Before The Big Bang?

Psx writes: "The New York times has an interesting article discussing theories of what happened before the big bang." Pretty heavy stuff to think about.

Comments

Re:What is North of the North Pole?

[stevelinton]

My very own favourtie analogy, but as I understood this article it was saying that quantum cosmologists are moving on from this viewpoint, or perhaps circumventing it. In the moments from the Planck time to the inflationary epoch (roughly the first 10^-35 of a second) the structure of the universe is somewhat malleable (eg by inflation) but not as completely unknowable (without a full theory of quantum gravity) as it was before the Planck time. Some versions of inflation, for instance, would make our universe just a small region where inflation happened to stop, in a much bigger universe where inflation may be a permanent condition.

At least I think that's what they're saying.

Re:I might be oversimplifying

[p3d0]

The very concept that not being able to measure something means it "doesn't have a value" is so ridiculous as to be laughable.

If you have a theory that doesn't have this property, and explains observations as well as quantum mechanics, please let us know what it is.

The arbitrary decision that a man is an observer but a cat is not is equally stupid and nonsensicle.

Then why have you made that decision? This isn't necessary for the Schrodinger's Cat experiment.

All they have are equations that seem to work.

No, they also have observations. They have reams of observations which are inconsistent, for instance, with the theory that any particle has a definite position at any given time. (Remember, that is also only a theory.)
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Re:I hate the NY Times..

[nublord]

userid: 12345678 password: 12345678

Re:I hate the NY Times..

[nublord]

You're welcome.

Re:I might be oversimplifying

[SIGFPE]

No. The electron has some possibility of being anywhere until it is measured. That does not mean that the electron is everywhere

So tell me...how do you explain the two slit experiment?
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Re:I might be oversimplifying

[SIGFPE]

The arbitrary decision that a man is an observer but a cat is not is equally stupid and nonsensicle (sic).

Where did you get that idea about humans and cats from? Few modern physicists think that there is anything special about humans that makes them 'observers' but that cats aren't. Do you have any reference to a book that makes this claim or are you making this stuff up yourself? All they have are equations that seem to work. Interpreting them is another matter Tell me - what does 'interpretation' add that the equations don't provide?

the very concept that not being able to measure something means it "doesn't have a value" is so ridiculous as to be laughable

Where is the crest of a wave after the wave has broken on the shore? What is its speed?
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Re:I might be oversimplifying

[SIGFPE]

Photons fired one at a time eventually produce exactly the same interference patterns as light beams. The probability distribution of the arrival point of each photon in the two slit experiment is different to the sum of that from two individual slits.

Please. Did your school not offer physics?

I have a PhD myself. What about you? Sounds like you didn't understand what you learnt at high school. This is a crappy retort but hey - you started the crappy ad hominem attack because you're clearly too ignorant to respond in terms of physics.
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Re:I might be oversimplifying

[SIGFPE]

I might be oversimplifying, but I think Heisenburg meant that an electron could be anywhere, not is everywhere

Unless they're historians as well no physicist could care less what Heisenberg originally meant. It's completely irrelevant to the practice of doing physics today.

Percentages are nice, but Joe want's to know! So what does Joe do? He declared to the world that his cat is 50% dead.

This is a completely incorrect picture. Joe tried damn hard to work with a probabilistic view of things for many decades. But you know what? - it didn't work. Joe didn't decide the cat was half dead because he had to know - he decided it because if the cat had a 50% chance of being dead it would behave completely differently to what is observed. Physicists aren't terribly afraid of probability (notwithstanding some comments to the contrary by Einstein). But probability theory failed. Simple experiments that can be repeated easily simply can't be explained by probability theory. And if you examine some books on physics you'll find that physicists are still using probability theory to describe plenty of physics - just not the parts that are better explained using superpositions of states.
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Not really hugely offtopic :-)

[spankfish]

In the worlds before Monkey, primal Chaos reigned.
Heaven sought Order, but the Phoenix can fly only when its feathers are grown.
The Four Worlds formed again and yet again, as endless aeons wheeled and passed.
Time, and the pure essences of Heaven, the moisture of the Earth, the powers of the Sun and the Moon, all worked upon a certain rock, old as Creation.
And it became magically fertile. That first egg was named "Thought".
Tapaphuta (sic) Buddha, the father Buddha said "With our thoughts, we make the world".
Elemental forces caused the egg to hatch. From it then came a stone Monkey! The nature of Monkey was... irrepressable!

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Re:Poetry

[Alien54]

Physicists sound like they are starting to become mystics, rather than say there was a cause. They sometimes fall into linguistic traps of their own making.

For example, by definiton, the universe is all that there is, and so how could there be anything else? The problem there is the definition, since maybe all that we see and extrapolate is NOT all there is.

It would be a scary universe where it is populated by explosions that we experience as the big bang, but where the "big bang"is a mundane routine event, and is as common as stars and galaxies are here.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

The early universe

[Starbreeze]

This was the subject of discussion a while back on /. IIRC. Here's a link to a story from last month with pictures of what they think the early universe looked like.

http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/news/press/00/pr0025.htm

Poetry

[Kraft]

From the article:

Nevertheless, most cosmologists, including Dr. Guth and Dr. Linde, agree that the universe ultimately must come from somewhere, and that nothing is the leading candidate.

... isn't that beautiful?

-Kraft

What is North of the North Pole?

[ryants]

I cannot take the time to login to the NY Times, but I have studied up some on cosmology, and most of what I read points to the following:

• Since the Big Bang is the beginning of time, asking "What came before the Big Bang?" is as meaningless as asking "What is North of the North Pole?" "Before" has no meaning at the beginning of time, just as "North" has no meaning at the North Pole. Similarly, asking "What caused the Big Bang" is equally nonsensical, since for the Big Bang to be the effect of a cause, the cause would have to happen before hand.
• Even if the Big Bang were not the beginning of time, any and all information from before the Planck time is forever lost, so there's no real point in discussing it anyways, except for idle conjecture and religious rantings.

For anyone looking for a good primer on such things, I would highly recommend The Little Book of the Big Bang. Very readable.

Ryan T. Sammartino

A New Theory

[6EQUJ5]

Everyone knows that the universe began with an event known as the Big Gang Bang. As things cooled over time, many porno stars were formed, and that's why cyberspace is now filled with them. "Billions and billions," as Carl Sagen once said. Worlds revolve around these stars, and without them life would not be possible (or bearable). Scientists are now trying to determine whether the universe will expand forever, or collapse in on itself and finish abruptly.

If you can think of a more plausible theory, I'd love to here it.