Do you honestly not know what I am asking, or are you passively-aggressively feigning ignorance?
No. I meant what I wrote. Or I wrote what I meant, depending on the answer to your question.
Ah, nothing adds more to a conversation than people who talk in riddles.
For the BB to exist, presumably something, some law or probability curve, had to exist. Even that is something, even if it isn’t matter or energy in and of itself.
Sorry, meant depending on the answer to the OPs question, and that was facetious, since the question is not about whether effect follows cause. But my first post was written as I intended it.
Nobody, the problem is that your question about what caused the Big Bang projects backwards concepts of time, space and causation (which assumes time) in a way that may not be valid. It’s like asking what’s out beyond infinity, or what happens when you divide by zero in the real numbers. It’s a little like (but not completely like) asking whereabouts in the universe did the Big Bang occur, as though one could say “two degrees south of Betelgeuse” or something, when the answer is “Everywhere”.
If time did not exist prior to the Big Bang, then it makes no sense to ask questions about what caused it. That may seem counterintuitive, but it must follow. That is why others seem to you to be speaking in riddles - they are in essence giving the answer “mu”, which is a way of saying your question does not compute. Not “I don’t know the answer”, but that the question itself is mis-cast.
An analogy I have heard used to try to explain the idea is to think of asking what is south of the south pole? It makes sense to ask what is south of Minsk, what is south of Noo Yoik, etc, but that process can’t be continued forever. It might be tempting to do something like stand at the south pole and point upwards or the like, but that too is flawed, because “southness” essentially assumes presence on the surface of the earth. The Equator does not divide the whole universe in two. Things above the South Pole are higher than it, not further south of it.
It seems logical that the probability was probably first, but to go from probability to actuality…oh well, I guess I have nothing to add since I don’t know and even though there are a lot of theories, there’s probably no way to really test them.
On the one hand, I understand that if time started with the big bang then it seems meaningless to ask what happened before. On the other hand, my understanding is the big bang came from a singularity. The singularity either had to form before time began, or had to always exist. If the singularity that exploded/expanded instantaneously came into being and exploded then something came from nothing. If it came into being and there was “time” before the big bang, then either it existed outside of time, or in a different, for lack of a better term, time line. Sorry if I’m not being too clear, I’m having a difficult time articulating some of what I’m thinking.
OK, I think I understand now. I was just confused on what you were talking about.
Well I have a bit more time, so let me try to be less cryptic. Your questions reveal that you already know some of this but bear with me.
We live in an expanding space-time place we call the universe. Everything we have ever observe is in that universe, and it is all rushing outward, AND the rate of expansion is increasing. Note that we do NOT observe our universe expanding into the surrounding space. As far as we can tell space is completely contained in our universe. IF there is space beyond our universe, no observations support this. This may be due only to limitations of our observations, or due to physical limitations on those observations, or due to time/space only existing within our universe. The last is what the current best theories are based on, and this is the basis of the cryptic answers in this thread.
we extrapolate backward in time, we find the entire universe starts at a point. Not a point in space…the only space existing, as far as we can tell, is all contained in that point. How can a whole universe fit in a point…well because the point IS a whole universe at that time. The point doesn’t come from somewhere because the point itself is already all the where there is at the beginning of time.
Yes, this doesn’t make sense, and is not satisfying, and that is the reason many of the greatest thinkers on the planet are still looking for a better explanation…but so far, the harder they look, the more it looks like this non sensible explanation is accurate.
If there were something beyond/before our universe so that it existed before the big bang, then it should have sent light towards us before the big bang, and we should be able to see something beyond the limits we observe. Our best telescopes are currently able to see so far that the objects we are looking at date back quite near in time to the big bang, and we don’t see farther/before than that.
One piece of evidence to support this “nonsense” is that we “see” the big bang at microwave frequencies in the form of cosmic background radiation. This is coming to us from the edge of the observable universe, and it started on it’s way to us at the time of the big bang. It seems to be coming from everywhere, because the big bang WAS everywhere when it happened.
