Stupid question? [If time and space did not exist before the big bang, where and when did it happen]

Factual Questions
21

Answering “where” is difficult because our human understanding of where tends to be relative to where in our universe, and that definition kinda falls apart at the Big Bang.

Kids in school are taught fairly simplistically that before the Big Bang everything was squished down into a single point, and then it all exploded outward, which is the basic gist of it, but it often leaves people with the idea that space existed somehow before that and it’s just all of the matter in it that was a single point and exploded outward. The idea of expanding space is a bit difficult for grade school kids to grasp, but understanding the expansion of space itself is key to understanding the nature of the universe and the Big Bang.

Let’s assume we have an imaginary flag, and we put it at some point in space, and that flag never, ever moves. It stays exactly where it is in the universe. Now we go some distance away and we place another imaginary flag, and that flag also never, ever moves. Both flags are completely stationary. What you find is that the distance between the flags is currently increasing. The flags aren’t moving. What is happening is that the space in between the flags is expanding.

The guy who figured this out was named Edwin Hubble, though like much in science, Hubble’s work was based on earlier work and ends up being related to the theory of relativity. Hubble got a telescope named after him, and the rate of expansion of the universe is now called the Hubble constant.

If you could go back in time, those two imaginary flags would get closer and closer. The flags still aren’t moving, but since space has constantly been expanding, the flags have been constantly moving away from each other (even though they aren’t actually moving), so going backwards makes the flags seem to get closer and closer. If you go back far enough those two flags meet at a point. In fact, all of the imaginary flags all over the universe all come squishing together at a point. That flag that was right next to you is now at that point. That flag that was 30 million light years away is now at that point. Another flag that is 50 million light years away in the opposite direction is also at that point. This is where the Big Bang happened, at that point. All of those flags, all of the “where” points in the universe, are all at one point. Since all of those little flags are all at the same point, this is what people mean when they say that the Big Bang happened everywhere. Every point in the universe was at that same point.

The “when” part of this, as was already answered, was about 13 to 14 billion years ago. 13.7 is the most commonly accepted number, but estimates vary a bit. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) came up with a number of 13.77. The Planck Collaboration came up with the number 13.82. All of those numbers are plus or minus a few hundred thousand years.

This leads to some interesting questions. If the universe is expanding, is it expanding inside of something? If so, what is that something? Are there other universes out there? What created the singularity that the universe expanded out of? At the moment, the answer to all of these is that we don’t have a freaking clue. For what it’s worth, Stephen Hawkings believes that there are other universes out there, and most folks consider him to be a reasonably smart guy.

Trying to take a step back and asking where and when did space and time happen is problematic because “where” and “when” are both terms that only apply to inside our universe. It’s kinda like having a sheet of paper sitting on your desk and having a ball sitting on the floor and asking where on the paper is the ball sitting. The ball isn’t sitting on the paper. And when and where spacetime began isn’t within our understanding of “where and when” as “where and when” only have meaning inside our universe.

22

Isn’t all of this anyone’s guess?

Science has a lot more to back it up, but still leads to “we don’t know for sure” and the same applies to Religion. Whether or not Science or Allegory, how can we know anything about the lack of a universe if we were borne into this realm and only understand and are only capable of understanding it’s internal workings. In other words, maybe we can only understand what we are part of and not anything outside of it, and due to being in this universe, our understanding is limited to it and we can’t perceive that there is something else completely outside of it, or before it. Sorry if this is convoluted, it’s kind of difficult to put it into words.
I’m being completely serious here, so please, don’t get offended or anything.

23

This! I totally missed this.
Much better stated than my post.

24

Read this

25

What you say is correct, aside from the false equivalence between science and religion. Scientific knowledge is based on reason and evidence, and it is inherent to the scientific method that all knowledge is provisional. We have speculative theories about the origin of our universe and of other universes, but no scientist claims to have evidence of these things, and it is quite possible that they will remain forever beyond our grasp.

Religious “knowledge” is based on making stuff up. There is no constraint to the imagination, provided that there is no requirement that the “knowledge” be consistent with reality.

26

It’s North Poles all the way up!

The “North Pole” explanation is not the only one. Another possibility is that our universe budded off from an eternal metaverse. The metaverse is almost completely filled with diffuse, high-entropy radiation. On rare occasions, there is a statistical blip in the local entropy and a new universe can branch off (via wormhole). So there is a “before”, but that before is boring and flat.

The difficulty with most beginning-of-the-universe scenarios is explaining the absurdly low entropy present at the time.

27

I agree completely. I should’ve worded it better, I wasn’t making a equivalency between religion and science. That’s what I meant by “allegory”.
But that is generally what I mean, some understanding is beyond our grasp or may as well be. It really seems as if this stuff is anybody’s best (educated) guess. I never really get into debate about this stuff because it is usually fruitless, like I will somehow discover a new piece of knowledge by regurgitating stuff I have learned with what someone else has learned.

28

Currently beyond us, sure.

Only if you agree that the idea you can read English is your best (educated) guess.

The problem you seem to have is thinking that all guesses are created equal. They’re not. Some are a lot better-supported than others.

29

There have been excellent answers to this, and I don’t think I can improve on them. But I do wonder about the preamble to the question.

So far, so good.

I do not see how a rejection of the consensus of the world’s scientific community is compatible with a love of science.

It seems to me that there is nothing at all incompatible with being a faithful Christian and believing that ultimately God created the universe, and also believing all of today’s accepted scientific models. (This cannot be said about “young earth” models or other literal interpretations of Old Testament stories.)

I hope this won’t be seen as a hijack because I am responding directly to a point made in the OP, although not the part with a question mark.

30

Kudos for the reference to the hilarious “it’s turtles all the way down” anecdote, which never fails to hand me a smile when I recall it.

For brevity’s sake, I won’t go into the specific details of that old story, but I invite any Cosmology buffs reading this who are unaware of the “turtles” quip to just Google it.

I liked it so much after hearing it several years ago that I once considered naming a rock band I had “Turtles All the Way Down.” Couldn’t quite talk my bandmates into it, though, as they thought it was a bit too unwieldy.

Cheers.

31

It’s one of my favorites as well, in part because although it sounds dumb–and is–it also manages to capture deep meaning. All of our questions about origins; “what made God,” “what came before the Big Bang,” “if our universe is a simulation, is there another simulation above that,” and so on all have the same fundamental problem. “It’s XYZ all the way down” is really the best we can do. And… maybe that’s not such a bad explanation after all.

32

I always thought that “Calico Jack” would make a great band name.

33

First, 13.8 billion years is closer than 13.7 billion years if you want to round it to the nearest 100 million years. To be exact, the current estimate is that the Big Bang happened 13,799,000,000 years ago, plus or minus 21,000,000 years. I presume that plus or minus 21,000,000 years means that the age of the universe is 13,799,000,000 years with 21,000,000 years being two standard deviations of the estimate. Two standard deviations means that the true age has a 95% chance of being within that period of time.

I emphasize this because people frequently don’t understand that margin of error doesn’t mean that you know precisely that a measurement is inside that amount. Suppose you measure 100 distances and tell someone about those measurements, each time giving the margin of error for the measurement. They then measure one of those distances more exactly themselves. They say to you, “You said that this distance was 22.823 miles with a margin of error of .004 miles. I just measured it more exactly and found that the distance is 22.8170527 miles. That’s outside your .004 miles margin of error. So all your measurements are obviously nonsense.” No, that only shows that one of the measurements is outside the given margin of error. We expect that about 5 of the 100 measurements will be outside the margin of error given for that measurement: