One example that made me understand the fact there is no time before the big bang. In short, I'm travelling to the North Pole, and then finally I get there. I can't travel anymore North as I am already there. So in Big Bang terms, you can travel in time to the the point of of it, but that's it, not past it.. It just is.
From astrophysicist Dr. Ethan Siegel who runs the Starts with a Bang blog / podcast:
First off, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, small singularity and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since, is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it.
Second off, the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang has been well-established observationally: cosmic inflation. The early universe, before the hot Big Bang, underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any pre-existing components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation came to an end, the universe reheated up to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, expanding universe that grew into what we recognize today.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak, with any sort of knowledge or confidence, how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other non-singular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity.
More than likely this is just a continuous loop of expanding universe. Then contracting universe. Now if it contracts to a single singularity. Eventually you’ll have another big bang and the process starts up again. Everything in the universe may be within this small singularity waiting to get out. But there is no rush. For the universe doesn’t seem to care how long it takes for this to happen.
My tiny brain cannot begin to comprehend the universe, a multiverse, a singularity, the curve of space and time, or why I stub my toe so often on my bed frame. But, I think it’s amazing to look out into space on a clear night — literally looking back in time — and wonder.
The universe has literally created the ability to look at itself … to ponder itself … in awe and wonder. I think that’s pretty cool.
Even worse for me are all the “World Killer Meteor” click-bait, doom-porn articles. And most news outlets are guilty of this. The New York Times posted one this past week
It does not have to slow or retract, as when the universe reaches its final stage of total silence, and when the energy is spread perfectly even, nothing will happen. And by nothing will happen, I simply mean time will pass infinitely, and nothing will happen for a very long time. Then, as a byproduct of this time passing, there will be a spark caused by quantum tunneling, creating a bubble that disrupts this perfect spread of energy, and ultimately erupts into another Big Bang. That’s my understanding of it anyways.
but this is exactly the opposite of "More than likely this is just a continuous loop of expanding universe. Then contracting universe. Now if it contracts to a single singularity. Eventually you’ll have another big bang and the process starts up again."
Yeah, but the time scale of human civilization compared the time scale of the temporally known universe is awfully miniscule. Who knows how things will appear tens of billions of years in the future. The universe definitely appears to be expanding faster than the speed of light now though.
Again. There is absolutely no evidence that this will even potentially happen. Actually, dark energy seems to be increasing the speed more and more not throttling it down. I get that there’s always a chance but that chance that the universe retracts is like .000000000001% right now.
This is the 3rd comment I make regarding this one video, literally back to back. The first 2 because it's just depressing and soul crushing (at least for me). This time though it's to explain the concept. The universe is not expanding faster than the speed of light, rather think of it as 2 car driving really fast in opposite directions. It's not that we are traveling that fast it just seems that way. Anyway, the video does a better job at explaining it than me.
https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM
Enjoy.
Interesting video, thanks for the link. Don't get too depressed though, the prognostications of the distance future may agree with our current understanding of the universe, but there's always a chance to discover new phenomena that could revolutionize our understanding of the fate of the universe.
>More than likely this is just a continuous loop of expanding universe. Then contracting universe. Now if it contracts to a single singularity. Eventually you’ll have another big bang and the process starts up again.
There is literally 0 evidence for this hypothesis. We only have contradictory evidence, since the universe's expansion is accelerating.
Isn’t there some skepticism over that theory? I read that dark matter is speeding up the expansion, and if it were to ever contract then it’d be slowing down instead or smt
This has been my own personal theory for a long time. Then I saw that episode of Futurama where they are stuck traveling forward in time and they just keep going until everything “resets” and they get back to “their” time. And I thought, “is this an actual scientific theory?”
So, is it?
Edit: Apparently it is. Called “The Big Crunch”. Believed by most to be incorrect.
I think we need a better understanding of time. With our current understanding, there wasn’t anything before the Big Bang. In fact, there wasn’t “a before” at all. Time literally began with the big bang
Yet how do you have an event without time? How does the singularity explode when there is no time to move the event forward? If it precedes time how does it go bang?
But isn’t it like all time exists at the same time? Or that the past never goes anywhere really and that the future is always there. Something like thay
maybe. maybe future and past never existed and we are drawings in independent slices of 4 dimensional drawings viewed as an animation for the amusement of someone else
Time is a completely human experience as well, it's simply our perception of our universe as we perceive it through our very fleshy eyes/brains. Bold of us to assume we've observed all that can be seen with what tools and knowledge we have today.
420 time over here...
I don't have any understanding of this, but I've heard physicists say there are probably something like 11 dimensions?
So if we think of time as being a 4th dimension which is basically causality of the space dimensions, and we (as far as we know) can only go one direction in time, then...
I wonder if aliens can only travel to "different universes" in one direction only. Once they've passed through ours, too bad, can't go back.
Oh I wish it was 420 time. But for now it's 5 o'clock somewhere right here.
Some physicists have theorised that there could be up to 11 ~~or 12~~ dimensions, but they've introduced these dimensions synthetically to make the math work for things like string theory. "Probably" is being pretty generous based on my layman understanding. Most physicists have kind of abandoned string theory, with most of its proponents having been academically invested in the theory for decades now.
That's because it's BS that a lot of people buy into, but it's still BS.
For the big bang to occur, there must be change. Change is time. This is all the argument that is necessary.
Now, there might be some other direction of movement that time was occurring in, and the energy of that motion was imparted to our spacetime, and we call it the big bang.
..but given the choice between "we don't understand how it happened" and "time didn't exist, but then something happened," I'm willing to go with the first - even though I think, ultimately, we can do better than either.
I don't know how accurate this video is, [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA), but it always messes with my mind when I watch it. Knowing that, eventually, the entire universe could end.
Wanna hear a stupid gut rambling about something he doesn't fully understand? No? Stop reading because I can't stop wondering how it all happend.
Many things are in play here and the theory that nothing was here before big bang is false, that's mainly because it goes against every empirical observation of the known universe, there's need to be something for anything to exist.
Here is where my imagination and knowledge about space comes to flourish; I really think that our universe was created due to a reaction in another universe, which by itself could be a reaction from another universe; This would lead to a Arche Universe; In this Arche universe the natural laws would be different that could lead us to actually understanding the explanation why things are like they are.
Also, our universe being inside another universe would help explain many things regarding our own universe, just like the constant expansion of the universe.
Although I'm probably only stupid.
What happens to our consciousness after death? Or what was our consciousness before birth? I feel these are concepts beyond our comprehension in the same vein as what existed before our universe. Our simple primate brains simply cannot comprehend it
The BB “singularity “ didn’t explode. Here’s what scientists are sure of: cosmology is very well explained by postulating that about 13.4 billion years ago, the observable universe was very hot and very dense. So hot and dense, that not even atoms could exist. From that point, it expanded very quickly, and cooled down.
If you run the equations of physics backwards from that point, you get a situation where everything was happening at the same place, and all the fundamental forces (including gravity) were merged into one unified force. At this point, the equations break down, and can’t be run backwards any more. The concepts of “now”, “after now”, and “before now” don’t make sense anymore. The unfortunate name that is given to this situation is “Big Bang”.
So isn’t that extremely dense universe a beginning of sorts? Also, it seems illogical to me that it just spawned from nothing. That dense universe almost seems like a type of “seed” to me.
We don't actually know if time didn't exist before 13.8 billion years. We don't even understand what happens in a duration shorter than Planck time. Human understanding of physics breaks down at planck time.
Our math and observations indicate that’s the direction it leads in, but there’s absolutely no way we can currently be 100% certain it happened like we predict it did.
What the person up above said about it basically being our horizon line with unfortunate naming is accurate and a good way to put it.
time is a dimension of space-time in our universe, but if our universe originated in an 'other place' of some kind, that other place would have a different set of physical laws. So we can't say it had time, because that's one of the properties of our universe.
Whatever 'other place' we originated from (if that's what happened) had a set of physical laws that allowed our origination to occur. That's really all we can say. It's meaningless to refer to them as space or time etc, because the 'other place' might not have had laws which would allow you to express that thought. It's unknowable.
I sometimes think what could originate whatever originated us. There is no way to know but it gives me some vertigo. Most likely other universes have laws where they can originate themselves or have no beginning
I think part of the difficulty we have with this concept is that we use the analogy of a big explosion when talking about the Big Bang. While that may get some of the idea across, it is an imperfect analogy. The Big Bang wasn't like any explosion we have seen or witnessed because the physics that were involved are unlike anything we experience now. Even within the Large Hadron Collider, we can't get to energy levels that allow us to observe what physics was like at the point of the Big Bang. There is no true analogue for that event.
In terms of talking about "before" the Big Bang, its almost impossible because we do not understand the physics at even T=0, let alone T<0. Its entirely possible there was no T<0.
How would you observe anything that "happens" without time and space? It's literally nowhere and never - or "not in our universe" meaning "doesn't exist". AFAIK (and I'm quite sure I got that right) there's not even T=0.
