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what was BEFORE the Big Bang?

maruli

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maruli
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Nov 12, 2005
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In the forum of a datingsite, someone started a thread titled: "How do I get to heaven?" and there she posted some religious statement of faith.

Thus I could not resist to add a comment:

"your heaven can only be beyond our universe ... so to reach your heaven, you have to spend at least 13 billion years of travelling at the speed of light, if you get beamed, and much longer at the speed of any rocket, just to reach the boundery of our universe. At that point, how do you know how farther it is?

Could any heaven be worth such a long boring journey, your soul nicely folded in an envelope? Or how are souls packed for longterm space travel?"


When someone claimed "The soul is ethereal, therefore time and space do not apply.", there was an easy hinting about some big money if this could be proven.

But next came the trickier questions:
"...tell me how something physical came from nothing. We learn in science that something to have something physical it has to start with something physical. When did time begin?"

My reply was the best that I could think of at this moment:
"My personal quick answer is that I see no need to assume a beginning of time nor any creation of matter. The most logical explanation is eternity and an eternal transformation of matter.
The Big Bang is a theory that makes no claims about what had there been before. "

What answer would you suggest, anything better?
 
About 2 months ago I attended an astronomy lecture about the big bang. Someone from the audience said he couldn't get his brain around the whole concept. So he asked "What came before the Big Bang"?

The lecturer responded with a perfectly wonderful reply:

"What were you thinking about before you were born"?


The point being, is that current science does not allow us to know what came before the big bang. It may never allow us to know. But everything around us is the result of it. The difference being that science is still looking for the answer; religion is not.
 
Not so much a direct answer to your question, but I have found the following to give pause for thought:

Either the Universe has a beginning, as the BBT theory suggests, or it has lasted for ever. If it has a beginning, then we have the hard-to-imagine concept of there being no 'before' the Big Bang. If it has not, we have the equally hard-to-imagine concept of an infinite amount of time extending before us. I cannot in all honesty claim to accurately perceive either possibility within my the realms of my experience.

The fact that it is hard to conceive there being no time before, indeed no 'before' at all, the Big Bang, is not enough on its own to reject the theory, as the alternative is no better.

And all this is before one considers the evidence leading to support the BBT.
 
maruli said:

But next came the trickier questions:
"...tell me how something physical came from nothing. We learn in science that something to have something physical it has to start with something physical. When did time begin?"
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Tricky indeed. But the obvious riposte is "...tell me how something non-physical came from nothing."

The point being, we don't have an answer, and neither do they. How did anything come from nothing?

Or, more fundamentally, why is there something, rather than nothing?

There are no better answers in mythology or philosophy than there are in science. Just be careful we don't all vanish in a puff of logic.
 
"your heaven can only be beyond our universe ... so to reach your heaven, you have to spend at least 13 billion years of travelling at the speed of light, if you get beamed, and much longer at the speed of any rocket, just to reach the boundery of our universe.
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Problem with this: The universe doesn't have a boundary. Space is like retro videogames with wrap-around screen edges. If you travel in one direction, you'll eventually loop around. As I understand it, the same seems to be true of time.

The Big Bang was an expansion of space, not just a mundane explosion: The screen went from being one pixel in size to an enormous stadium screen.

...tell me how something physical came from nothing.
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One alternate answer I've come up with for that, which may or may not sound profound: There wasn't ever a nothing for it to come from.
 
Maruli...just to let you know, the best place for subjects like this is the science forum or the philosophy forum. You will get more responses.
 
Perhaps there wasn't even a "before". Perhaps "time" as we know it has not existed "before" the big bang.
 
Asking what came before the big bang is not a question you can ask, it is like asking what is south of the south pole. If space time is curved then how can there be anything or any when previous to its origin.
 
To be pedantially correct, the current theory is that the initial point of the universe was a quantum fluctuation in a de Sitter space which did not have the dimension we call "time" as a large dimension; thus, this vacuum fluctuation, which began a cascading inflation that led to the three large space and one large time dimensions that we call "spacetime" represented the initial moment of time for our spacetime; to ask "what came before the first moment of time" is the same as to ask "what is the sound of one hand clapping." There can be no answer that has real physical content.
 
People have been struggling with this issue throughout recorded history. The real trouble is our difficulty in comprehending reality outside the realm of human experience. Astronomical distances, time and space and the microscopic world of the atom and quark can't be grasped intuitively; human "common sense" ceases to be meaningful at these scales.

The religious take the easy option and say "God did it" when they can't understand or explain something, scientists have a much tougher job when they attempt to understand the nature of the universe. Even more difficult for the scientists is communicating their ideas to the rest of us. I, for example, can grasp the implications of relativity theory, but the maths is completely beyond me. To some extent, I'm guilty of "belief" in the same way that the religious folks are. The difference is that I'm making the effort to understand, and not taking the lazy man's way out. The "God did it" option is a miserable, intellectual, buck-passing which leads only to the question "What made God?".

Science doesn't have all the answers, but it has a whole load more than the bible or the Quran.
 
a lot of interesting answers - but I still do not know how to best answer the the original questions put to me by a christians. I did not want to give her the impression that her religious believes are better than science. What would you reply to a christian ?

by the way, camel, I am a woman, and an avatar like yours is indecent and inappropriate in such a forum as this.
 
maruli said:
a lot of interesting answers - but I still do not know how to best answer the the original questions put to me by a christians. I did not want to give her the impression that her religious believes are better than science. What would you reply to a christian ?
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Just say "quantum foam". It's easier to say than "quantum fluctuation in de Sitter space", and gives a nice visual image of tiny little bubbles of space time that come in an out of existence until suddenly, one bubble...BANG. There we are!
 
John Bentley said:
Just say "quantum foam". It's easier to say than "quantum fluctuation in de Sitter space", and gives a nice visual image of tiny little bubbles of space time that come in an out of existence until suddenly, one bubble...BANG. There we are!
Click to expand...
Oh, is that where Aphrodite came from? Or, she was born of the "foam" of the sea.
 
Iacchus said:
Oh, is that where Aphrodite came from? Or, she was born of the "foam" of the sea.
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Yeah, it is kind of a "just so" story. Pure theory with nothing to back it up. But at least the consequences of that mythical event are well described and have a lot of evidence to back them up. Plus, as I understand it, quantum foam is not mythical in itself, as this is where the Casimir force comes from.
 
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