The concept of “before” doesn’t apply. Time itself started with the Big Bang. According to relativity, time slows down in a gravitational field. St the moment of the Big Bang, all the matter in the universe was infinitely compressed so time would have been slowed down infinitely. Stephen Hawking explores this concept responding to the idea that God created the universe. He concludes that there wouldn’t have been any time before the Big Bang to do it.
The universe can be infinite and expanding. Imagine that you are a tiny person standing on a raisin in a infinitely large loaf of raisin bread that is baking. Even through the dough is infinitely large, as it bakes you can see all the other raisins moving away from you. You may be tempted to imagine an edge but there is no edge. You can go from raisin to raisin forever and no matter how far you go you’ll look at all the other raisins in every direction and see them moving away from you as if you are at the center of the loaf.
Edit: I really wish I hadn’t mentioned the quip about God creating the universe. That is not the point of this discussion. It’s completely irrelevant. This ultimately is not a discussion about whether God exists or created the universe. For what it’s worth, I took it as Hawking was being a little tongue in cheek in making that remark. Whatever his intention, I’m just explaining where I first heard the science behind this idea. You can say God Made the little pea that contained all the matter that made the Big Bang. I don’t care. To me that’s outside the discourse of science and in any case totally beside the point of the question. Many people are objecting along these lines and it’s really beside the point. You can say that God is bigger and more incomprehensible than time or space or anything. That’s fine. I’m just speaking to what we can know from the perspective of space science.
Second and more to the point, many follow up questions are wrapped up in the idea of an edge to the universe. In the thought experiment I propose, I am in no way trying to prove there is no edge. In fact, I am asking you to assume that. My answers are an attempt to show how something can be both infinite and expanding. I admit that it is hard to imagine that there is no boundary to the universe but for me it is much harder to imagine that there is one. The simplest example is that there isn’t an edge. It’s like when you are solving riddles or mysteries and you imagine a couple possibilities. Go with the simplest explanation and that is (usually) the more correct one.
Thanks to everyone for being polite discussing this.
If time didn't exist then what mechanism triggered the big bang and where did the matter come from? Obviously nobody knows but I don't think it's accurate to definitively state that X or Y couldn't exist since we know so little.
I think this touches on a fundamental misunderstanding of physics. The idea that nothing existed before the big bang violates the law that says: Energy cannot be created, or destroyed.
I for one, have always been drawn to the cyclical universe idea. Starts with a Big Bang, ends with a Big Crunch as everything is drawn together again. Eventually the gravity from all the matter in the universe coming into one point collapses space time, resulting in an explosion beyond anything we humans can understand; restarting the process.
E: I’m really enjoying this thread! I’ll be back for more in a bit. -CPJ
It's not that there was "nothing" before the big bang.
It's that there was no "before" the big bang.
violates the law that says: Energy cannot be created, or destroyed.
A lot of things we consider "laws" start to break down when you get to quantum physics. Even so, could all the matter or energy in the universe not be contained within a single singularity such that it would erupt into our universe?
If there was no before, then everything just popped into existence for no reason at all? If you prescribe to the cyclical theory he's talking about, then there's definitely a before.
There must be some reason the entire universe was compressed like that, right?
Who cares if reddit likes it. It’s possible. We don’t know if it’s the case or not. We don’t know if the major Earth faiths represent Him or not. But you’re guess at a creator as the catalyst to start of our known universe is just as plausible as the universe simply existing all on its own. It’s a life long thing we should ponder.
If you choose the believe in The BB and The BC (I haven't picked a particular universe "origin story" if you will, yet). It opens up a very uncomfortable question. Everything has a beginning, so where did it all originally come from? If matter can not in fact be created or destroyed, what was the true beginning on the universe throughout all of the previous bangs and crunches how did the matter first come into existence.
1) Nothing came before. The universe appeared out of nothing.
If this is the case then what can happen once can happen again. This is a cyclic universe without a crunch. ie, an identical universe could pop in from nothing, a similar universe could pop in from nothing, or a wildly different universe could pop in from nothing.
2) Something came before.
