That’s nonsense. You think some massive amount of matter just materialized from nothing into a singular point? How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?
Comment on Evidence
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
“Before” the Big Bang is nonsense. It’s equivalent to saying “head north from the North Pole.”
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Not just matter but time as well. That’s what they were referring to. There is no “before time”.
Regarding your rethorical question: go find an answer and you’re sure to win the Nobel Prize.
wonderfulvoltaire@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Absolutely nothing is a reliable constant except the speed of light.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
But the speed of light changes. It can be slowed down. It just doesn’t change while moving through outer space (a vacuum). The maximum speed is the constant.
0ops@lemm.ee 1 week ago
It wasn’t matter that did the banging, it was space-time itself. Have you heard how we know that the universe is expanding? Well we can extrapolate backwards and find the point in time where space-time was just a point: “the big bang”. Not only was there no space-time for matter to exist in before the big bang, there was no concept of “before” because that word only makes sense in the context of spacetime. So yeah, the person you’re replying to is right, “before the big bang” is a nonsense phrase.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
They keep finding inconsistencies to that. Groupings and radiation and gap distances that don’t line up with the expansion expectations.
Then the other more applicable point is that what makes you think “the big bang” was the first big bang? You think mass and entropy and radioactive decay and all this shit in the nothingness of space all started with “the big bang” but it only happens once and then in a ridiculously long time from now when everything reaches absolute 0 and there’s no energy left anywhere, that it’s just done? A one trick pony?
Well what if it all eventually manages to head back to its origin point after that and it makes another big bang that kicks off again?
0ops@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Then the other more applicable point is that what makes you think “the big bang” was the first big bang?
Well, again you’re using terms of time to describe the birth of time, so no that’s not what I think because that statement doesn’t make sense. But I’m being pedantic, I’m sure you meant “what if our’s wasn’t the only big bang?” And to that I can confidently say “maybe?”. It’s an interesting question but it’s just not a scientific question. According to big bang theory, our universe, space-time and all the matter and energy in it, began with the big bang and we still exist inside it. Other big bangs, if they exist in some higher medium, are simply outside our scope. We just can’t design tests to answer those questions. Best we can tell scientifically is where our universe started.
You think mass and entropy and radioactive decay and all this shit in the nothingness of space all started with “the big bang” but it only happens once and then in a ridiculously long time from now when everything reaches absolute 0 and there’s no energy left anywhere, that it’s just done? A one trick pony?
Again maybe? You’re kinda putting words in my mouth. Idk if our universe is the only one, it’s impossible to know. My original point was that time as defined by general relativity could not exist before the big bang because it was itself a product of the big bang.
frezik@midwest.social 1 week ago
It’s only something we can speculate about. It represents a limit to our ability to gather any evidence that might validate those speculations. We can’t say what happened before it, because time itself was one of the things that popped out of the big bang. What would “before” even mean if time didn’t exist?
Even if time and matter did exist in some sense, we can’t get any evidence for it. We can’t make any kind of useful theory about it. At best, we can make wild guesses.
We could also just say “we don’t know what it was like”. Russell’s Teapot suggests we should just say there was nothing, because we can’t prove there was anything.
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
There’s no evidence to point to the big bang as being the very beginning, though. There may well have been a billion big bangs before this one. Each one taking so long to reset and start anew that to us, it might as well be seen as about infinity. Humanity outright doesn’t have the knowledge of what happens on extremely large or extremely small scales. We don’t really have a clue for what actually made space start to expand in the first place, so we don’t know if it’s ever happened before, or even if it happened anywhere else at any other time but outside of our observable universe.
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The works of Roger Penrose have shown that it’s conceivable or potentially even provable that at the very largest scales of time and space, there is no meaningful difference between the accelerating “cold” end of our universe and the collossal expansion that began the universe as we know it, and in fact those two states are perpetually cycling, birthing new universes from the explosion of old ones. This is based on the idea that when there is no more physical mass in the universe, you can look at the universe from a reference frame that only looks at the geometry of the energy expanding through space and it’s identical to the beginning states.
I would recommend PBS Spacetime youtube channel for a lot better explanations of conformal cyclic cosmology than my feeble mind can try to relate.
frezik@midwest.social 1 week ago
Maybe there were other big bangs, but we need evidence of that, and that evidence doesn’t exist.
Jyst saying “but we don’t know” isn’t a replacement for evidence.
kogasa@programming.dev 1 week ago
Based on the comment you’re replying to, I assume they would say "no, nothing materialized from nothing because there wasn’t a ‘before’ in which nothing could have existed’
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
What makes anyone think “the big bang” has only happened once?
kogasa@programming.dev 1 week ago
I’m not a physicist, I don’t know one way or another. But it’s possible that there’s a leading explanation for the formation of the universe based on a mathematical model that predicts exactly one big bang.
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 week ago
How do you think all the stuff managed to get there in the first place?
You’re still thinking like a meat-monkey. There are stranger states out there than one can imagine, and that’s not hyperbole. There was no causality before expansion, because there was no meaningful interactions or spacetime in which interactions can occur.
You’re always going to have a hard time imagining this, because again, you are a human. We all are, none of us can imagine states of the universe without time and space.
kureta@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
very nice analogy. I’m stealing it.
kemsat@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I still think that means I have to up towards Polaris.
nothacking@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
It’s not so much that we know there was nothing before it, but that we can’t figure out what was before it.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No, in our current best-supported model of the universe (Lambda-CDM) the concept of “before” the Big Bang is meaningless. It is the apex of the spacetime “bell” from which everything emerged.
rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
But something must have triggered the big bang. The model might not support this, but this only means the model is insufficient to describe what goes beyond our known universe.
Whattrees@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
That’s a separate claim you’d have to prove. We have no evidence of something triggering it, we don’t even know that it would need to be triggered. All of our observations occur inside this universe, therefore we have no idea at all if cause-and-effect even applies to the universe as a whole. The short answer is: we don’t know and have no reason to posit the need for something else.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, since it’s by definition beyond the ability of science to answer. It suffers from the infinite regress problem which many people invoke God to solve (the uncaused cause) but that’s not very satisfying, is it?
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Obviously God did it. /s
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
It is incoherent that sonething could suddenly exist out of nothingness.
Clearly the universe does not exist, this is all an elaborate statistical artifact.
orbitz@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Seems like a distinction without a difference, I sort of assumed the OP meant that is all I mean. We don’t know anything before the beginning after all. Like you said.