What came before the big bang?

boing
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Imagine you are trying to explain to someone with a poor grasp of spherical geometry what directions are like at the South pole. They have only experienced space with N-S and E-W and up-down axes.

“So, if you keep on going South, you eventually get to the Sount Pole. You can’t get any further south than that.”

“Why can’t you go any further? Does the South Pole stop you?”

“No. There is no physical barrier as such. This is just as far as you can go by heading South.”

“So what happens if you keep going?”

“You are then heading North.”

“But that doesn’t make sense. You would be heading South, with West to your Right and East to your Left. When you cross the pole, they would be the wrong way around.”

“No, they wouldn’t. As you cross over the South pole, they swap over.”

“So what are Left and Right when you stand on the South Pole?”

“They are both North”

“You make no sense. No sense at all. I think you are making all this up.”

How does this relate to the Big Bang? Well the universe seems to have expanded from a smaller volume. It is tempting to assume that just before that it was in a smaller volume still. There is a point where every particle in the universe is pretty much overlapping every other particle. If we extrapolate backwards from that, there would be a point about 10^-35 seconds earlier where everything was at a point, but it may be the case that the universe happened with some finite fuzziness or uncertainty, and it was never in a dimensionless dot. Nevertheless, it is still convenient to zero our hypothetical clocks from the extrapolated time where the extrapolation converges to a point, even if this is not real.

What happens if we keep going? Do we start heading forwards in time again, like the South Pole? Ignore for the moment that we cannot head backwards in time or survive the conditions of the Bug Bang, and the Big Bang point may not exist. Were we to approach this point we would either not have enough dimensions, or flip them over in some way. Or something else that we have not imagined because the geometry is so unlike our own.

This failure to predict what happened before time zero has been presented by some as a great and signal failure in science. When I went to College, the age of the Universe was between 4 million years and Infinity: it is now 13.798±0.037 billion years, and we are making inferences based on measurements back to the millisecond point. I think science is getting on just fine. Let’s leave some for our kids to do.

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86

This! what happened is the first dimension came into existence. That allows a for point. Then a second, allowing a line between 2 points, then a third, allowing a volume. Maybe time came in first? Maybe 4th? Maybe nth? Who cares, it’s a thought experiment!! Cosmology is awesome.

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I think the idea of the universe “coming from” a thing implies that the universe is just another consequence in some larger closed system. Might be.

Ever seen super-critically cooled water freeze? All it takes is a condensation nucleus. I’ve often considered the big bang to be some sort of phase change, where energy first condensed into matter, analogous to how liquid changes to solid, all at once, and you can never really tell where the condensation started. Not a perfect analogy, mind you.

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Either there was an outside frame and the big bang happened within it, or there was no outside frame and everything spontaneously began as it, with no precursor and we have to come up with a fancy way to explain that. That’s the best I can do.

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Where can I get my hands on some of this ice-9 like they have in the video?

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You guys appear to not realize that the science you’re getting is filtered … here, on HuffingtonPost, on reddit …

The reason I’m AWOL is because I’ve been filtered out by the moderators. This is increasingly the reality of the situation online:

(1) We have a very serious science education problem. People have lost track of the concepts, and cause & effects in science, probably because problem sets invite students to memorize, rather than assimilate – but also because the science journalism does not keep track of such things for the readers. This has been extensively studied by physics education researchers like Eric Mazur & David Hestenes. Not only can most people not explain what assumptions go into their beliefs, but neither do people even know what a worldview is, nor that they exist within science.

(2) Our system for discourse has not been designed to support emergence. Amazon makes half of its revenues off of books that are ranked 30,000 and above. This is called the long tail. The long tail exists for science as well, and conventional scientists have put extraordinary effort into avoiding the exploration of it (even as certain businesses, like Pfizer, invest heavily in mining it …). So, we’ve yet to build discourse systems which support the long tail in science. Cracks are starting to emerge in this approach. Online scientific discourse is not improving; in fact, it’s constantly getting worse, as those who know become increasingly rigid in their beliefs (thus, refusing to hear out the good ideas at the periphery with the bad) … And those who don’t know are the recipients of rude comments. Those who know of problems in conventional theory are also insulted, along with the confused ones.