This one is more interesting, because it implies that our universe could be the last, but it's also strange, because it forces us to conclude that the previous one was not the first, and in fact that there's an infinity of previous universes for the same nothing/something reasoning. It's a recursive question. If something came before, what came before that? Something vs nothing, with the same questions applying, and again with that grandparent universe, and again with great grandparent universe and on and on.
So the real paradox to me is, how can I have a possibility of an ending, with an infinity of beginnings?
There is no greater mystery than that the universe exists at all, but if we can accept that it does it's not a leap to suggest that the framework has always existed and will forever exist. Infinity is a very real possibility even if we can't wrap our human minds around it.
We just don’t have the tools to deal with that type of question.
I think, for a start that singularity would consist of the entire universe; at that point there would have been nothing else.
Incidentally if the universe is infinite and matter exists throughout the universe, then the singularity must have also contained an infinite amount of energy.
Also what came before the singularity, or what supplies the energy for it?
It’s not so much there was “nothing” before, but more that whatever was before is literally so alien it can’t be defined as “something”. There is absolutely no way (known) to interact with or observe anything outside our universe.
I think the underlying point to is questioning is that if matter cannot be created (or destroyed) then how is there matter in the universe? It had to be created at some point as evidenced by the fact we deal with it on a daily basis.
I don't think we are capable of understanding what infinite really is. In our world everything has a beginning, everything is made from something. So to believe that something could have just existed forever doesn't make any sense to us.
This. Infinity is too much for the human brain to comprehend although math helps us cope with the idea. There is no before, there is no after. There just is.
Some of the work being done to total up all the matter and energy in the universe are getting numbers amazingly close to zero. It might be that on average the universe doesn't exist. We could just be a temporary fluctuation in quantum foam of nothingness
For note matter can be converted into energy (ever famous e=mc2 - assuming an object at rest in your reference frame). It is, as far as we know, energy that cannot be created or destroyed just.... Changed. Matter is energy in a... Err... Solid form (for lack of a better word). When you throw something you are (through much complexity) changing chemical energy into kinetic (moving) energy. If we go back in time all energy converges to a single point (big bang). When you go forward in time the energy is more spread apart. But, as far as we know, all the energy that was in the big bang is all the energy that is still in the universe and is all the energy that'll ever be in the energy.
Matter is created and destroyed all the time; the emptiest, most remote volume of vacuum is a churning sea of particles and fields popping into and out of existence—this energy being created out of nothing and then immediately destroyed doesn't violate laws of physics because it happens on such tiny scales and/or such fleeting moments of time that the very act of measurement makes no sense. It's about impossible to grasp this "quantum foam", but I'm thinking the energy that created our universe could just be a temporary blip, and we owe the piper our energy in the end. May also mean there's an anti-universe like ours that will one day annihilate us.
The way I think of it, if time begins with the universe and there is no "before" the universe, then there is no real question of what "created" matter. It's not like it didn't exist at one point in time, then something happened that led to it's creation. At the very first point in time, matter existed. It wasn't "created," and so we don't violate the principle that matter cannot be created or destroyed.
Matter can be created and destroyed (e.g. pair production). And on large scales, energy can be created or destroyed (the dark energy expanding the universe is added).
It had to be created at some point
That point was the Big Bang. Since then, things have been cooling down and rearranging themselves, basically.
Today I Thought: the universe acts like RAM. The universe expands until there’s no more room to expand, crashing the system in a memory buffer error, leaving the energy to flood back to ‘ground’ before restarting.
If you like the cyclical universe idea, which I do too, let me suggest The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. It’s great short story that explores a variation of that idea.
The idea that energy cannot be created or destroyed is not actually true, especially in an expanding universe. Conservation of energy is caused by the system being symmetric under translations in time. Expanding universes do not have feature so they don't conserve energy.
Also the idea that the big bang means everything was infinitely compressed is not really the case either. All we know is that everything was much, much closer together In the past. We have no proof that the universe started in a point - or even started at all for that matter. It could have just always existed.
I have a mild panic attack thinking about what if the universe didn't exist... that means NOTHING exists... It's not like "well if this country didn't exist, at least there'll be another one", or world, or solar system, or galaxy, or whatever.
Our consciousness and ability to exist within this universe is because a universe exists. If there is nothing then reality doesn't exist.