That may not be what the microwave signal we observe actually is, but the explanation fits the observation…it quacks like a duck, and was predicted by theory before it was observed.
If there was a “before” the big bang, we don’t know of it, and the evidence is that we CAN’T know of it. All the time and space we have evidence for exists only after the big bang. There is plenty of speculation, but it does not lead to any theory that we have or could ever have the means to test.
“Well a whole universe just can’t spring into existence from nothing!” I hear you say. In fact many cosmologists are well beyond mere suspicion that it could and did.
Quoting some fundamentalist:
The Big Rip is considered to be more of an outlier scenario, that can only happen if a particular kind of dark energy – known as phantom energy – proves to be the driving force behind the universe’s accelerated expansion. As far as I know, the most conservative models, that feature a simply cosmological constant, simply predict an ever-ongoing expansion, yet not one that will ever rip any bound systems apart.
As for the OP’s question, if by ‘our concept of cause and effect’ they mean that every effect needs a prior cause, well, it’s possible that this notion ceases to work at some point – where you actually have something genuinely uncaused occurring --, but it’s not necessarily the case. One possibility would be the already mentioned infinite/cyclical cosmologies, in which, of course, for every effect a cause may be specified (though this still doesn’t serve as an explanation for the ‘why’ of that cosmology – Heidegger’s fundamental question, why there is something rather than nothing, remains unanswered). But something similar is also possible with a finite past. Picture time like the real open (0, 1)-interval: if every real number in this interval is identified with a moment in time, then, since there is no smallest number in that interval, there exists a prior moment for every moment you car to specify, and thus, possible cause for every effect; yet nevertheless, the interval is finite. In other words, a finite past does not imply a first moment.
For the larger question, there are plausible scenarios for creation out of nothing as well as in a sense ‘creation-free’ models. Of the first kind, there are those that follow Alexander Vilenkin, who sometime in the 80s showed that there is a possibility for a spacetime to tunnel itself into existence; however, this still leaves the question of the primacy of the laws of quantum physics in question (though, if those could be shown to be strictly logically necessary, such a scenario would essentially be the ultimate creation from nothing).
Alternatively, there are those who maintain that in the end, there’s still nothing there, it’s just been shifted around a little. There’s been a bit of a fuzz about Hawking’s recent claim that because of gravity, universes can create themselves out of nothing; now I haven’t read his recent book, but the idea isn’t actually a new one: the gravitational potential between two objects is negative, so it might well be that the total mass energy of the universe is zero (here’s a Hammock Physicist post explaining the idea in more detail). So in a sense, there’s still nothing there, it’s just a rather inhomogeneous nothing. (However, I believe this runs into problems with a universe with positive net cosmological constant, and in general the problem of specifying something that could pass as a ‘global’ total amount of energy in a general relativistic universe.)
Myself, I’m not really sure that the concept of nothing, and in particular, the concept of nothing ‘existing’, makes all that much sense, from a philosophical point of view. So I’m not sure there’s meaning to the idea of creation from nothing, as I’m not sure that nothing has logical primacy over something. Rather, I believe, in the end, in something like an aprioristically motivated physicalism: since nothing can’t exist, something must, and that something just looks a lot like a universe from our point of view.
Oh, just because I recently read about it and found it rather fascinating, Roger Penrose has put forward a stab at his own cyclically infinite cosmology, in which all the matter in the universe ultimately gets swallowed by black holes and turned into (Hawking) radiation, so that all that remains in the end is a homogeneous photon gas; that, however, is conformally invariant (i.e. invariant under changes of (energy-)scale), and essentially timeless; which is indistinguishable from the state of the universe at the Big Bang.
I have read through the replies and while I get what everyone is saying, the answers are at best, unsatisfying. I guess that yes, I was asking about first cause.
