Comment by bmacho
4 days ago
> The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe – a singular moment when space, time and matter sprang into existence.
It is indeed "often described" in the media as such. However, that is _not_ the currently accepted theory. "What if there were no space and time before the Big Bang" is just Stephen Hawking's pet theory.
A more accurate summation would be that our theories do not permit us to go back beyond what appears to be the "Big Bang", and indeed, we can't quite get to it either, since the need for Quantum Gravity becomes too great as we get to what seems to be the "zero time". We have no principled, reasonable way to make any claims about what came before the point where our theories break down, and that includes the claim that there was no space or time at all before then.
Thus, anything and everything you've heard about what is there "before the big bang" has always been speculation. I mention this because sometimes people read the science media, which is always reporting on this speculation, and think that the reporting on the speculation constitutes "science" constantly changing its mind, but that's not the case here. Science has consistently not had a justifiable position on this topic, ever. It has always been speculation. It is the press that often fails to make this clear and writes stories in terms of what "science" has "discovered", but any claims of certainty in this area are not the claims of "science".
Interesting thing with this work is that it does create an observable, testable hypothesis: slightly positive curvature of the universe.
Seems inevitable that we'll discover we aren't the only universe / only cycle.
We went from thinking the Earth was the center of the universe, to the sun being the center of the universe, and the next obvious step is our universe isn't at the center of universes.
What people seem to not be able to conceptualize, consciously or not, is that there really is no "before" the Big Bang in the standard model (Lambda-CDM), if time itself exists only after t=0.
The Lambda CDM does not really say that. As other commenters have pointed out, Lambda-CDM is silent on the very earliest few moments of the universe where quantum gravity would be required.
What is the currently accepted theory?
We have no theories working at those conditions. Wiki says
> General relativity also predicts that the initial state of the universe, at the beginning of the Big Bang, was a singularity of infinite density and temperature.[6][obsolete source] However, classical gravitational theories are not expected to be accurate under these conditions, and a quantum description is likely needed[7].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_singularity
> [6][obsolete source]
I didn't know but apparently wikipedia treats old sources as obsolete, doesn't matter if there's new information or not that would make it obsolete.
I wonder if any sources supporting the notion that the earth is round must be updated every couple of years with a new source or study.
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This is the best theory we have:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question
At t=0 or "before" none
Might as well believe in God if you’re going to believe in spontaneous accidental creation…
Why not? If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside the realm of science and in the realm of belief. Until someone figures out a way to experimentally verify the big bang hypothesis (or any other explanation for the origin of the universe or what came "before"), it's entirely fair to attribute it to whatever you feel like, be it a god or anything else. There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.
Well, I think surely the entirely fair thing to do is to just admit we don't know rather than make any attribution or imply any possession of an answer to those questions?
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If you can't observe it, test it, and reproduce it, then it lies outside of the realm of (natural) science and may lie within the realm of mathematics, philosophy, or (gasp) theology.
> There is no law of the universe that guarantees that science is capable of answering all questions.
There's a name for a more nuanced version of this "law" and there's a good amount of work being done arguing for and against weaker and stronger versions of it: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sufficient-reason/
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There's quite a big philosophical difference between "there exists a point beyond which it is possible to make observations" and "the universe was created by an omnipotent being"
Verily, for all knowest that the gods live up in the sky, which is forever unreachable and unobservable by any man.
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Am omnipotent being is a necessity for making observations. A lot of religions considers consciousness as God.
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Anything outside of what we can observe will always be based on faith anyway. We'll probably never understand what's "before" the big bang, wether it make sense to ask that question or why something exists rather than nothing.
To me, calling the unknown "God" is imposing a term loaded with human preconception and biases in exactly the place you don't want those things.
I don't think so - god is substantially less parsimonious. But in the end, I think you're sort of using two different notions of belief as if they were the same.
I believe (lowercase b) in all sorts of stuff, scientific and otherwise, but believing in God typically indicates some kind of act of faith, which is to say, ultimately, to believe in something despite the absence of evidence for it and for some deeper reason than can be furnished by a warrant of some kind. I can believe in the spontaneous generation of the universe in the lowercase b sense of the word without really having anything to do at all with the latter kind of belief, which I think is kind of dumb.
Historically, in the West at least, the ability or inability to reason one's way to the existence of God determined whether you needed to rely on faith or not.
https://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xii/en/encyclicals/docum...
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Sort of like believing that we have free will.
You're confusing belief with accepting the current scientific consensus.
The Big Bang theory was created by a Catholic priest. So yes.
And the Big Bang was created by the priest's God.
Which God? Vishnu? Ra? Amatarasu?
Prince Philip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Philip_movement
Assume God exists.
Various isolated cultures are going to come up with different names for God.
This like saying which Sun? Surya, Ra or Helios?
All are different names of sun. But there is only one sun.
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How so? If you attribute it to an earlier universe, you are just pushing the problem further back. It doesn't seem to be a proof or even a mild indication.
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Things existing is pretty miraculous! How is any of this stuff here?!?!?
Belief in anything is completely trivial unless you act based on those beliefs. No one is going to waste time worshiping, or murder someone over, the "nothing" from before "something".