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Before The Big Bang?

Posted by timothy on from the big-pleading? dept.

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.

2 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Re:I might be oversimplifying by SIGFPE · · Score: 4
    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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    -- SIGFPE
  2. What is North of the North Pole? by ryants · · Score: 3
    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

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    Ryan T. Sammartino
    "Ancora imparo"