In the end, questions like this really have no answer that will satisfy. In all reality, is an answer that a giant fly crapped out a point of universe and then it big banged any less of an answer than any other?
Unfortunately that is the case. It is difficult, if not impossible, to wrap your brain around the concept of “infinity” or “nothing”. I don’t think we can understand it in any meaningful way.
Time only exists inside the universe. It is a property of the universe. It is not necessary for the universe to inhabit a 5-D space, but imagine for a moment that it did, and that you were a 5-D person looking upon this universe. Time would simply be one dimension like height or width. The universe would simply be there, and you could survey all of time with the same ease we can survey a box from left to right. Asking what happened in the time before the universe came into being is like asking what part of the box is left of the box. None, nothing. And if we now dispense with the 5-D creatures and the 5-D setting, we can perhaps see how the universe can be a self-contained 4-D cosmos, existing simply because it exists.
I’m not saying the question of why there is something rather than nothing is meaningless. But asking what came before the universe which in turn caused the universe very well may be meaningless. I understand this is a very hand-wavy argument that doesn’t take into account the differences between spatial and temporal dimensions.
The thing about the fly is, it just raises the question “from whence came the fly?” You my have to go back a few turtles, but sooner or later I maintain you’re going to have to get to one that is standing on nothing. (On account of the fact I don’t personally believe in actualized infinite regress.) Whether our universe is the one with the first bang-from-nothing, or whether our universe is a simulation in a computer game being played by a character in a D&D game inside a gigantic simulator that’s described in a book written by somebody whose universe was spun off from a universe that was banged-from-nothing, IMHO at some point there is a bottom of the stack which is truly causeless.
I just don’t see why we can rule out infinite regress. I hear people say it all the time, but I don’t know why. It’s either infinite regress or something from nothing, but I see no reason to settle on one to the exclusion of the other, except for aesthetics or personal incredulity.
Well, my reason is that I don’t think it’s logically coherent to have an actualized object that doesn’t have an age. Remember, infinity is not a number; you can’t be “infinity” years old.
This opinion is an evolution from one in the God debate, where you theoretically had an entity that could remember every day of its life, and yet could not number them. I see this as inherently contradictory. From there, one notes that it gets no less absurd if the entity in question is somewhat forgetful; whether or not the entity remembers it, the information about what days it existed through either exists or it doesn’t. So even if the entity was completely insensate it could not have existed in an actualized state ‘forever’…which means nothing can have done so.
That’s my reckonging on the subject. It’s been argued against before, on this very message board, but I do not feel it has ever been convincingly refuted. (Most of the counterarguments have seemed to be of the “it just works - look at the (unactualized) number line!” variety, which seem to miss the point. Though I admit I maybe misunderstood them. Maybe.)
This argument seems non-sensical to me too. Consider, as DrCube points out, that if time is a property of the universe, which at least I believe to be true, then any God that created the universe, created time. So, much like the very question of “what happened before the universe”, describing God as a being that remembers every day but can’t count them makes no sense.
I don’t think infinite regression is illogical because, regardless of whether you believe in God or not, the concept of time has no meaning outside of the universe. The Big Bang is sort of like a hyper-dimensional edge, and asking what happened “before” it makes as much sense as, like others mentioned, asking “where” the Big Bang happened… it was an infinitely dense point, yet it is was everywhere. To say that it was the beginning of the universe, and yet the universe has no single first cause is the temporal equivalent.
I like the unbounded (0,1) example, or perhaps a more tanigble one might be the Kelvin temperature scale, because I think it illustrates exactly why the question just doesn’t make sense. We can observe roughly how “cold” something has to be to be absolute zero, and we can edge closer and closer to it, but theoretically we can never reach it. And I think asking what happened before the Big Bang is exactly like asking what’s colder than absolute zero. All we can really say is that it, it appears that there is some theoretical first moment in time and that it behaves as if it were a singularity. As our knowledge and technology improve, we can get arbitrarily close to that point, but we’ll never actually be able to observe that point. Hell, we can’t even meaningfully describe that point. In fact, I’m not even sure if “infinite density, infinite energy” is qualitatively different from God, but that’s a completely different discussion.
