Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-debate-hawkings-idea-that-the-universe-had-no-beginning-20190606/

by _Microft • 7 years ago

249 284 7 years ago

kumarvvr• 7 years ago

Curiously,Indian philosophy also propounds that the universe has neither a beginning nor an end.

I think it might actually be more unique for western philosophy/religion to be building a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end - a lot of other ancient cultures seemed to see things as a cycle - for instance, we see in the Mayans that they saw the world as a series of cycles. It makes sense in early traditions to not have a beginning and end - if there's no track of "progress" in a historical fashion, it would be hard to visualize any sort of long lasting change in the cycle.

djsumdog3• 7 years ago

Some of our best fictional stories are in cycles. The "Hero's Journey" is often a circle with growth, where you end up where you started from. Every season of The Wire pretty much ends in a circle.

roland002• 7 years ago

It was Aristotle's Unmoved Mover being incorporated into Christian Thought around AD 50 via Philo of Alexandria that changed Monotheistic religion of God being the Organizer of All Things from Chaos into the Creator of All Things out of Nothing, Ex Nihilo. Beforehand Monotheistic Religions believed God was a creator but he created out of chaos and imbued the formless with a specific form.

Likewise simultaneously around the time of Aristotle during the time of the Hellenistic Era, The Seleucid Empire arose from the fires of Alexander the Great Empire. The 2nd king in the Seleucid Dynasty decided to make a universal time calendar that just increments again and again past individual rulers and this change the nature of stories tremendously in the empire.

When Time Became Regular and Universal It Changed History https://aeon.co/essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universa...

When Antiochus I Soter in 281, after his father death decided to keep the calendar his father created (and he had already served 10 years as a co-ruler prior from 291 to 281.) And not start over it started the various populations that were opposed to the Seleucid authorities to tell apocalyptic tales of the end of days, not just the end of the ruler / authority but the end of everything. Especially since later Seleucid rulers such as Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175 BC to 164 BC) seem to limit Jewish religious rights, though Historians are not sure if this true (it may have been about taxes and other areas of authority.) Well there was a rebellion in 167 BC and the internal Jewish Warriors succeeded from the Seleucid Empire (The Maccabees Rebellion.) Well the rebellion was successful and they were independent for 130 years (though lots of civil wars for authority) and only in the end succumb to the Romans except the Jewish People saw the Romans at first as liberators for they still feared various Greek / Hellenistic empires and the Jewish People thought he romans were better.

-----

TLDR: Cyclic thinking and Creation from Something / Chaos was actually the norm in monotheism, only during the Hellenistic (Greek Influenced) / Roman Era did this shift to Creation out of Nothing (Ex Nihilo) instead of Creation out of Chaos. But yeah read the article I linked to.

omarchowdhury• 7 years ago

What of Indian philosophy can you cite regarding this? From what I gather, it's seen as cyclic.

eyeundersand• 7 years ago

I would imagine the OP meant the cycles are never-ending, as opposed to one iteration of the cycle.

swatkat2• 7 years ago

Nasadiya sukta[0] in Rigveda ponders about creation of Universe and what existed before that. Last two paragraphs (6 and 7 in wiki) are the hard-hitting ones.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta

SomeOldThrow5• 7 years ago

What does it even mean to ask “what happened before time”? The question seems nonsensical to me.

sp3322• 7 years ago

You can still have causality.

pavel_lishin2• 7 years ago

Can you expand on this? How can you have causality - cause and effect - that's divorced from some sort of flow of time?

quotemstr3• 7 years ago

Causality without time makes no sense. Even if you don't have a ticking clock, you can define "time" with a counter and a Lamport clock. Any time you have state, you have time. A timeless universe is hard to grasp.

ASalazarMX• 7 years ago

It's nonsensical to wonder what happened in our universe before it existed, but if our universe has an external superuniverse, it's not illogical to wonder what happened there that caused our universe to exist.

erikpukinskis3• 7 years ago

Can we follow this a little further?

Let’s say you and me are little bits of algae which are floating in blob in the ocean off the coast. We are in a larger current which we cannot see. The current is such that we will eventually strike the shore together.

We are in a cluster of material together. It’s not exactly algae, there are a bunch of random gels, some mostly decomposed skin parts. Some very fine grit.

Of course the ocean is constantly mixing everything up, so even though we have been in this blob together for several weeks, that’s not exactly normal.

Well, there millions of blobs like ours, so I guess it’s sort of normal. But there are a quadrillion billion blobs that won’t last the hour. So our blob is, if not abnormal, improbable.

You and I are algae, so we can’t sense much. But we have noticed many events over our lives. Very early in our lives we perceived the day cycle. There are good times to photosynthesize, boy did we feel that. Time. We noticed quite a few bacterial... situations. And geometrically there have been a number of events in our blob. It used to be much bigger, for one thing. We certainly noticed every time a chunk got taken out of the blob and the energy gradients went haywire.

Of course we’re algae so we don’t remember, but we notice.

There is a world outside our blob, but we cannot know it. Sadly, this is physics. There’s not enough atoms in the blob to make a fin, let alone an eye or a brain. So there will be no peering out of the water at the sky. We can sense events within the blob. Outside the blob there may be more going on, but we certainly can’t see it.

There are unexplainable patterns in the blob. Why does it look sheared off on two sides? “We”, meaning our limited algae consciousnesses, didn’t exist during those events so we are just as cut off from our past as we are cut off from the world around us.

And we are barreling now, in a wave towards the shore.

And now we are floating.

And now we are rolling through a wave towards the shore.

And now we are slipping calmly on the surface.

And soon we will crash onto the sand, where we will be consumed by bacteria and insects, and our blob will be no more.

It is inevitable. The first law of algae says: you will be eaten.

But we will not be eaten this minute. And so I ask you: what happened in the blob, before it existed?

Luckily, though we can’t see outside the blob, we can ponder questions like this, because we are hypothetical blobs, and hypothetical blobs have human brains!

