Willy Wonka

Hi everyone, this is my first post

I've recently read yet another article that states that it is nonsensical to ask "what happened before the Big Bang"?

I don't think it is.

Yes, I know that time only began with the Big Bang. But the fact that spacetime is self-contained does not answer how it came to exist at all.

Ultimately it's always going to boil down to explaining how nothing became something and how there could've just "been" nothing in the first place - both inexplicable. This is why both theists and atheists dodge these questions.

NB: I am an atheist.

Hawkingfan

That sounds like an ignorant article. Physicists certainly do not think that way. Especially Stephen Hawking. The theory he is working on, The Unified Theory of Gravity, will answer such questions.
The problem is that the current laws of science, from the classical theories of Einstein and Newton, to the Planck theory of quanta, "break down" at the initial state of the universe prior to the big bang.
But there is a light at the end of the tunnel. It seems that the superstring theory may provide the answers. Hawking and others are working very hard at it right now (he is developing the theory and inventing the mathematics for it).

Lord Asriel

Hey, another Brit! Hi Willy, do be sure to say hello to everyone in <a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=43" target="_blank">the welcome forum</a>.

I think the problem with discussing what happened "before the Big Bang" is that language is inadequate. It is impossible to avoid words like "before" or "nothing", which have no meaning in the complex world of the very early universe. Perhaps the human mind, which only evolved in order to adapt to the universe, not to understand it, is an inadeqaute tool for the solving of this mystery.

Oxymoron

I am assuming that your question is scientific, not philosophical (you have clearly grasped that the concept of "before" without time is meaningless). The really important question is then "how could we determine what - if anything - happened before the Big Bang?"

In "standard" BB models, all of our lovely equations end up with naughty singularities at t=0 that render the state unknowable. Which might (and I can only say might) make the question unanswerable in principle. Well, we may have to accept that our knowledge has limits, though bearing in mind the scope of the problem that wouldn't be a huge tragedy. I personally find the idea that we can get to within 10^-34s of the birth of our universe 13 billion years ago and understand an inkling of what's going on an absolutely f**king amazing achievement.

Of course, a Hawking "horizon" model might well prove viable, it really is hard to tell. Or something else might appear which does a similar job, in which case a whole new physics might appear that will tell us what happened before t=0. However, until then, I support said article stating that it is currently nonsensical.

Willy Wonka

Good answers.

I *was* kinda thinking along the Philosophical side but I started this thread in Science and Skepticism because I was making a point about how philosophy is often touched upon in Physics.
I think the article implies the commonly-held belief that there is no mystery to existance itself, which I think is wrong.

Shadowy Man

Sure there is mystery... there are a huge number of things about the universe that we don't know about.

And there are major questions out there to which we don't yet have answers.

Ernest Sparks

Willy:
The word 'mystery' comes from a root word that means 'something hidden'. If the root of the so-called Big Bang is hidden from us, that does not mean it is 'nothing'.

M'Lord:
I think 'nothing' can be avoided by substituting 'x NOT verb-about-x' for 'NOTHING verb'.
So, 'Nothing came before the Big Bang' becomes 'Any thing does not come before the Big Bang."
In my opinion, any talk about predecessors of a Big Bang is talking about something (or some stuff), though that may not be like any thing or stuff we are familiar with.

Ernie

[ November 13, 2002: Message edited by: Ernest Sparks ]</p>

joedad

Speculating about "before" the BB is like a flatlander talking about "up." But certainly the universe existed before the BB.

Nothing that exists within the universe can be dispatched into nothingness. Nor can we dispatch from nothingness anything that is universal. It would seem strange to think that the universe as an entity would behave differently, on a plane of absolute existence, than any of its constituent parts.

If we are incapable of making any tiny part of the universe "not exist," how is it ever feasible to expect the universe as a whole to behave any differently?

joe

Sidian

we can? what makes them think the universe is so young? if we can see light 13 billion lightyears away/ago doesn't that mean the universe is older?

Shadowy Man

We can only see back as far as the time of last scattering (the exact date of which depends on your favorite cosmological model). We can infer some characteristics of the universe at that time, and perhaps before, by observing that light in great detail - it is highly redshifted, and lies in the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

What happened before that time is more speculation than observation. The extrapolation of the universe's expansion to a T=0 singularity is purely theoretical at this juncture.