I ♥ *SCIENCE!

Adding video to channels (Science) - requested by EDD.

"what happened before the big bang"?
answer:
"we dont know"
but maybe.................
awesome..in the truest sense of the word.
coming from my philosophy and perspective:
life giving over to death to give birth to new life is a much more poetic and vastly more beautiful dynamic than nothing.
our minds are not capable of comprehending absolute nothing but just like a child who has lost a tooth my mind keeps going back to that equation to attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible.

Pfft, "explained". I'd much rather be learning by doing. I'll go make my own big bang. If you need me, I'm on the toilet.

Oh, and sideboob at 1:08... you're welcome.

>> ^gwiz665:
Oh, and sideboob at 1:08... you're welcome.


She is quite bangable... sorry...

On a serious note: excellent animation, excellent explanations, but I don't agree with one thing: she states that there was "nothing" before the big bang. I agree that there was probably no space/time, but I feel there was something there that actually "banged." I would imagine that it would be something that is entirely incomprehensible to us (as is the stuff that exists outside of that), but it seems logical that for there to be a big bang, there had to be some sort of thing that would do it...

Then again, wtf do I know?

Agreed Ponceleon. I didn't like how she said there was nothing then the big bang occurred, creating something. Something cannot come from nothing (at least by our terms). It contradicts itself. Only thing I can conclude is that we just don't have a way to comprehend and communicate the specifics of the origin of this theory.

Oddly enough, it's easier for me to *somewhat* grasp the alternative theory that the universe always was. It's all very confusing, but fascinating nonetheless.

Once I got past the something from nothing part of the video, the rest was great.

Someone should tell this lady about the bible.

It's quite frustrating to see a physicist falling into the same trap as us regular people: There's no such thing as "before the big bang." She says it right there in the video; space and time were created by the big bang. "Before" is an indication of time, albeit a vague one, so how can there be a time before time existed?

If time is said to have begun to exist at some point then there was certainly a "before time". Yes, you can't measure "before time" because there's no unit to measure nothing by. But there was a before.

As for the discussion of the nothing that existed before the something that is now everything... our universe is a bubble of reality that was blown into existence, by some external force. External? External to what? External to our reality. So there must have been something then, somewhere, but it wasn't here, because nothing was. It's as if we're proving the existence of other universes by deductive reasoning. The energy that created everything had to originate somewhere, and it couldn't have come from here, because there was nothing here.

Knives, excellent post, that was kind of what I was trying to say...

I think another way of thinking about it is that our reality (time/space) began at that point. There may have been "something" before that moment, but it probably didn't exist by the standards of what we consider it to be "real" in our universe. To say that it was nothing is perhaps accurate in the sense that it couldn't be measured or understood by our conception of the universe we live in, but in its own frame of reference would still constitute being "something."

Ah pronouns, they are certainly getting their due in this discussion.

We are getting very philosophical, but that's cool. Let me just spark another J.

OK, cool... now what were we talking about?

/watches everybody ponder the question of what was/is/will be prior to the big bang..
please..
by all means....continue...

Also, this is an interesting addendum:

>> ^KnivesOut:
If time is said to have begun to exist at some point then there was certainly a "before time". Yes, you can't measure "before time" because there's no unit to measure nothing by. But there was a before.

No, this is another common mistake. You're assuming that without time, there is still an order to events. What we perceive as time flowing in the forward direction is simply the direction of increasing entropy. We say event A happened before event B, because event A happened at a time of lesser universal entropy than event B. There is no before without time and the universe.

As for the discussion of the nothing that existed before the something that is now everything... our universe is a bubble of reality that was blown into existence, by some external force. External? External to what?

No. Nobody says that it was created by an external force. That is just silly and makes no sense.

A little history on the origins of the theory...

Georges Le Maitre: Catholic Priest and Astronomer who proposed the idea of the "primeval atom." His idea was actually considered to be absurd by the scientific community as it indicated a moment of creation. At the time scientist preffered the Static Universe.

Edwin Hubble: Of course you know this guy. He proved that the universe was expanding, providing evidence that supported the Big Bang Theory

CMB: A form of electromagnetic radiation filling the universe that must be explained by a model of the universe. From the wikipedia entry: "Although many different processes might produce the general form of a black body spectrum, no model other than the Big Bang has yet explained the fluctuations."

These are just some places to start researching of course...

