# What came first?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-came-first/55051>\
**Category:** Great Debates\
**Created:** [February 19, 2001, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-came-first/55051 "2001-02-19T05:24:31Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![tygerbryght](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/a9a28c/32.png) [@tygerbryght](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tygerbryght)\
**Post date:** [February 22, 2001, 5:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-came-first/55051/21 "2001-02-22T05:37:45Z")

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[QUOTE]  
\*Originally posted by Lemur866 \*  
\*\*

> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by tygerbryght \*  
> \*\*
> 
> > [@](#):
> >
> > … However, I thought that cosmologists had reached the point where they were mostly in agreement that the “observer effect” (or something of the sort) pretty much required a Something or Someone on hand at the Beginning? \*\*
> 
> Short answer: no. You’ve drastically misunderstood the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
> 
> It is true that there are a few people who beleive that a conscious entity is somehow required to collapse the waveforms into a single state. But I don’t think any of those people are serious physicists or cosmologists. For an interesting fictional speculation on this idea, see Greg Egan’s “Quarantine”. \*\*

I’ve clipped to what I intended to be the key to my comment - I _ **thought** _.

I don’t claim to understand a significant part of what cosmologists say - I’m math-deprived (too long away from school; when I went back, I didn’t make it through integrals) ☹

I do read Hawking’s “popularizations”, and pay attention to commentary from people like Brin (though I know he’s not active as a scientist any more, he’s equipped to understand and maybe, halfway, translate what those who still do research are saying. Was the Egan story published in Analog?

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**Author:** ![Phobos](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/3d9bf3/32.png) [@Phobos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Phobos)\
**Post date:** [February 23, 2001, 1:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-came-first/55051/22 "2001-02-23T13:33:59Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> \*Originally posted by Lemur866 \*  
> Short answer: no. You’ve drastically misunderstood the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle.
> 
> It is true that there are a few people who beleive that a conscious entity is somehow required to collapse the waveforms into a single state. But I don’t think any of those people are serious physicists or cosmologists. For an interesting fictional speculation on this idea, see Greg Egan’s “Quarantine”.

Not to mention that quantum mechanics applies to subatomic particles, not the creation of spacetime. There is the question of the Big Bang seed being particle-like, but that kind of spacetime singularity is not explained by modern physics at all.

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