The answer to life, the universe and everything? We’ve already discovered that. Look it up.
I agree. We’re looking. And if it’s discoverable, we will find it. My comment was more on what was discoverable, given how we think.
and my weakly-witty retort was simply to say we don’t know what we can discover, so don’t put rhetorical limits on it.
look, i don’t know anything more than you do. but i object to the idea that humans can’t understand our environment. i am obviously an optimist, and will proudly hold that belief 
Hey! I went to a lot of effort to get settled into that zero gravity chair.
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Ignoring the fact that there isn’t just once theory called “the Multiverse” (there’s several different theories which involve a multiverse) I’m pretty sure none of those are actually mutually exclusive to the big bang theory. Here’s how wikipedia describes the big bang theory:
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the early development of the universe.[1] The key idea is that the universe is expanding. Consequently, the universe was denser and hotter in the past. In particular, the Big Bang model suggests that at some moment all matter in the universe was contained in a single point, which is considered the beginning of the universe.
Expanding, hotter denser in the past. String theory, MoND, and various flavors of multiverse theories all predict the same thing, hence are consistent with the big bang theory. (String theory, for example, is really competing with particle physics models – particularly the standard model – not cosmological models like cosmic inflation or big bang.) In fact, the author even mentions one of the more interesting multiverse models: the “bubble universe” theory.
It’s hard to imagine any theory that can account for CMBR, cosmological redshift, and relative abundance of elements without predicting an expanding universe that was once hotter and denser than it is now. Big bang is a pretty safe bet. Safer than Newtonian mechanics back when it was believed to be the most reliably demonstrated scientific theory ever devised by human beings.
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While I’m sympathetic to your perspective, I don’t think it’s “lazy” to point out that human beings have very limited, parochial sensory and cognitive abilities and we may simply be physically unable to conceive of the sorts of things needed to explain the existence and evolution of the universe. It’s worth at least considering the possibility even if you’re going to abandon it as being defeatist.
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Really, I’m not sure I’m ready to believe either. It seems wiser and humbler to simply say “I have no idea what created the universe (if it was “created” at all!) and I don’t believe we’ll find out in my lifetime, despite how curious I am to know the truth”.
So when a scientist discusses “the time before the Big Bang”, I get just as skeptical as when someone discusses “the time before God created the world”. Whether the universe began in darkness and void, or even if the universe ever actually “began”, is simply beyond the ken humanity at the moment, and anyone speaking otherwise is delusional.
I wouldn’t dream of putting limits on it. I meant to say that what we can discover is dependant on our bodies and brains, and may not include things beyond the answer “42”.
Until we can claim to have the merest inkling of how our brains work, there’s no justification for putting rhetorical limits on it.
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The journey to INFINITY takes FOREVER.
nuff said, don’t forget to kiss your wife goodbye.
“why something rather than nothing?”
“because it is what it is.”
ha, I can’t tell if that’s nonsensical or profound.
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Time, being a construct of our limited understanding of a connection between events, did not exist because there were no events to connect. When entropy got started, then so did cause and effect, and therefore time in the raw sense, awaiting our evolution so that we could notice it. Our understanding of time is likely to be different than other beings’ understanding of it - the comprehension of it is tightly integrated with our psychophysiology.
But what caused the first cause? Why was matter so condensed at the beginning?
The answer to that is 42.
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I have a question that has been bothering me for a while, tried to explain it to kids but they just stared blankly at me asked for money !
Apologies if it’s obvious but here goes:
As explained in article, before the Universe existed there was no concept of Space/Time, it came into being at that point. I’m good with that but lets say for example that at some point in our future the Universe was to cease to exist (collapse for example), then how would it be possible for it to exist now, at this point also since if it ceased, then so would Space/Time, hence there would be nothing to contain our history, past/present etc. In other words, how could the Universe exist here and now if it id gone from future since ‘Here and Now’ only makes sense if it is still around.
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I find the usual answer to this sort of question is “a little of both”.
We apologise for the inconvenience.
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Let’s think this through:
Big bang is implied by
Receding galaxies, which are implied by
Doppler shift, which is caused by
Motion away from us, which is assumed from
Red shifted light
So we have this train of logic all based on a single phenomenon and an assumption. If that assumption is wrong then most of what we think we know about the universe ain’t so. Well, Doppler effect is not the only cause of red shift. Every hospital uses a magnet to produce a red shift. It’s called MRI. But astronomers deny magnetic fields in space. So there you are: dead skunk in the middle of the road, stinking to high heaven.
One way to think of it is that space is a medium that matter and energy can exist within and travel through. We can even measure it, such as in “there are X miles of (mostly) empty space between our solar system and another.” You can put stuff in it, like stars and planets and daffodils and meatloaf and Studebakers.
Before the Big Bang, there was nowhere to park your Studebaker and no place to drive it to even if you could.
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Enjoy it while you can.
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but it’s not entirely silly to interpret the answer to your question as saying “Monday two minutes earlier = Sunday 23:59”… yeah, you’re outside the frame of reference of “Monday” now, but you still have something, not nothing.
No matter the mental gymnastics I try to wrap my head around the description above, I’m having a hard time believing/understanding time and space didn’t exist and then, poof, they just did.
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Space isn’t some featureless emptiness. It has geometric structure; there is for instance a difference between how distances and angles work in a Euclidean plane, a hyperbolic plane, and on a sphere.
General relativity is based on the idea that the geometry of spacetime changes depending on what matter and energy occupy it, and predicts that it should expand when the density is low and contract when the density is high.
I’m not sure people agree that it is. The universe is supposed to be very flat, but if that’s the result of inflation, the over-all geometry might still be some bounded form like a giant sphere. And, of course, there’s the question of whether it comes back in the future or expands forever.
I think the talking point you’re looking for is that astronomers deny electric currents in space. Magnetic fields in space are very plainly part of standard cosmology. And of course it’s never just been the existence of redshift, but the way it relates to multiple frequencies, distances, background radiation, plus other things like elemental abundances.
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Maybe “before” is too strong a word. It does, however, follow that an effect must have a cause. Even in vacuum fluctuations, which are completely random, the cause is the Heisenberg uncertainty principal. For radioactive decay, the cause is the fact that the nucleus of the atom is unstable. You cannot say WHEN an atom will decay, but you can at least point to an atom and that “that will one day decay.”
So, if the universe in an effect, what is the cause?
I can, in fact, accept the possibility for quantum fluctuations to cause strange things. However, in my experience, quantum fluctuations happen in time and space, so what if there is no time or space for them to happen in? And if there was no “space” for this to happen in, then what did it happen in? And whatever this mysterious “it” is that preceded the universe, where did THAT come from? And it also stands to reason that this mysterious “it” must also have something analogous to time, because for something to actually happen (creation of the universe) there must, logically, be some point when it did not happen.
In any case, the book sounds like my type of read. I might just have to pick it up.
Now maybe this is just an artifact of the imprecise language we use to discuss such topics, but follow my logic. I’d love to hear some thoughts on this:
- The big bang is described even in this very article using temporal terminology, implying that it was an event:
It appears instantaneously from nothing and immediately expands.
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To me an ‘event’ is a fundamentally something which has properties or in other words it is a state.
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In order for something to have properties, their must be some other state by which to distinguish that which it has, from that which it does not. (e.g. Hot is only meaningful is contrast to Cold.)
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Thus having a state of any sort necessitates at least one other state.
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This leads me to the view the Big Bang as at the very least a binary event. (i.e. it was not, then it was).
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In turn this leads me to believe there was ‘something’ prior to the big bang. Some sort of meta-space or meta-time upon which quantum processes fluctuate. Perhaps some laws of physics arise from the Big Bang, but others precede it.
Even as I write this the logic feels shaky. I feel like the way out of this conundrum is probably some sort of symmetrical or recursive process/description. The Big Crunch comes to mind as a parsimonious alternative to the Big Bang.
Thoughts?
