this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 months ago (4 children)

“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It's not so much that we know there was nothing before it, but that we can't figure out what was before it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (2 children)

No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

But something must have triggered the big bang. The model might not support this, but this only means the model is insufficient to describe what goes beyond our known universe.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

But something must have triggered the big bang.

That's a separate claim you'd have to prove. We have no evidence of something triggering it, we don't even know that it would need to be triggered. All of our observations occur inside this universe, therefore we have no idea at all if cause-and-effect even applies to the universe as a whole. The short answer is: we don't know and have no reason to posit the need for something else.

What does it mean for something to be "beyond" everywhere or before time?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

I wish we could see beyond our universe, I want to know so much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, since it’s by definition beyond the ability of science to answer. It suffers from the infinite regress problem which many people invoke God to solve (the uncaused cause) but that’s not very satisfying, is it?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Obviously God did it. /s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

It is incoherent that sonething could suddenly exist out of nothingness.

Clearly the universe does not exist, this is all an elaborate statistical artifact.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

Seems like a distinction without a difference, I sort of assumed the OP meant that is all I mean. We don't know anything before the beginning after all. Like you said.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

very nice analogy. I'm stealing it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (5 children)

That's nonsense. You think some massive amount of matter just materialized from nothing into a singular point? How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not just matter but time as well. That's what they were referring to. There is no "before time".

Regarding your rethorical question: go find an answer and you're sure to win the Nobel Prize.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Absolutely nothing is a reliable constant except the speed of light.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago

But the speed of light changes. It can be slowed down. It just doesn't change while moving through outer space (a vacuum). The maximum speed is the constant.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

It's only something we can speculate about. It represents a limit to our ability to gather any evidence that might validate those speculations. We can't say what happened before it, because time itself was one of the things that popped out of the big bang. What would "before" even mean if time didn't exist?

Even if time and matter did exist in some sense, we can't get any evidence for it. We can't make any kind of useful theory about it. At best, we can make wild guesses.

We could also just say "we don't know what it was like". Russell's Teapot suggests we should instead say there was nothing, because we can't prove there was anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

There's no evidence to point to the big bang as being the very beginning, though. There may well have been a billion big bangs before this one. Each one taking so long to reset and start anew that to us, it might as well be seen as about infinity. Humanity outright doesn't have the knowledge of what happens on extremely large or extremely small scales. We don't really have a clue for what actually made space start to expand in the first place, so we don't know if it's ever happened before, or even if it happened anywhere else at any other time but outside of our observable universe.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

The works of Roger Penrose have shown that it's conceivable or potentially even provable that at the very largest scales of time and space, there is no meaningful difference between the accelerating "cold" end of our universe and the collossal expansion that began the universe as we know it, and in fact those two states are perpetually cycling, birthing new universes from the explosion of old ones. This is based on the idea that when there is no more physical mass in the universe, you can look at the universe from a reference frame that only looks at the geometry of the energy expanding through space and it's identical to the beginning states.

I would recommend PBS Spacetime youtube channel for a lot better explanations of conformal cyclic cosmology than my feeble mind can try to relate.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Maybe there were other big bangs, but we need evidence of that, and that evidence doesn't exist.

Jyst saying "but we don't know" isn't a replacement for evidence.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's no evidence that time started at the big bang, either. So it's silly to say.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 months ago

Not how it works.

"Time exists" is a positive statement. We need evidence for positive statements. There is no evidence of time until the big bang.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

It wasn't matter that did the banging, it was space-time itself. Have you heard how we know that the universe is expanding? Well we can extrapolate backwards and find the point in time where space-time was just a point: "the big bang". Not only was there no space-time for matter to exist in before the big bang, there was no concept of "before" because that word only makes sense in the context of spacetime. So yeah, the person you're replying to is right, "before the big bang" is a nonsense phrase.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

They keep finding inconsistencies to that. Groupings and radiation and gap distances that don't line up with the expansion expectations.

