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Physicists Debate Hawking’s Idea That the Universe Had No Beginning
- kumarvvr 7y agoCuriously,Indian philosophy also propounds that the universe has neither a beginning nor an end.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoI 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.
- djsumdog 7y agoSome 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.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoI'm not saying they aren't, and that all narratives conceived in the west require them, but the Abrahamic (and earlier Zoroastrian) religions developed this sense of there being a definite beginning, middle, and end of everything, and that's not a concept universal to many religions.
- roland00 7y agoIt 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-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.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoZoroastrianism had to concept of a universe that starts with nothing and comes to an end as far back as the 6th century BCE. But I agree, adding a concrete understanding of time really helps to cement the linear narrative.
- roland00 7y agoAgreed with the Zoroastrianism bit, that did occur prior. I was trying to be simple and concise so I did not mention other strands of monotheism that influenced Judaismm and the Middle East such as the Egyptians / Amun (the Hidden One) or the Persian Zoroastrianism (which pioneered the concept of Angels as winged divine beings that Judaism and Christianity incorporated.) Yadda, yadda, yadda religion and history is complicated but also interesting.
- swatkat 7y agoCheck out Nasadiya sukta[0] in Rigveda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta
- SketchySeaBeast 7y agoCool - Is there a similar verse describing the end?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- omarchowdhury 7y agoWhat of Indian philosophy can you cite regarding this? From what I gather, it's seen as cyclic.
- eyeundersand 7y agoI would imagine the OP meant the cycles are never-ending, as opposed to one iteration of the cycle.
- swatkat 7y agoNasadiya 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasadiya_Sukta
- SomeOldThrow 7y agoWhat does it even mean to ask “what happened before time”? The question seems nonsensical to me.
- sp332 7y agoYou can still have causality.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoCan you expand on this? How can you have causality - cause and effect - that's divorced from some sort of flow of time?
- kowdermeister 7y agoIf I turn on a very simple computer, then the clock starts at zero. From the computers perspective that's all there is, it doesn't know the cause. From my point of view there absolutely is a case, me pushing a button. This is not a god argument, there might be natural processes that can trigger such events.
- pavel_lishin 7y agoThe computer, and the external universe of which it is unaware, still have time.
- Cyph0n 7y agoTotal amateur here: how do we know that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe?
- AnimalMuppet 7y agoAlmost-total amateur here: We don't. We really don't. We don't have any physical evidence of anything from before the big bang (presuming that's what we call the "beginning"). Zero. All we have is people having views on the current situation, trying to apply those views backwards to "before", where they may or may not fit, and saying "I think it's like this".
- hirundo 7y 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 7y agoA 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.
- djsumdog 7y agoBut 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.
- BurningFrog 7y agoThere can still be an unobservable (to us) universe outside ours. If you assume the universe started N billion years ago, there is an event horizon expanding at the speed of light that fit this definition of an "observable universe" for us while allowing for an infinite number of equal universes, some of which are partially shared with ours.
- BurningFrog 7y agoNitpick: 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 7y agoThe article is vague in the topology. No boundary or also infinite?
- antidesitter 7y agoThe article has an image illustrating the no-boundary proposal.
- RappingBoomer 7y agoyes, quite possibly...and it may have no end...which means we should not make personal decisions that give us no chance at eternal life via the advanced science of the future
- djsumdog 7y agoThis 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?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Retric 7y agoIn 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.
- deepsun 7y 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.
- abtinf 7y agoThe 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 7y agoYep. 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".
- jerf 7y agoThat'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.
- abtinf 7y agoThe 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.
- jerf 7y agoI addressed what you said, you just blindly re-iterated your point without any engagement with mine at all. To spell it out even more clearly, what if "the universe" is larger than the observable universe? In that case, it would still be reasonable to ask where did the observable universe come from? For instance, if we are a simulation, you would place the simulator in "the universe", which as a definition is a fine place to put such a simulator. But it means that questions about our observable universe would then be fair game. You're trying to shut down thought by simply redefining terms, but even by your own definitions, it doesn't work. It's not a sophisticated or well-thought out position, it's just "I give up entirely, and so should everybody else" dressed up in pretty clothes that are trying to look cool. You're welcome to give up in that way, most people do by default after all, but you've got no grounds to insist that others also give up.
- quotemstr 7y agoCosmology 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.
- onion2k 7y agoThat'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 7y agoThis 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 7y 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.
- onion2k 7y agoisn't that just an elaborate way to say 'give up'? Accepting that we don't understand something is a first and very necessary step to even realising there's something to understand. Believing that we have the answer (eg "God made the universe!") is exactly what shuts down scientific inquiry and makes people 'give up'. I'm saying literally the opposite of that - we have to realise there's something to out there to learn in order to try and learn it.
- resters 7y agoCognitive 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 7y agoI don’t thunk my brain could handle no beginning
- jvagner 7y agoWith all respect, I think we generally live in a human society that has been built around that very constraint.
- sarego 7y agoCurious to know why that is. Would you mind expanding?
- jdironman 7y agoBecause if we have not beginning, we have no purpose. If we have no purpose, this is all really for nothing. I am not arguing whether it is or not, or whether there is a beginning, but lets look at it this way... You woke up this morning, that was the beginning of this day at night you will rest. Now, lets say there is no memory or record of 'waking up' beginning, we therefor cannot anticipate an end and everything we do now may feel for some less meaningful. I don't really know. I am just expressing my under-educated overthinking take on it.
