if the big bang is place, rather than a time, would it be possible,if we could, to move at the speed of light to that place, and see the big bang still in progress?
If I understand the idea correctly the big bang is always “happening” being that there is no time inside of it. So we should still be able to view it, I think.
geezee…these discussions make my head hurt…
According to standard interpretations, there were no bosons (including protons) until the GUT era (10[sup]-43[/sup] to 10[sup]-35[/sup]). And even with that, there was no electromagnetic force to carry the photons until 10[sup]-12[/sup]. So no, you could never see it.
I meant, “including photons”.
In the sense that some people believe that God had no beginning, and no end; then there would be nothing out side of God, and it would be impossible to separate one’s self form it. If God is just existance then it includes every thing. If God is “a” being then something would be out side of God and something else could exist.
Monavis
So we agree that the configuration at one end of our region of the universe is a singularity since spacetime is infinitely curved there too?
OK, I’ll tell you that I think you are pulling equations out of thin air in order to “prove” that there was a nothing-to-something transition. Neither I, nor Hawking, nor any notable cosmologist, does so.
I mean the location of that configuration, just as the location of the north pole is Latitude=0.
We still know where they are. Singularities are indeed mysterious and not by any means fully explained, but that doesn;t mean we cannot say anything about them at all. For a start they exist rather than not.
“Emergence of mass” was your phrase. When I ask what you mean, you reply “no one knows”. I’m tempted to agree ;).
The same as the value of latitude when not exactly at the north pole.
I said “as compressed as it (the universe) can be”. If some uncertainty principle or other quantum mechanical effect means that the universe was never literally infinitely small, the description still stands: there is no possible more compressed configuration.
Again, you unnecessarily propose a nothing-to-something transition. The nature of the universe in the Planck epoch may be unknown, but there is no reason to suddenly say it wasn’t there.
Then perhaps it would be useful to stop proposing that the universe pops out of existence at this point?
I suggest that the word “event” (and the phrase “Big Bang”) has misleading connotations, and that the Big Bang is the universe at that place, just as the north pole is a place on Earth.
I said no such thing. I said time stopping is indistinguishable from time continuing without change.
No time does not equal no configuration - the universe always had a certain configuration. No time = no change in configuration to become even more compressed.
To use a favourite example of yours, your “proof” is equivalent to cancelling the sixes in 16/64.
In one direction - the changes in the other is our region.
I thought you said it was an event? In any case, I suggest it is a place.
Again, the shape of the universe does not require “mechanisms” to change its configuration. That simply is the configuration at each “place”.
I have to call you on this. You and I both know full well that he is not saying that black holes do not exist - rather, it is a specific detail about information content.
This last attempted legerdemain regarding Hawking’s bet notwithstanding, I say the same of you.
It is. I am attempting to convince you that it makes no difference how we think about that timelessness if, as Hawking suggests, we consider time as another dimension of space.
Why do we live at our latitude, rather than at the north pole? Why is the north pole not a little more north? I suggest that the universe is this shape, and that a cause of “time progressing” is not necessary.
Very well, but you’ll note that it is not I who have been officially warned about my tone in this thread.
We are in it right now. The Big Bang is the universe.
Is the earth the north pole?
SentientMeat has thus far made some excellent points about temporality, etc., that clear up some of the false (but nevertheless quite common) conceptions of the OP. Here are a few more points of my own, with perhaps some recap.
As you imply here, the Big Bang and Creation by God are not mutually exclusive concepts. I was raised Catholic and always taught that the Big Bang and evolution were God’s methods of creation. (I do not, however, believe in a monotheistic “God” now.)
As others have stated or implied, according to the Big Bang Myth the laws of physics simply didn’t exist before the Big Bang happened.
Sure, it’s a myth, which is not to say it’s a complete fabrication. The Big Bang Myth is an extrapolation of the facts as we perceive and measure them, stated in terms that make sense to our minds, and generously fortified with conjecture and embellishment. It’s our species’ way of connecting the dots we know about. It is certainly more sophisticated and truer than a straight-up creation myth, but it is a myth all the same. The same can be said of evolution (which, however, has even better, stronger, more in-your-face facts to deal with, like the fossil record).
So take it all with a grain of salt. Apply skepticism (the true kind) to both the myths of monotheism and our modern materialistic myths.
You could think of all the matter as being “trash-compacted” into the singularity of the Big Bang, though that would not be quite accurate as it wasn’t really matter as we know it in that form. It was “everything” in a point without space or time.
That’s precisely right. Time itself is said not to have existed before the Big Bang, and it came into being as the Big Bang events unfolded.
Again, any of the laws Eistein discovered didn’t exist before the Big Bang. “Quite literally nothing” is a fairly accurate way of describing the singularity.
Sounds something like brane cosmology.
No. If you want to go by the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, most of which is still considered orthodox today, God is eternal. He exists outside time and never changes whatsoever. He has no moving parts, so to speak. God also has eternal and complete understanding of His own mind and thus never introspects nor ponders nor remembers as we humans do.
Two points here, one of which anticipates my own take on cosmology.
According to Thomism, yes, God “could not” be in existence without already having a concept of the Universe. That is, God already “thinks” (though not as we do) whatever he will ever think eternally (outside time) and wills whatever he will ever will eternally. Hence, it is not the case that God, within time, one day says to Himself, “Let’s create the Universe.” Rather, the will to create is eternal in Him.
Second, I think you are quite right and perceptive in noting or imply that God could not, logically speaking, create the concept of “infinity.” Nor did he decide that Pi is 3.14~ or that 2 + 2 = 4. We can perceive, however, that these truths are necessarily so in all possible universes. Hence, any God, no matter how powerful, is bound by them and limited by them.
These truths alone are sufficient to explain the existence of the universe. A true void, nothingness, is impossible (utterable but actually inconceivable) inasmuch as these truths would pertain even in as void a universe as we can conceive of. My intuition (and my own myth) is that the Big Bang is the inevitable result of these truths: there was nothing to “block” infinite being from expanding, bounded only by these principles. And, as you suggested earlier, there is indeed a multiverse in which an inconceivably numerous (but finite) set of partitions (not separate universes!) exist. To reference an earlier but still powerful myth, these principles are the Chaos from which the titans and gods arose.
It is at the north pole, yes. Elsewhere on Earth, the Earth is not the north pole. The entire Earth comprises both the north pole and all the latitudes which are not the north pole.
Similarly, the universe today is not the Plank epoch universe, but it is all the “Big Bang”.
There’s too much amphiboly in there to agree with that. Configuration of what? Where are the ends of our region? How many are there? How does the abstract mathematical construct of infinite curvature apply exactly to quasi-real spacetime? And why are we speculating on something — a singularity — that, by definition, has properties that we are impotent to examine?
I did not attempt to prove any nothing-to-something transition. I proved that if there was no time, then there was no mass. If you disagree, then show, without metaphors about thin air, that energy can exist in a state of no change; that is, that energy can exist when particles are motionless. As you know, it a particle were still, we would know both its scalar and its vector — an impossibility.
Time? The location of time? What does it mean for time to be a “configuration”?
Right. They exist. In fact, an infinite number of them exist. For every U, U/0 is a singularity. But you can’t say anything about their properties. An equation whose solution is undefined tells you nothing about what it describes. When you use the term “infinite density”, it doesn’t mean that you are describing how dense something is. In fact, it is rather the opposite: it means you cannot describe how dense it is. It isn’t that it’s really really dense. It’s that its density is not defined.
Well, emergence of mass seems like a parallel phrase with beginning of time. If we are going to say that time had a beginning, then mass must have had a beginning as well (in fact, a concurrent beginning) unless you intend to stipulate that time pre-existed space-time.
No, I don’t think so. I can describe a latitude that is smaller than a Planck length. In fact, I can describe a distance that is smaller than a Planck length. But is that distance possible in a coordinate universe? And is the universe even a coordinate system? It appears to be a distribution of probabilities rather than a matrix of constants. And it isn’t even clear why Planck measures should apply in a pre-particulate universe. In fact, as I said before, it can be argued that before the Planck Era, there was no universe. That would differentiate the initial singularity from the universe.
Fine, but then it isn’t a singularity at all, but merely a really really tightly compressed mass, subject to description by thermodynamic equations.
