What Happened Before the Big Bang?

The Bad Astronomer writes to tell us that a recent advance in Loop Quantum Gravity theory appears to allow the mathematics of cosmology to be extended to the time before the Universe underwent the Big Bang. Bad Astronomer also attempts to simplify things a bit with his own explanation of the new discovery.

Comments

There is no before the Big Bang.

[Ckwop]

I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.

While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would be large than the current Universe at that size.

In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.

In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!

Simon

Re:There is no before the Big Bang.

[eln]

That's an interesting hypothesis, and one I've heard before. What is the evidence for it though? Is it just that all of our current models break down at that point, so we assume there was nothingness? Or do we have some sort of observed evidence to support the idea that time itself did not exist prior to the big bang?

As humans, we have a hard time envisioning "eternity," but we have an equally hard time grappling with the idea that existence itself would have a finite beginning or end. Both of these concepts exist too far out of our experience to really grasp. I guess this is why people find so much comfort in faith in a divine being that both exists eternally and defines the beginning and end of existence as we know it.

Re:There is no before the Big Bang.

[Pendersempai]

I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.... I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!

I agree that it's a beautiful concept, but it might not be right. It's testable, and they're going to test it. If you want call your arguments scientific, you have to accept that in science, the most beautiful explanation is not always the correct one. I think that both geocentrism and flat-earth theory are beautiful in a kind of fairy tale aesthetic, but we had to let them go because they were wrong. If they run the experiments and conclude that time extended prior to the big bang, so be it.

Anyway, isn't it more appealing that time is cyclical rather than terminal? Consider the alternative: all the rich vibrancy of the universe slowly dying of metastasized entropy until it is an ever-expanding fossil of inert dust. How much nicer that there may be a cure for entropy, even if it is one that we will not survive!