Before the Big Bang, there was...
- Thread starter Jon
- Start date
We can believe in cause and effect, but we would be wrong at the quantum level.
The Big Bang (which is actually not that good of a name for whatever happened) was the result of a series of probability events. A quantum fluctuation triggered something else which probably caused a cascade of events leading up to the macro-level expansion event that is commonly called the Big Bang. But in the strictest cause-and-effect sense, you cannot point to a reliable causal event for the fluctuation other than to say it is a property of the structure of whatever is there.
Actually, not so surely.
The problem is that we cannot fully describe what was there before the event in question because the BB changed everything. Here is a mental image for you as an analogy:
Say you are a police officer in Hiroshima, Japan on the morning of August 6, 1945 and you want to investigate a murder near the shipping docks. Just after 8 AM, the USA bomber Enola Gay flies overhead and drops an A-bomb right over the center of your investigation. In a matter of much less than one second, ALL OF YOUR EVIDENCE is fried. Incinerated. Burned by nuclear fires. So now, you have a murder to investigate and no intact evidence. All you can do is speculative. You know something must have happened, but how could you ever prove it?
We who are scientists worry about what things were like just before or during the BB. But the universe changed so drastically that you can't know what it was like before that event. So you can only speculate based on extrapolation. The BB "nuked" our evidence.
The Big Bang (which is actually not that good of a name for whatever happened) was the result of a series of probability events. A quantum fluctuation triggered something else which probably caused a cascade of events leading up to the macro-level expansion event that is commonly called the Big Bang. But in the strictest cause-and-effect sense, you cannot point to a reliable causal event for the fluctuation other than to say it is a property of the structure of whatever is there.
Actually, not so surely.
The problem is that we cannot fully describe what was there before the event in question because the BB changed everything. Here is a mental image for you as an analogy:
Say you are a police officer in Hiroshima, Japan on the morning of August 6, 1945 and you want to investigate a murder near the shipping docks. Just after 8 AM, the USA bomber Enola Gay flies overhead and drops an A-bomb right over the center of your investigation. In a matter of much less than one second, ALL OF YOUR EVIDENCE is fried. Incinerated. Burned by nuclear fires. So now, you have a murder to investigate and no intact evidence. All you can do is speculative. You know something must have happened, but how could you ever prove it?
We who are scientists worry about what things were like just before or during the BB. But the universe changed so drastically that you can't know what it was like before that event. So you can only speculate based on extrapolation. The BB "nuked" our evidence.
Thanks for seeing that, Bee. It gets crazier. According to the math, our current concept of time didn't apply for up to several hundred thousand years after the Bang. Remember, of course, that 100,000 years is nothing when the age of the universe is 14,600,000,000 years. It is unclear whether there was something else that could mark time for the physical processes going on at the time, thought it IS clear that if something WAS operational, it had nothing to do with us.
I understand "They" are currently checking the microwave background for the signatures of "Black Holes" that are outside our universe. I may well have the wrong end of the stick!
I also know that the big bang theory is just that, one of many possibilities, just currently the most popular.
My uneducated idea is that distance, like the distance from one side of the universe to the other , can only be traversed at speed. In other words, you need time for light to travel across the universe.
I think time, or rather the passage of time is variable, and the rate of time is linked to the local density of matter.
The result is that as matter turns into energy, the universe becomes lighter, and as the universe expands, less dense, time speeds up, as it time speeds up light can travel from one side of the universe to the other practically instantly, hence the size of the universe in effectivly reduced to nothing. A natural result of the "Suns" turning matter in to energy.
Our sun, a small insignificant star in the scale of things, turns many thousands of tonnes of matter in to energy every second. If you take in to account all the stars in the universe, and the billions of years, then it's possible to imagine the universe getting lighter! (Less weight) time speeds up, the apparent distance across, vanishes, Bang! New start!
I also know that the big bang theory is just that, one of many possibilities, just currently the most popular.
My uneducated idea is that distance, like the distance from one side of the universe to the other , can only be traversed at speed. In other words, you need time for light to travel across the universe.
I think time, or rather the passage of time is variable, and the rate of time is linked to the local density of matter.
The result is that as matter turns into energy, the universe becomes lighter, and as the universe expands, less dense, time speeds up, as it time speeds up light can travel from one side of the universe to the other practically instantly, hence the size of the universe in effectivly reduced to nothing. A natural result of the "Suns" turning matter in to energy.
Our sun, a small insignificant star in the scale of things, turns many thousands of tonnes of matter in to energy every second. If you take in to account all the stars in the universe, and the billions of years, then it's possible to imagine the universe getting lighter! (Less weight) time speeds up, the apparent distance across, vanishes, Bang! New start!
Ah, but Uncle G: Currently, the universe IS converting matter to energy but the universe is still expanding. If time speeds up we will never know it because we will be inside the effect of the speed-up. (Relativity at work.) The only folks who would recognize the speed-up would be our putative neighbors from the next closest parallel dimension/universe.
I don't understand this. Time is just a word used to describe a phenomenon. The fact that you mention "several hundred thousand years" means you have used the non-useable!
Uncle, I think a lot of physicists think that everything will become so far apart that we end up in like a slow death. You will see no starts in the sky because they will have all expanded to incomprehensible distances away from us. No Big Dipper!
Uncle, I think a lot of physicists think that everything will become so far apart that we end up in like a slow death. You will see no starts in the sky because they will have all expanded to incomprehensible distances away from us. No Big Dipper!
If you enjoy science, then this is a great resource: https://www.youtube.com/user/worldsciencefestival/videos
I've watched plenty of stuff from there on the Universe, Quantum Mechanics et al.
Also, this is a great video on Quantum Mechanics. 6M+ views.
I've watched plenty of stuff from there on the Universe, Quantum Mechanics et al.
Also, this is a great video on Quantum Mechanics. 6M+ views.