(3) Rational problem-solving must be supported, and if it is not, people fall back onto their lizard brains, which do a form of pattern matching (aka stereotyping) known as associative coherence. This is typically when an appeal to authority is made. At this point there were two chances to get it right: when they learned science, and when they talked about it. The mechanics of this machinery are the same for everybody, because this is the same system which keeps us alive and out of harm’s way, so when people see it kicking in independently within the minds of millions of people, it literally appears as a conspiracy. But, it’s not. It’s based upon feelings, much of it happens beneath our awareness, and the switch between rationality and irrationality happens fluidly. See Daniel Kahneman’s work on decision theory, for which he received a Nobel.

(4) If we do not build systems which support the rational exploration of the long tail in science, censorship will become the norm in scientific discourse, and the problem of dogma will worsen yet more than it already is. This is the inevitable result of the debunking culture, which is a form of faith in scientists designed to protect peoples’ pre-existing beliefs, at the expense of innovation. We have no choice but to re-introduce standards for critical thinking, philosophy of science and Mertonian norms back into our scientific discourse – but be aware, that this will place certain mainstream ideas out of the sphere of science. And this is why it has yet to happen – because much of mainstream science today, as practiced by professionals and taught in universities, is actually metaphysical.

If we refuse to build these discourse systems, then innovation will ultimately suffer, and our quality of lives will follow.

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91

Nothing in relativity or quantum mechanics predicts or requires multiple universes (except maybe the anthropic principle, which seems iffy to me anyways).

Huh? Please explain. Of course the universe is non-deterministic, but the fundamental constants of the universe need to be fine-tuned to have life. In other words, we have 3 spatial dimensions – the exact number for planets to orbit stars. The 1/r^2 law for gravitation is critical. Two spatial dimensions, and planets crash into the sun. Four spatial dimensions and the planet flies off. It is also nice how we have just the right amount of radioactivity. If atoms together less tightly, no larger elements with which to build life. There are a lot of physical constants that have to be “just right” for life. Although the universe may be non-deterministic, the physical constants are still fixed throughout the entire universe (at least, that is what the evidence shows so far).

Now, as to the “multiple” universes, that is the old bifurcating-universe crap that is the staple of cheesy sci-fi shows. Sorry, but even the Copenhagen interpretation is preferable to that steaming pile. But, even if you DO have a bifurcating universe, the physical constants, once again do not change.

Side note: I am not a huge fan of the Copenhagen interpretation. I once read a theory that the “spooky action at a distance” can be solved neatly by allowing photons (and presumable other particles) to also flow backwards in time, which solves the paradoxes nicely. I am still concerned about how the universe knows when to collapse a wave function…

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Distilled water, an extremely smooth sided container (sealed is best), and your freezer. Though I think the vibration from the motors in most freezers is enough vibration to cause nucleation.

Ideally it’s -10 outside. Used to happen to me all the time when i would prep 40mL VOA vials with distilled water and then leave them in my mobile lab truck. So much fun. 20 years as a chemist and this one still makes me smile every winter.

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Not necessarily a bad one, though. Some of the more theoretical particle physics has used the same, for instance talking about breaking symmetry between forces and so on in the early universe. Still purely speculative, of course, but I think interesting.

Those would be retrograde waves. It’s an interesting idea, but in practice having the future determine the past is just non-determinism with some arrows drawn backwards; and it’s not really clear to me how you get that certain types of interactions predictably lead to collapse and others not, if it all depends on the future.

Anyway, though, you can certainly assume the multiple universes interpretation is stupid. It’s very clear, though, things do exist in superpositions up to a certain point; that interpretation is basically a logical consequence of working out what would happen if you don’t suppose collapses. And it works out pretty well.

Whether that’s preferable is a philosophical not observable question. So like I said before: we know the universe has to be non-deterministic or multiple, but each option is just as consistent with observations as the other. So singling out one or the other as untestable is a mistake.

As far as the universe being “just right” for life, it seems unconvincing to me. We know it’s set up in a way that somewhere in its huge expanse, a little bit of life is possible. But it’s not obvious to me that a universe with more dimensions or different elements certainly couldn’t have a different form emerge in some corner, when in theory life could exist in something entirely different like cellular automata.

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Quantize space and time (conceptually - we can’t reliably do this in mathematical practice yet). Now what do the fields and virtual particles and vacuum state look like?

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There’s plenty of those.

For example: the black holes = new universe generator theory, or living inside of a computer simulation, or the string theory: universe in a bubble.