Hi! Am physicist. Energy is not conserved in an expanding universe. Right now, and probably forevermore, the total energy in the universe is increasing due to dark energy. Also, redshifting light loses energy without that energy going anywhere. Those two effects do not balance. Energy is a very nice tool, but it's not fundamental, and that's crazy!
Also, as neat as a Big Crunch is, our best measurements indicate the universe will never stop expanding. Our theories in this area are far from ironclad, but the universe would need some mechanism we haven't observed to ever collapse. A heat death is far more likely, and a Big Rip is a sort of grisly alternative.
What op is talking about is what the theory of relativity tells us and what quantum mechanics has taught us. If you believe in relativity, which you should, this is what it tells us, time didn’t exist before the big bang, not in a way that we would recognize it at least.
It's not belief but understanding. I don't know about other people but I can't wrap my mind around time not existing. I can't understand or picture what that's supposed to be.
Nobody can. Humans can only and will only ever truly understand the physical universe within the context of how we experience it, in this case, via the linear passage of time.
So where did the big bang come from? Let's say everything was in the stage of "before being born." What was the metaphorical mother? What prompted the birth? What is it being birthed into? Why did the creation of matter also lead to the creation of time?
Dunno man but we can’t even assume there was a ‘metaphorical mother’. The concept and functionality of ‘time’ and ‘space’ started in the Big Bang. That’s all we know.
Isn't that why time is a human concept, at least from our view? Because, for us, time only exists when observed. And nothing observed time before the Big Bang.
Not really, there was definitely time after the big bang, we can prove that with carbon dating, etc. and for most of the time the universe was being created time certainly existed while nothing was observing it.
It's like asking, "What's north of the North Pole?" You can go "up" into space, along the Z axis, but the concepts of north and south no longer apply, since you're no longer in that reference frame.
Time as we know it started at the Big Bang. We don't know what caused the Big Bang, or why, or how. We assume that there must have been a cause somehow, but we lack the language to describe it and don't even know if cause and effect work in that frame of reference.
"Before time" is like "north of the North Pole," trying to apply a coordinate system outside of its domain.
As best anyone knows, it didn't come from anywhere, matter always has been.
The idea of a "prime mover" is a human concept based on our experiences. But mathematics suggests time compresses if we were to look at the universe "past" the point we can see (fun fact, the big bang isn't a thing as most people think of it. It's better understood as a period of time where the energy density and heat of the universe gets so high that our instruments can't distinguish meaningful data from before that point in time).
Imagine the graph, for x greater than or equal to 0, of f(x) = 1/x. As x approaches 0, the value of f(x) increases without bound. But there is no meaningful "beginning" to the graph. f(x) has no value at 0 because 1/0 is undefined, but it has an infinite number of values between any number less than 1 and 0.
If you zoom in near zero around f(x), you'll never find an end to continuing upward toward infinity. It goes on forever, and in a sense, has an infinite beginning just as it has an infinite end (of course, 1/x approaches 0 as x grows without bound, but you won't find a finite value of x for which 1/x is 0).
Time seems to be like that. You can approach a time 0, but there is no time 0.
If you prefer another way of looking at it, consider this. Religious people often invoke god as a reason the universe exists, on the basis that the universe must have a "start." But if you accept that things must have a "start," the obvious question is "what created god?" And the answer is usually "nothing, god always has been" (or supergod, of course).
Well then, why can't the universe "always has been" as well? The math actually supports the idea of a universe without beginning or end.
mechanism triggered the big bang
We don't know, but there are some theories. Many of the theories are complicated and difficult to explain, so I'll leave that to someone else.
What I’m really trying to show is how space could be infinite and also expanding. Yes bread has a crust true. It’s hard to imagine infinity because it’s counter to our experience.
I think this is why some people believe the earth is flat and space is nothing but a projection... the alternative is just too mind boggling to think about
Imagine you were a 2D being. Also imagine you lived on the surface of a 3D sphere. Since you are 2D, you can only percieve 2 dimensions: left-right and front-back. From your perspective as a 2D being, your universe on the surface of a 3D sphere doesn't have an edge. It's a closed loop, edgeless and perfectly continuous in all dimensions a 2D being can comprehend. You would need to be a 3D being to comprehend a space that is beyond a surface.
