Before the Big Bang: why the huge silence?

Factual Questions
1

Okay, maybe not the “huge silence,” but a silence, anyway. Just for the record, I’m an atheist firmly planted in the real world, don’t believe conspiracy theories in general, and usually trust smart, accredited scientists to not blindly make stuff up or quote 2,000 year-old books written by semi-literate monks.

But my question is – and apologies if it’s already been referred to somewhere else because i couldn’t find it anywhere – is why the relatively Big Silence by most of the finest cosmologists/physicists/astronomers etc. on what was (or more appropriately, wasn’t) around before the Singularity suddenly popped our entire universe into being in a matter of one attosecond to the power of minus ten trillion . . . lock, stock and barrel?

I reluctantly accept the Big Bang because so many great minds are so remarkably sure about it, but if they’re so damn sure about THAT, how come there is this vast silence on what there might have been BEFORE it? I’m sorry, “nothing” or “the absence of anything” just doesn’t cut it for me.

If they are able to conjure up such a specific, concrete vision of the Big Bang, to the extent of dividing its evolution into tinier and tinier time scales until those in themselves become almost abstract – why can’t they at least come up with some sort of an EXCUSE for what they think was around before our universe sprang into existence?

For all intents and purposes, unless you were somehow able to perceive things on timescales of femtoseconds or attoseconds, our universe IN ITS ENTIRETY was simply NOT THERE one attosecond (to the power of minus ten trillion trillion trillion or what have you) and the next was ten trillion trillion trillion light years across, with everything that was destined to be IN IT already extant in one form or another (all numbers complete fabrications of my imagination).

Are we simply unequipped to answer that question, mentally? or even venture a theory? They seem so damn convinced about the progression of events AFTER the Big bang – why the complete absence of a theory about BEFORE the Big Bang?

I’m really sorry, but “absence of anything,” “non-existence of anything that could be perceived as ‘something,’” or simply “nothingness” just is not an answer.

It’s all very well to babble endlessly about the Big Bang and dark matter and String Theory, but really, how can I seriously muster a defense against “God created everything” in the face of such a profound silence from Earth’s greatest scientific minds?

Man created God, and then MAYBE Man’s God created everything, but that’s not what I’m here to discuss. What do our most incredibly, awesomely gifted scientific minds have to say about this?

Hint: I WILL accept “We just don’t have any idea,” or “The human mind is simply not equipped to conceive of such things” but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

2

It’s my understanding (as filtered through what I remember of the community college astronomy class I took 11 years ago) that the phrase “before the Big Bang” is an oxymoron, because time itself is a product of the Big Bang.

So the answer to your question is “Mu”.

3

This is basically it. We can know things about the Big Bang because our current Universe is the result of it, and we can extrapolate backwards from present conditions to arrive at some concept of the moments just after the Big Bang.

But we can’t know anything for sure about what came before the Big Bang. It could have been “nothing” (even if you dislike the idea), or it could have been a previous Universe. We don’t know if the “laws” that govern the present Universe would have operated in any previous Universe, or if physics was completely different.

Of course scientists can (and do) speculate about what came “before” the Big Bang (if anything), but these theories are not really testable.

4

What came before the Big Bang?

Well, to paraphrase Stephen Hawking in what has become almost a cliché:

5

Asking what happened before time existed is like asking what’s north of the North Pole.

I think a lot of people imagine the Big Bang as something happening to an infinitely small ‘singularity’ that is floating around in space somewhere. But there was no space for it to float around in, because space itself was within the singularity.

EDIT: Scooped on the Hawking quote!

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6

There is no huge silence, nor vast silence, nor any need for an excuse on the part of science. You are simply asking the wrong question. Asking what happened “before the Big Bang” is a misuse of terminology. What you are really interested in knowing is better posed as “Does anything exist outside our Universe?”, and scientists have certainly spent plenty of time thinking about that question, though without any hard answers yet.

You can start reading here:

7

It may not tickle your fancy but that’s the answer. The Big Bang was the beginning of existence. There was nothing before it. And scientists don’t address subjects that don’t exist.

8

There is no reason even to assume that our puny ape brains, forged as they were on the savannah in Africa, are capable of grokking the answer in the first place.

9

I’ve always hated that. There are at least three points on Earth that could be called the North Pole. At any one of them, you can point North. What’s North of the North Pole? Two other North Poles.

10

Scientists aren’t silent on the matter. See Eternal Inflation at wikipedia. You don’t hear about it as much because it is more speculative, with less in the way of measurement support. The (only?) support there is comes from the details of the measurement of the cosmic microwave background. This article talks about spots in the CMB which may be evidence of other universes in the multiverse having an effect.

I’ve also seen articles to the effect that the variation of the amplitude of the CMB spatial modes with there period is tied to characteristics of how inflation proceeded. ETA: Those measurements have only been available for a short time. The first, COBE, in 1989, but the WMAP results, with much better detail, only since 2003. From the Big Bang wikipedia page linked below:

In contrast, the Big Bang makes a lot of predictions, like the relative abundance of Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium. These put it on firmer footing.

