*A universe simple enough to be understood is too simple to produce a mind capable of understanding it. (Cambridge cosmologist John Barrow
*
Good one!
I was going to suggest that before The Big Bang was The Big Fuse.
I’ll freely admit I don’t fully understand the concept of an inflationary origin for the universe, but it seems as though it was a random event (or multiple random events, if one assumes multiple inflation events). This has had me living in abject terror for years: I’m walking around on some nice sunny day and all of a sudden, a new universe pops into being about three inches from my left ear. I find that very disturbing for some reason. Yeah, I could get hit by a bus, but complete annihilation of not just me but all existence by some chance universe-inflating event seems…I don’t know, unfair.
That’s what certain people are worried the Big Hard-On Collider might do.
But note, the theory of the Big Bang holds that it started with just a pin-point of a singularity and expanded to some number of mega-lightyears in just the first few femtoseconds. So if it happened anywhere within a few galaxies’-radius of your left or right ear, you would be gone faster than a nerve impulse could travel from one synapse to the next in your brain. Somehow, I find that prospect comforting. It would happen faster than you could possibly know it, and be totally painless. (I imagine that death in certain kinds of plane crashes would work this way too.)
Consider, furthermore, the implications if death by Proximate Big Bang happens so fast that you would never even know it: If that’s the case, how do you know it hasn’t happened to you already? The entire universe that you knew could already be long gone already, and you’d never know it. So what reason do you have to suppose that it hasn’t already happened?
Heh, same reason I assume I’m not dead: if I were, how come I don’t remember all the stuff that hasn’t happened to me yet?
I realize there may be a flaw or two in that argument.
Because if I was dead I’d be unable to think about the matter.
In the Eternal Inflation models, there isn’t actually a risk from “new Big Bangs” occurring within our universe. The idea is that inflation is the primordial state, and that the vast majority of the multiverse is still in that primordial state. It’s unstable, and every so often a bubble of non-inflation (such as our own universe) will form and expand, but inflation is so rapid that new inflationary space is created more quickly than it can be converted into non-inflationary space. Nor can two of those bubbles ever interact, because they’re being carried apart faster than they expand by the inflation of the space between them.
There is no risk of anything in our universe shifting from the inflationary state to the non-inflationary, because it’s already happened. Nor is there a risk of anything shifting from the non-inflationary state to the inflationary, because that would mean “rolling uphill”, from the more stable state to the less stable one. What might be a risk would be if there’s yet another state “downhill” from our current configuration, that our universe might spontaneously start shifting into (note that this is also a risk in many other cosmological models), but we have no evidence that lower states even exist.
If such states do exist, then it’s possible that a decaying black hole might provide a “nucleation site” for the state change to start at (in fact, if a decaying black hole isn’t enough, it’s hard to imagine what would be). It’s also possible that a high-energy particle interaction might do it, but if so, it would take an interaction significantly more energetic than those produced by the LHC, since more energetic particles are found in nature already.
Unless I have missed some new physical theories (a real possibility), the reason is that no information can be found that would have made it through the Big Bang.
In the first moments of the Big Bang, the universe was so hot that particles could not exist for very long. It was also so dense that light, if it was created, would instantly be absorbed. As time passed, the universe expanded. As it expanded it cooled. When the temp/density came down enough suddenly particles could exist and light had enough room to travel without instantly hitting and being absorbed.
Also during this time all the forces we know were unified into one force. As the universe cooled and expanded the force broke symmetry and separated.
Since there were no particles that could exist early in the universe, there is no way to pass information. Same thing with light. You can, due to the clumping of matter in the universe and background radiation, infer some aspects of the Big Bang and there may be other ways of inferring that information that I am not aware of.
Half Man Half Wit touched upon the conservation of information. The thing I don’t know about this area, and I don’t think anyone else does either, is that even if information about the Big Bang is conserved and we could somehow tease it out, is if that information will tell us anything that happened before the Big Bang. It could be that the information can tell us everything about the Big Bang except what caused it.
Of course, I am a lowly network engineer and I could be totally wrong.
Slee
One thing I’ve always been curious about is the fact that, early enough in the Universe, the fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak nuclear) were unified. What does this mean in practice? Say, somehow, they were reunited today - what would happen? Would, say, an electromagnetic-emitting object like a radio suddenly become a gravitational attractor as well?
Well, there’s Penrose’s Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, in which the universe ‘renews’ itself periodically because the far-future state (given some exotic physics) of an expanding cosmos is indistinguishable from a big bang state because, roughly, of the notion of scale no longer mattering; in this scenario, gravitational waves from events prior to such a renewal may be detectable in the following universe thanks to leaving a trace in the cosmic microwave background.
The theory is highly speculative, however, and depends on physics we have as yet no reason to assume to exist (the ultimate instability of all fermionic, i.e. matter, particles, for instance).
(This wasn’t intended as a gotcha, by the way, but your comment made me recall the idea which seemed appropriate enough for this thread.)
Of course, thinking takes time… It takes about half a second for “consciousness” to work. (We’re all walking around half a second “in the past.”) So, if the universe ended in that half second…
I’m pretty sure it would lead to the breakdown of ordinary matter into a new kind of high-energy soup. Matter as we know it depends on the strong nuclear force and the electromagnetic force (at least!) If protons can’t tell themselves apart from neutrons, and electrons don’t have any desire to be near protons, then…nothing good! There might not be any kinds of particles at all, just energies.
This reminds me of Alexei Panshin’s SF novel Star Well, where he notes that people objected to the experimental cosmology of one scientist, because they feared the universe would not survive. Now that’s high-energy physics!