And while I do think that these sorts of explanations probably seem unsatisfying at first, but for me, once a lot of that really “clicked” for me, it actually felt far more satisfying than actually discovering what the first moment is, if it actually existed. Or, to give an analogy, it’s the same sort of satisfying that a flick, where the gruesome villain remains off camera until near the end of the film, and you’re inevitably disappointed that it couldn’t live up to your imagination. To me, knowing there is no first cause is like never seeing that villain, and never having your imagination spoiled.
Action requires time; without time everything is static and there is no activity at all. No action, no thought, no sentience. Period.
So - if god “created” our space-time continuum, that proves beyond any doubt that he is experiencing time. How can that be if he’s not in our space-time continuum? Well, he obviously has his own space-time continuum, distinct from ours. He must have one - else he would be an impotent mindless statue.
To visualize how this would work, go grab an old reel of film. You know, the ones that are continuous strip of separate images all strung together. Within the ‘universe’ of the film, each frame is a moment of time; they run in sequence, with some being earlier or later than the other. That is to say, it is a timeline, an entire space-time continuum, with the ‘space’ part defined by the boundaries of any given frame. And as expected, everything that appears on the film appears for a certain number of frames; at any given frame one can look back and recall all the proir frames it was in, and count them to determine its ‘age’ at that point in the film.
Now, look at yourself. You are outside the film; the entire timeline of the film is before you all at once. Yet, you also experience your own timeline separate from that of the film, in which you move and act. And if you had created the film, that would have been an act that had taken time; even if you had ‘poofed’ it into existence, there was a prior point in your timeline before it existed, and a point after it did; that’s a change, and change requires time.
To the characters in the film strip, you are timeless; you are as equally existent to the first frame of the film as you are to the last. Not that the characters in the film are aware of you either way; they do not react to the passage of time in your timeline.
Anywhere, where was I? Oh yeah. Regardless of what’s going on with the filmstrip, and whether or not it sees you as timeless (from its own definition of time), you still have an age, and a series of past moments that you’ve experienced, from the perspective of your timeline. Which means, you’re not really timeless, and you had to have a beginning at some point. That it was ‘before’ or ‘outside’ the timeline of the film is irrelevent; within the timeline that matters to any given entity or object, that object has a discrete beginning before which it did not exist. (That point may be at the very beginning point of the entity’s timeline, but it’s still a finite beginning.)
For any given timeline, there was a start. If that point was an empty point or a filled point, it makes little practical difference to me; either way there is a point behind which there is no ‘before’. North of the north pole: precisely. And this applies to every timeline, that every entity and object that exists exists in; there is always a first point, because infinite regress is logically incoherent.
Of course, as with the filmstrip, perhaps any given timeline might have been created with or spun off of some other timeline. But if you keep tracing that back, eventually you’re going to get to something that was the original source; that timeline’s initiation is your indisputable uncaused cause. (Unless you want to postulate circular causation, but I tend to reject that; bootstrapping seems logically incoherent too.)
I cannot agree with this. That you put “period” at the end, implies that you’re not willing to consider an alternative, but I’m willing to give it a shot.
The very idea of “static” and “action” are nonsense words in a non-temporal existence in exactly the same way that “south of the south pole” or “colder than absolute zero” are nonsense. To be static implies that change is possible, and change requires at least two different ordered states, which implies time. Thus, those concepts don’t make any sense in that context.