The possibilities that Dr. Levin speaks of are just possibilties right now. They have not yet been given the status of Theory. All we know is that the Big Bang certainly happend... and it blows my mind every time I think about...

errr...
*Amazon

uggh.. just go to this: Big Bang by Simon Singh

Your avatar alone makes anything you say on this topic that much more valid.

>> ^KnivesOut:
As for the discussion of the nothing that existed before the something that is now everything...

That's another thing that bugged me in this video... I've never heard any scientist claim there was nothing before the big bang. It's always been said that the universe existed as an extremely dense, extremely small mass. Physics as we know them don't work in this sardine universe so we have no idea what came before that.

Nothing turning into something is how creationists describe the big bang.

>> ^Fusionaut:
uggh.. just go to this: Big Bang by Simon Singh


"the day without a yesterday"
fitting.
thanks fusionaut.

Much as I love the discussion about before/after, I think you've missed the point.

What she is trying to say is that the universe wasn't there before the big bang - ie, that the universe was created at the time of the big bang rather than something exploding and filling the the void that we call the universe.

Even the addendum video added above doesn't help - it shows black "space" being filled by the debris from an explosion, again giving the impression that the universe was already in place but void of anything. The original video goes some way to showing "outside" of the universe and how it was created (and grew/wobbled) because of the Big Bang.

That's what I think, anyway.

When it comes to things like this, I think it's worth keeping in mind that people have always thought they knew how things began. Are we so different?

I don't pretend to know - I do read up on interesting theories (the big Bang, String/M Theory, etc.) and am proficient in discussing them, but for all we know 100 years from now people will laugh at our conception of these things.

>> ^mentality:

No, this is another common mistake. You're assuming that without time, there is still an order to events. What we perceive as time flowing in the forward direction is simply the direction of increasing entropy. We say event A happened before event B, because event A happened at a time of lesser universal entropy than event B. There is no before without time and the universe.

I'm a bit confused about some things you said. You're using the concept of entropy to define the concept of time. Doesn't entropy require time to be defined? Because that would be problematic.

One other thing that I find curious is when you mention the universe without time, as you said, it's very difficult for people to understand. To me, I think it's as hard to imagine universe without time as it is to imagine the universe without space. It's not like pressing the pause button on a movie. Without time, all physical properties that rely on time would collapse, the universe would make no sense, equations would go haywire.

So maybe it's more accurate to say there is no universe without time?

I'm not a theoretical physicist, so please be gentle.

Then how do you explain "The Land BEFORE Time"??

Score +1 for me.

gtjwkq,
ah... welcome to the paradox my friend.
have a seat,this is gonna get interesting.

The reason there's so much conjecture about the conditions before the big bang is because we have absolutely no way of observing what came before. It seems that everything about our universe that we can detect or experience; space, time, light, matter and energy were all created at the Big Bang.

This is exactly why the Catholic church accepts the Big Bang as the method of creation. They know that what came before is safely outside the realm of empirical knowledge. It is the final sanctuary for their "God of the gaps".

If you watch it again you'll see she wasn't saying any one theory was correct. She started out by saying that generation from nothingness was the "simplest" theory, then went on to give a couple of very different alternatives.

some leading physicists have been saying that things become fuzzy early on,
in a quantumly weird kinda way. such that you could expect that the idea of what happened at the big bang would begin to break down, and there's an alternate answer to all of this, that it was just mathematical probabilities, this is just one lineage of them.

Time is a dimension, similiar to the familiar 3D spatial dimensions we are hurtling through right now. Your energy is traveling through spacetime at C - the speed of light. Your movement through spatial dimensions is significant, the remainder of your energy is flowing in the time dimension. (Which we perceive as familiar rate of time flow.) Photons travel at C through spatial dimensions only, leaving nothing to the time dimension. (Photons do not age.) If you could accelerate your mass/energy to the speed of light, you will be shifting your movement purely into the spatial dimensions, and out of the time dimension altogether. You can watch the universe grow old just like a photon could.

Speed of light -> C = No time. Mass -> M = Miller time.

If anyone is interested, here is an answer from a theoretical physicist.

Hubble discovered that the Universe is expanding. Hence, as you go backwards in time, there are two options. Either all matter (and space) collapses to an extremely small region at some finite time in the past, or it does not. Hawking showed that it does. This is called the Big Bang. At this point in time, the description furnished by the theory of general relativity breaks down. The idea is that a better understanding of how general relativity and quantum mechanics work together will explain what happens at this point in time, and before. However, this work is ongoing and a final answer is still lacking. Ask me again in 50 years.