We can certainly guess what our bodies were before the blob existed. They were a cloud phosphorous and nitrogen. And presumably there were other plants or bacteria in our proto-blob that produced those nutrients for to become us.

That bit of skin I mentioned was on a dead whale. It was on the ocean floor but it got kicked up to the surface in a storm.

The gels came from jellyfish. And the salty water around us... well, it was salty water.

What shape was all that stuff in? A strange one. But still, we could draw it if we had some art supplies. And fingers. The current that brought in the whale skin could be drawn to an approximation. The bacteria largely came from two identifiable blooms, plus a long tail of about a thousand others, plus an unknowable tail catalog of origins describing the last 0.001% of bacteria in our blob. We couldn’t draw that, but maybe a light watercolor fog around our greater vicinity could represent it.

If I could draw our blob before it existed, it would look like a strange flower. With very long tendrils but also several beautiful simple twisted surfaces.

Now, what about the universe itself?

Science suggests its origins were not nearly so “soft”. Our blob was sort of “assembled” from pre-blob parts. The universe doesn’t appear to have been assembled in a soup that same way. Trend lines suggest it started as a singularity, not an assemblage.

But all physicists will admit we don’t have the technology to peer into those first moments. Like us and our blob, there’s just not the equipment available to look outside the universe to get data, nor was there equipment present to remember things as they happened.

We just don’t know what physics is like in those kind of moments. Is it an assemblage of parts from a larger vicinity? Are there even larger vicinities than our blob?

Or, to put it in terms that you and I would understand: did the universe, at birth, have a bit of whale skin in it? Some dead jellyfish bodies?

We can only speculate. As for me I say: why not?

But I’m just a bit of algae. What do I know.

SomeOldThrow5• 7 years ago

if our universe has an external superuniverse

This is also meaningless, scientifically: there is nothing you can measure which is outside the universe. Things like a holographic universe are inherently untestable. I hope we continue looking for testable things, but this speculative path rapidly leads away from science and physics and into "linguistic tricks to confuse humans". It's not even philosophy at that point, it's just arguing over semantics.

mensetmanusman5• 7 years ago

It's nonsensical to some, but not to others :) never forget the incredible capability of consciousness.

MrQuincle• 7 years ago

It might be phrased differently. Like this. Is there something more universal than time. Look at spacetime from an outsider's perspective. Suppose it is 2D+1D, then one way time can be represented is as frames where each frame is slightly different. The interesting part is that those consecutive frames have very strong constraints. But what are those constraints? One of them is that energy is conserved. One other might be that it's Markovian: you only need to have the last frame for the next. If there exist (entangled) histories this seems to be wrong. The quest for (moderately) consistent frameworks that all have their own emergent nature of time might be a very fruitful one. It's rather a "beyond" time than a "before" time.

karmakaze2• 7 years ago

It helps to think of time as change. Time started when the first thing changed. So to say there was no beginning helps by not having to answer what the first change was ot why it did. It's still hard to imagine no first change without an infinite regress. Maybe if you think of it reletivistically as in there wasn't a singular beginning but a beginning area where depending on where you are it could be a beginning but not the beginning.

hirundo• 7 years ago

“Asking what came before the Big Bang is meaningless ... It would be like asking what lies south of the South Pole.”

Isn't Polaris Australis south of the South Pole? Was Hawking imagining an Earth-shaped space that isn't embedded in a larger space?

weego• 7 years ago

A stars position can't be defined as being south of somewhere. South exists as a logical construct of our magnetic poles. Once you lose that you have no relative measure to work with. The same is possibly true of time.

djsumdog3• 7 years ago

But the trouble with the South Pole and Shuttlecock metaphors is that you assume those objects are literally everything; all matter. If you define the Universe as Everything there is (seen and unseen; where what we see is the "Observable Universe") there is no outside location from which to observe it in entirety.

That's where the analogy really breaks down, but I guess it's still a useful thought experiment so long as you realize the limits to the domain.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

Nitpick: North/south exist due to the planet's rotation, not the magnetic poles.

The magnetic poles happen to be near the rotational poles, but that's incidental.

Sorry to be That Guy today :(

Ericson2314• 7 years ago

The article is vague in the topology. No boundary or also infinite?

antidesitter5• 7 years ago

The article has an image illustrating the no-boundary proposal.

djsumdog3• 7 years ago

This seems different than the concept of infinite time, where prior to the big band there was something the collapsed into a ball of energy and maybe someday our universe will collapse back again (which has lost merit since we've seen matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating .. meaning in a few trillion years, atoms may be so far apart that light can't reach anything .. the eventual heat death of the Universe).

In the shuttlecock example, there is an assumption the shuttlecock is the Universe and there is nothing outside to observe the object. Same with "What's south of the south pole." It ignores the stars and galaxies past Earth itself.

There is also a theory there could be many other big bangs and universes next to our own, but they are all accelerating away from each other. We can't see the one next to ours because it's expanding itself, as is ours, and all these are moving away from each other. Imagine a room of beach balls and they're all just inflating, but also moving away from each other at the rate they're inflating. In you're inside one, it's not only impossible to see another one, but because of the speed-of-light speed limits, it's impossible to travel to another one or even provide/disprove it exists.

There are a lot of questions about what, if anything, is outside the observable universe. Are we sitting in a ball on some gigantic alien's coffee table?

Retric• 7 years ago

In terms of expansion we have little data to extrapolate thousands of times the current age of the universe. The reasons behind said expansion are unknown making extrapolation have meaningless error bars.

Current estimates for heat death are vastly beyond a few trillion years. With another universe possibly randomly showing, though the odds of that depend on the unknowable size of this universe.

deepsun2• 7 years ago

what, if anything, is outside the observable universe

The answer is similar to the time. Remember, in cosmology there's no really separate space and time, there's only space-time.

