Before the Big Bang
Comments(12)
I’ve always been a fan of the bouncing universe, you know: bang, we expand, we stop, we contract, bang, we expand etc. . . .
You ever stop to think what was actually going on before the big bang? I personally don’t go there, how do I know whether or not the reincarnation of the universe changes in between or not, if in fact the bouncing theory is even correct. Some truly great minds do though. There is a new theory that supposes we may never know what the universe was like before the big bang.
Scientific American (and sponsor/partner of this blog) has an article out on this new theory. It’s kind of heady stuff but JR Minkel does a nice job of explaining it — check it out here.
If you’re in the states:
I’ll be here tomorrow, but if YOU”RE not, HAPPY 4th!
I should state I’m by no means a physicist nor a mathemetician of any kind. So maybe there’s something I just don’t understand that can’t be explained to me without me spending a whole lot of time on the mathematics…
But what’s bothered me for years about the whole Big Bang thing is this…
If everything in the universe is expanding, including you know, the usuals… matter, energy, — and Time… TIME! hullo?? TIME?? …
Then maybe using a word like “before” in relation to this Big Bang is kind of conundrum misnomer of some sort.
I just wonder if maybe this obsession with origin and what was before, and where things came from (notice tense)… I
just wonder if that’s all a side-effect of being stuck in a some kind of proverbial Flatland of sorts.
I said it was heady
It makes me wonder if the universe we know really is just an expanding bubble. This would explain the expansion going on everywhere and the curvature of space-time. That we are only part of a multi-verse of similar bubbles and the bounce theory is just wishful thinking.
After all what happens to bubbles when they get too large? Poof, they burst into smaller pieces of bubble wall. Maybe the space our part of the multi-verse occupied is soon taken up with another bubble of a universe. Maybe the stuff from our universe is recycled to make a new bubble or bubbles, or even added to existing bubbles.
Did you stop and consider God in all this?
Hubert Reeves said once, that neither astrophysics nor religions can tell what was before.
They are in the same dilemma(don’t tell me, we had a water-world before the creation).
As an engineer I’ve wondered just where or what the universe is expanding in to? Did some infinite space exist prior to the Big Bang which reputedly occurred from a single point, or is the expansion from this single point creating it’s own space to contain it as it expands with a quality of infinite elasticity? If the former, where did the space come from, if the latter, by what mechanism?
But the bubble metaphor is still just another terrain in Flatland.
Because then instead of asking what’s before The Big Bang, you’re asking what’s outside the bubble.
Same problem again.
Where’s it expanding to? Is there some space beyond ready for it to expand into? Is there nothing that becomes something with the expansion?
And then, what is nothing?
Same problem again.
*sigh* It’s the same question really, isn’t it?
What’s before The Big Bang? = What’s outside the bubble? = What’s nothing?
It’s kind of like… we’re a certain distance from each other. Okay, now both of us stay still, but change that distance, and let’s meet, while we’re both in the same spot we were.
How do you do it?
Certainly can’t do it in our 3 dimensional perspective.
Oh, and then add to that time slowing or speeding up or standing still. And that’s where I have to get off that mathematical crazy train. I have enough trouble dealing with my budget, and calculus won’t help me with that. haha.
And I guess I don’t understand why I would consider god in all this. God IS… If you happen to be of a leaning of believing. I AM of the leaning of believing, and it doesn’t help really with the science of escaping this Flatland perspective.
And yep, neither astrophysics nor religion has an answer for “before time”. Stuck in the conundrum.
On the other hand, a true faith could allow for peace regardless.
But my faith doesn’t prevent me from wondering, thinking, and feeling.
Perhaps some with a more specific view would see this as a faith problem.
But in my broad belief, I see no such confliction.
Indeed, even with ‘the same dilemma’, I still see no collision, only parallels that swing close in areas… Close, but no cigar. (And that’s ‘just a cigar’ by the way.
)
Maybe the intersection is outside of Flatland?
I think that was the gist that the movie “Contact” was going for, actually.
That story also used the –let’s both of us stand still and meet, from a distance– thing too.
I was only sorry they skipped on the pi thing.
But maybe we should stop now. This isn’t Tom’s Philosophy Blog. LOL.
I actually remember a theory in grade school that suggested a kind of mix of Big Bang and Bubble theories. This universal goo that makes up the solar system is constantly exploding and imploding. In the goo are millions of bubbles, like boiling goo. As the pressure in these bubbles increases the skin on them expands and thins pulling fragments apart. the points on the bubble don’t actively change position…they just float there anchored only to the center of the bubble.
To qoute Robert Heinlein ” I don’t know who’s cranking. I’m pleased He doesn’t stop.”
Carl Sagan said that there is no sense in contemplating what was before the big bang since we will never be able to reproduce or observe it, no matter how deeply we are able to peer into space. The expanding universe simply “is”, and we do not have enough data to know if there is enough mass to eventually stop the expansion and cause collapse. Einstein and Hubble made similar statements.
Sagan did however, wonder about objects at the extreme edges of our expanding universe, beyond the roughly 100,000 known quasars (quasi-stellar radio sources) which can be detected only in x- or gamma-rays bands, and theorized that they may be on the other side of the big bang’s shock wave or that they are objects which had not yet produced any viable stars early enough for us to view their light today (more than 14 billion light years).
I’m more inclined to favour the idea that no viable stars were produced early enough out there for us to see them today. I mean, who knows what the heck’s out there this moment.
Ugh, there’s TIME again…
For that matter, if time is even moving the same way there, damn it.
The age old question still remains I guess.
How high is up anyway? If the expansion ends and start to shrink, will the past come crashing down on
us. time is reverse?
Geez Neil, you make it sound violent.
heehee.