Well, that depends. Like I said, if we’re going to impose upon the universe the restrictions of Planck dimensions, then references to durations and distances shorter than Planck are meaningless. Therefore, there was no universe (given Planck restrictions) prior to an expansion of 1.6 * 10[sup]-35[/sup] lightmeters.
You know, this is a lot like the debate over whether a photon has mass. First, we have to differentiate between relativistic mass and rest mass, and agree not to consider relativistic mass since relativistic mass and energy are synonyms. (Energy is a perfectly good word, and it is therefore unnecessary to have another.) But then when we’ve decided to discuss rest mass only, we have to clarify that by “rest” we really do not mean rest, since a particle cannot be at rest. What we really mean is the invariant length of the particle’s four-momentum: m = sqrt((p[sup]2[/sup] * c[sup]2[/sup] - e[sup]2[/sup]) / c[sup]4[/sup]). (From e = m * c[sup]2[/sup] / sqrt(1 - v[sup]2[/sup]/c[sup]2[/sup]), where p is momentum). By the time we’re done, we’re left with an untestable proposition as to whether a photon has mass or not (not to mention the possible reconciliation of problems that might arise with loss of gauge invariance, charge conservation, and so on). We can do things like take measurements of planetary magnetic fields, but at best these approaches do nothing more than test limits rather than quantities. We can see whether rest mass approaches zero, but not whether it equals it. Likewise, the more we talk about the universe and whether it was (or is) a singularity, the more we have to differentiate between an actual singularity and something that is close to it — whatever that might mean. And all of this back tapping and side stepping is for no reason other than pre-emptively adopting a conclusion that that there was not nothing before there was something.
I don’t think that it’s a problem with connotation as much as it is a problem with equivocation. I understand what you mean when you say that the universe is the Big Bang, since the Big Bang is ongoing, at least in a sense. (Although the Bang part has petered out considerably.) But what most people mean when they refer to the Big Bang is an event — specifically, the wave collapse of the initial quantum singularity. But I submit that all these references to the north pole are equally misleading, since the analogy, “Big Bang : Universe :: North Pole : Earth”, breaks down if you insist that the universe is the Big Bang.
This is more equivocation. If we speak of time as a dimension (as in T=0), then it is not the same as speaking of time as a differential (as in change of state). It is T versus Delta-T. It would be like using the term inertia to mean both inertia and momentum. To say that there is no time (T=0) is to make a statement about a status. It is like a photograph of something that moves. But to say that there is no time (no change in state) is to make a statement about a process. It is like a motion picture. If we use film as an analogy, then there are (let us say infinite) frames, each with a value of Tn. The value of T changes as the film moves through the projector. T0 is the first frame of the film. The assertion that the first Delta-T does not come from nothing is correct: it comes from the movement between T0 and T1. But the assertion that there is some frame before T0 is incorrect. There is not. There is no film, and then there is the first frame. This analogy, of course, places a burden on your model since without a projector, there is no mechanism for moving the film from T0 to T1.
I don’t understand that statement. The universe has never become more compressed. We cannot treat a thought experiment as though it had been an actual event.
No, it isn’t.
Are you talking about the light cone? If so, then “our region” is synonymous with “the universe”.
Well, it’s two mints in one, I reckon. But when I spoke of no changes taking place, I meant it in the same way that I thought you did; i.e., no changes during the stateless uncollapsed singularity. What’s to change? There are zero dimensions. What can move? What can be different? What can be then and what can be now?
No, not that. The mechanism is required for the wave collapse — the event of first expansion (where T=Planck, if you wish). The mechanism required for wave collapse is modulation. A charged particle of constant amplitude will oscillate with perfecy periodicity. But if its wave modulates, then its amplitude will vary with its position and, in accordance with certain probabilities, will possibly collapse. But there is nothing known in physics (or for that matter, knowable in physics, given that the solution is undefined) to account for a wave collapsing without modulation. And I don’t mean a gap here; I mean an impossibility. It is not a matter of invoking the supernatural to explain something for which science does not yet have an answer (epistemic necessity). It is a matter of invoking the supernatural out of metaphysical necessity. There cannot have been even a potential for a mechanism, let alone an actual mechanism, before there was at least enough room for modulation to occur. An amplitude cannot change without an actual dimension in which to expand (or contract) anymore than a sphere with actual height can be drawn on a sheet of paper.