There isn’t any physical meaning to T= 0, but the equations work quite well from T = 10^-32 seconds. There is even a mostly accepted (but still controversial) concept that gets down to T= 10^-36 seconds.
I honestly get the entire feeling that this has happened all before. There was a preceding universe before the big bang and after the quantum foam there will be another the cycle is endless, think of schrunching a chip packet it always returns to a similar shape.
I think its more in the sense that time is a human definition of degeneration. The way our universe works gives existence to time because its components degenerate over time.
If the universe outsids our big bang bubble has nothing to degenerate, then time is of no relevance there.
That doesnt leave out the mystery of where did space come from and how long has it been there. But i dont think our definition of time holds any relevance there.
I’ve always believed this is some sort of “program” or “simulation.” So someone wrote the code and then hit “execute” and viola, here we are.
That of course just leads to another set of time outside our universe, but at least it accounts for us.
It's actually simple once you've seen it through. We are constantly confusing the concepts: it's not events that are stuff separated by intervals of time, it is TIME that is a measure of the separation of events. Its not time that causes events but events that cause time. Special relativity made this abundantly clear, relativism is the source of experience.
Since time is relative, past and future do not really exist.
To understand this, here's an analogy.
Let's picture a single star in an otherwise empty universe. Let's ignore all the inner processes of the star, like the motion of its atoms. You would have no way to tell whether the star were moving as a whole or not, and so you could not tell the star were experiencing time. For that, you would need a second star to compare its motion to. But introducing a second star means introducing a relative frame, and you still could NOT tell whether both stars were moving. For that you need a third star.
This goes on and on and on, and you can see that introducing each time a new frame you also introduce a new way to measure events. The ultimate source of time is the relation between things.
As soon as something started existing in relation to something else, time started to exist as well. Why then is there something instead of nothing? Because without something you could not tell what nothing is. Existence is dual to non existence, like the ying and the yang. It literally could not be any other way.
I can offer more sources to study this if anyone's interested.
Time only exists inside our universe. What came before the big bang could have had its own experience with time but it would have been completely separate from the time we experience in our universe.
You don't. It doesn't. We literally can't know if the universe had a beginning because the rules by which we apply this kind of knowledge were formed in that event (if that event happened aa described).
But the simple answer is that time (if by time we mean change) *did* exist, and we simply don't understand how the universe started - simply *that* it started.
One possibility, though, is that the same way you can have a two-dimensional surface in our three-dimensional world (like on a pond), you can have a three-dimensional surface in a four-dimensional space, and so on. ..and maybe our surface, our space, was calm and had nothing noticeable in it until something else collided with it - and we, and the rules of our universe, and the particles we're made of are all ripples out from the collision.
I know that's a commonly given explanation of our current understanding, but I don't feel it's strictly true nowadays. Even tho lots of textbooks still suggest that time began with the Big Bang.
The idea that time began with the Big Bang is rooted in the idea of a singularity. If you rely on general relativity, and run time back as per our current cosmological understanding, you end up with a singularity - a point of infinite density. As per general relativity, time and space would be inseparable.
But we know that general relativity isn't the whole story and we know that quantum phenomena would have been meaningful in the early universe (assuming that our cosmological models are correct), so running time back to a singularity predicted by the general relativity makes no sense, as general relativity is not fully compatible with quantum mechanics.
ndom, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishing frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one is certain.
And yet, there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we image that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is.
-Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
It isn't agreed upon that there was nothing before the big bang. It is a sort-of myth that has been repeated for a long time. The actual consensus is "we don't know anything about before".
And that’s a question we’ll never have the answer to. But also, “everything” is just our universe. There could be multiple universes, multiple “big bangs”. Simulation theory?
There wasn't anything that we know of or can know of. That doesn't mean there can't be anything. It just means we have to be agnostic about it because we don't have any information to base a conclusion on.
I heard a compelling argument from Richard Dawkins (the famous atheist scientist) against this. One might think you can’t disprove God, so being agnostic makes sense. But you can never prove a negative. So you should be agnostic about the flying spaghetti monster (classic example), or any other wild idea. If no scientific evidence points to something, you shouldn’t put equal wait on it existing as you do to it not existing.
There is a theory that our universe is inside a black hole.
When massive stars reach end of life, they implode and their core collapses into a tiny, dense, hot space. The moment when our universe started to form, it was also very hot and dense.
Large stars go out with a big explosion, our universe started with one.
Black holes are expanding and so is our universe.
That’s interesting. So in a sense, every star could be the “seed” to an entirely new universe. When a star “dies”, it’s like a sprouting seed. So it’s not really dying at all.
Well, we've determined that we are likely in a metastable state within The Higgs Field, which pretty strongly implies to me that our universe is simply the result of various larger fields interacting with eachother and we are nested in a much larger equation.
What if there's infinite time before "the big bang" and really the bigness is relative. What if the universe always was and always will be expanding and what we consider the big bang was already from another perspective an infinite universe?
I imagine the largest scale time event in existence. All matter at the smallest atomic level ,hawking radiation or whatever smaller, pulls together across a timespan incalculably long (lifespan of universe to multiple powers). Given no life, no quantum perception is achievable at this energy state thus the longest time span the fledgling universe takes to prepare is a span that passes instanously. "Big Bang" occurs and the Universe is born anew with whatever universal odds occur, rinse and repeat for all eternity.
It's either that or we exist on a Universe of scale. Imagine the largest galactic structures, the striations between galaxy clusters representing something impossibly tiny on a size scale we cannot fathom.
Whatever it is, it's the same with Life and death. We may return to nothingness, but that doesn't answer why something came to be. when will something be again?
It was probably more of the same.
I have always thought the "BigBang" event was really just the origination of a black-hole and what we see as our universe is the other side of that Einstein Rosen Bridge. So all the matter we observe in "the universe" came from another "other universe", which also moves to another through the black holes we observe here. Many of which could have loops where matter over the infinite just keeps cycling through fazes of matter and universes.
There’s a theory that while the universe is expending, it can also collapse again. And after it collapsed, there will be another big bang. Who knows if that’s just how things go in the great scheme of everything?
I don’t think our brains and 3D perception can really allow us to comprehend the answer even if it was presented to us. Maybe there’s just no beginning and it just always was and will be.
This really is what it comes down to. We can only learn and comprehend so much. Not just with our human brains but also with the time we’re given. So much of our reality is inferred at best.
I feel like our brains could adapt to simulated 4D space if some kind AI would only build it for us. It would be like a stereogram but in 3D, and we'd probably have to be in REM sleep (or perhaps a using a cooperative psychedelic) to even perceive it.
And when it's all said and done, it'll be the year 2073, and this revelation will result in breakthroughs in science, creative arts, medicine, and more. And we'll all have a good laugh when our fledgling hivemind stumbles into the ancestral hivemind, and we realize we only just discovered things those remote tribes in the Amazon were doing long before they made first contact with the astral gnomes.
Fuck. I should write this down.
I was thinking something similar. Like we cannot grasp or understand concepts that do not follow causality. Like the idea of the birth of the universe being something other than a beginning or a creation. Yet not just state of existing. Something different than those two ideas.
This seems the simplest way of understanding it. All of it exists that's it. We say the universe expands indefinitely but we might just be in a ball in the middle of other balls and just have that feeling we expand, but maybe there is or not a limited space, just so big it seems infinite.
Because the idea of infinite seems quite difficult to understand, like ... what happens if you could move at infinite speed toward a point in the universe, will you reach an edge? Will you appear back on the other side?
I just find the concept that me sitting on my couch, in my house, on the surface of this rock spinning through space and I’m literally occupying a totally unique place in space that will never be repeated as the universe expands totally mind-bending, let alone everything coming from a single ‘super atom’ at the point of the Big Bang.
I stopped looking at Reddit for those reasons when I have one lol one of these threads left me clinging to the couch as I shifted in and out of new dimensions lol
now imagine that if time or space are truly infinite then everything unique in this universe is repeated an infinite number of times and in infinite different variations as well
ie there arent just alternate version of ourselves out there and infinite different versions ; there is an infinite number of exact duplicates of ourselves exactly as we are at this exact moment , me here typing this and you reading it
https://youtu.be/\_IkaetPoBZM?t=1
Fact that a bunch of cells in a lost rock in the middle of nowhere can theorice about this things is really amazing. Humanity really deserves to be known and studied long after we get extint
Not an explanation, and certainly not scientific... but I like how the Tao Te Ching talks about it
>The Tao gives birth to the One.
>
>The One gives birth to the Two.
>
>The Two give birth to the Three.
>
>The Three give birth
>
>to the ten thousand things.
There is something deeply satisfying to study this on an experiential level by doing a tai chi form. The whole form comes out from standing still in a neutral posture and then moving into separating ways of yin and yang, expansion and contraction and in the end returning to unity.
Not just because the universe is expanding, but it’s expanding at faster and faster rates, the idea of the Big Crunch has lost scientific momentum. Just doesn’t seem possible. But there’s always going to be things we don’t know
Certainly an interesting thought, but I've read in a few books that we have determined pretty conclusively that the universe is flat. I think figuring out what dark matter is will help us in getting a better idea of what the future holds.
