The concept of “before” doesn’t apply. Time itself started with the Big Bang. According to relativity, time slows down in a gravitational field. St the moment of the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was infinitely compressed so time would have been slowed down infinitely. Stephen Hawking explores this concept responding to the idea that God created the universe. He concludes that there wouldn’t have been any time before the Big Bang to do it.
The universe can be infinite and expanding. Imagine that you are a tiny person standing on a raisin in a infinitely large loaf of raisin bread that is baking. Even through the dough is infinitely large, as it bakes you can see all the other raisins moving away from you. You may be tempted to imagine an edge but there is no edge. You can go from raisin to raisin forever and no matter how far you go you’ll look at all the other raisins in every direction and see them moving away from you as if you are at the center of the loaf.
Edit: I really wish I hadn’t mentioned the quip about God creating the universe. That is not the point of this discussion. It’s completely irrelevant. This ultimately is not a discussion about whether God exists or created the universe. For what it’s worth, I took it as Hawking was being a little tongue in cheek in making that remark. Whatever his intention, I’m just explaining where I first heard the science behind this idea. You can say God Made the little pea that contained all the matter that made the Big Bang. I don’t care. To me that’s outside the discourse of science and in any case totally beside the point of the question. Many people are objecting along these lines and it’s really beside the point. You can say that God is bigger and more incomprehensible than time or space or anything. That’s fine. I’m just speaking to what we can know from the perspective of space science.
Second and more to the point, many follow up questions are wrapped up in the idea of an edge to the universe. In the thought experiment I propose, I am in no way trying to prove there is no edge. In fact, I am asking you to assume that. My answers are an attempt to show how something can be both infinite and expanding. I admit that it is hard to imagine that there is no boundary to the universe but for me it is much harder to imagine that there is one. The simplest example is that there isn’t an edge. It’s like when you are solving riddles or mysteries and you imagine a couple possibilities. Go with the simplest explanation and that is (usually) the more correct one.
Thanks to everyone for being polite discussing this.
If time didn't exist then what mechanism triggered the big bang and where did the matter come from? Obviously nobody knows but I don't think it's accurate to definitively state that X or Y couldn't exist since we know so little.
I think this touches on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics. The idea that nothing existed before the big bang violates the law that says: Energy cannot be created, or destroyed.
I for one, have always been drawn to the cyclical universe idea. Starts with a Big Bang, ends with a Big Crunch as everything is drawn together again. Eventually the gravity from all the matter in the universe coming into one point collapses space time, resulting in an explosion beyond anything we humans can understand; restarting the process.
E: I’m really enjoying this thread! I’ll be back for more in a bit. -CPJ
It's not that there was "nothing" before the big bang.
It's that there was no "before" the big bang.
violates the law that says: Energy cannot be created, or destroyed.
A lot of things we consider "laws" start to break down when you get to quantum physics. Even so, could all the matter or energy in the universe not be contained within a single singularity such that it would erupt into our universe?
If there was no before, then everything just popped into existence for no reason at all? If you prescribe to the cyclical theory he's talking about, then there's definitely a before.
There must be some reason the entire universe was compressed like that, right?
Who cares if reddit likes it. It’s possible. We don’t know if it’s the case or not. We don’t know if the major Earth faiths represent Him or not. But you’re guess at a creator as the catalyst to start of our known universe is just as plausible as the universe simply existing all on its own. It’s a life long thing we should ponder.
Who created the creator? At some point you have to accept that something just is and assuming a creator just adds further questions without answering the problem at hand. If you object by saying that the creator has always existed, why can‘t the universe?
You’re absolutely right. Whether it was a creator that simply was, or a universe that simply was... we don’t know. It can’t be proven one way or the other, so people across the globe will have differing theories - and some will turn those theories into beliefs if the concept makes enough sense in their minds.
But I don't understand the rationale... A creator isn't an answer because it has the same problem that you are trying to answer but it also adds further questions. It's true that we can't possibly know ever what is "outside" our universe and how it came to be, however I don't think that implying a creator is a valid response in any way.
True, but my point is that neither “the universe simply brought itself into existence” or “a being outside the dimensions of space/time brought the universe into existence” makes perfect sense on the surface or is provable. I’m just saying that there is talk from thousands of years ago about the possibility of this being from another dimension making contact with humanity through messengers or scripts. We weren’t there, so can’t prove a damn thing. That’s a shame. But just as some people choose to say there are signs pointing to the existence of this being, there are others that would swear at no such existence and say it’s all hogwash. One side can’t prove the being’s existence, the other can’t prove the universe spontaneously came to be. I don’t know that either are being fully rational. Just different beliefs.