>> ^gtjwkq:
I'm a bit confused about some things you said. You're using the concept of entropy to define the concept of time. Doesn't entropy require time to be defined? Because that would be problematic.

I don't really understand this topic myself, but here goes:

Loosely speaking, entropy is defined as how ordered a system is. So, water in the form of ice crystals is much more ordered and has lower entropy than water vapor. So you don't need time to define entropy.

The fascinating thing is that on a microscopic scale, processes are symmetric in time, meaning that hypothetically, if you filmed a microscopic event and then played it backwards, both versions of events would be valid. You would not be able to tell which way time is supposed to flow. Entropy however, is the only (?) property of the universe that is NOT time symmetric. On a macroscopic scale, the second law of thermodynamics states that entropy of an isolated system will increase over time. Or you can rephrase the second law as: time flows forward in the direction of increasing entropy.

Check out this wiki page for a better explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_of_time

>> ^mentality:
The fascinating thing is that on a microscopic scale, processes are symmetric in time, meaning that hypothetically, if you filmed a microscopic event and then played it backwards, both versions of events would be valid.

You probably meant sub-atomic or quantum scales... a LOT smaller than microscopic.

PS: Janna Levin has a book I can highly recommend: How the Universe got Its Spots

I think a lot of the confusion here is due to one aspect that I didn't like about her explanation: She says that the universe started with the Big Bang. This is not entirely correct. The Big Bang Theory says absolutely nothing about the origin of the universe, but covers only the evolution of the universe since a very early time, specifically from when the universe was 10^-43 seconds old. The time before this is called the Planck epoch, and the knowledge we have of physics today is insufficient to describe what happened then.

Any speculation about what happened before The Big Bang (or more precisely, the Planck Epoch) is just that, speculation. Some speculation is more qualified than other speculation though, and I think she does a good job of laying out a variety of ideas that has been pushed forward during the years. The ideas from string theory and M-Theory linked to above are very interesting, but they too are so far only speculation, albeit very good speculation involving some interesting high-level mathematics.

So please keep on speculating!

The expansion and contraction of the universe is explained by the Rubber Band Theory which clearly states that if you stretch the universe just right and pluck it, you can play Dueling Banjoes. Just ask Ned Beatty, he knows all about the end of the universe.

>> ^mentality:
>> ^KnivesOut:
If time is said to have begun to exist at some point then there was certainly a "before time". Yes, you can't measure "before time" because there's no unit to measure nothing by. But there was a before.
No, this is another common mistake. You're assuming that without time, there is still an order to events. What we perceive as time flowing in the forward direction is simply the direction of increasing entropy. We say event A happened before event B, because event A happened at a time of lesser universal entropy than event B. There is no before without time and the universe.
As for the discussion of the nothing that existed before the something that is now everything... our universe is a bubble of reality that was blown into existence, by some external force. External? External to what?
No. Nobody says that it was created by an external force. That is just silly and makes no sense.


You have to extrapolate that there was an order of events. If space-time began to exist at some point, there there was certainly in immeasurable "non-time" BEFORE that point when it began to exist. Things DIDN'T, then they DID. There's your order of events. I'm not saying you can use a stop-watch and compare the two, but there was certainly an order.

And by external force, I'm not claiming that some supernatural being had a hand in any of this. I like the idea of realities colliding in M-dimensional space, with massive amounts of energy blowing bubbles of reality into existence. No god necessary. The external forces that I'm imagining are invisible and immeasurable only because of our lack of technology to look outside the reality that we exist in.

Just came from a creationist sift.... Raptor Jesus is not amused with this discussion.

>> ^ponceleon:
Just came from a creationist sift.... Raptor Jesus is not amused with this discussion.

have you ever ridden a raptor? it's no surprise he's such a grouch

>> ^rottenseed:
>> ^ponceleon:
Just came from a creationist sift.... Raptor Jesus is not amused with this discussion.

have you ever ridden a raptor? it's no surprise he's such a grouch


I'd be pissed off if I had 2 enormous toenails.

She's big bangable.

You know what? I take my science from this guy.

On a side note how Ironic would that be to find out that our universe is contained in the cytoplasmic goop of a cell that resides in something much more complex than we currently understand.

