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: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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