11

I think there’s actually a very good reason: we’re capable of arbitrary symbolic manipulation (extended as necessary by outside resources, such as pen & paper, computers, or simply other puny ape brains), and thus, can in principle compute anything that can be computed at all (as per, say, the Turing machine definition of computability). To all appearances, only computable processes are physically possible (all proposals for processes going beyond this include what is known as ‘supertasks’, i.e. performing infinitely many operation in a finite amount of time, and similar things). Thus, we seem to be in principle able to understand anything that can physically happen (if by ‘understanding’ we mean something like ‘recapitulating’, i.e. giving a step-by-step account of). So, there’s good reason to assume that we ought to be able to understand the origins of the universe.

Of course, this may fail in practise in several ways—we could just not have enough resources, i.e. not enough paper exists to write down the answer, for example. But I don’t think there’s any reason for defeatism until we haven’t spent a few tens of thousands of years trying.

As to the OP, there are many proposals on the table regarding the origin of the universe (which I take to be a question regarding the how, rather than the why, of its coming into existence—these questions are often not well distinguished, as for instance in Lawrence Krauss’ recent book A Universe from Nothing, in which he purports to answer the latter, while only talking about the former—nevertheless, I think his lecture on the subject may be interesting).

Alexander Vilenkin has proposed the universe to be the result of a quantum tunneling event: in principle, out of the quantum vacuum, all sorts of structures can spontaneously arise, owing to the fundamental uncertainty relations (note that this does not explain the existence of the quantum vacuum, or why the universe should obey quantum mechanics in the first place).

James Hartle and Stephen Hawking have issued the no-boundary proposal, in which the universe does not have a proper ‘beginning’, i.e. no point to the past such that there is no ‘before’ this point, but nevertheless, is of finite past-temporal extent. (Hence, the ‘north of the north pole’-analogy.)

Perhaps the most widely-discussed proposal currently is that of eternal inflation, in which our universe is simply a ‘bubble’ (one of many) in which the exponential inflation has run out of steam, so to speak, leading to the big bang with its associated matter generation, etc.

Finally, an off-shoot of the second main contender for the theory of quantum gravity, Loop Quantum Gravity, known as Loop Quantum Cosmology, posits a ‘big bounce’ scenario in which our current universe was formed from the collapse of a previous one.

These are only some of the approaches to the ‘before the big bang’ question, many others, some more plausible, some less so, have been proposed. However, this is firmly in the realm of the speculative at this point, which may be one of the reason it hasn’t trickled down into the public consciousness.

12

I noticed a long time ago that the universe seems strangely indifferent to what “cuts it” for me. I suspect that the universe has the same attitude towards you. Seriously, the universe has been around a lot longer than you and I, it’s a lot bigger than you and I, and there’s no reason for it to attempt to limit itself to concepts that you and I can currently understand.

I mean, in 1969 the New York Mets won the World Series, for crying out loud!

13

‘Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.’

14

And to really bake his noodle there is also no way to disprove the notion that the Universe and everything in it, and everything that happened in it all the way back to the Big Bang, didn’t come into being last Tuesday.
Beyond just shaking one’s head at the sort of logical pretzels creationists contort themselves into, I mean.

[QUOTE=Colibri]
It could have been “nothing” (even if you dislike the idea), or it could have been a previous Universe.
[/QUOTE]

Well, yeah, but if there was a previous Universe, then it too must have started somewhere and we’re back to square… whatever comes before zero and isn’t negative :). Might as well come to terms with the idea that at some point there really was “nothing” and then there was “something” right now, save some time.

It’s not like theists are any better at it, anyway. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” ? OK, sooo… who said the Word, and what did they say it *in ? Or with *? To which of course the reply is that God transcends time and space, or exists outside of the Universe or some such. Which is another word for “Why must you be so difficult ? Just put a fiver in the collection plate already !”.

15

I think the best proof that God did not create the universe is the presence of people who can seriously ask the question, “What came before the universe started?” and demand that the answer be something that fits their everyday experience.

16

It’s universes all the way down!

17

I never understand why people ask questions like, “What happened before the Big Bang?” as if the previous Big Bang was the first one.

“Big Bangs” have been going on for eons and will continue to do so.

The current Big Bang is expanding the universe, but at some time in the far distant future this expansion will slow down, stop and then begin to retract. This slow collapse will continue until the universe shrinks down upon itself to the point where it is so compact and the pressures so intense that it explodes again.

This explosion is simply another Big Bang and the same process of expansion and contraction will repeat itself again.

18

Mangosteen: I believe you are making declarations of fact, for which there is absolutely no evidence. There may have been previous Big Bangs…but there also may not have been. It is not known at this time.

19

There is no reason to assume the expansion will slow down and reverse. In fact, based on what we now know, the expansion of the universe is increasing. It is more likely that it will continue to expand until everything is beyond the light horizon of everything else.

20

I see people say “we don’t know”, and others say “there was nothing”, yet they don’t bother to argue against the other. But they can’t both be right. Which one is it? We don’t know, or was there nothing?
How do we know that expansion just hadn’t been going on forever, with the Big Bang being just one event in infinitely many? Is it really established that time began at the Big Bang? What if the Big Bang was only the result of time evolving from whatever it was previously into what we experience today? Maybe Planck Time and Planck Length aren’t really constant, but are rather expanding. Maybe there never was a singularity, just endless expansion.