Then the other more applicable point is that what makes you think "the big bang" was the first big bang? You think mass and entropy and radioactive decay and all this shit in the nothingness of space all started with "the big bang" but it only happens once and then in a ridiculously long time from now when everything reaches absolute 0 and there's no energy left anywhere, that it's just done? A one trick pony?

Well what if it all eventually manages to head back to its origin point after that and it makes another big bang that kicks off again?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Then the other more applicable point is that what makes you think "the big bang" was the first big bang?

Well, again you're using terms of time to describe the birth of time, so no that's not what I think because that statement doesn't make sense. But I'm being pedantic, I'm sure you meant "what if our's wasn't the only big bang?" And to that I can confidently say "maybe?". It's an interesting question but it's just not a scientific question. According to big bang theory, our universe, space-time and all the matter and energy in it, began with the big bang and we still exist inside it. Other big bangs, if they exist in some higher medium, are simply outside our scope. We just can't design tests to answer those questions. Best we can tell scientifically is where our universe started.

You think mass and entropy and radioactive decay and all this shit in the nothingness of space all started with "the big bang" but it only happens once and then in a ridiculously long time from now when everything reaches absolute 0 and there's no energy left anywhere, that it's just done? A one trick pony?

Again maybe? You're kinda putting words in my mouth. Idk if our universe is the only one, it's impossible to know. My original point was that time as defined by general relativity could not exist before the big bang because it was itself a product of the big bang.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What I meant by "what if it wasn't the first big bang?", was that what if it wasn't the first of our own universe? I mean what if space will at some point stop expanding and start contracting. Pull everything back close together again. Then theres another expansion just like what we're currently in now. The best scientists, physicists, and mathematicians haven't been able to work out a lot of major thing about our universe or how it works or even if it's flat or folded in on itself yet. The data and tests/measurements don't exist yet. So until that can get worked out into a theory, it's silly to say time began at the expansion.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Last I heard scientists were leaning more toward the ever-accelerating expansion "heat death" theory then the expansion-to-contraction "big crunch" theory, but it's not set in stone yet. But even if "big crunch" came out on top, assuming that the life of the universe is cyclical is pure conjecture. It could be right, but it's unprovable, so we'll never know.

As for the existence of space-time before the big bang, I don't know what to tell you, I'm just quoting theory. By definition, the big bang is when space-time came to be. If the big bang was the result of an ancestor universe's big crunch, we can't assume that the same space-time carried over, let alone that the ancestor universe even had something analogous to space-time. Barring some insanely massive breakthrough, it's simply unknowable.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Based on the comment you're replying to, I assume they would say "no, nothing materialized from nothing because there wasn't a 'before' in which nothing could have existed"

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What makes anyone think "the big bang" has only happened once?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm not a physicist, I don't know one way or another. But it's possible that there's a leading explanation for the formation of the universe based on a mathematical model that predicts exactly one big bang.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 months ago

Physicists don't even know why it started expanding to begin with. We also don't know if there's anything outside of our own universe. We also don't know if our universe is curved and folded in on itself, which would make several mathematical calculations for the size of the universe and what was going on with expansion a bit easier to try and work out (I'm also not a physicist. These are just things ive read about) or if it's flat. Their best measurements right now is that it's flat. But they still aren't sure, because they don't know how big space actually is right now. If it's big enough, it could still be curved in on itself, but we just can't measure the flatness of two points far enough apart from each other to notice the curve. An example I given was that it would be like trying to show the earth was round by measuring an area of a sandbox.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?

You're still thinking like a meat-monkey. There are stranger states out there than one can imagine, and that's not hyperbole. There was no causality before expansion, because there was no meaningful interactions or spacetime in which interactions can occur.

You're always going to have a hard time imagining this, because again, you are a human. We all are, none of us can imagine states of the universe without time and space.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

I still think that means I have to up towards Polaris.