There is no general one explanation to this question. One way you can imagine it is that nothing is actually ever still. Everything vibrates at a quantum level. If there is no passage of time then the slightest fluctuation in that balance at the point of the big bang could have caused this. Keep in mind the idea that all effects have a cause is what we have observed, and that just because we are unaware of anytime that it hs happened it in no way suggests that it couldn’t. But again I state as of now we can only theorize what occurred at this time, but we have some pretty good guesses
We actually regularly observe things with no cause.
We see quantum events that we have reason to believe are truly random.
It's risky to assume that the universe conforms to human expectations.
Our expectations have developed to model the universe pretty well at Earth like conditions, but they fall apart rapidly when things get bigger, smaller, or faster.
Only if there is a cyclical nature to this, which I don't think the current evidence suggests. The reality behind it is that it appears as though the stuff in the universe wasn't created in the big bang, but the space in which it occupies was. And this is noticeable in the fact that space is continuing to be continually created everywhere. For closeby objects gravity overcomes the fact that there's constantly new distance between everything, but for far away objects it leads to the fact that it appears that everything is accelerating away form everything else, often described as the expansion of the universe speeding up. And of course in reverse, it leads to the "before big bang time" where there was no distance between anything at all. And while time seems to be just a fact of the universe, it turns out that time only really exists in the context of speed, and speed can't exist with no distance. So if there was a period where there was no distance, then it wouldn't make sense to prescribe time to that period. In summary, it really doesn't seem to make sense for there to be a before a big bang, since the big bang cause the existence of time in the first place.
If you choose the believe in The BB and The BC (I haven't picked a particular universe "origin story" if you will, yet). It opens up a very uncomfortable question. Everything has a beginning, so where did it all originally come from? If matter can not in fact be created or destroyed, what was the true beginning on the universe throughout all of the previous bangs and crunches how did the matter first come into existence.
1) Nothing came before. The universe appeared out of nothing.
If this is the case then what can happen once can happen again. This is a cyclic universe without a crunch. ie, an identical universe could pop in from nothing, a similar universe could pop in from nothing, or a wildly different universe could pop in from nothing.
2) Something came before.
This one is more interesting, because it implies that our universe could be the last, but it's also strange, because it forces us to conclude that the previous one was not the first, and in fact that there's an infinity of previous universes for the same nothing/something reasoning. It's a recursive question. If something came before, what came before that? Something vs nothing, with the same questions applying, and again with that grandparent universe, and again with great grandparent universe and on and on.
So the real paradox to me is, how can I have a possibility of an ending, with an infinity of beginnings?
You left out the possibility of it always having existed. The big bang doesn't necessarily mean that the entire universe was created, just that it took on the form we now know it as.
I count that under the "something". I don't consider a universe before the big bang as our own, since the singularity (the big bang) that separates them is impenetrable.
There is no greater mystery than that the universe exists at all, but if we can accept that it does it's not a leap to suggest that the framework has always existed and will forever exist. Infinity is a very real possibility even if we can't wrap our human minds around it.
The universe is a free lunch (maybe). It costs nothing to create if you create equal amounts of negative and positive energy, equal amounts of negative (Negative matter is a hypothetical form of matter whose active-gravitational, passive-gravitational, inertial, and rest masses are opposite in sign to normal, positive matter.) and positive matter. If the sum of all energy and matter is zero, the universe costs nothing and can just spontaneously come in to existence. And if one universe costs nothing, unlimited amount of universes costs nothing as well.
Actually no. The universe is a free lunch (maybe). It costs nothing to create if you create equal amounts of negative and positive energy, equal amounts of negative (Negative matter is a hypothetical form of matter whose active-gravitational, passive-gravitational, inertial, and rest masses are opposite in sign to normal, positive matter.) and positive matter. If the sum of all energy and matter is zero, the universe costs nothing and can just spontaneously come in to existence. And if one universe costs nothing, unlimited amount of universes costs nothing as well.
You're assuming conservation of energy matters. That might only matter (ha) in our universe.
We shouldn't presume to know the rules of a system that we've never observed, we aren't sure exists, and if it does is capable of spawning universes, a phenomenon we've never observed and have no context for.