Now one can, as you do, argue that it implies that it’s inherently contradictory of the very concept, but I think it’s simply that, as space-time beings, if it is possible, we would still likely be unable to conceptualize it, and so our inability to understand it doesn’t necessarily mean anything. This is akin to a flat world being trying to understand a three dimensional object. We obviously know that three dimensional objects exist, but they have no way of conceptualizing it except through some sort of projection into their world. Or, for a more pertinent example, we can mathematically describe a hypercube with relative ease, and we can project one into a form that we can observe, but it is extraordinarily difficult, if not utterly impossible, for our minds to perceive a fourth spatial dimension, let alone more.
I actually think your analogy of film illustrates my point well. The “beginning” of the film is something that is only meaningful from a perspective intrinsic to the film itself. Discussion of what “caused” the first frame is equivalent to asking what is in the frame before the first frame.
In fact, the “creation” of the film isn’t something that happened in a frame of the film at all, but rather something that happened in a way that cannot be examined, or explained in any meaningful way within the context of the film itself. To an observer inside the film, the ordering of the frames would seem to imply that the “creation” of the film occurs in the first frame, or “before” the first frame, but from an observer outside of the film, implying that the film was somehow created in the first frame or “before” the first frame is utter nonsense.
And this is where you attempt to create a timeline outside of the universe falls apart. Sure, in this example of film, the viewer exists in some sort of timeline, but his timeline is utterly incomprehensible to any observer internal to the film. To anyone inside the film, the external observer appears to be everywhere and everywhen, because he IS everywhere and everywhen from that perspective. So, just as the observer internal to the film is utterly unable to comprehend or describe the time of the external observer, this is what it is for us to attempt to comprehend what “time” may be like for a being existing outside the universe. Yes, he may have something akin to “actions” and some sort of “ordering”, but it’s not something that we can possible explain within our own context.
Consider an extension to your analogy. Let’s say the view of the film, in his timeline, puts a mark on the 1000th frame, then the next day, puts a mark on the 500th frame. The external observer sees that the 1000th frame was marked before the 500th frame, and can distinguish that one day passed between them. For the internal observer, they will observe that the 500th frame is marked and the 1000th frame is marked.
Ignoring the complications of whether or not they can determine that those marks are actually from the external observer or not, they will necessarily see the mark on the 500th frame as being before the mark on the 1000th frame. In fact, they’ll see it as exactly 500 frames earlier, and have no way of determining that it actually happened a whole day after the one that appears later. How will they have any meaningful way of determining what “really” happened in the external world? How can they meaningfully describe the passage of time externally in a number of frames? I really can’t think of any way they that is at all possible.
Thus, I think this analogy actually illustrates exactly how “time” can be, and I believe is, a nonsensical concept outside of the universe.
As with the film example, the “beginning” of the universe doesn’t necessarily have any meaning external to it. As the nature of the singularity seems to indicate to me, I think the only reason it appears to be of any real signficance is precisely because of our perspective as temporal beings.
But moreso, I don’t see how there HAS to be a first point either. Sure, it’s implied by theory, but just how we can never actually reach absolute zero, we can never reach the very beginning moment.
Let’s consider a simple mathematical example like the famed 0.999~ = 1, or to make it relevant to this point, 1 - 0.999~ = 0 Any finite number of 9s after the decimal, no matter how long will never quite be enough to make that true. In fact, one of the proofs I’ve seen for this is exactly that the reason they’re the same is because you cannot choose a number that is between the two values, as any two distinct real values has an infinite number of points between them.
And this is sort of where we are. We can theoretically see that there’s a zero, but all we can do is make the number of 9s after the decimal arbitrarily large. No matter how refined our knowledge gets or how powerful our technology becomes, we can never produce an infinite resolution. Thus, the theory easily shows that there’s a beginning, and it makes a lot of sense that there is, but for any point we can observe, there’s always a point before it.
But that’s the whole fault of your logic right there. To reiterate the point from above in less words, the observer in the film cannot describe the external timeline in any meaningful way; therefore, carrying his perspective of time outside of the film is utterly meaningless.