that the big bang was the beginning of time, but then they hedged by saying something like, "Or at least we can call it the beginning of time, since we don't know what happened before that."

So, maybe it was the beginning, and maybe not.

Or, it occurred to me, maybe this is like the uncertainty principle, where the physicists explain to laymen why we can't know something, but actually believe there is no truth to be known. Do physicists talk to laymen like we don't have any idea whether time precedes the big bang while they really believe that it didn't?

I found me a cosmologist who had been at the Feynman lectures, and put him that question. He said, "Nobody knows what happened before the big bang. Nobody knows what happened before the big bang. Nobody knows what happened before the big bang."

So, what I'm thinking is that we don't know. Maybe there was time before, and maybe not. Calling the big bang the beginning of time is a convention, like calling 1/1/1 the beginning of the calendar.

McCullough sort of implied a singularity CAN'T exist, and it has me wondering about that whole bit about matter being unable to be created or destroyed.

Lets say energy, rather than matter. And lets point out that whatchamacall it, potential energy (like being far from the center of a gravity well) is a kind of energy. And lets posit that all of the matter and electromagnetic energy in the universe may equal the potential energy of the, uh, expansion. (I don't know how to explain this very well, but I do know that hearing the idea was stunning enough to stop Einstein in a crosswalk while he processed it.)

Let's make a balance sheet and put all matter and electromagnetic energy on one side. Call that positive energy. Now, on the other side, put all the energy used to expand the cosmic egg to its current size. Call this negative energy. If we add the positive energy to the negative energy, the result may be zero.

In which case, even if the universe had come from nothing, there wouldn't have been any net creation of energy.

Whew!

Maybe that only counts after... it's... created.. ?

Maybe. Or maybe another big bang will happen tomorrow, near Pluto, and wipe us all out.

Or maybe the singularity that may or may not be allowed to exist is composed of eternal material.

Yes, that seems plausible.