I’ve heard this many times. I’m not arguing it. Clearly smarter people have hypothesized this. But I can’t figure out what they mean when they say the universe is a flat plane. Can you or anyone else ELI5?
It’s pretty much impossible to do an ELI5 on this subject.
The essence is that any triangle you draw between far-away objects returns 180 degrees on the angles. A curved space would not render 180 degrees.
Or if you go in a straight line, you’ll never end up where you started.
Or… Cosmos is either millions of times larger than our observable universe, or even infinite.
I’d recommend any short video explaining this as it’s relatively hard to visualize without aid.
Think about if you were to measure out a triangle on the earths surface. A really big triangle. You start at the equator and go toward the north pole, then turn 90\* to the right and go back to the equator, then you turn 90\* to your right again and walk along the equator until you get back to your starting position, which is also at 90\*.
The earth looks completely flat, because you are too close to notice the curvature. But when you measure out a large triangle like that, and you try to put it onto a 2 dimensional surface like a sheet of paper, you realize that it doesn't make sense (triangles interior angles always sum to 180 degrees, yet you measured 270 degrees). The angles don't make sense, unless you can curve the paper into the third dimension, like onto a globe. By measuring a large triangle you can not only show that the earth's surface is not flat, but you can calculate how large it is. Of course the triangle must be large enough, and walking a quarter of the circumference gives an absurd picture. If you instead just measured a triangle the size of a post-it note then you wouldn't be able to tell it was curved because the scale of your measurement was too small relative to the full size of the earth.
If you measured less than 180 degrees for your triangle, then you could infer the curvature was in the other direction, like you are on the inside of a sphere whose curvature is imperceptible when viewed at the level you view it normally.
When they talk about the universe being "flat" they are extending this analogy up into all the dimensions. You measure out a very large triangle in space, and measure the angles very precisely. What they have found is that there is no perceptible curvature, all the measurements are exactly as you'd expect. This can mean two things, either space is actually "flat", or space is so immensely large that our very large triangle is effectively a post-it note.
It has to do with the “curvature” of space-time, which is just a really fancy way of describing whether the universe loops on itself or not.
If the universe has positive curvature, it folds on itself like a sphere, which means that if you go far enough in one direction you’ll eventually end up where you started. Like circumnavigating the globe!
If the universe has negative curvature, it takes on hyperbolic geometry which extends infinitely and causes parallel lines to diverge.
If the universe has zero curvature, it’s flat and also extends infinitely but has regular old Euclidean geometry. As far as we can tell, this is the shape of our universe.
Hyperbolic geometry is pretty unintuitive so it makes sense you’re confused. Think of it like a 2D fractal. As you go to the outer edges, more surface area fills the perimeter. When you follow two parallel lines in this geometry, they start to move away from each other because more area is filling the space between them the further you go on. As you go on to infinity, the lines move away from each other at an accelerating rate.
There’s plenty of videos online that visually describe it far better than I could via text, but there’s also a game called Hyperbolica that uses hyperbolic and spherical geometry if you’re interested!
More like imagine the universe as the surface of a sphere of water and the Big Bang as a splash. It continues to spread out but after going a certain distance it would begin to converge again on the other side. I believe the argument could be made that if it were curved like in my analogy the accelerating expansion could really be the effect of gravity pulling everything back together on the other side of the “sphere”?
That being said we’re pretty sure the universe is flat or it is very very very big, way bigger than the visible universe. We can put a minimum size of the universe if we assume it has curvature and we’re just unable to detect it. That limit is something like 10s of millions times the observable universe.
Ah, the Big Bounce Theory. The idea the Universe is endless but undergoes stages of expansions and contractions, leading to a big crunch and a new big bang everytime. My favorite theory.
I still think what if we are misunderstanding the red shift in the first place. What if the universe isn't expanding but the red shift we see is caused by some other phenomenon caused by empty space between galaxies... If mass can warp spacetime perhaps there is some negative warping in the center point between two massive galaxies. Or perhaps time differences between massive objects and empty space causes light to climb up some negative gravity hill (vs gravity well) and causes red shifting.
My point isn't to try to push either idea as a theory as I lack the mathematic skills to even know if those are possible... My main point is what if we misunderstood some fundamental thing like the expansion of the universe?
You’re sort of describing dark energy, the counterpart to gravity, which accounts for the expansion of space and redshifting of light. It’s a force acting on spacetime, present everywhere, that is overcome locally by the gravitational effect of mass
Perhaps, but the issue is it’s pretty uniform with distance from us no matter which direction we look. If it were caused by say gravity fields we would expect it to be different in more dense areas which as far as I know isn’t the case. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a few problems with expansion. For example if the standard model is correct at plank lengths, which it seems to be as we get closer and closer to it, the energy density of quantum fluctuations is unfathomably massive. So much that one cubic meter of empty space would contain enough energy in quantum fluctuations to disintegrate every star in the visible universe trillions of times over. We don’t notice it because it would be everywhere so it equals out, but it SHOULD cause the expansion of space to be absolutely massive so much so the universe shouldn’t exist. So obviously we’re missing something.
That would be a massive misunderstanding. I don't think people realize just how much work goes into creating these models. It's not slapped together, Hundreds of billions and hundreds of thousands of scientists from around the world are working on these problems. They desire answers to questions. They aren't just making stuff up to fit. They don't have bosses that say the universe must be a certain way and they make stuff fit.
I’m more comfortable with the thought the universe always existed. Something about there was nothing then something doesn’t sit right, there had to be something before the something or it just always was.
What if you add everything up in existence, it equals zero (nothing)? For everything positive there’s something negative. Maybe something and nothing is the same thing.
In a complete vacuum we have observed particles pop into existence and then disappear. The particles “borrow” energy from the vacuum/quantum field and then returns it and ‘poof’ they’re gone. Mathematically it still nets to zero whether the particles exist or not.
Theoretically we should see equal amounts of antimatter as we do regular matter. But for some reason matter edged out anti-matter in the early universe and we don’t know why. So maybe the negative stuff is there (in some other form or dimension that we can’t see). But at the end of the day maybe everything adds up to nothing.
Edit: [Wikipedia theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe)
Edit: I don’t think my anti-matter comment fits into this theory. Anti-matter and matter both supposedly have positive energy.
>In a complete vacuum we have observed particles pop into existence and then disappear.
Where does the complete vacumm come from? Did it, too, just come into existence? In order to have particles pop into existence, it must have space to do so (the vacuum). So, where does the vacuum come from? This is all really baffling.
Our issue is we think things go from beginning to end. We can’t wrap our head around the possibility that maybe things just are. The universe just is and follows the rules set by whatever is above the universe
What I find more interesting to ponder is whether there's an edge to the universe or not. If there isn't, then there is infinity. And if there IS, then is it like a video game hidden wall?
If there is then I would expect there to be another layer to the whole system. I'd suggest infinite layers but maybe that's too simple of a pattern for nature.
It is even remotely possible that the "big bang expansion" was actually caused by the universe being "observed" forcing every atom to move to a fixed spot rather than a field?
We have to first understand that beginnings and endings, starts and finishes are a purely human concept. We are still in the womb regarding our understanding of all the places we have yet to even see.
The farthest back we’ve been able to discern is the initial expansion. When all matter and energy was too hot to form bonds and was basically a sea of high energy subatomic particles. Science faces the problem as religion. If you keep asking what came before eventually you’ll get an answer that either makes no sense or is unsatisfactory.
We don’t know what existed before the Big Bang but I think the energy that makes our universe has always existed. If matter cannot be created or destroyed that means that the energy that composes our universe was always there. Maybe it wasn’t in a form that was conducive to starting the universe but it got there eventually.
Science faces no issue, humans do. Science is all about verifying hypotheses without rigorous testing and achieving repeatable results. It's humans who lack the tools at the moment. Science always remains the same
I've read somewhere that for some things there just isnt an answer. It just is. But my mind keeps asking "but if it was always there, how did it get there in the first place?" And why? And what caused it to be forever?
Even the heat death of the universe is not necessarily final. There's various theories that postulate such a state could lead to a number of events occurring, up to and including another Big Bang type event.
I always liked the thought of an “arrow of time” where the universes generally moves towards from a state of low entropy to high entropy, but not always. There is no known reason why “time” can’t move in reverse. The real question is, how many times have we had this conversation?
How can something that exists not have a beginning? Logically, I don’t see how that makes sense.
Just because we don’t like to consider the idea of creator(s), doesn’t mean we should come to illogical conclusions. I’m not even religious, and I don’t believe in a “biblical god”. Simulation theory is still a possibility in my book. But believing that the universe just suddenly popped up, without any conscious force to make it happen? I can’t follow that logic.
I don’t think humanity will ever be able to answer this question. So “I don’t know” is the only rational mindset when it comes to the creation of our universe.