So when you're looking at the edge of the observable universe, you really looking back in time. So the answer to the question "what is outside" is the same as "what was before".

Or, in simpler words, the question is meaningless, as there's no space to talk about "outside". Not sure the last phrase is correct, as I've just talked about separate space from time.

SketchySeaBeast5• 7 years ago

If you are restricted to the typical 3 dimensions of movement (and 1 through which we are non-optionally traveling) - you should either get to a physical boundary, or you end up in a loop, right? I mean, you won't travel so far you end up in Tuesday.

rightbyte• 7 years ago

The observable universe is a growing sphere around earth or where ever you happen to observe it. So to answer the question "what's outside" we just need to wait for the light to reach us.

Obviously "outside the observable universe" must be outside of that sphere? Just because stars we see now are not still at that position doesn't make the question meaningless. The answer could be that outside the sphere, right now, there are most likely more stars, planets and gas.

Balgair7• 7 years ago

Wikipedia's 'Timeline of the Far Future' is a great article on the posibilities of our universe's fate [0]. Of note are the entries near the end of the list.

Year 10^(10^(50)) : Estimated time for a Boltzmann brain to appear in the vacuum via a spontaneous entropy decrease [1]

Year 10^(10^(120)) : High estimate for the time for the universe to reach its final energy state, even in the presence of a false vacuum.

Year 10^(10^(10^(56))) : Around this vast timeframe, quantum tunnelling in any isolated patch of the vacuum could generate, via inflation, new Big Bangs giving birth to new universes. Because the total number of ways in which all the subatomic particles in the observable universe can be combined is 10^(10^(115)) a number which, when multiplied by 10^(10^(10^(56))), disappears into the rounding error, this is also the time required for a quantum-tunnelled and quantum fluctuation-generated Big Bang to produce a new universe identical to our own, assuming that every new universe contained at least the same number of subatomic particles and obeyed laws of physics within the range predicted by string theory.

Suffice to say, our understanding of physics and the universe is still in an infant state when it comes to predictions of the universe's future. Much more funding is needed :P

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain

irrational• 7 years ago

This kind of discussion always reminds me of the Asimov story "The Last Question"

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

antidesitter5• 7 years ago

Boltzmann brains may not occur after all [0], which is reassuring [2]. See De Sitter Space Without Dynamical Quantum Fluctuations [1].

[0] http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/05/05/squelchi...

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0298

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.00850

CuriousSkeptic2• 7 years ago

If the universe reaches a final state at one point, isn’t the implication that this is where all process that defines time ends. If so, how can one speak of things happening “after” that point?

kregasaurusrex• 7 years ago

If I had to choose a favorite article on all of Wikipedia, this would be it. Almost reads like a sci-fi novel of our own personal voyage through the cosmos.

codetrotter• 7 years ago

There is also a theory there could be many other big bangs and universes next to our own, but they are all accelerating away from each other.

I speculate that there is. And I assert that for our universe to be meaningful, it must birth a sentience into life in the fourth dimension. That probably sounds very wishy washy but does anyone get what I mean and agree with me on this? I’ve never told anyone about this postulation before but I doubt that I am alone in thinking this.

Balgair7• 7 years ago

Anthony Aguirre at UCSC does research in this area:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0712.0571.pdf

http://scipp.ucsc.edu/~aguirre/Research.html

AnimalMuppet3• 7 years ago

Must? Or the universe has no meaning?

That seems to me like you've grabbed on to a mysticism with no foundation.

martincmartin• 7 years ago

there is an assumption the shuttlecock is the Universe and there is nothing outside to observe the object.

It's not an assumption, it's explicitly part of the model.

Same with "What's south of the south pole." It ignores the stars and galaxies past Earth itself.

If I say "the latex in this balloon is like the surface of the earth," I'm not so much ignoring the stars & galaxies, they're just not part of the analogy.

Is your point that, for an object to be curved, there must be something for it to curve into? For example, in order for a 2D surface (like the latex in the balloon) to be curved, it necessarily must be in a 3D (or higher) space?

throwawaymath3• 7 years ago

Is your point that, for an object to be curved, there must be something for it to curve into? For example, in order for a 2D surface (like the latex in the balloon) to be curved, it necessarily must be in a 3D (or higher) space?

Given the context I'm guessing you asked this rhetorically, but if not: it is not true in general that a curved n-dimensional object must be embedded in a n + k-dimensional space. Curvature can be intrinsic.

winter_blue2• 7 years ago

matter in the universe isn't slowing down in spreading apart, but accelerating

How come this does not violate the law of conservation of energy which says there's a fixed amount of energy in the universe? For matter to accelerate would require energy right? Where is the energy fueling this universal acceleration coming from? According to Newton's laws, doesn't there also need to be an external actor causing this acceleration? (Sorry if this sounds like a basic question--I don't know much physics besides some required intro courses I took for my CS major).

jerf3• 7 years ago

"How come this does not violate the law that says there's a fixed amount of energy in the universe?"

It may. It is currently not clear if conservation of energy holds at the cosmological scale.

antidesitter5• 7 years ago

Energy conservation is a consequence of time-translation symmetry (by Noether’s theorem), which is broken in general relativity. Hence, broadly speaking, energy is not conserved in general relativity.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/02/22/energy-...

zaarn2• 7 years ago

There is no matter being accelerated but space itself is expanding, which is why distant objects may accelerate beyond the speed of light, atleast that is what it looks like.

dugluak• 7 years ago

> Are we sitting in a ball on some gigantic alien's coffee table?

sometimes I have the same question but quite opposite. What if there are miniscule worlds right on our coffee table.

swamp40• 7 years ago

Both.

jeffwass• 7 years ago

Horton Hears a Who

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

On being given the planetary model of an atom I think it's relatively common to consider that maybe atoms are mini star systems. That was one of my early "aw shucks, someone else had that idea already!?" deflationary moments.

will_brown2• 7 years ago

Or both...we can simultaneously exist on some aliens coffee table while they simultaneously exist on your coffee table.

