47,308 times.
Twelve times we agreed there was a giant hotdog before the Universe began.
Damn, I’m old.
Lawrence Krauss’s “A Universe From Nothing” took this kind of approach, but it doesn’t address the deeper philosophical “why something rather than nothing” problem, because the physical laws that govern the processes (however deep you go) sure look like they are a “something” that we can imagine did not exist. I doubt that there’s any satisfying way to address that deeper question. It’s turtles all the way down.
There is no time in space! We judge our world time by the units of measure as the world rotates 1 complete rotation. Dividing it into increments of Day, Hour, Minute, second and so on.
If we send a space craft to the moon, it is referenced to world time. It takes so many days/months etc. to arrive at a location and return.
Once a body/planet etc. is moving it has nothing to resist therefore it continues to move if no other planet or ? is close enough to cause a magnetic pull. If the pull is great enough it will orbit the close object.
To keep the world in orbit it has to travel at an exact speed that balances out the magnetic pull of the sun and the inertia that wants it to pull away as a ball on a string pulls away when whirled around.
It’s hard to disagree with that.
The thing is, saying that “there was no before time itself” miss the point a little bit because when people ask about what was before the big bang, they often mean before in an explanatory sense. It’s really a philosophical question, that is somewhat difficult to clearly articulate in English.
And the simple answer is: we don’t know. The first few answers in this thread got it.
And not “We don’t know, therefore god” but just “We don’t know”.
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Actually, there is time in space. That’s why it’s called ‘space-time’ - a single concept - because space and time are inseparable. See Einstein’s Special and General theories of relativity.
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Our time standards are based on vibrations of the Caesium atom, not on the orbit or rotation of the earth.
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I’m sure you mean ‘gravitational’, not ‘magnetic’.
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A planet doesn’t have to travel ‘at an exact speed’. If the speed is greater, it will simply go into a higher orbit. In fact, the speed is constantly varying since the orbit is not circular, but elliptical.
Yeah - that’s the trouble with threads like this - ‘time’ means at least two different things:
[ul]
[li]The universal phenomenon that allows change to occur and causes events to happen after or before other events (this is the one that’s meaningful to the question)[/li][li]Years, Months, days, hours, seconds, ticking clocks, rising and setting suns etc - units and conventions we use for measuring the above on Earth (this is the one that people tend to think is meaningful)[/li][/ul]
Perhaps - what were the preconditions that, allowed/were required for, our universe to exit?
There is a notion of change of state, of something. But it doesn’t need to be a change that occurs in our current universe’s space-time domain. Hardly watertight, but maybe an improvement.
Why? What actual, rational explanation do you have for why nothing cannot spontaneously give rise to something?
Of course there is. Causality could be bunk.
Indeed, this is my (amongst others’ of course) reply to the stock answer that people have thrown around for the past 10 years or invoking quantum instability etc. There needs to be some sort of matrix and laws for this randomness to create something out of, and that isn’t “nothing”.
Causality could be bunk? So you’re saying that the universe could have been created by a miracle?
:dubious:
Before this universe was another one. It contracted due to the Big Crunch, which was followed by the Big Bang. And before that one, there was another one.
It’s a good a theory as any, and so far, hasn’t been proved wrong. For now, I’m sticking to it.
Turtles… uh, universes… all the way down? :)
I’ll have you know my phone signals do go out as little demons!
The Bright and Luminous Void of nothingness
Ask a simple question like, “Why am I here”?
I think we already did that one, at least for IT staff on a snow day. It was something about the accounting department being there to do payroll, and somebody has to fix the photocopier if it breaks.
With only 35 posts I can only imagine your next question, but seriously if it was before the universe which fills all in all then there was nothing to see till God said, “Let there be light”.
These are the same questions they ask on the other side as soon as you get there, but I’m not there yet so I can’t answer your question.
Anyone else is just an uneducated guess … :eek:
We don’t actually know that “nothing” existed prior to the Big Bang, just that the Big Bang allowed the formation of the various particles and waves that we now use to observe and measure the universe. As a result, the Big Bang is as far back as can look (and likely will ever be able to look) with the tools at hand and any we are likely to develop in future.
Introducing a god into this is a waste of effort - it adds no understanding, just more complexity.
I’m pretty sure it has been disproven, at least so far as our current universe is concerned. There simply isn’t enough mass and spacetime is expanding too fast (and even accelerating!) for it all to come back together again in a big crunch, no matter how long we wait. Of course that’s all based on our current understanding of cosmology.