Look, I can’t prove (in anything but a totally solipsistic way) that I exist and - by logical extension - I am even less able prove that any of you exist either, so let’s not even begin to debate the existence or otherwise of a ‘Big Bang’ or a ‘Big Crunch’ or any other hypotheses totally unable to be substantiated as occuring, let alone actually being possible in a generic reality that we can all believe in.
Suffice it to say, I haven’t had breakfast yet.
It’s perfectly possible to substantiate the hypothesis of the Big Bang. It would also be possible to substantiate the hypothesis that our Universe will end in a Big Crunch, except that the evidence that has actually arisen does not turn out to support it. It is extremely difficult, at best, to substantiate any hypothesis about any time prior to the Big Bang, but even then, there are some models relating to such that could, in principle, be tested.
Thanks! Thanks also to Chronos for chiming in.
Speak for yourself. Mine takes about 5 seconds, and even after that, there’s serious debate about whether it works at all.
Good point. We can’t prove anything, so let’s not discuss anything. Oh wait: isn’t that exactly what solipsism is?
While scientists can speculate like the rest of us, isn’t is fair to say that it’s not possible for them to “do” science with reference to this question? AFAIK there can’t be any observable phenomena from any pre-BB cosmos, nor is it possible for cosmologists to work backwards in time beyond a point when time itself first came into existence. Speculation can be interesting but in the absence usable data or theories from which we can draw inferences it remains speculation.
Well, there are cosmologies in which you may find observable evidence of pre-big bang penomena (Penrose’s Conformal Cyclis Cosmology I mentioned), and there are cosmologies in which you can work backwads to pre-big bang states, like Loop Quantum Cosmology (also mentioned earlier). Additionally, even if you can’t directly test for what happened pre-big bang, I think it would be permissible to accept a theory for which you have good evidence in another area of phenomena, and which uniquely describes a mechanism for universe creation—so if you work out a consistent theory of quantum gravity that makes observable predictions (about cosmis ray spectra or something), and that theory describes a beginning of the universe of some kind, then your (provisional and modulo eventual falsification) acceptance of the theory entails an acceptance of its ‘creation story’ without, I think, running afoul of even the strictest falsificationists’ requirements. (Whether, of course, falsificationism is really an appropriate method for cosmology or cosmogenesis, where you will always only have a sample size of one, is another question altogether.)
Well, I think I most definitely have to agree with that. It may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard of a so-called “lost tribe” that has no concept of anything past the number ten, simply accounting for for any higher number as “many,” and no matter how long you spend trying to explain what the numbers 11 and above are, they won’t be able to comprehend it.
So I’m thinking it may just boil down to the fact that the human brain is simply not equipped to deal with certain things – even Einstein purportedly had some big questions about entanglement and other quantum theories – so if HE had problems with them, what are WE supposed to think?
I myself would knock down 99.9999% of the theories spewed (spewn?) forth from the mouths of leading physicists – string theory being one ot hem, but then I am faced with something that I would have also dismissed out of hand – if it hadn’t killed something like 200,000 people by exploding twice.
Or understanding that the power of an atom is such that a single one fissioning – that’s ONE atom, mind you – produces, and I quote from somewhere, “enough power to make a grain of sand visibly jump.” Considering how many atoms there are in a single grain of sand, well, uhh, I am at a loss. (I’d imagine something like enough green peas to fill ten Madison Square Gardens, or something similar).
Somehow, the multiverse theory is one of the most viable proposals I’ve heard of so far, but only insofar as I can actually wrap my mind around it, sort of.
But the concept, no matter how simple-sounding, of Infinity, is impossible to wrap one’s mind around. That’s why I don’t immediately laugh when someone suggests us – our universe and everything in it – might just be some chem student’s experiment on some impossibly large planet (does it even need to be a planet?)
Or that the entire universe is simply one neuron being created in some . . . thing’s “brain.”
One thing I know – if within the existence in which we live it is possible for four-limbed, limited-longevity beings to create an object that fits in a plane that can wipe a sizable portion of the earth into a very, very large cloud of dust within the space of a second, then ghosts, faeries, dragons, and yes, even a God is possible. (A very pathetic and sadistic god, but a god nonetheless).
I guess I’ll find all this out during my express-elevator ride to Hell.
I don’t have the math to personally decide the validity of ‘string theory’. But I don’t like calling it a ‘theory’. It’s not even a hypothesis; since a hypothesis needs to be falsifiable, and ‘string theory’ isn’t. Maybe the math is spot-on, but you can’t test it. Maybe ‘string model’?
Aside: It really annoys me when people say something like “Even Einstein asked questions”. Well, yeah, of course. That’s kind of the whole point of Einstein. It was his job to ask questions, and he got famous because he was really, really good at it.
And Johnny L.A., I personally use the term “string model”, for exactly the reason you state.
Kamakiri writes:
> It may be apocryphal, but I’ve heard of a so-called “lost tribe” that has no
> concept of anything past the number ten, simply accounting for for any higher
> number as “many,” and no matter how long you spend trying to explain what
> the numbers 11 and above are, they won’t be able to comprehend it.
There are several languages which have no numbers higher than three (or some such small number). The most famous case of this is Pirahã. The languages with these small number of numbers aren’t lost in any sense. They are living languages which aren’t even that inaccessible to outsiders:
Whether you can’t explain higher numbers to them is a different question. The fact that a language doesn’t have a word for a concept doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to teach someone who speaks that language that concept. People learn to understand concepts which can’t be expressed by a single word in their language all the time.
I was going to try to explain to you all the things that are wrong in your post, but let me just say the following. Languages differ in many unusual ways that you don’t know anything about. These differences might make it somewhat harder for the speakers of them to understand certain concepts, but they don’t make it impossible to understand those concepts.
Well, there goes my shot at immortality.