[Note: Most or all of the theories, terms and questions below are not original and have been thought and discussed before. I apologize for any boredom I might cause.]
A clever dead greek named Socrates liked to convey compelling information using written conversations between two or more participants. Seems a good idea to me, seeing as some of’em dead greeks said some pretty cool stuff. I’ll limit myself to one participant talking to himself, like a crazy person. I’ll start by paraphrasing more recently diceased frenchman thinker Descartes:
**I think, therefore I am. **
You are? You mean you exist? Maybe not even you. Something exists? There is thinking, therefore there is existence?
In that case, why does anything exist?
*Well, maybe the question “why” itself is erroneous when applied to existence as a whole. Maybe our brains deceive us into thinking that question actually makes sense instead of just being some meaningless chaos with an interrogation point in front of it.
Maybe “Why” is only valid when applied to finite slices of time where one discrete event causes another. I throw a ball made of a gazillian particles and therefore, as seconds go by, each particle’s state and position changes adequately, as seems to be the rule 'round this here corner of the U-Verse we been able t’observe. If I don’t throw the ball, the particles are still doing their stuff, some of it appears to be done faster or slower depending on temperature is all. No particle ever fully stops as far as we can tell. If it moves only a fraction of a nanometer every trillion years, it’s still moving. Just, perhaps, not moving in a detectable fashion in our timescale.*
In which case one should say the Big Bang “occurs” or “is occurring” instead of “occurred”. Perhaps the Big Bang has always been occurring and will always be occurring and doing so in an exponential fashion such that, to us, the moment the size of the universe equaled that of the smallest particle we’re able to measure would mark the start of the Big Bang. Before then, there was nothing…which doesn’t really make sense at all, unless it’s all because of magic.
*No, it seems more reasonable that the absence of everything, total nothingness or total immobility (and the whole heat-death of the universe) is just an illusion. It also seems that movement will never cease either, instead taking place on a different time-scale. We can hardly imagine each electron only completing an orbit in trillions of years, or a trillion time that, ad infinitum but it could happen.
The alternative is a critical point at which the universe has expanded so much that it now, following whatever laws of physics are applicable at that scale*, starts contracting in a “Big Crunch”, implying an infinity of subsequent implosions and explosions by that same logic. A cycle without beginning nor end, both of which would imply nothingness at the extreme: a sort of giant balloon inflating and deflating according to magical rules.*
Would the deflating mirror the inflating exactly and the next “Big Bang” produce the exact same universe, ad infinitum or will each be slightly different, reaching for a state of equilibrium? How harmonious and symmetrical are the laws of physics as a they govern all scales? This theory calls for limits, and therefore, a finite number of laws of physics between the two critical points at which the universe reverses movement. If time is not absolute and is related to the expansion, will there be two moments at those two points, where time stands still? How does that make sense?
Well, I think that’s enough questions for one thread. I hope this wasn’t too tedious a read and I look forward to your opinions and theories if you have any.
*Think newtonian Vs. Quantum physics when it comes to different scales; Perhaps there are more outside our range of observation: the infrareds and ultraviolets of our knowledge-assisted minds. I’m sure we’re not done being surprised by what rules we uncover.