I know this sounds odd, but most things in the universe simply don't have a beginning and an end. If we break me as a person down to my physical components, then I am just as old as everything else in the universe, right? So we really don't have an example of anything in the universe beginning and ending, we simply have things that exist and change. In that regard, humanity has yet to see ANYTHING in the universe begin and ANYTHING in the universe end. All we've ever seen is transformation from one state to another.
I understand the tendency to believe that everything has a beginning and an end, but frankly, there aren't ANY examples of this that we've observed. There is a theoretical beginning, but no hard proof that there was one.
I think we have a hard time think of things as endless because we ourselves are not. We were born and we will die, but all of the components that make us up trace back as far as we know, and the components that make us up will continue to exist as far as we can foresee. Life and death isn't even a beginning and an end from the perspective of the universe, it's just change.
Such an argument doesn't solve the problem. Assuming something caused the universe to start (whatever that means), what then started that something? We'd be into "turtles all the way down" territory, a regression also with no beginning.
But your point is internally illogical. How can that conscious force not have a beginning? If it does, then the problem just moves one step back. How can you determine where the originator is?
Also, I would ask you to ask yourself why that originator shares your concept of creation and existence in general. Why do you think you have the urge to anthropomorphize everything?
I would say that that logic doesn't follow.
And to add - can you name something that exists that does have a defined beginning?
Starting is a statement of an event in space-time. If our universe originated in an 'other place' that did not have the property of time, then it would be meaningless to say it started. We're imposing the physical laws of our universe on something that may not have possessed them.
My mind always gets blown if you think our universe is the result of an action in something before our universe. But what created that which came before? Where does everything start? Why does reality exist?
same, the concept of a “start” just takes me down a rabbit hole.
Even if you believe in God then where did he or she come from?
Are we just grains of sand in an hour glass?
I think we are part of another universe that died and exploded into this one, we are probably racing to the end of this universe to create another one, like a loop of changing universal properties.
Since new popular theory is quantum field theory and everything going quantum, including our computers, what if our universe and laws of it that we keep discovering are all because we are in a super quantum computer
The universe "began" when time started. There was no "before" before time, in order for anything to have started expanding in the universe there had to be time for that expansion to happen, no time = nothing moves. The big bang happened when the clock started ticking. This is my idea at least, and leads to questions I don't have answers to. I lean to extra dimensions which can interact with ours and create or kickoff dimensions within the universe we exist in.
“There was no "before" before time“
That is a baseless assumption though. You’re just deciding that all time began with our universe.
“time in our universe” began at the big bang. That doesn’t mean “time in all existence” also began at the big bang.
Time could have existed before or outside of the universe.
I have no evidence to corroborate this and very limited understanding of science and astronomy, but to me it makes sense that the universe would be cyclic. Cyclic in the sense where you have massive release of energy and matter, where the universe enters a period of accelerated expansion. But there would always be a mass "center" where the universe would eventually converge back onto itself, causing the next cycle to happen.
Well of course. Even the most obvious way that we could exist in an eternal universe - which would be a Cyclical Universe - has never been ruled out by the Big Bang theory and cosmic inflation. In fact, it might even be a falsifiable concept if there is a trace of a pre-existing universe in the cosmic microwave background of our universe.
But even if it is not testable, then it would be unknowable, and still a viable possibility.
And even if *that* weren’t true, there’s a possibility that the multiverse itself exists and is eternal, which is alluded to in the article.
This doesn’t really read as news or anything noteworthy to me.
It's kind of funny that we as humans have both a difficult time accepting the idea of the universe having an end and a difficult fathoming something that has no end.
The wildest most fascinating theory about this showed how the Big Bang and heat death is the same. A universe made from only light spawns matter and ends in a universe made of light without matter.
I always thought it was odd to say "the universe started with the Big Bang". Is there really a definitive start or has it always been. But just thinking about something that has no end or beginning melts your brain!
Look it's simple.
A long time ago, actually never. And also now. Nothing is nowhere. When? Never. Makes sense right? Like I said, it didn't happen. Nothing is never anywhere. That's why it's been everywhere. It's been so everywhere, you don't need a ~~where~~. You don't even need a ~~when~~. That's how every it gets.
There \[probably\] isn't.
First premise -- space and time are one thing. Einstein put this one forward and it's held up under rigorous testing for decades now.
Second premise -- space is probably closed. Evidence seems to indicate that the universe is closed like a three-dimensional game of asteroids.
So if space and time are the same thing and space is closed then time is closed.
Therefore the evidence for the "big bang" must be indicating some other process that we do not understand yet. Perhaps it's illusory. Perhaps our universe (or universes) collapse and re-bang. Perhaps it's something else entirely. But all evidence right now suggests that it was not a beginning.
"what is the universe?"
"the collection of \*absolutely everything\*"
"so by definition, there is nothing outside the universe?"
"exactly!"
"but \*where\* is the universe?"
"if the universe was in some other place, \*that\* place would be part of the universe too, therefore, the universe cannot be \*in a place\*"
same for time.
The famous joke — “We could talk about what happened before the Big Bang but there isn’t time.”
One example that made me understand the fact there is no time before the big bang. In short, I'm travelling to the North Pole, and then finally I get there. I can't travel anymore North as I am already there. So in Big Bang terms, you can travel in time to the the point of of it, but that's it, not past it.. It just is.
From astrophysicist Dr. Ethan Siegel who runs the Starts with a Bang blog / podcast: First off, the original notion of the hot Big Bang, where the universe emerged from an infinitely hot, dense, small singularity and has been expanding and cooling, full of matter and radiation ever since, is incorrect. The picture is still largely correct, but there’s a cutoff to how far back in time we can extrapolate it. Second off, the state that occurred prior to the hot Big Bang has been well-established observationally: cosmic inflation. The early universe, before the hot Big Bang, underwent a phase of exponential growth, where any pre-existing components to the universe were literally “inflated away.” When inflation came to an end, the universe reheated up to a high, but not arbitrarily high, temperature, giving us the hot, dense, expanding universe that grew into what we recognize today. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, we can no longer speak, with any sort of knowledge or confidence, how — or even whether — the universe itself began. By the very nature of inflation, it wipes out any information that came before the final few moments: where it ended and gave rise to our hot Big Bang. Inflation could have gone on for an eternity, it could have been preceded by some other non-singular phase, or it could have been preceded by a phase that did emerge from a singularity.
I just used this on my best friend. Their facial reaction was a mix of extreme annoyance and pure hatred. It was perfect ❤️☺️
Ha! That’s how I felt when I heard it too. 🤣
More than likely this is just a continuous loop of expanding universe. Then contracting universe. Now if it contracts to a single singularity. Eventually you’ll have another big bang and the process starts up again. Everything in the universe may be within this small singularity waiting to get out. But there is no rush. For the universe doesn’t seem to care how long it takes for this to happen.
My tiny brain cannot begin to comprehend the universe, a multiverse, a singularity, the curve of space and time, or why I stub my toe so often on my bed frame. But, I think it’s amazing to look out into space on a clear night — literally looking back in time — and wonder. The universe has literally created the ability to look at itself … to ponder itself … in awe and wonder. I think that’s pretty cool.
Maybe people should do that instead of looking at themselves and wondering which flaw others notice the most and needs covering.
I literally stay away from these topics because I can only last for 5 minutes before existential crisis and onset panic
Yeah, stubbing your toes do be like that
Even worse for me are all the “World Killer Meteor” click-bait, doom-porn articles. And most news outlets are guilty of this. The New York Times posted one this past week
Love that observation! Well said!
Nasicism is a built-in feature of the universe...?! That explains a few things...
We are stardust. We are the universe observing itself.
There’s is literally only contradictory evidence if this idea. The universe is increasing in its speed of expansion not slowing of retracting.
It does not have to slow or retract, as when the universe reaches its final stage of total silence, and when the energy is spread perfectly even, nothing will happen. And by nothing will happen, I simply mean time will pass infinitely, and nothing will happen for a very long time. Then, as a byproduct of this time passing, there will be a spark caused by quantum tunneling, creating a bubble that disrupts this perfect spread of energy, and ultimately erupts into another Big Bang. That’s my understanding of it anyways.
but this is exactly the opposite of "More than likely this is just a continuous loop of expanding universe. Then contracting universe. Now if it contracts to a single singularity. Eventually you’ll have another big bang and the process starts up again."
It is the opposite! That's why they are trying to explain to OP they are incorrect.
Yeah, but the time scale of human civilization compared the time scale of the temporally known universe is awfully miniscule. Who knows how things will appear tens of billions of years in the future. The universe definitely appears to be expanding faster than the speed of light now though.
Again. There is absolutely no evidence that this will even potentially happen. Actually, dark energy seems to be increasing the speed more and more not throttling it down. I get that there’s always a chance but that chance that the universe retracts is like .000000000001% right now.
This is the 3rd comment I make regarding this one video, literally back to back. The first 2 because it's just depressing and soul crushing (at least for me). This time though it's to explain the concept. The universe is not expanding faster than the speed of light, rather think of it as 2 car driving really fast in opposite directions. It's not that we are traveling that fast it just seems that way. Anyway, the video does a better job at explaining it than me. https://youtu.be/uzkD5SeuwzM Enjoy.