I meant in the sense we’ve been using the term — as a singularity (infinite density). He is saying that black holes do not exist in that manner, but only appear to do so.
I’m not here pulling rabbits out of hats and doing magic tricks. Frankly, the thinly veiled accusation that I am somehow trying to deceive people with math tricks is a bit insulting and is certainly unnecessary. If you have something to counter what I’m arguing, then counter it. But do not attack my integrity as a method of argument, please.
The universe.
One end of our region is in the Planck epoch (or is the Planck epoch, however you want to say it - I don;t distinguish).
At least one.
Just as any mathematical construct applies to quasi-reality, such as “2” versus two objects.
Not all of its properties are so mysterious. Its location and existence, for example, are as beyond doubt as that of the sun.
And I agreed that “mass” might make little sense in the Planck epoch, which still does not impugn the premise that no time does not imply nothing.
In our reference frame. Are you proposing a reference fram outside the universe? Good luck with that.
Time is the difference of configurations of the universe. If there is no possible further change in configuration, there is no further time in that direction.
Yet again, time is not the configuration itself, it is the difference of the configurations. Similarly, the Earth is not just the north pole, nor the Latitude of 37[sup]o[/sup], it is all the latitudes.
I do not mean the mathematical equation, I mean the thing it describes, the instance of infinite curvature. If there were one of them in my head right now, I would not be able to communicate with you so, and my immediate vicinity might be rather dangerous.
A neutron star is really really dense, agreed?
I would suggest that spacetime pre-existed mass, given that “mass” makes little sense near to or within the Planck epoch: the symmetry breaking most vertainly occurred after (ie. elsewhere than) this.
Why then, let us quantise latitude in such a way as well. One would still not say that the north pole does not exist, nor that something *causes[/]i the Earth to expand therefrom.
Probabilities which are resolved upon observation. Your descritpion might I suppose, apply to the “future” (ie. the region of the universe in that direction) but certainly not to that region in the other, the “past”.
By whom? You? You would then have to propose a nothing-to-something mechanism. Again, good luck with that.
Whose spacetime is infinitely curved, yes?
Consider these two statements:[ul][li]There is no such thing as before the Planck epoch.[/li][li]The Planck epoch universe is exactly the same as the universe at any time before it.[/ul]Do you think these two statements are synonymous? I do.[/li]
When I say “there was nothing before something” I mean that there is no such thing as “before the something” - there has always been something. When you say it, it sounds like you’re proposing a nothing-to-something transition. I will happily stand corrected, for then we can agree that there has never been nothing, and that the universe cannot be said to have been “created” or “caused”.
And do you accept the existence of that singularity?
Ah, I see. Then I will analogise the north pole as the Planck epoch universe instead. Like I said, I think the phrase “Big Bang” is misleading in all kinds of ways, so I’ll try not to use it at all.
And what is the mechanism whereby latitude L0 moves to L1? I suggest that it does not, and neither does the universe, which merely has that shape.
I rephrase: there is no imore compressed configuration* than that in the Planck epoch.
We disagree.
Exactly!
The expansion of the universe.
Just as the north pole is a point.
”Movement” is a change in configuration of the universe.
The expansion.
”Then” is that configuration, “now” is this one.
Not if we are simply finding out where we are in the universe, which may have more regions than the three-dimensional temporal one we inhabit.
I asked whether you thought black holes existed, you said “Apparently not”. I have already agreed that the universe may not ever have been literally zero in extent.
I apologise, unreservedly.
Infinite causality is perhaps as perplexing as the concept of infinite space or infinite time.
The problem of infinite causality was solved by the postulation of the “prime mover”, which is imagined as God.
Personally I don’t see how you solve a problematical concept by giving it a personality.
I believe that equilibrium is impossible, that perpetual motion is the essence of the universe. Otherwise equilibrium would be an infinite condition. The substance of the universe would be in a homogenous, stable, and probably a perfectly attenuated state.
Whatever math is eventually invented to describe perpetual motion, I’ll bet one will not equal one, and equations will end up chasing their tails.
I have no idea what you’re saying, Ex Machina, but the only comment I wanted to make is that the Big Bang would require no cause. A wave collapse appears to be entirely random.