Once there is a systematic way to test what was before the big bang, then we can prove whether or not something was before. There is no way to prove or falsify that there was or wasn't a before. Therefore it is unfalsifiable, and not science but conjecture.

>> ^KnivesOut:
You have to extrapolate that there was an order of events. If space-time began to exist at some point, there there was certainly in immeasurable "non-time" BEFORE that point when it began to exist. Things DIDN'T, then they DID. There's your order of events. I'm not saying you can use a stop-watch and compare the two, but there was certainly an order.

No. What we perceive as the big bang can just be a local minimum of universal entropy on the time axis. Imagine a universe on the time axis at the point of local minimum of entropy. No matter which direction you're moving on the time axis, time will be moving forward. There will not be a time before this local minimum. You're not getting the relationship between entropy, the arrow of time, causality and the order of events.

Just to clarify the point I made earlier. Big Bang is not the point in time when the UNIVERSE stops working. It is defined as the point in time when our current THEORIES for the Universe stop working. I think it would be useful to keep this distinction in mind.

I don't quite eat up what these people are theorizing. The big bang is just a theory, they can't prove it. Its the same concept as to try and understand what it feels like before you were born and became in existence or what happens after death. Its simply impossible to have proof and only theory exists. How can they say there were no time? time does not exist, that ticker was made by man according to how things work in the universe, the universe itself has no time. Does a piece of rock laying on a desert floor have time ?

Humans are simply not intelligent to comprehend the big question. You can know what is 1 plus 1. Its within human comprehension. Try to think what was there before and how everything started out of nothing, or what caused the spark. You can't. We do not posses this intelligence. The same as a pet can not comprehend 1 plus 1.

So.. you are saying we should just give up thinking about the big questions?

I am not a fan of string theory. I think it is straying too far towards religion. For instance, string theorists believe everything was made out of "strings". One day they will see a planet or moon far away eclipse a star even further away and say, "hey that's a string, we are correct". Also, where did the "brains" come from? The idea that the universe has always existed is too difficult for most people to understand, but they should not try and rationalize the universe by adding in things like strings and brains that have little to no evidence, and just pose the question: "where did THEY come from?".

>> ^Bananular:
I am not a fan of string theory. I think it is straying too far towards religion. For instance, string theorists believe everything was made out of "strings". One day they will see a planet or moon far away eclipse a star even further away and say, "hey that's a string, we are correct".

I don't mind them trying to define a single kind of entity behind everything, it's actually very elegant (not that reality has to be elegant), they just need to get to the point where the bizarre equations are testable, or capable of explaining other proven equations and constants.

It reminds me of set theory: a guy named Georg Cantor worked from a simple concept of a "set", and was successfuly able to explain many (all?) elements of mathematics in terms of sets, which is amazing. You don't have numbers, functions, operators, infinity, etc. as separate things, but all as different manifestations of something more elemental.

The construct of sets doesn't even really matter, all that matters are its properties and how they help find what is common and "explain" all other elemental concepts in mathematics.

If reality is not actually made of strings, that's ok, as long as the properties of strings can help us make sense of it.

Reminds me of something i read in a terry pratchett book though it may not be his originally.

"In the beginning there was nothing... which exploded"

>> ^oomskaap:
I don't quite eat up what these people are theorizing. The big bang is just a theory, they can't prove it.

In science, a theory isn't merely a guess, or a hunch. It's much, much more than that.


>> Humans are simply not intelligent to comprehend the big question. You can know what is 1 plus 1. Its within human comprehension. Try to think what was there before and how everything started out of nothing, or what caused the spark. You can't. We do not posses this intelligence.

You do not, cannot know that.

Pffft, ofcourse something can come from nothing! My wifes fury. I don't understand where it comes from but it is spontaneous and its power is awesome to behold. It creates light - blinding headaches. It utilizes gravity - objects fly. And it can shrink back in on itself - ready to explode again from nothing. I do, however, have a string theory. She tries to get into g-strings she wore prior to her becoming a sumo wrestler.

What if the universe's existence was like that of a Klein bottle where the Big Bang is the cross section point? The universe would expand like the surface of the bottle until it reconnects with itself, all that mass (and other dimensions) coming together to form the next big bang, and so forth?




disclainer: I am not a scientist

A 21st Century version of "Let there be light".

I never thought of Big Bang theory like this...