Retra• 7 years ago

There are. Look into a microscope.

graycat• 7 years ago

And notice that just to discuss these questions, even to start, we make a LOT of assumptions about space, time, dimensions, etc. that as far as we know are particular to our experience. The assumption that these hold outside our universe -- that there is even space out there anything like the space we experience -- is laughable. It's nearly as absurd as assuming that ET has two arms, legs, eyes, and ears and then discussing height, weight, and hair color!

thatoneuser2• 7 years ago

I'm under the impression that with the heat death, such a large vacuum would create the massive quantum states which would lend to a new big bang. Would that not also be infinite time?

abtinf5• 7 years ago

The explanation I've found most persuasive is to take a purely philosophical approach: the universe had no beginning and will have no end because those concepts do not apply. The universe is everything. If there was something that "caused" the universe, it would just be part of the universe. If there is something after the universe ends, it would just be part of the universe. There is nothing outside the universe, if there was it would be part of the universe.

FartyMcFarter• 7 years ago

Yep. If you're a programmer, think about a "game of life" simulation (or any other simulation).

The answer to "what was there before the first state in my simulation?" is simply: "nothing, within this universe".

jerf3• 7 years ago

That's not an explanation, that's just a relabeling, moving the questions people have from the label "the universe" to the label "the observable universe", but neither answering them, nor making them any less relevant.

abtinf5• 7 years ago

The universe is everything. By definition, there can be no evidence for anything outside, before, or after it. Any such evidence would be in the universe. There are no valid questions about it, nor valid answers. Any claims about something outside the universe are neither true nor false—they are completely arbitrary. They have the same intellectual status as God.

jchook• 7 years ago

I agree.

The problem seems to be the word “Universe”. As soon as you assign a word to a thing, it gains boundaries that separate it from nothing and everything else.

My favorite description of origins of things comes from Spencer G. Brown in Laws of Form.

My own short poem about the origin of things:

First there is none, and so just one. Yet none and one are two. Once there’s two, they share a room, hence there now are three. Remembering the two before, the three completes the five, and on the numbers multiply until they are complete.

And a koan:

The student asks the master, please teach me. The master replies, how can I teach you if I have no tongue with which to speak, and no space within which to exist?

quotemstr3• 7 years ago

Cosmology is deeply disturbing if you think about it too long. Why should the universe exist? What is a causeless cause? How can something come from nothing? Regardless of the precise mechanisms involved, at some scale, some kind of steady-state cyclic model seems unavoidable --- the whole idea of existence not existing is bizarre and puzzling. The only way out of the causeless effect problem is to nop out of the effect.

onion2k2• 7 years ago

That's only disturbing if you believe everything is simple enough that humans could comprehend it straight away. If you accept that some stuff is beyond our understanding, and will be for quite a while yet, everything is much less bothersome. Accept that you are fallible and the universe is fine.

I'm not saying this is easy though.

almost_usual• 7 years ago

This is how I view the universe. We make attempts to interpret it and probably never will fully comprehend it. The perceived boundaries of our universe is the edge of our consciousness and what we understand as humans. As we evolve so will our understanding and interpretations.

For me it is more of a humbling feeling than disturbing.

chii• 7 years ago

If you accept that some stuff is beyond our understanding

isn't that just an elaborate way to say 'give up'? I asked religious friends of mine about what god _is_, and the common answer is that it's beyond human understanding.

I don't believe that people should take things on faith, and accept that anything is beyond understanding.

quotemstr3• 7 years ago

There's good reason to believe that humans can understand everything that exists: we're Turning complete, and mathematics admits no higher category of functions than those that a Turing machine can compute. We may not be able to physically compute every function, but we can devise a plan for computing any function, and isn't that tantamount to being able to understand anything in principle?

umvi• 7 years ago

the whole idea of existence not existing is bizarre and puzzling

The alternative is that matter has always existed, which is equally bizarre and puzzling, though things make more sense that way.

syn0byte• 7 years ago

While everyone else wonders about the nature of time. I wonder about the nature of "sense." What is "sense"? How do some things 'make' sense and others don't? Is "sense" universal? If not, why?

logicchains• 7 years ago

From a probabilistic point of view, we're observing with extreme selection bias: we only see the universe in which we do exist, not all the ones in which we don't, so no matter how incredibly unlikely existence is, from the perspective of existing consciousness it is guaranteed. This means it's possible for consciousness to arise from pure entropy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain.

erikpukinskis3• 7 years ago

Related question: how fast does time go in a “pure entropy” situation?

Or, maybe more useful, what happens to time as you asymptotically approach pure entropy? Does it speed up?

If so, it would make a Boltzmann brain inevitable. Or... not an inevitable brain, but an inevitable random low entropy state, right?

procgen• 7 years ago

This is the so-called 'superultimate question', whose answer defies inquiry: "Why is there something rather than nothing?"

resters• 7 years ago

Cognitive biases and the vast cultural/religious narratives around cosmogenesis make it next to impossible to reason about the universe in this way.

her_tummy_hurts• 7 years ago

I don’t thunk my brain could handle no beginning

jvagner• 7 years ago

With all respect, I think we generally live in a human society that has been built around that very constraint.

sarego• 7 years ago

Curious to know why that is. Would you mind expanding?

jihadjihad• 7 years ago

For an eloquent companion piece, I would highly recommend this essay: http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/the-bridge-from-nowher...

dmix• 7 years ago

The linked 1981 source document "Astrophysical Cosmology" proceedings from the Vatican look's interesting (Hawking's raw talk is at page 575 in the PDF):

http://www.pas.va/content/dam/accademia/pdf/sv48pas.pdf

The preface mentions the academy was from 1603 and Galileo Galilei was a member.

gavanwoolery• 7 years ago

I have very little knowledge of astrophysics, but I thought it would be an interesting idea if the universe constantly recycled itself. That is, every so often it collapsed in on itself and produced another big bang. Theoretically some parts of the universe would have already achieved escape velocity, but the rest of it is gradually gravitating towards some center of mass. Is such a thing even feasible?

svachalek• 7 years ago

A few decades ago, that was widely believed as the most likely state of the universe. However, it's now known that the big bang is essentially still accelerating and this is blamed on an unknown force called "dark energy". It doesn't have much effect within galaxies, but galaxies themselves are blowing away from each other at ridiculous speeds.

XorNot• 7 years ago

Well it's more that space itself is expanding. It doesn't affect small scales because other forces collapse everything back together fast enough to overcome it. If the increase in dark energy is consistent though, eventually it'll be expanding so fast not even our atoms can hold themselves together.

eigenschwarz• 7 years ago

It's definitely an interesting an idea that has been considered before. Hopefully the Wikipedia page on cyclic models can be a starting point of interest to you! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model

deepsun2• 7 years ago

Not really, because you again assuming that there's an independent time-line, where a ball of universe expands and collapses.

Our current understanding of the Universe is that _time itself_ "expands and collapses". You cannot talk about time "before", because there was no time "before" the big bang, just as there's no space "outside" the ball, to talk about its boundaries.

MisterOctober2• 7 years ago

Lee Smolin makes an intriguing suggestion with regard to how the universe reproduces in his book "The Life of the Cosmos" -- I can't say I was persuaded, but I think it's worth reading

Japhy_Ryder• 7 years ago

Not sure if you were somehow subtly referencing this, but...

“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” ― Douglas Adams

EdwardDiego2• 7 years ago

Am I wrong, or are they arguing on matters of belief rather than evidence?

sonnyblarney3• 7 years ago

The word is 'speculation' not 'belief' that that's pretty much what all science is. The evidence usually comes later.

EdwardDiego2• 7 years ago

There I was thinking that the scientific method involved falsifiable hypotheses - so how are they going to prove or disprove their respective beliefs? I'm getting string theory flashbacks where half of the physics community is into it, the other half is not, and no-one can prove anything, but they still have a grand old time arguing about it anyway.

dddddaviddddd• 7 years ago

Agreed that is where science starts. Speculation leads to generating testable hypotheses and experiments.

brink• 7 years ago

Yeah, but this seems trying to avoid the possibility of the universe having a beginning simply because it's unsettling; taking the less likely thought path because it conflicts with beliefs.

I'm not saying that's what it is, that's just what it seems like what's happening here to me.

sonnyblarney3• 7 years ago

I misinterpreted the direct idea of 'Big Bang' at a very young age and thought that the nature of time changed over time, ergo, 'the beginning' could never be achieved (even if you could travel backwards in time), i.e. it's 'infinitely far back' similar to how time changes for traveller/observer as one approaches the speed of light.

Only in any given time frame could one mark 'the start', but that would be a misinterpretation.

So time did have a 'start' but it was 'infinity ago'.

I realized at some point this has nothing really to do with 'Big Bang', but later I've come back to the idea as at least novel!

It's fun to see smart people contemplating alternative things.

senorjazz2• 7 years ago

It's fun to see smart people contemplating alternative things.

It certainly is. Most recent theory I heard of whilst staying up too late watching youtube videos, was by Roger Penrose on CCC (Conformal cyclic cosmology) [1]

My very basic understanding of it (probably wrong understanding though) was that the universe is mathmatical, thus mathmatical tricks are valid constructs when understanding the universe. Once the universe has expanded to heat death, it will have infinite size and zero mass which is the same as having 0 size and infinite mass which will cause a big bang and another universal epoch.

I'm probably remembering it all wrong, but as a layman who enjoys watching much smarter people than I contemplate and try to explain these thing, I found the idea very interesting

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[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVDJJVoTx7s

or maybe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM47acQ7pEQ

d0m• 7 years ago

Say we could break any physical rules of our current universe, is there a good theory that would explain how something might have been created out of nothing? i.e. imagine for a second that we're in a simulation and that the current laws of physic are just arbitrary created by a "host". This "host" could have very different physical laws. Could we think of any theory that would explain the creation of something out of nothing in this "host"?

I'm very puzzled as to why the universe even exist.. wouldn't it have been much simpler not to have anything at all? I can only think of one answer: It couldn't have been otherwise. I.e. physically speaking, it had to happen.

Maybe that's how we should approach the problem? Let's try to "create nothing"... maybe we'll realize that it's actually impossible to "have nothing" unless X happens, and maybe we'll figure out that X happening would explain how our universe was created?

Or said in a different way, maybe the universe is actually "nothing", like it always was and will always be. But "nothing" may just be physically impossible so you need "positive" and "negative" things to cancel each other out so that the end result is "0".

I'm not too sure where I'm going with this, but it reminds me of the quote "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." So, whatever the theories about big bang, multi-verse, universe expanding/collapsing indefinitely or even God-based theories, all of it comes back to "how did the first thing come out out of nowhere?" People talk about "Singularity", but this is just "kicking the can down the road". Still, by kicking the can I guess we keep learning new things, and maybe someday we will have the technology to answer these questions. Unfortunately, it seems like answering the next frontier seems to be an order of magnitude harder (time-wise and cost-wise) than answering the previous question.

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

That is the most fundamental question.

Why does anything exist at all?

Conceptually, this question persist across all the big bangs, collapses, multi universes, or any other conception science has made informed conjectures about, doesn't require time, sequences, or cause and effect These are all processes suppose there is some underlying construct / process / force / structure. But nothing, not even the concept of nothing, not even ideas, maths, shadows on a cave wall.

It is unknowable.

Koshkin3• 7 years ago

Yet, for many specific values of $anything the answer is very much known.

dmbaggett• 7 years ago

You might be interested in Our Mathematical Universe by Max Tegmark. He tries to argue that, fundamentally, the universe is "just math." In other words (glossing over enormous complexity here) if the basic axioms of math are true, the universe must exist.