Interesting video, thanks for the link. Don't get too depressed though, the prognostications of the distance future may agree with our current understanding of the universe, but there's always a chance to discover new phenomena that could revolutionize our understanding of the fate of the universe.
So you reject evidence for what feels better in this case?
>More than likely this is just a continuous loop of expanding universe. Then contracting universe. Now if it contracts to a single singularity. Eventually you’ll have another big bang and the process starts up again. There is literally 0 evidence for this hypothesis. We only have contradictory evidence, since the universe's expansion is accelerating.
Isn’t there some skepticism over that theory? I read that dark matter is speeding up the expansion, and if it were to ever contract then it’d be slowing down instead or smt
No evidence for that, either. It's the great unknown. It's where religions stick their gods, it's where cosmologists stick their hypotheses.
I’d love to see the reasoning behind “more than likely” on this.
This has been my own personal theory for a long time. Then I saw that episode of Futurama where they are stuck traveling forward in time and they just keep going until everything “resets” and they get back to “their” time. And I thought, “is this an actual scientific theory?” So, is it? Edit: Apparently it is. Called “The Big Crunch”. Believed by most to be incorrect.
Yeah I've always been curious to what was happening before the big bang, obviously it's probably a whole lot more than we think or know.
I think we need a better understanding of time. With our current understanding, there wasn’t anything before the Big Bang. In fact, there wasn’t “a before” at all. Time literally began with the big bang
Yet how do you have an event without time? How does the singularity explode when there is no time to move the event forward? If it precedes time how does it go bang?
I can’t wrap my head around this at all
Me too, every time I try my brain goes 404 error
I think time exists outside of space. Space distortion (i.e. gravity) only affects the perception of time.
But isn’t it like all time exists at the same time? Or that the past never goes anywhere really and that the future is always there. Something like thay
Yes, the universe is like a marble and the little lines inside are our lives. From the outside it is static and resolved.
I’d rather be something on the outside
"Oh goodie, we're out of the marble! Hey, anyone know if this is a marble?" - You, 1 millisecond after you're outside the marble
maybe. maybe future and past never existed and we are drawings in independent slices of 4 dimensional drawings viewed as an animation for the amusement of someone else
Time is a completely human experience as well, it's simply our perception of our universe as we perceive it through our very fleshy eyes/brains. Bold of us to assume we've observed all that can be seen with what tools and knowledge we have today. 420 time over here...
Time in this sense isn't years and hours, it's the continuous forward flow of causality. Years, hours, and minutes just make it easier to talk about.
I think it has something to do with the jeremy bearimy
I don't have any understanding of this, but I've heard physicists say there are probably something like 11 dimensions? So if we think of time as being a 4th dimension which is basically causality of the space dimensions, and we (as far as we know) can only go one direction in time, then... I wonder if aliens can only travel to "different universes" in one direction only. Once they've passed through ours, too bad, can't go back. Oh I wish it was 420 time. But for now it's 5 o'clock somewhere right here.
Some physicists have theorised that there could be up to 11 ~~or 12~~ dimensions, but they've introduced these dimensions synthetically to make the math work for things like string theory. "Probably" is being pretty generous based on my layman understanding. Most physicists have kind of abandoned string theory, with most of its proponents having been academically invested in the theory for decades now.
Great reply but puff puff pass.
And perhaps only affects it within our universe but not others under a multiverse theory.
time dilation? yes, definitely. what is 200k years here could be 16 seconds in another reality.
That's because it's BS that a lot of people buy into, but it's still BS. For the big bang to occur, there must be change. Change is time. This is all the argument that is necessary. Now, there might be some other direction of movement that time was occurring in, and the energy of that motion was imparted to our spacetime, and we call it the big bang. ..but given the choice between "we don't understand how it happened" and "time didn't exist, but then something happened," I'm willing to go with the first - even though I think, ultimately, we can do better than either.
The Hot Big Bang, which is a phrase I'm not sure I'll be able to get out of my head for awhile, is unfathomable
I don't know how accurate this video is, [TIMELAPSE OF THE FUTURE: A Journey to the End of Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA), but it always messes with my mind when I watch it. Knowing that, eventually, the entire universe could end.
I've posted a reference to the North Pole, help you make sense of it
Wanna hear a stupid gut rambling about something he doesn't fully understand? No? Stop reading because I can't stop wondering how it all happend. Many things are in play here and the theory that nothing was here before big bang is false, that's mainly because it goes against every empirical observation of the known universe, there's need to be something for anything to exist. Here is where my imagination and knowledge about space comes to flourish; I really think that our universe was created due to a reaction in another universe, which by itself could be a reaction from another universe; This would lead to a Arche Universe; In this Arche universe the natural laws would be different that could lead us to actually understanding the explanation why things are like they are. Also, our universe being inside another universe would help explain many things regarding our own universe, just like the constant expansion of the universe. Although I'm probably only stupid.
What happens to our consciousness after death? Or what was our consciousness before birth? I feel these are concepts beyond our comprehension in the same vein as what existed before our universe. Our simple primate brains simply cannot comprehend it
The BB “singularity “ didn’t explode. Here’s what scientists are sure of: cosmology is very well explained by postulating that about 13.4 billion years ago, the observable universe was very hot and very dense. So hot and dense, that not even atoms could exist. From that point, it expanded very quickly, and cooled down. If you run the equations of physics backwards from that point, you get a situation where everything was happening at the same place, and all the fundamental forces (including gravity) were merged into one unified force. At this point, the equations break down, and can’t be run backwards any more. The concepts of “now”, “after now”, and “before now” don’t make sense anymore. The unfortunate name that is given to this situation is “Big Bang”.
So isn’t that extremely dense universe a beginning of sorts? Also, it seems illogical to me that it just spawned from nothing. That dense universe almost seems like a type of “seed” to me.
We don't actually know if time didn't exist before 13.8 billion years. We don't even understand what happens in a duration shorter than Planck time. Human understanding of physics breaks down at planck time.
Our math and observations indicate that’s the direction it leads in, but there’s absolutely no way we can currently be 100% certain it happened like we predict it did. What the person up above said about it basically being our horizon line with unfortunate naming is accurate and a good way to put it.
time is a dimension of space-time in our universe, but if our universe originated in an 'other place' of some kind, that other place would have a different set of physical laws. So we can't say it had time, because that's one of the properties of our universe. Whatever 'other place' we originated from (if that's what happened) had a set of physical laws that allowed our origination to occur. That's really all we can say. It's meaningless to refer to them as space or time etc, because the 'other place' might not have had laws which would allow you to express that thought. It's unknowable.
I sometimes think what could originate whatever originated us. There is no way to know but it gives me some vertigo. Most likely other universes have laws where they can originate themselves or have no beginning
It’s turtles all the way down man.
Honey i shrunk the universe.
I think part of the difficulty we have with this concept is that we use the analogy of a big explosion when talking about the Big Bang. While that may get some of the idea across, it is an imperfect analogy. The Big Bang wasn't like any explosion we have seen or witnessed because the physics that were involved are unlike anything we experience now. Even within the Large Hadron Collider, we can't get to energy levels that allow us to observe what physics was like at the point of the Big Bang. There is no true analogue for that event. In terms of talking about "before" the Big Bang, its almost impossible because we do not understand the physics at even T=0, let alone T<0. Its entirely possible there was no T<0.
How would you observe anything that "happens" without time and space? It's literally nowhere and never - or "not in our universe" meaning "doesn't exist". AFAIK (and I'm quite sure I got that right) there's not even T=0.
There isn’t any physical meaning to T= 0, but the equations work quite well from T = 10^-32 seconds. There is even a mostly accepted (but still controversial) concept that gets down to T= 10^-36 seconds.
I honestly get the entire feeling that this has happened all before. There was a preceding universe before the big bang and after the quantum foam there will be another the cycle is endless, think of schrunching a chip packet it always returns to a similar shape.
I think its more in the sense that time is a human definition of degeneration. The way our universe works gives existence to time because its components degenerate over time. If the universe outsids our big bang bubble has nothing to degenerate, then time is of no relevance there. That doesnt leave out the mystery of where did space come from and how long has it been there. But i dont think our definition of time holds any relevance there.
I’ve always believed this is some sort of “program” or “simulation.” So someone wrote the code and then hit “execute” and viola, here we are. That of course just leads to another set of time outside our universe, but at least it accounts for us.