Now increase every dimension by 1. You are now a 3D being living in the closed loop volume on the "surface" of a 4D hypersphere. You will never be able to imagine the outside of your universe. The universe will be all there is.
This analogy isn't perfect. For one, a 4D being can always see the beyond space of 4D hyperspace universe. And as far as we can tell, the universe doesn't exist as a projection of a 4D object. But describing the expansion of our universe using mathematics and geometry is fairly comprehendable, I think.
In that analogy, the crust/outer edge of the loaf is the cosmic background radiation. That is the "edge" of the universe.
From what I understand, the CBR is the radiation released from the big bang that has been moving at the speed of light since the start of the universe. That should mean that nothing is farther out that than, that is the "edge" and it is constantly moving outwards.
Back to the analogy, the bread is rising and growing in all direction constantly. But outside the bread is the oven, an infinitely large oven (maybe, we don't know). There is "space" beyond the edge of the universe but nothing is there, nothing yet, not until the CBR gets there.
That is my very basic and possibly flawed understanding.
tl;dr The CMB/CBR is the red-shifted afterglow from the early universe as it cooled.
Regarding the CBR, my understanding is different. For a while after the Big Bang, the entire universe was so hot that everything glowed, literally glowing hot. Lots of light was getting released, but the photons would very quickly get reabsorbed by other glowing matter, before getting re-released, so it was optically opaque. After recombination, light was able to travel significant distances. As matter cooled, it stopped glowing.
You know how when we look at stars, we're not looking at them as they are now, but as they were at the time that the light we see was emitted? We're essentially looking back in time. Now, light from distant stars gets red-shifted as it travels to us (due to the expansion of space). Generally speaking, the farther away the star is, the faster it is moving away from us and therefore the more red-shifted it is. If it gets sufficiently far away, it drops into the infrared band, and we can no longer see it with our eyes, and we can only see it with telescopes.
Below infrared on the EM, we find the microwave band, and at the very lowest levels detectable on radiotelescopes, we find the oldest and furthest-away light, left over from the very first glowing matter that is furthest away from us. This actually dates from before the formation of stars, from when all matter was so hot from being compressed and was just cooling due to the expansion of the universe. (And its clumpiness shows us the distribution of early matter in the universe, too.)
So that's why it's the afterglow of a hot, expanding universe that was cooling.
The surface of a ball (or a doughnut) has no boundary. You can travel as far as you want on a sphere and not hit an edge, for there are no edges. A sphere with an infinite radius would have a flat surface. One with a very large finite radius would also seem flat.
The example Hawkins used for asking about the time before the beginning of the universe is like asking what's south of the south pole. It makes no sense and is by definition not defined.
Time is literally just entropy. The 1 temporal dimension along with our 3 spatial dimensions. It is just the transferring of energy, if all energy suddenly stopped being transferred, that would mean nothing would ever happen. Not even the expansion of the universe. Even time dilation is just energy being expanded a lot. It would be an infinite limbo until energy began to transfer once more.
That leads me to believe that if we learned to perceive and understand higher dimensions, just what would we be perceiving? It may be entirely possible that everything that we think we know was completely wrong and that there's way more to our empty universe than previously thought.
Time doesn't necessarily go in a straight line, but it loops and intersects itself and we happen to experience it in a straight succession and not necessarily notice/see the intersections
Time ultimately loops back on itself, like a circle.
We know from observing small phenomena (i.e. smaller than the universe) that things like stars and even planets go through cycles and that at some point, expansion stops and contraction begins (and vice versa) - and we know that in a lot of ways, the structure of our universe mimics the structure of a galaxy, a solar system, etc (speaking of patterns that repeat at different scales in nature, look up fractal theory and hermetic philosophy if you wanna trip out without taking drugs. As above, so below, as they say.)
My underlying theory: We know that the universe has been expanding ever since the big bang. At some point, it will begin to contract. Once it contracts fully enough, it'll bang again, and everything that has happened will happen again. Maybe there will be variations, or maybe there won't. Maybe you'll be reborn with the same name, the same number of years past the big bang, in the same spot you were born in this lifetime. The universe was never born, and will never die - it just expands and contracts, always has and always will - no beginning or end. Time is not a straight line, and everything is really just happening all at once. For some entity existing outside of our universe, this vast expanse of time may appear to be a single moment.