I have to admit I didn't fully buy the line of reasoning. But it's very interesting.

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 7 years ago

if the basic axioms of math are true

Isn't the problem that you can't prove axioms. We intuitively "know" them to be true but without proof.

AgentME3• 7 years ago

UD+ASSA (http://fennetic.net/irc/finney.org/~hal/udassa/) is an extension/refinement of the mathematical universe idea that I find very compelling. It explains why even though "everything mathematically describe-able is real", we personally see and anticipate that some things are more likely than other things, including why physics stays the same instead of spontaneously changing, etc. (One of the original authors of the idea thinks there's issues with it, but I think it's still a very useful idea: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zd2DrbHApWypJD2Rz/udt2-and-a...)

Since considering it and the mathematical universe idea, the question of why anything exists at all no longer feels so mysterious. Even if there were somehow an objective universe with nothing in it, as long as the basic concepts of logic still held (which of course they do, they don't depend on the universe), then there would still be logical/mathematical structures that describe entities that see themselves as conscious.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 7 years ago

I haven't read it, but that certainly sounds a lot like saying that the map is, in fact, the territory.

jawns• 7 years ago

There's an interesting philosophical line of thought that distinguishes between things that are necessary and things that are contingent.

A necessary thing must exist; it can't not exist. A contingent thing may exist, or it may not.

In the classical definition of God, he has no beginning or end. He was not created by some other force. He exists necessarily. He just _is_. In fact, many theists describe God using terms such as "being itself" or "pure is-ness". Even the Hebrew name for God -- I AM -- makes references to this. And if God is necessary and uncreated, it gets around the question of, "Well, who created God?"

But I've heard people point out that if you can say that God just is, without having been created, then why not say that the universe just is, without having been created?

I think the answer to that question lies in this distinction between necessary and contingent things.

Theists who have a classical conception of God would argue that God is necessary, but the universe is contingent.

If you're interested in the philosophy behind this, here's an interesting resource: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/god-necessary-being/

galaxyLogic2• 7 years ago

Why is God a necessary thing?

bobthechef5• 7 years ago

Btw, laws are not actually things. They're descriptions that are reified by some people. What you have are things in the universe that have natures that their natures lead to detectable patterns. A law of physics is just a shorthand way of saying "things of this kind behave in this way". It's very important to understand this instead of assuming the universe is some vacuous collection of natureless things that are governed from the outside by some "laws".

radarsat1• 7 years ago

I don't know about why anything exists, but it stands to reason for me at least that if there is a non-zero net energy, without any boundary conditions, then it has to expand. That it expanded and cooled down into its current form is coincidental.

Why there is non-zero energy in the first place is, I'll agree, odd. Your idea of it balancing out some negative energy elsewhere is interesting.. Maybe we're just the positive side of a temporary virtual particle in a higher universe-particle "foam" like the quantum foam.

kazinator• 7 years ago

The word "beginning" is contextualized to the concept of time, and time is an abstraction that exists within the universe. To say that the universe has a beginning is to say that time has a beginning. But that is nonsensical; something only has a beginning if its existence is preceded in time by other existence. The existence of time can't be preceded in time by the existence of something else. For that to have meaning we need some "meta-time". "Meta-time" can only exist in a "meta-universe": a larger, imaginary universe in which we are embedding "our" universe. Well, did that larger one have a beginning, and why would we even consider it a separate universe at all?

EMM_386• 7 years ago

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation. The laws of physics don't invent themselves, so it would seem that true "nothing" never existed. I'm not talking about the quantum soup of the vacuum of space, because that is something.

If we take Hawking's idea that the universe smoothed out to a zero point where there was no time and nothing else, how does that point because laws of physics, gravity, etc? What properties of a zero point (that had no properties) cause it to create an inflationary universe?

Everything breaks down at that point, because trying to use mathematics or physics to explain something that existed before mathematics and physics doesn't work.

newsoul2019• 7 years ago

Is there a theory that the beginning and the ending of the universe are directly connected to each other? And that time doesn't so much start over and return to the starting point on a circle, so to speak?

heimdall• 7 years ago

The Big Bounce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

To me it's more satisfying than the idea of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe

philipov4• 7 years ago

Roger Penrose believes in a model he calls Conformal Cyclic Cosmology. He doesn't believe in Cosmic Inflation, and instead proposes that the accelerating expansion of our present universe forms the inflationary period of the next universe. He gets around the second law of thermodynamics by saying that the difference between the two universes is a redefinition of entropy. The mapping between the two different definitions of entropy makes our maximal entropy state look like a minimal entropy state in the new universe.

tmountain• 7 years ago

This reminded me of a pretty good (and robust) debate with some of the world's leading physicists regarding the existence of and quantification of nothing.

2013 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate: The Existence of Nothing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OLz6uUuMp8

nxpnsv2• 7 years ago

There was no "before" as time itself was created with the universe.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

How was time created, time means changing state, without time there is no change. So in order for a change to happen in the existence of time you'd need a further time dimension; then you're just shifting the problem up the stack.

Creation of time requires a meta-universe of some sort. Though perhaps there's some other way to conceive time not existing further back than a given point that works around creation being something that's done within a temporal dimension.

wavefunction• 7 years ago

I have wondered in the past if "time" has varied over the existence of the Universe, like if the first 100,000,000 years relative to our own reckoning was actually more like 100 billion years as time is elastic and changed over some other higher-dimensional axis. Just a musing by a speculator

mabbo• 7 years ago

The problem in your argument is the word 'become'. To 'become', something has to not be so and then later be so- with 'later' implying time on both sides. Hawking's argument is that there is no time on the other side.

My interpretation is that the energy of the universe exists in time and space, evolving across the dimension of time. But it has an edge called 'the beginning'. That's the shape of the beast- a defined edge that we cannot reason outside of.