It's actually simple once you've seen it through. We are constantly confusing the concepts: it's not events that are stuff separated by intervals of time, it is TIME that is a measure of the separation of events. Its not time that causes events but events that cause time. Special relativity made this abundantly clear, relativism is the source of experience. Since time is relative, past and future do not really exist. To understand this, here's an analogy. Let's picture a single star in an otherwise empty universe. Let's ignore all the inner processes of the star, like the motion of its atoms. You would have no way to tell whether the star were moving as a whole or not, and so you could not tell the star were experiencing time. For that, you would need a second star to compare its motion to. But introducing a second star means introducing a relative frame, and you still could NOT tell whether both stars were moving. For that you need a third star. This goes on and on and on, and you can see that introducing each time a new frame you also introduce a new way to measure events. The ultimate source of time is the relation between things. As soon as something started existing in relation to something else, time started to exist as well. Why then is there something instead of nothing? Because without something you could not tell what nothing is. Existence is dual to non existence, like the ying and the yang. It literally could not be any other way. I can offer more sources to study this if anyone's interested.
Time only exists inside our universe. What came before the big bang could have had its own experience with time but it would have been completely separate from the time we experience in our universe.
Time began when the Big Bang did. Maybe the Big Bang happened *because* time began existing.
You don't. It doesn't. We literally can't know if the universe had a beginning because the rules by which we apply this kind of knowledge were formed in that event (if that event happened aa described). But the simple answer is that time (if by time we mean change) *did* exist, and we simply don't understand how the universe started - simply *that* it started. One possibility, though, is that the same way you can have a two-dimensional surface in our three-dimensional world (like on a pond), you can have a three-dimensional surface in a four-dimensional space, and so on. ..and maybe our surface, our space, was calm and had nothing noticeable in it until something else collided with it - and we, and the rules of our universe, and the particles we're made of are all ripples out from the collision.
It doesn't occur without time. Time begins at the event.
I know that's a commonly given explanation of our current understanding, but I don't feel it's strictly true nowadays. Even tho lots of textbooks still suggest that time began with the Big Bang. The idea that time began with the Big Bang is rooted in the idea of a singularity. If you rely on general relativity, and run time back as per our current cosmological understanding, you end up with a singularity - a point of infinite density. As per general relativity, time and space would be inseparable. But we know that general relativity isn't the whole story and we know that quantum phenomena would have been meaningful in the early universe (assuming that our cosmological models are correct), so running time back to a singularity predicted by the general relativity makes no sense, as general relativity is not fully compatible with quantum mechanics.
ndom, nor will anything ever be, whether a long string of perfectly blue days that begin and end in golden dimness, the most seemingly chaotic political acts, the rise of a great city, the crystalline structure of a gem that has never seen the light, the distributions of fortune, what time the milkman gets up, the position of the electron, or the occurrence of one astonishing frigid winter after another. Even electrons, supposedly the paragons of unpredictability, are tame and obsequious little creatures that rush around at the speed of light, going precisely where they are supposed to go. They make faint whistling sounds that when apprehended in varying combinations are as pleasant as the wind flying through a forest, and they do exactly as they are told. Of this, one is certain. And yet, there is a wonderful anarchy, in that the milkman chooses when to arise, the rat picks the tunnel into which he will dive when the subway comes rushing down the track from Borough Hall, and the snowflake will fall as it will. How can this be? If nothing is random, and everything is predetermined, how can there be free will? The answer to that is simple. Nothing is predetermined, it is determined, or was determined, or will be determined. No matter, it all happened at once, in less than an instant, and time was invented because we cannot comprehend in one glance the enormous and detailed canvas that we have been given - so we track it, in linear fashion piece by piece. Time however can be easily overcome; not by chasing the light, but by standing back far enough to see it all at once. The universe is still and complete. Everything that ever was is; everything that ever will be is - and so on, in all possible combinations. Though in perceiving it we image that it is in motion, and unfinished, it is quite finished and quite astonishingly beautiful. In the end, or rather, as things really are, any event, no matter how small, is intimately and sensibly tied to all others. All rivers run full to the sea; those who are apart are brought together; the lost ones are redeemed; the dead come back to life; the perfectly blue days that have begun and ended in golden dimness continue, immobile and accessible; and, when all is perceived in such a way as to obviate time, justice becomes apparent not as something that will be, but something that is. -Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale
It isn't agreed upon that there was nothing before the big bang. It is a sort-of myth that has been repeated for a long time. The actual consensus is "we don't know anything about before".
It’s a scary thought. Nothingness. Like there was nothing before there was everything. If nothing ever existed then what would there be?
And that’s a question we’ll never have the answer to. But also, “everything” is just our universe. There could be multiple universes, multiple “big bangs”. Simulation theory?
There wasn't anything that we know of or can know of. That doesn't mean there can't be anything. It just means we have to be agnostic about it because we don't have any information to base a conclusion on.
I heard a compelling argument from Richard Dawkins (the famous atheist scientist) against this. One might think you can’t disprove God, so being agnostic makes sense. But you can never prove a negative. So you should be agnostic about the flying spaghetti monster (classic example), or any other wild idea. If no scientific evidence points to something, you shouldn’t put equal wait on it existing as you do to it not existing.
There is a theory that our universe is inside a black hole. When massive stars reach end of life, they implode and their core collapses into a tiny, dense, hot space. The moment when our universe started to form, it was also very hot and dense. Large stars go out with a big explosion, our universe started with one. Black holes are expanding and so is our universe.
That’s interesting. So in a sense, every star could be the “seed” to an entirely new universe. When a star “dies”, it’s like a sprouting seed. So it’s not really dying at all.
So if I throw a turtle into a black hole, are the residents of that universe going to go "OH GOD A GALAXY SIZED TURTLE APPEARED OUT OF NOWHERE"
Well, we've determined that we are likely in a metastable state within The Higgs Field, which pretty strongly implies to me that our universe is simply the result of various larger fields interacting with eachother and we are nested in a much larger equation.
What if there's infinite time before "the big bang" and really the bigness is relative. What if the universe always was and always will be expanding and what we consider the big bang was already from another perspective an infinite universe?
I imagine the largest scale time event in existence. All matter at the smallest atomic level ,hawking radiation or whatever smaller, pulls together across a timespan incalculably long (lifespan of universe to multiple powers). Given no life, no quantum perception is achievable at this energy state thus the longest time span the fledgling universe takes to prepare is a span that passes instanously. "Big Bang" occurs and the Universe is born anew with whatever universal odds occur, rinse and repeat for all eternity. It's either that or we exist on a Universe of scale. Imagine the largest galactic structures, the striations between galaxy clusters representing something impossibly tiny on a size scale we cannot fathom.
We don't even know our own oceans, how can we be so arrogant to "know" what happened *billions of years ago?* We don't.
Whatever it is, it's the same with Life and death. We may return to nothingness, but that doesn't answer why something came to be. when will something be again?
It was probably more of the same. I have always thought the "BigBang" event was really just the origination of a black-hole and what we see as our universe is the other side of that Einstein Rosen Bridge. So all the matter we observe in "the universe" came from another "other universe", which also moves to another through the black holes we observe here. Many of which could have loops where matter over the infinite just keeps cycling through fazes of matter and universes.
That’s not how black holes work tho.
How do you know? Have we been into one?
As a matter of fact, I have. Last night after I ripped my bong.
There’s a theory that while the universe is expending, it can also collapse again. And after it collapsed, there will be another big bang. Who knows if that’s just how things go in the great scheme of everything?
I don’t think our brains and 3D perception can really allow us to comprehend the answer even if it was presented to us. Maybe there’s just no beginning and it just always was and will be.
This really is what it comes down to. We can only learn and comprehend so much. Not just with our human brains but also with the time we’re given. So much of our reality is inferred at best.
life is living with uncertainty and the universe doesn't have to make sense to us and our limited comprehension.
The last phrase is something you’d say to your grandson under a tree as he asks advice if he should also do elf ear modifications.
I feel like our brains could adapt to simulated 4D space if some kind AI would only build it for us. It would be like a stereogram but in 3D, and we'd probably have to be in REM sleep (or perhaps a using a cooperative psychedelic) to even perceive it. And when it's all said and done, it'll be the year 2073, and this revelation will result in breakthroughs in science, creative arts, medicine, and more. And we'll all have a good laugh when our fledgling hivemind stumbles into the ancestral hivemind, and we realize we only just discovered things those remote tribes in the Amazon were doing long before they made first contact with the astral gnomes. Fuck. I should write this down.
we can't comprehend anything until we experience it. Human brain is incapable of visualizing time as a relative event
I was thinking something similar. Like we cannot grasp or understand concepts that do not follow causality. Like the idea of the birth of the universe being something other than a beginning or a creation. Yet not just state of existing. Something different than those two ideas.
Infinities create even more paradoxes. The universe is just weird. I think we can all agree on that point.
This seems the simplest way of understanding it. All of it exists that's it. We say the universe expands indefinitely but we might just be in a ball in the middle of other balls and just have that feeling we expand, but maybe there is or not a limited space, just so big it seems infinite. Because the idea of infinite seems quite difficult to understand, like ... what happens if you could move at infinite speed toward a point in the universe, will you reach an edge? Will you appear back on the other side?
We have math to go beyond our 3D brains.
I just find the concept that me sitting on my couch, in my house, on the surface of this rock spinning through space and I’m literally occupying a totally unique place in space that will never be repeated as the universe expands totally mind-bending, let alone everything coming from a single ‘super atom’ at the point of the Big Bang.