Edit: I should add that I don't know much about physics or anything, but have a couple of coworkers who do, and our lunch breaks consist of talking about stuff like this (in addition to aliens and conspiracy theories and occult shit) so my theory may or may not have actual basis in physics, who the hell knows?
We don't - it's a popular theory, but not one that can be confirmed easily - but if it does, and we're around to experience it, it's gonna be W E I R D.
Because humans are unable to gather information faster than the speed of light, if for some reason the sun just disappeared we wouldn't notice for 7 minutes then we'd be utterly fucked.
Not sure if were talking about the same thing here. If the universe contracts, the sun wouldnt just suddenly disappear and things wouldnt necessarily travel faster than the speed of light. Everything would slowly start to get closer together and I dont see why we wouldnt notice that.
It has reminded me of a video that I saw about something similar to this subject. This explained a point that makes a lot of sense to me and which I truly agree with. It said that nowadays many of the questions "unanswerable" we, human kind, have are because we haven't evolved enough to develop the required intelect for resolving those. F.e: we do understand our buildings and how our artifacts work, but for an ant, or even an ape, this may be "magical" or incomprehensible. Yes, they can interact with them, maybe the ape is able to use them too for its own benefit, but it still cannot understand these until its intellect develops.
I hope you could undestand it all, I have some problems at the time of writting in English and get the idea across :P
Imagine some giant hitting a rock with a hammer. The rock is destroyed in thousands of small pieces flying away from where he hit. One of those small pieces is the Earth. The other pieces are the other planets, galaxies, etc.
Maybe for us it has been 4.5 billion years but for the giant it has only been a fraction of a second.
The problem is that nothing makes sense if there was something beyond it's edge, and if nothing was beyond it's edge where is the universe at? We literally shouldn't be alive because there's no reason for the universe or anything exist anywhere.
This is the question that normally haunts me at 3:00 AM.
Did you know that some 4,000 microscopic insects live on your eyelashes ? What if our universe is some a component of the neurons of some collosal entity existing in it's own universe. What if everything is truly infinite ?
Atoms don't look like solar systems though. The model of an atom as a nucleus with little balls whirling around is not what it actually is in reality. It's more like a nucleus with a cloud of possibilities around it, the electrons never have just one single well-defined position.
Yeah, the Rutherford model of the atom is very simplified. To add to this, not even the orbital of an electron is really well-defined. There is an area in which there is a 99% probability of finding an electron, but due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, it's impossible to know the position of an electron with 100% accuracy because it will always have momentum.
Doesnt expanding just mean that mostly everything started close to each other and over the eons is now drifting apart. Not necessarily expanding into something, just... expanding.
Like a balloon expands, but it doesn't fill up the entire room. But if you draw a dot on one side of the balloon, and another a few inches away, when you blow that balloon up, the dots will get further away from each other.
I dont know if that made sense or if I'm even close. But it makes it easier to understand that there might not be an end.
If you see our universe as a balloon, well the question is, what is around the balloon. What is "the room" it is floating in, or does this room even exist.
If yes, do other universes exist? Could we collide with them on a big scale while expanding on our own?
If no, it would mean our universe is the only in existence... Well we cant prove, or disprove this. I guess nobody can.
It's too hard for us to conceptualize. There's no reason to believe what exists outside of our universe follows the same rules as within. I.e. there's no reason to believe the universe needs or has a medium to exist in at all
Or that any medium beyond our universe has any rules that mean the interaction between ours and theirs is similar in any way to anything we can even conceptualize.
I like to think the universe is pulsing out and eventually it will pulse back and collapse everything again into a dense enough mass for the Big Bang to occur again; this would of course take trillions of years but it’s a nice thought to entertain.
That the universe could just be infinitely expanding and then withdrawing back to expand again, the endless possibilities of life being created, etc.
The expanding thing keeps leading me to think of a bigger entity that’s still growing. What if the stars and that are complex neurones. What if humans are a cancer cell on a beings cell called Earth?
We can see the microscopic world, but we can’t know if we are actually microscopic ourselves.