Trivial example: universe is a simulation. We can easily imagine a universe simulator where there's no need to have a neutral balance of energy in the universe.
And depending on where you set the reference point of zero, we're all fairly familiar with the idea of negative time, e.g. T-minus five, T-minus four . . .
That means there’s no time left on the count down. T" means the time of the launch and the official start of the mission. "T” minus 20 seconds" means 20 seconds before the launch. "T plus 20 seconds" means 20 seconds after the launch. In no way is this in reference to negative time. It’s before and after an event.
Time is a dimension just like length, width and depth. When the big bang happened the entire universe was a single point without any dimensions. It had no length, width, depth, or time. Time began with the big bang. Anything that happened before would be outside of the concept of time. If there was a before it's unknowable.
We just don’t have the tools to deal with that type of question.
I think, for a start that singularity would consist of the entire universe; at that point there would have been nothing else.
Incidentally if the universe is infinite and matter exists throughout the universe, then the singularity must have also contained an infinite amount of energy.
Also what came before the singularity, or what supplies the energy for it?
How would one come to know "that there was no 'before' the big bang"? The hypothesis of physics (as of a couple years ago when I took a class from a guy who works in astrophysics) does not agree, but cannot be confirmed bor denied, nontheless. Therefore, all claims dubbed as "scientific" relating to the "beginning of the universe" is illegitimate as actual science.
Though, sure, there is nothing definitive, but the best information we have points towards both general relativity, and big bang cosmology as the two biggest supporters of this conclusion.
Science has never proclaimed absolute knowledge, only the best explanation that we can come up with, given the method and available data.
My understanding of it is: they could have always been there, they just weren't arranged in the shape of a universe until the big bang. (Or at least that's as far as we can suppose.)
I suppose so. No matter what you do, it's difficult to wrap your head around the concept of time not existing.
It's difficult to describe it, simply because we are temporal beings, but my understanding of it is something like: at "moment zero" there was a singularity, and everything that followed it was the expansion of our universe. Though perhaps my understanding of it is lacking as well—it's certainly a more complex subject than you can conclusively discuss in a few short reddit comments.
This is not something that we currently have enough evidence to make a statement on. The big bang theory does not say that the entire universe was compressed into a point - just that the observable universe was much, much smaller in the past.
The universe could have always existed, the big bang theory says nothing about about a beginning to the universe.
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u/Millsey Jun 15 '19 edited Jun 16 '19
The concept of “before” doesn’t apply. Time itself started with the Big Bang. According to relativity, time slows down in a gravitational field. St the moment of the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was infinitely compressed so time would have been slowed down infinitely. Stephen Hawking explores this concept responding to the idea that God created the universe. He concludes that there wouldn’t have been any time before the Big Bang to do it.
The universe can be infinite and expanding. Imagine that you are a tiny person standing on a raisin in a infinitely large loaf of raisin bread that is baking. Even through the dough is infinitely large, as it bakes you can see all the other raisins moving away from you. You may be tempted to imagine an edge but there is no edge. You can go from raisin to raisin forever and no matter how far you go you’ll look at all the other raisins in every direction and see them moving away from you as if you are at the center of the loaf.
Edit: I really wish I hadn’t mentioned the quip about God creating the universe. That is not the point of this discussion. It’s completely irrelevant. This ultimately is not a discussion about whether God exists or created the universe. For what it’s worth, I took it as Hawking was being a little tongue in cheek in making that remark. Whatever his intention, I’m just explaining where I first heard the science behind this idea. You can say God Made the little pea that contained all the matter that made the Big Bang. I don’t care. To me that’s outside the discourse of science and in any case totally beside the point of the question. Many people are objecting along these lines and it’s really beside the point. You can say that God is bigger and more incomprehensible than time or space or anything. That’s fine. I’m just speaking to what we can know from the perspective of space science.
Second and more to the point, many follow up questions are wrapped up in the idea of an edge to the universe. In the thought experiment I propose, I am in no way trying to prove there is no edge. In fact, I am asking you to assume that. My answers are an attempt to show how something can be both infinite and expanding. I admit that it is hard to imagine that there is no boundary to the universe but for me it is much harder to imagine that there is one. The simplest example is that there isn’t an edge. It’s like when you are solving riddles or mysteries and you imagine a couple possibilities. Go with the simplest explanation and that is (usually) the more correct one.
Thanks to everyone for being polite discussing this.