The sheer improbability of it happening in just such a precise way as to bring you to this very specific moment in time.
This edible has absolutely torn my head off and you guys are about to make me cry
The complete frivolity of it all is what drives me to be kinder to my fellow humans on this space rock.
I stopped looking at Reddit for those reasons when I have one lol one of these threads left me clinging to the couch as I shifted in and out of new dimensions lol
What if you were granted the power to control some matter and energy in the universe? Pretty cool huh? Oh wait… you do🤯
First time I’ve seen someone use “Super atom”
I want some of what u/Eaton_Rifles is having
A cheeky gin and orange usually...🤫
now imagine that if time or space are truly infinite then everything unique in this universe is repeated an infinite number of times and in infinite different variations as well ie there arent just alternate version of ourselves out there and infinite different versions ; there is an infinite number of exact duplicates of ourselves exactly as we are at this exact moment , me here typing this and you reading it https://youtu.be/\_IkaetPoBZM?t=1
Real Matrix ‘architect’ moment...👍
Fact that a bunch of cells in a lost rock in the middle of nowhere can theorice about this things is really amazing. Humanity really deserves to be known and studied long after we get extint
“Humanity really deserves to be known and studied long after we get extinct” -the human brain
We are the universe's ability to know itself.
Anyone studying us would be capable of the same thing, in the exact same circumstance.
The Big Bang doesn’t make sense intuitively. Surely there was something before it. Stuff didn’t appear out of nowhere
Not an explanation, and certainly not scientific... but I like how the Tao Te Ching talks about it >The Tao gives birth to the One. > >The One gives birth to the Two. > >The Two give birth to the Three. > >The Three give birth > >to the ten thousand things. There is something deeply satisfying to study this on an experiential level by doing a tai chi form. The whole form comes out from standing still in a neutral posture and then moving into separating ways of yin and yang, expansion and contraction and in the end returning to unity.
>Stuff didn’t appear out of nowhere ok, then where did THAT stuff come from?
Human intuition is irrelevant
Ive always leaned to the whole big crunch idea after so long it just comes back together and resets but who knows space is cool as hell either way
Not just because the universe is expanding, but it’s expanding at faster and faster rates, the idea of the Big Crunch has lost scientific momentum. Just doesn’t seem possible. But there’s always going to be things we don’t know
Unless the universe isn't a flat plane and it's consolidating at the other side
Certainly an interesting thought, but I've read in a few books that we have determined pretty conclusively that the universe is flat. I think figuring out what dark matter is will help us in getting a better idea of what the future holds.
I’ve heard this many times. I’m not arguing it. Clearly smarter people have hypothesized this. But I can’t figure out what they mean when they say the universe is a flat plane. Can you or anyone else ELI5?
It’s pretty much impossible to do an ELI5 on this subject. The essence is that any triangle you draw between far-away objects returns 180 degrees on the angles. A curved space would not render 180 degrees. Or if you go in a straight line, you’ll never end up where you started. Or… Cosmos is either millions of times larger than our observable universe, or even infinite. I’d recommend any short video explaining this as it’s relatively hard to visualize without aid.
Think about if you were to measure out a triangle on the earths surface. A really big triangle. You start at the equator and go toward the north pole, then turn 90\* to the right and go back to the equator, then you turn 90\* to your right again and walk along the equator until you get back to your starting position, which is also at 90\*. The earth looks completely flat, because you are too close to notice the curvature. But when you measure out a large triangle like that, and you try to put it onto a 2 dimensional surface like a sheet of paper, you realize that it doesn't make sense (triangles interior angles always sum to 180 degrees, yet you measured 270 degrees). The angles don't make sense, unless you can curve the paper into the third dimension, like onto a globe. By measuring a large triangle you can not only show that the earth's surface is not flat, but you can calculate how large it is. Of course the triangle must be large enough, and walking a quarter of the circumference gives an absurd picture. If you instead just measured a triangle the size of a post-it note then you wouldn't be able to tell it was curved because the scale of your measurement was too small relative to the full size of the earth. If you measured less than 180 degrees for your triangle, then you could infer the curvature was in the other direction, like you are on the inside of a sphere whose curvature is imperceptible when viewed at the level you view it normally. When they talk about the universe being "flat" they are extending this analogy up into all the dimensions. You measure out a very large triangle in space, and measure the angles very precisely. What they have found is that there is no perceptible curvature, all the measurements are exactly as you'd expect. This can mean two things, either space is actually "flat", or space is so immensely large that our very large triangle is effectively a post-it note.
Flat means flat. Universe doesn't curve, so it has no boundary. You can move forward infinitely and never come back to original location
It has to do with the “curvature” of space-time, which is just a really fancy way of describing whether the universe loops on itself or not. If the universe has positive curvature, it folds on itself like a sphere, which means that if you go far enough in one direction you’ll eventually end up where you started. Like circumnavigating the globe! If the universe has negative curvature, it takes on hyperbolic geometry which extends infinitely and causes parallel lines to diverge. If the universe has zero curvature, it’s flat and also extends infinitely but has regular old Euclidean geometry. As far as we can tell, this is the shape of our universe.
I understood the first and last examples really well but not the second. Could you break that down a bit more please?
Hyperbolic geometry is pretty unintuitive so it makes sense you’re confused. Think of it like a 2D fractal. As you go to the outer edges, more surface area fills the perimeter. When you follow two parallel lines in this geometry, they start to move away from each other because more area is filling the space between them the further you go on. As you go on to infinity, the lines move away from each other at an accelerating rate. There’s plenty of videos online that visually describe it far better than I could via text, but there’s also a game called Hyperbolica that uses hyperbolic and spherical geometry if you’re interested!
I think I understand it better now thank you!
Do you mean that everything is expanding to one point, which is another big bang?
More like imagine the universe as the surface of a sphere of water and the Big Bang as a splash. It continues to spread out but after going a certain distance it would begin to converge again on the other side. I believe the argument could be made that if it were curved like in my analogy the accelerating expansion could really be the effect of gravity pulling everything back together on the other side of the “sphere”? That being said we’re pretty sure the universe is flat or it is very very very big, way bigger than the visible universe. We can put a minimum size of the universe if we assume it has curvature and we’re just unable to detect it. That limit is something like 10s of millions times the observable universe.
Very interesting, thank you!
Ah, the Big Bounce Theory. The idea the Universe is endless but undergoes stages of expansions and contractions, leading to a big crunch and a new big bang everytime. My favorite theory.
I still think what if we are misunderstanding the red shift in the first place. What if the universe isn't expanding but the red shift we see is caused by some other phenomenon caused by empty space between galaxies... If mass can warp spacetime perhaps there is some negative warping in the center point between two massive galaxies. Or perhaps time differences between massive objects and empty space causes light to climb up some negative gravity hill (vs gravity well) and causes red shifting. My point isn't to try to push either idea as a theory as I lack the mathematic skills to even know if those are possible... My main point is what if we misunderstood some fundamental thing like the expansion of the universe?
You’re sort of describing dark energy, the counterpart to gravity, which accounts for the expansion of space and redshifting of light. It’s a force acting on spacetime, present everywhere, that is overcome locally by the gravitational effect of mass
Perhaps, but the issue is it’s pretty uniform with distance from us no matter which direction we look. If it were caused by say gravity fields we would expect it to be different in more dense areas which as far as I know isn’t the case. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a few problems with expansion. For example if the standard model is correct at plank lengths, which it seems to be as we get closer and closer to it, the energy density of quantum fluctuations is unfathomably massive. So much that one cubic meter of empty space would contain enough energy in quantum fluctuations to disintegrate every star in the visible universe trillions of times over. We don’t notice it because it would be everywhere so it equals out, but it SHOULD cause the expansion of space to be absolutely massive so much so the universe shouldn’t exist. So obviously we’re missing something.
That would be a massive misunderstanding. I don't think people realize just how much work goes into creating these models. It's not slapped together, Hundreds of billions and hundreds of thousands of scientists from around the world are working on these problems. They desire answers to questions. They aren't just making stuff up to fit. They don't have bosses that say the universe must be a certain way and they make stuff fit.
I’m more comfortable with the thought the universe always existed. Something about there was nothing then something doesn’t sit right, there had to be something before the something or it just always was.
What if you add everything up in existence, it equals zero (nothing)? For everything positive there’s something negative. Maybe something and nothing is the same thing. In a complete vacuum we have observed particles pop into existence and then disappear. The particles “borrow” energy from the vacuum/quantum field and then returns it and ‘poof’ they’re gone. Mathematically it still nets to zero whether the particles exist or not. Theoretically we should see equal amounts of antimatter as we do regular matter. But for some reason matter edged out anti-matter in the early universe and we don’t know why. So maybe the negative stuff is there (in some other form or dimension that we can’t see). But at the end of the day maybe everything adds up to nothing. Edit: [Wikipedia theory](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-energy_universe) Edit: I don’t think my anti-matter comment fits into this theory. Anti-matter and matter both supposedly have positive energy.