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Well, in a micro-sense, superpositions of multiple realities seems like a nice mathematical trick, and who knows, it may even be true.

But the concept of an alternate universe where, do to random quantum fluctuations, I am actually good-looking and a super rock star seems to be, at least on a philosophical level, absolutely absurd. But, I guess you could take conform in knowing that in at lease ONE universe, you achieved the fame and riches that you always wanted, or in that at least one universe the USA has a government that actually follows the Constitution.

Besides, if every wave function collapse yielded a new universe, where would you keep them? The universe basement would soon run out of space. And don’t forget about putting labels on them, Your label maker would run out of tape after the first few billion universes… Well, I guess you could always use a sharpie marker, but buy them by the case… :wink:

Perhaps, but I call it unlikely. Way back before Windows came out, I wrote a cheesy program that used gravitational law to plot an orbit on the screen. By playing with it, I found out that 1/(R^2) was absolutely critical. Now, since gravity is a conservative force, that means that orbits can only exist in three-dimensional space (well, you COULD throw out conservative forces, but that is logically absurd). In a 2D world, you would get tons on black holes, and in a 4D world, you would get no planets orbiting stars, so everything would be frozen. Both are not a good idea for life. You also need atoms that fuse easily enough to have stars, but not so unstable that everything is radioactive. Gravity also needs to be multiple orders of magnitude weaker compared to the other forces, or EVERYTHING would be black holes. You also need the electromagnetic strength to be just right. Too weak, and everything is a plasma. Too strong, and I would imagine that forming molecules would be quite difficult. Those things seems to be immutable.

I could imagine that if the mass of the electron were substantially different, that life would be possible, but would likelye work substantially different…

Now, because a certain amount of fine-tuning needs to be done (how much might be debatable), that implies that either:

  1. There are a infinite number of universes (or a single universe that keeps on being re-made an infinite number of times)

  2. There is something inherent in the math of the universe that requires it to be the way that we see it.

  3. There is a creator.

And so far, all three options have approximately as much scientific proof… In fact, I would surmise that #2 is the least likely of the three…

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There is no need for collapse. Different portions of the superposed wavefunction begin to interact differently with the rest of the universe, and as a result you get two distinct blobs of non-zero complex amplitude rapidly moving away from each other towards different parts of the quantum configuration space. Once they do not overlap (faster for larger systems), they do not interact with each other and are mutually unobservable.

If you let the normal quantum laws operate exactly as it says on the tin, you find that postulating “collapse” makes no new predictions and that “bifurcation” happens automatically for free. Occam’s Razor - why should I assume collapse if it doesn’t buy me anything and adds, as your concern reflects, a huge amount of additional algorithmic complexity?

Snark aside, the universe is not a 4D spacetime object. Each particle is an infinite dimensional Hilbert space object, and the ensemble of particles we call the universe exists in an infintie dimensional configuration space.

That being is not “you,” but it may be a current portion of what was once your wavefunction. Google “quantum suicide.” It isn’t an idea I’d want to take too seriously at any confidence level anyone today should possess. But if it is a deterministic fact about the universe that future portions of your wavefunction experience different outcomes, and if you are sufficiently certain that there if non-zero probability of a particular outcome (even if that portion has measure zero in the vast set of possibilities), then… well, some folks more willing to speculate than I am have put this forward as an explanation for the Fermi paradox.

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How about 5) there are an infinite number of dimensions (and we interact with 4 of them in a linear fashion)?

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Sequential experience of existence is a limitation of the meat engines that host human consciousness.

The traditional concept of “time” is our attempt to explain a subjective phenomena as an absolute condition.

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That is on even more shaky ground. According to string theory, the universe may have 9 or 11. That seems to be the limit. And who knows if string theory is even real? At this point, it is not really mature enough to be testable… well, some people are experimentally looking for gravity in the extra dimensions, but that is a very difficult path to follow.

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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Heat is only meaningful relative to absolute zero. Cold is only meaningful if your girlfriend needs a coat.

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Fry: “So it’s true! There are multiple dimensions!”
Prof. Farnsworth: “No, just the ten.”

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The problem as I see it.

First:

For example, take a collection of uranium atoms undergoing radioactive decay due to quantum processes in their nuclei.

Then:

…there is no deeper reason, no underlying set of causes, that explains it. It just happens.

Doesn’t everything ‘just happen’?

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Wha? I don’t even…

I am disappoint.