Edit: At least, I presume your 'because' was meant to be 'become'.

pdonis5• 7 years ago

My interpretation is that the energy of the universe exists in time and space, evolving across the dimension of time. But it has an edge called 'the beginning'.

Actually, Hawking's proposal was that there is no "edge". In his proposal, the 4-D spacetime of the universe has no boundary, just as the 2-D surface of the Earth has no boundary. What we call the "beginning" of the universe is more like the South Pole of the Earth: we pick it out of all the other points because of a particular property we're interested in, but it's not an "edge" any more than any other point is. (Note that this analogy, which Hawking used, is referred to in the article.)

naringas4• 7 years ago

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation.

I disagree, pure nothingness has the largest potential for creation because by virtue of not being there (nor anywhere) it doesn't prevent anything at all from creating itself.

if this sounds strange is because the concept of nothingness is strange.

rather than asking why is there nothing rather than something, I marvel at how we can conceptualize 'nothingness' in such a way that we can even think of these kinds of questions

bobthechef5• 7 years ago

You're misunderstanding potential.

Potential cannot exist of its own accord. It is secondary to something already actual and only then can it be actualized.

If in the beginning there was truly nothing, and I mean also the absence of any cause that could make things exist, then there is not only nothing to actualize anything since only actual things can actualize, but not even the potential to be actualized.

So no, absolute nothing can not produce nothing and can never yield anything not even in principle.

senectus13• 7 years ago

Pure nothingness cant be detected or measured because nothingness isn't there. if it was there it wouldn't be nothingness it would be something.

senectus13• 7 years ago

the more i think about this the more wrong i think you are.

You're assuming that "nothingness" isn't an impediment to creation of something... it may very well be the ultimate barrier to something being created.

We'll probably never know, but at the end of the day until we can devise a way to define and measure "nothingness" we cant setup any experiments (thought or otherwise) to develop theories from/about it.

brankoB3• 7 years ago

The act of creation requires there to be something there beforehand. You can't create something from nothing, it doesn't make any sense.

pdonis5• 7 years ago

What properties of a zero point (that had no properties) cause it to create an inflationary universe?

In Hawking's proposed model, there is no "creation". The 4-D spacetime of the universe just is; it's a 4-dimensional geometric object with no boundary. See my response to mabbo downthread.

Koshkin3• 7 years ago

Pure nothingness has no potential for creation

In mathematics, at least, this is not true. For example, a set consisting of the empty set is not empty.

bobthechef5• 7 years ago

You're confusing formalism with metaphysics.

Emptiness isn't nothingness. Emptiness presupposes something that is empty of something expected to fill it, the absence of something not the total absence of anything. Absolute nothingness isn't empty because there's nothing that can be empty. Nothingness is not a something, but people here seem to be reifying the notion.

brankoB3• 7 years ago

"Pure nothingness" would be the empty set, not a set with something in it.

ttsda• 7 years ago

Everything breaks down at that point, because trying to use mathematics or physics to explain something that existed before mathematics and physics doesn't work.

What is the meaning of this paragraph? Mathematics are not dependent on the existence of any particular universe

dghughes• 7 years ago

Whenever I see an image like the one in the article of a cone showing the start of the universe it reminds me of something being shot. Or an object with great velocity striking a stationary object. One end is the point of impact and the cone is the debris spraying outward.

canada_dry• 7 years ago

Just as a shuttlecock has a diameter of zero at its bottom most point

As a lay person this - right from the starting block - is what messes me up. I.e. something that exists cannot logically have a zero diameter part. Anything zero does not exist.

Most related theories have similar kinds of initial premise that you must just accept.

klank• 7 years ago

something that exists cannot logically have a zero diameter part

Do elementary particles exist?

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

No, only observations of them do ;o)

ars• 7 years ago

Elementary particles have size delineated by the forces that act on them.

The concept of a "physical size" has no meaning, since particles don't act upon each other that way.

But the forces do not have a zero size, and that's important.

cblades• 7 years ago

It's a metaphor. It's not meant to be taken literally.

zarmin• 7 years ago

taken where?

mensetmanusman5• 7 years ago

Of course the Universe can arise from nothing. Especially when you give nothing specific properties beyond ‘not anything.’

Zenst2• 7 years ago

The start of the Universe was the start of time. My personal theory is that when matter enters a black hole, some of that matter (in some form) gets snapped out of space-time, emerging at time 0, at 0,0,0 coordinate. With all the black holes over time, all venting into the same space and time, producing lots of matter in a single space at the same start of time, which would create a big bang.

Just a theory, but one I've not fully proved, nor disproved.

Of course this would mean that the future created the past, and a bit of a paradox, but not entirely impossible.

kbmax• 7 years ago

Slightly different but related thought: what if inside of each black hole singularity is another universe? The stuff it collects ends up in this other universe. Which would mean our universe is just "inside" the black hole of another.

Then perhaps the accelerating expansion of spacetime we detect here has something to do with the accelerating accumulation of mass of our "parent" black hole.

Zenst2• 7 years ago

That would add an interesting spin upon multiverses. Without a doubt, black holes and understanding them are very much key to many unanswered and unknown questions.

JudgeWapner3• 7 years ago

to me it's more rational to think that each black hole is just punching a hole in our 4-d spacetime fabric just like a sharp point can punch through a bag. what the stuff drains into - I have no idea. Perhaps a higher-dimensional space that contains our universe?

golover7212• 7 years ago

For me the hardest idea to grasp is the concept of “nothing”. It seems to me that is something the human brain cannot possibly comprehend. There is always something as far as our senses are concerned. I guess that’s why the idea of nothingness after we die so such a hard notion to comprehend.

heroHACK17• 7 years ago

Conversely, even the concept of "everything" is hard to grasp. "Everything" in the sense of an infinite universe where everything is realized infinite times over. It's absolutely bonkers to me.

sova2• 7 years ago

You have no proof that it's simply nothingness when you die. If this universe has countless beginning points, what makes you consider a single ending point would exist anywhere?

jhayward2• 7 years ago

You have no proof that it's simply nothingness when you die

Do you mean to imply that you have proof to the contrary? Why is there any reason to assume anything else?

golover7212• 7 years ago

Absolutely, and no proof that there isn’t. It certainly seems that the idea of an afterlife is appealing since in some ways it is easier to comprehend than “nothing”.