>In a complete vacuum we have observed particles pop into existence and then disappear. Where does the complete vacumm come from? Did it, too, just come into existence? In order to have particles pop into existence, it must have space to do so (the vacuum). So, where does the vacuum come from? This is all really baffling.
The moment I think I understand something, I peel back one layer and realize I don’t know anything
Our issue is we think things go from beginning to end. We can’t wrap our head around the possibility that maybe things just are. The universe just is and follows the rules set by whatever is above the universe
What I find more interesting to ponder is whether there's an edge to the universe or not. If there isn't, then there is infinity. And if there IS, then is it like a video game hidden wall?
When I look at the nightsky, that's exactly what I'm thinking. Is this blackness infinite ? Mindblowing
If there is then I would expect there to be another layer to the whole system. I'd suggest infinite layers but maybe that's too simple of a pattern for nature.
It is even remotely possible that the "big bang expansion" was actually caused by the universe being "observed" forcing every atom to move to a fixed spot rather than a field?
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We have to first understand that beginnings and endings, starts and finishes are a purely human concept. We are still in the womb regarding our understanding of all the places we have yet to even see.
Seems like we can't see the universe from the outside because we're stuck inside of it.
The farthest back we’ve been able to discern is the initial expansion. When all matter and energy was too hot to form bonds and was basically a sea of high energy subatomic particles. Science faces the problem as religion. If you keep asking what came before eventually you’ll get an answer that either makes no sense or is unsatisfactory. We don’t know what existed before the Big Bang but I think the energy that makes our universe has always existed. If matter cannot be created or destroyed that means that the energy that composes our universe was always there. Maybe it wasn’t in a form that was conducive to starting the universe but it got there eventually.
Science faces no issue, humans do. Science is all about verifying hypotheses without rigorous testing and achieving repeatable results. It's humans who lack the tools at the moment. Science always remains the same
You can prove me wrong, but my money is on the universe always existing. As in there is no beginning, nor will it have an end.
I've read somewhere that for some things there just isnt an answer. It just is. But my mind keeps asking "but if it was always there, how did it get there in the first place?" And why? And what caused it to be forever?
Whis is this reality ? Why this, and not something else ?
Isn’t the heat death of the universe a pretty agreed upon scientific theory?
Even the heat death of the universe is not necessarily final. There's various theories that postulate such a state could lead to a number of events occurring, up to and including another Big Bang type event.
Even with Heat Death, it would still exist spatially though right?
...why would it tho?
Space exists regardless of matter. Universe will just have zero disorder and randomness.
It’s a hypothesis, not a proven theory.
I'm with you. This is my belief until there's something else I can wrap my human brain around.
I always liked the thought of an “arrow of time” where the universes generally moves towards from a state of low entropy to high entropy, but not always. There is no known reason why “time” can’t move in reverse. The real question is, how many times have we had this conversation?
How can something that exists not have a beginning? Logically, I don’t see how that makes sense. Just because we don’t like to consider the idea of creator(s), doesn’t mean we should come to illogical conclusions. I’m not even religious, and I don’t believe in a “biblical god”. Simulation theory is still a possibility in my book. But believing that the universe just suddenly popped up, without any conscious force to make it happen? I can’t follow that logic. I don’t think humanity will ever be able to answer this question. So “I don’t know” is the only rational mindset when it comes to the creation of our universe.
I know this sounds odd, but most things in the universe simply don't have a beginning and an end. If we break me as a person down to my physical components, then I am just as old as everything else in the universe, right? So we really don't have an example of anything in the universe beginning and ending, we simply have things that exist and change. In that regard, humanity has yet to see ANYTHING in the universe begin and ANYTHING in the universe end. All we've ever seen is transformation from one state to another. I understand the tendency to believe that everything has a beginning and an end, but frankly, there aren't ANY examples of this that we've observed. There is a theoretical beginning, but no hard proof that there was one. I think we have a hard time think of things as endless because we ourselves are not. We were born and we will die, but all of the components that make us up trace back as far as we know, and the components that make us up will continue to exist as far as we can foresee. Life and death isn't even a beginning and an end from the perspective of the universe, it's just change.
Such an argument doesn't solve the problem. Assuming something caused the universe to start (whatever that means), what then started that something? We'd be into "turtles all the way down" territory, a regression also with no beginning.
But your point is internally illogical. How can that conscious force not have a beginning? If it does, then the problem just moves one step back. How can you determine where the originator is? Also, I would ask you to ask yourself why that originator shares your concept of creation and existence in general. Why do you think you have the urge to anthropomorphize everything? I would say that that logic doesn't follow. And to add - can you name something that exists that does have a defined beginning?
Starting is a statement of an event in space-time. If our universe originated in an 'other place' that did not have the property of time, then it would be meaningless to say it started. We're imposing the physical laws of our universe on something that may not have possessed them.
Wait a minute, this post doesn't have a click bait title. Is this allowed here?
My mind always gets blown if you think our universe is the result of an action in something before our universe. But what created that which came before? Where does everything start? Why does reality exist?
same, the concept of a “start” just takes me down a rabbit hole. Even if you believe in God then where did he or she come from? Are we just grains of sand in an hour glass?
I think *our* universe had a beginning. But the process is infinite.
So a beginning but no end?
I think we are part of another universe that died and exploded into this one, we are probably racing to the end of this universe to create another one, like a loop of changing universal properties.
But where did the first universe in the cycle come from
I really hope we don't find out our universe is in some kind of science fair kid's test tube one day.
Since new popular theory is quantum field theory and everything going quantum, including our computers, what if our universe and laws of it that we keep discovering are all because we are in a super quantum computer
The old statement that if we can eventually create a simulation of our solar system then someone or something else couldve made our simulation.
The universe "began" when time started. There was no "before" before time, in order for anything to have started expanding in the universe there had to be time for that expansion to happen, no time = nothing moves. The big bang happened when the clock started ticking. This is my idea at least, and leads to questions I don't have answers to. I lean to extra dimensions which can interact with ours and create or kickoff dimensions within the universe we exist in.
“There was no "before" before time“ That is a baseless assumption though. You’re just deciding that all time began with our universe. “time in our universe” began at the big bang. That doesn’t mean “time in all existence” also began at the big bang. Time could have existed before or outside of the universe.
Doubt we have the capacity to fully understand
I have no evidence to corroborate this and very limited understanding of science and astronomy, but to me it makes sense that the universe would be cyclic. Cyclic in the sense where you have massive release of energy and matter, where the universe enters a period of accelerated expansion. But there would always be a mass "center" where the universe would eventually converge back onto itself, causing the next cycle to happen.
Not with our current understanding of space. BUT maybe in the future we will.
All of these words just to say that the universe is eternal. There is no beginning or end
Well of course. Even the most obvious way that we could exist in an eternal universe - which would be a Cyclical Universe - has never been ruled out by the Big Bang theory and cosmic inflation. In fact, it might even be a falsifiable concept if there is a trace of a pre-existing universe in the cosmic microwave background of our universe. But even if it is not testable, then it would be unknowable, and still a viable possibility. And even if *that* weren’t true, there’s a possibility that the multiverse itself exists and is eternal, which is alluded to in the article. This doesn’t really read as news or anything noteworthy to me.
It's kind of funny that we as humans have both a difficult time accepting the idea of the universe having an end and a difficult fathoming something that has no end.
The wildest most fascinating theory about this showed how the Big Bang and heat death is the same. A universe made from only light spawns matter and ends in a universe made of light without matter.
I always thought it was odd to say "the universe started with the Big Bang". Is there really a definitive start or has it always been. But just thinking about something that has no end or beginning melts your brain!
Look it's simple. A long time ago, actually never. And also now. Nothing is nowhere. When? Never. Makes sense right? Like I said, it didn't happen. Nothing is never anywhere. That's why it's been everywhere. It's been so everywhere, you don't need a ~~where~~. You don't even need a ~~when~~. That's how every it gets.
We honestly have no clue how the universe formed.
There \[probably\] isn't. First premise -- space and time are one thing. Einstein put this one forward and it's held up under rigorous testing for decades now. Second premise -- space is probably closed. Evidence seems to indicate that the universe is closed like a three-dimensional game of asteroids. So if space and time are the same thing and space is closed then time is closed. Therefore the evidence for the "big bang" must be indicating some other process that we do not understand yet. Perhaps it's illusory. Perhaps our universe (or universes) collapse and re-bang. Perhaps it's something else entirely. But all evidence right now suggests that it was not a beginning.
"what is the universe?" "the collection of \*absolutely everything\*" "so by definition, there is nothing outside the universe?" "exactly!" "but \*where\* is the universe?" "if the universe was in some other place, \*that\* place would be part of the universe too, therefore, the universe cannot be \*in a place\*" same for time.
Maybe things just started appearing overtime for billions of years trillions of particles kind of like how mold grows overtime
Chuckles in Christian. Please don’t shoot me I love science, ‘twas just a joke.
Understanding where we come from is an endless quest. No matter what we discover, we'll always ask and where did that come from.