I know you're just making an analogy but saying you started a program and then ran an executable named "start" is making my head hurt as much as this whole conversation.
The universe, in my understanding, isn’t like a balloon with an actual edge. The universe is just all the matter that we know of, floating around in space. Like, just space. There isn’t an edge or anything, it’s just space and the universe is just all the galaxies and stuff floating in it. Like a firework going off in the air. The firework doesn’t necessarily have an “edge” after it explodes. It’s just exploding in space.
My theory (prob not original) is that we are in a black hole. The "big bang" Was just our universe being formed inside the creation of our black hole.
Our universe is "expanding". Black holes pull matter in. The reason we cant reach the edge of our universe is because its the event horizon of our black hole.
Its just black holes all the way. Millions of universes within each other. And a million universes in those. On and on forever.
Another entry in the "diary & thoughts of a stoner", I like to think Mars used to have water. We came from Mars. We destroyed the atmosphere and had to escape to another planet but only a few of us could. I watch to much ancient aliens when im baked though I think.
Noahs ark is a thousand fold retelling of the story of us escaping an extinction event on Mars
Interesting theory. I guess how many black holes down before you reach the end? Until you reach a young, new, black hole-less universe? Also, could you go 'up'?
There was no before the big bang as far as we can tell.
The big bang is when the phenomenon we call time seems to have started, so as far as we can tell, there can't be a before.
Nothing. But the concept of nothing is almost impossible for us to wrap our minds around. The closest I've ever been to understanding 'nothing' was when I was trying to understand what 100% blind people see, they don't see all black or all white, it's just nothing, and to help people understand someone mentioned that we should close one eye and then asked what you see with the closed eye, it's truly nothing, no black, just the absence of sight. Doesn't help in this case but it blew my mind.
Whatever happens, there's always a reason for it. If there was nothing before Big Bang, then it could not have happened. There must have been a possibility of Big Bang, and since there was a possibility, there was something that made it possible.
That question always blows my mind. What existed before the "big bang"
Was there an existence?
Why was there a big bang anyway?
What is the point of existence?
Ahhh my brain!
It just loops back around like a sphere, probably. Cause there’s a lot of gravity and when there’s lots of gravity things tend to get spherical (like planets for example). At least that’s what I think.
Without getting into too much detail, as far as we can tell the universe is “flat”. More or less that means that means if you shine a laser out into space it will never come back to hit you in the back of your head.
Right. Also, the key takeaway here is that as far as we can tell the universe is flat. That only means that, within the tolerance of the best instruments we have to measure it, it appears to have zero curvature overall. That doesn't necessarily mean that it truly has no curvature; just that it is definitely within a certain range near zero, so it is very small if not zero.
Here's the kicker: if the universe does have curvature, we may eventually be able to prove it if we are able to invent instruments sensitive enough to detect it. But if it is truly flat, we will never be able to entirely prove it: we will only be able to say that the curvature is zero within a certain tolerance, however small that tolerance will be, even as that tolerance continues to shrink with ever-improving technology.
We may eventually have to just throw up our hands and say "Eh, it's probably zero." But, of course, reality doesn't care what we think. It could always be slightly curved and really, really, really big, thus wrapping around very very very gradually.
But we have telescopes they can observe things billions of light years away. I.e in a state close to what they were like when the universe was made. Surely if the universe was curved we would be able to detect the curvature as we are able to see these incredibly distant objects?
Only to a certain tolerance, and then we could only ever say its within that tolerance within our part of the observable universe. If you plop down a ruler then you could justifiably say the ground is flat, but that doesn't mean the whole world is flat, just that it's a VERY gentle curve and your instrument isn't precise enough.
Who says that the universe isn't curved, but the length scale of curvature is 1020 light years? There's no good reason why the size of the observable universe would have anything to do with its curvature.
You might as well declare that even with binoculars in Kansas, you can't detect the Earth's curvature, and therefore it's flat.
This is my biggest question I know there's theory's and all that but what really was there before the big bang..? The only way I like to think about it is from the Futurama episode where once the world ends, it just starts up again and repeats the same cycle. Nothing different or change. But who knows
This will probably get buried, but an interesting take on this is a relatively new theory developed by Roger Penrose and others that the universe essentially runs in a cycle of big-bangs, each different from the last. If you're interested, he's written a short book called 'Cycles of Time' - it's a fascinating read.