JudgeWapner3• 7 years ago

I can momentarily stun myself if I concentrate long enough on the idea of "what if there was just nothing? No universe, no cosmos, no light, no time, no matter. Just nothing." Think about that for a minute or two.

mensetmanusman5• 7 years ago

Things would surely be simpler :) also, that is what you will experience after death according to many here...

andrepd2• 7 years ago

I have exactly the same thought, to a tee.

ganzuul• 7 years ago

It is stunning that this concept emerges as something physical in the form of an event horizon.

'Dark stars' have been around as a concept a lot longer than black holes.

openfuture• 7 years ago

The world is just one big "console.assert(false, world)"

tectonic• 7 years ago

I really enjoyed "Why Anything? Why This?" by philosopher Derek Parfit.

http://www.sfu.ca/~rpyke/cafe/parfit.pdf

anigbrowl• 7 years ago

If it's shaped like a shuttlecock then it will have a nodal center - a causal echo, if you like - in its early phase but some time after the beginning.

gauravjain13• 7 years ago

Perhaps tangential, but: Why is science up for “debate”? We could all offer opinions around the edges of present-day human understanding, but is there any merit to these debates? Feels like a lot of fluff. I wish Feynman were still around.

ironmagma• 7 years ago

Science is born out of debate. The only way current “science” came to be is through postulating and testing of those postulates, the testing of which reveals many flaws in theories and then those theories are tossed out. The fact that the truths we see now seem fixed is merely an illusion of the present. In fifty years, 20% of the current theories could seem like garbage compared to what we will have in the future.

thatoneuser2• 7 years ago

I think that's the most interesting part of science - the place where brilliant minds hypothesize and ponder about what may be. Sure it's fluff but we'd no doubt say similar of Einstein prior to his publications in the early 1900s if we were there then.

We live in a world of echo chambers. Where people can't imagine thoughts other than what they've been fed. I think that while this isn't rigorous, it's a healthy thing in moderation.

sgentle• 7 years ago

Possibly one of the most intriguing ideas I've ever heard is that there is no difference between "true" in the sense of "1+1=2" and "true" in the sense of "polar bears exist". The universe isn't described by the mathematics we have constructed to explain it, it is that mathematics.

In that sense, the question of what happened before our universe is similar to the question of what happened before 1+1=2... sort of a strange thing to ask. Our universe exists because it is a coherent tautology.

Of course, like all metaphysical posturing it's almost certainly impossible to ever know. But I find the elegance of the idea appealing.

Edit: I believe I was thinking of Max Tegmark's mathematical universe hypothesis, but also a little of David Lewis's modal realism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism

smitty1e• 7 years ago

like all metaphysical posturing it's almost certainly impossible to ever know

The concept that we can round off infinity and fit it within some tidy scientific experiment shall have seemed quaint by the time we meet the Almighty.

Nevertheless, reverse-engineering reality is our task under the sun, so: best be about it.

dr_dshiv3• 7 years ago

Note that this idea -- that the basis of the universe is math itself -- is attributed to the presocratic philosopher Pythagoras.

In the ensuing Platonic worldview, it was understood that the world began with total Oneness. In modern terms, that's treating the entropy of the universe as equal to 1; there is only one state for the entire universe to be in. Then, this increases to twoness, between the something and the nothing. As the something and the nothing interact, that interaction is the threeness; and from the three, the multitude. They then believed that this resulted in the formations of geometry which led to the elements, which they expected to consist of the simplest 3 dimensional shapes. They were pretty much spot on, except they didn't know that the spherical harmonics of atoms are even simpler than the platonic forms.

Not a bad cosmology for 2500 years ago. I think there is still a lot of profound thought to process and consider.

andrepd2• 7 years ago

In modern terms, that's treating the entropy of the universe as equal to 1; there is only one state for the entire universe to be in. Then, this increases to twoness, between the something and the nothing. As the something and the nothing interact, that interaction is the threeness; and from the three, the multitude. They then believed that this resulted in the formations of geometry which led to the elements, which they expected to consist of the simplest 3 dimensional shapes.
They were pretty much spot on.

Is it me or is that paragraph completely devoid of meaning? Is it actually saying anything? This reads like medieval scholastic philosophy: so far up its own bottom it no longer makes any sense.

mantap• 7 years ago

One of the dirty secrets of mathematics is that not all axiomatic systems are equally successful. There is a kind of survivorship bias whereby axiomatic systems that are "interesting" are studied whereas axiomatic systems that are "boring" fall into obscurity.

For example, number theory has an incredibly rich structure that stems from the very simple axioms of peano arithmetic. Linear algebra is another field that has been amazingly fruitful, not just in physics but also in pure mathematics too.

Those axiomatic systems survived infant mortality and grew to become adults, but they are the rare exceptions.

What "the universe is math" really means is that the universe has structure. The universe is not complete randomness, nor is it complete emptiness. The universe has enough structure that we can use increasingly sophisticated mathematics to describe it.

But don't think that the universe embodies all of mathematics. There are vast wastelands of mathematics that people thought up that didn't end up being interesting, even if internally consistent.

What is really happening is the intersection of survivorship bias in pure mathematics with the anthropic principle in physics. We can observe the structure of the universe only because it has structure, and there are certain theories of mathematics that survived because they are not "boring".

Is it a surprise that the "not boring" kinds of mathematics are often the kind required to describe the structure of the universe?

chantelles• 7 years ago

Distances between our limited repetitive Universe Origin Debates and meaning describe how our intellectual ecosystem interferes with knowing. That is something, at least.

Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning

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