Nope, not fixed as yet.
When it is there’ll be another bloody big bang
A couple of comments here. First, time is not a man-made construct. It seems to be an inherent property of the universe. Very closely tied to the idea of space…
Second, space itself was created at the BB, according to the prominent idea. Your comments make it sound like you envision a pre-existing space that the BB happened within, but that’s not it.
Before the big bang, it was just god hanging around in his bedroom, bored off his ass. Then he got a really cool idea . . .
What took him so long? Presumably, he waited an infinite amount of time before starting.
Time isn’t a man made construct but our perception of it is… that’s not to say that we get to choose how we perceive linear time for the most part, but it’s part of our physiology.
It’s thought that prior to the Big Bang all that existed was a single point within which there was no time, and there will again be no time after our universe ends.
But the Big Bang was a singularity. The thing about singularities is that the laws of physics as we understand them, including the one that says “matter is neither created nor destroyed”, break down at them. It’s weird and philosophically unappealing to a lot of physicists and cosmologists, but we seem to be stuck with a universe that has singularities in it.
Oh, that’s an easy one: There isn’t any.
Off-topic, but am I the only one who thought the OP meant “What happens before the universe is boned?” (which is a much more interesting question, I think :D)
I am not. I refer you to that other Great Philosopher of the 20th Century, Mr Natural, who, when asked what it all means, replied, “Don’t mean shit.”
Words to live by.
This question is an old one, and so far as I know, it was St. Augustine who first came up with the answer (held to by physicists today) that time is a part of the Universe, and therefore did not precede the Universe.
This can be a difficult concept for people to grasp. We’re so used to time, that many people, when they encounter the idea that time had a beginning, immediately postulate some sort of “meta-time”, which retains all of the same problems as time. Nope, 'twasn’t that, neither.
It’s turtles, turtles, turtles – all the way down!
It wasn’t even that structured…God was cleaning the gunk out of his trouser cuffs, and one little pebble struck the ground, and viola…
Some years ago Sky & Telescope Magazine ran a contest to come up with a more apt name for the Big Bang. After receiving hundreds of suggestions, they finally concluded there was no better name. They listed a few of the entries, and my favorite was:
Bertha D. Universe.
I guess this means my “meta-meta-time” postulate still stands then. After all it’s one meta louder.
I thought it was “What happens before the universe is bored?” which leads to “boned” which leads to “born”.
If you were of African-American woman non-cesarian born then…
But more seriously… Before the Big Bang it seems that “nothing” couldn’t exist. If nothing existed then there would be nothing out of which to create something. Something needed to exist because nothing couldn’t.
Considering the creation of particles at the quantum level from ‘nothing’, I vaguely remember Chronos or Q.E.D. reminding posters in another thread that a zero-potential energy field is still a field (I hope I stated that correctly). This suggests that something can form from nothing because the field changes. What changes the field? I don’t know.
It strikes me that at the lowest level that perhaps the universe is made up of fields of energy interacting. Some are non-zero, other fields are zero and appear to be “empty” space. There could be truly no “empty” space because - with no fields acting in an area then that area is effectively not part of the universe. Are there theories that point to this idea or discredit it?
Please explain further. Of course things age-- a star has a “lifespan” which ends when its fuel is exhausted-- but is that what you meant?
See-- that’s the part I can’t understand. I can’t wrap my mind around nothingness. It’s easy for me to invision that all of the stars, planets and other celestrial bodies were created during the Big Bang, but space itself? My puny mind insists that space had to be there.
At that point, you’ve got to be religious or philosophical because according to current science there was no before. Just wasn’t, plain and simple. No meta-time. Nothing like that. And that’s as far back as our science in this universe can go.
But… what’s to say our universe is the only universe? If you were inside of a black hole (well, not in the singularity), I imagine that’d be your entire universe as far as any science could ever detect. Obviously your universe started in ours, but you’ll never know that, and can’t. Well, unless your soul is evaporated from that black hole and ends up born again in our universe. But then you’ve got to start all over.
Every once in a while I come across fairly decent articles about our universe just being a simulation, which is also something you’d never notice. So maybe before the universe existed, our processing bandwidth was reserved for looking at porn on a higher plane.
Yeh. I realize that.
Even though I was half-joking… if you really give it some thought, the fact that the universe exists at all is one thing. The fact that it just so happened to be configured in such a way that it made it possible for life to arise AND that it is able to form an appreciation of itself and it’s insignificant place within the very universe that spawned it is another thing entirely. It will never cease to blow me away. Even more so than the fact the universe exists at all.
Where was his bedroom?
Upstairs. He was still living with his parents at the time.
Where was the house?
Look, sorry, this is GQ, I shouldn’t be playing this game here. I’ll stop.