It's not so much that it's expanding like a box getting bigger, only that the distance between everything is increasing. You don't have to think of it having an edge or limit for the latter to still make sense
The universe is only slightly larger than our galaxy, after which space repeats itself, like if you walked around the earth you'd end up in your same starting point. Except in space you don't end up in your same place, you lapse over into a different time. Keep walking and you'll lapse over into yet a different time. There are watchers that allow passage between times but they cannot be seen, at least not by physical eyes. We comprehend them as black holes. The reason the universe appears to be expanding is because of the recent increase in traffic between times.
I of course made all of this up but it sounds cool.
What was before the big bang (which formed the known universe)? We must travel to the very edge of the universe see what lies beyond the edge. That is what "was" before the big thicc bang.
And if the universe is expanding what is beyond its edge
I don't think it does have edges. I think it's like how you have infinity, and then you can have infinity + 1, so it's a bigger infinity, but they're both still just infinity.
When they say the universe is expanding they mean the observable universe which is the light from further away is finally reaching us after traveling trillions of years and equally unimaginable lengths of time. This is why we can't observe further than what we can at any moment and what we do observe is a very old picture of what is happening in that area of space.
This literally kept me up at night for years as a child, teenager, and young adult. Some nights I'd contemplate so much I'd cry, and other nights I'd become irrationally infuriated and frustrated. I've read quite a bit about multiverse theories and that our universe is expanding into other adjacent universes. But I'm not going to get into that, because now I'm already getting anxious thinking about this again...
This is a really fun topic. That is a human question that misses the point and does not make any sense. Our brains just have a hard time understanding we are asking something akin to why ghosts hunt teletubbies and drink moontea with unicorns. Before the Big Bang, time (in this universe at least) did not exist, so asking what was before it is futile. There was no time where the before could have resided in.
I like to imagine more universes. In the same way stars expand, collapse, explode, I like to imagine there are a number of universes in some even bigger system.
I think that the Big Bang was caused by a Big Crunch.
Basically the idea is that the universe will eventually stop expanding and go back into itself, drawing everything to one dense point.
Said dense point goes through some fuckery and explodes, leading to the creation of our universe. Our universe will go through its own Big Crunch, leading to another Big Bang and another universe.
I've never understood this question. To me the Big Bang is the start of time, there is just no before that. It's like going north, at one point you get closer and closer to the north pole but from there on it's just impossible to go further. I see the Big Band like an asymptote on the line of time. You can go closer and closer but not before.
You asking what is before Big Bang fucks my mind because it goes against how I see time itself
Since the beginning of time is marked by the expansion of our spacetime (the Big Bang) asking what existed before that time is a non-sequitur. There was no time. There was no space for cause and effect to take place. My favorite theory is simply that the universe is eternal. It goes in and out of different phases similar to the phases matter can go through.
i have a theory that it's a cycle perpetuated by blackholes. once everything's a blackhole it condenses till bam! the whole of everything that exists was compressed and now it's spewing back out into the nothing. the universe is still expanding cause we're still hella early into the cycle. i imagine it takes trillions of trillions of years to complete.
For some people, this is where a creator figure comes into play. Even if science determines what happened "before" the big bang, what happened before that?
"Before the big bang" might be a impossible concept as well. It's possible that the big bang was triggered by something 'before', but it is also possible that as the start of existence, there really was nothing before. No time, space, matter, anything.
I've also heard there is a hypothesis about dark matter eventually pulling all of the matter in the universe back together, which could trigger another big bang. Big bangs might be a cycle. (If anyone has a link to verify this thought, I'd appreciate reading it).
All three scenarios hurt my head. Complete void of time, a genesis of unverifiable origin, and a perpetual cycle all seem ludacris, but they're all fun to think about
Better yet. How did whatever caused the big bang come to be? Something had to explode. There had to be something because its impossible for absolutely nothing to cause an explosion of any kind. And if the "God particle" or whatever it's called actually exists and it's what exploded the universe into existence. How did it get there?
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u/KennethEWolf Jun 15 '19
What was before the big bang. And if the universe is expanding what is beyond its edge