- antidesitter 7y agoCountered the downvote because I’m interested in this line of reasoning. Could you expand on that? Why do you think having no memory of “waking up” to existence makes it less meaningful? I'm reminded of the following quote by Alan Watts from The Way of Zen: To the Taoist mentality, the aimless, empty life does not suggest anything depressing. On the contrary, it suggests the freedom of clouds and mountain streams; wandering nowhere; of flowers in impenetrable canyons, beautiful for no one to see, and of the ocean surf forever washing the sand, to no end.
- Koshkin 7y ago
- jihadjihad 7y agoFor an eloquent companion piece, I would highly recommend this essay: http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/the-bridge-from-nowhere http://nautil.us/issue/16/nothingness/the-bridge-from-nowher...
- dmix 7y agoThe 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 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 7y agoI 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 7y agoA 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 7y agoWell 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 7y agoIt'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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclic_model
- deepsun 7y agoNot 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.
- deleted 7y ago
- EdwardDiego 7y agoAm I wrong, or are they arguing on matters of belief rather than evidence?
- sonnyblarney 7y agoThe word is 'speculation' not 'belief' that that's pretty much what all science is. The evidence usually comes later.
- EdwardDiego 7y agoThere 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.
- semi-extrinsic 7y agoThe trouble is, unless you have a grand old time arguing vague ideas, you might not find the ideas that can lead to new falsifiable hypotheses.
- raattgift 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning Modern cosmology got kicked off in the 1700s by observations of "nebulae" that showed many of them were collections of stars, and in particular that some were much much much larger and more distant than others. Just before WW I the absorption and emission line structures of the spiral ones were discovered to be strikingly similar except the smaller (in angle) dimmer (in apparent magnitude) ones were squashed into the red. Just after WW I is when spiral nebulae were identified as anything remotely like our modern understanding of spiral galaxies. 1920: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_(astronomy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Debate_(astronomy) [poor Shapeley, so bright and so so wrong on this point] about five years after a working theory of post-Newtonian gravitation was even available, and almost exactly two years after General Relativity aced its first observational test in the solar system. Up to that point even the greatest names in astronomy (even Einstein) believed everything in the sky was within or in a close (~ kiloparsecs) orbit around the Milky Way. Towards the end of WW II and just after radio astronomy became important, particularly the study of the 21cm hydrogen gas line, which was clearer than the red-squashed lines of visible light passed through prisms, and in particular different limbs of galaxies had different redshifts, proving rotation. Some three decades later, the 21cm redshift difference between the inner and outer parts of a number of galaxies showed that there is non-Newtonian gravitation obviously at work in large galaxies. (Also coincidentally around that time, the cosmic microwave background was discovered, but it was some years before the small anisotropies in it could be studied -- BOOMERaNG and COBE in particular to start with). The evidence in all these cases arrived in advance of vague ideas, and forced the hunt for tractable explanations for the evidence in its totality, rather than as individual stand-alone pieces. One of the biggest pieces to fit in is of course the highly successful standard model of particle physics, which also was driven by evidence arriving kinda by surprise somewhat concurrently with surprise evidence from cosmological observations. The result is the "concordance cosmology", \Lambda-CDM, which concords with all the available data (well, or rather it's updated as new data shows up from various observatories and experiments). It's certainly subject to speculation: what's the microscopic description of dark matter? is the cosmological constant actually uniform everywhere in spacetime? is there a non-cosmological-constant term required to match new data for the Hubble flow? These are pretty big questions, but they're forced on us by the in-your-face obviousness of the metric expansion of space, and the peculiar motions of galaxies within clusters, and the outer parts of galaxies around the inner parts. Also, what's going on in "the dark ages"? We have an obvious gap between the surface of last scattering and the first starlight, but the details of the observed first starlight and the cosmic microwave background don't interpolate as well as one would naively expect. And we have so many exabytes of data about the latter (and a lot of data about early galaxies too) that vague ideas die quick deaths: they don't even get a chance to generate new "falsifiable hypotheses", they are generally born inconsistent with some existing data. The "trick" is abduction: trying to reason out a simple-enough-to-be-useful explanation that fits the known data. Of course, you can get away with wild speculation and vague ideas in areas where there is little to no data at present. Anything before the electroweak decoupling is anyone's guess, as is anything much more than a trillion years in the future, or far outside the Hubble volume.
- sonnyblarney 7y agoI 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.
- senorjazz 7y 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 -------------------------------- [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVDJJVoTx7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVDJJVoTx7s or maybe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM47acQ7pEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM47acQ7pEQ
- words-words 7y agoWords words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words words.
- bleh123 7y agoA part of me wonders if the disproportionate weightage of particular scientists/researchers skews the field toward their ideas more than others. As far as i can tell, the Vatican proposal by Stephen Hawking is a hypothetical, one that has math going for it, but in a case considered by the opponents, going against it. The consensus of the community of scientists backing Hawkings hypotheticals could as easily have backed the opposing view, but there you have it, its considered the accepted view of reality. Why? I can't reasonably explain that to someone less tuned in to the physics community, but there it is. Reminds me of a conversation over drinks with a colleague of mine who i know to delve in alternate theories talking to me about Birkeland Currents[1] and how "popular science" favored the theories of (coincidentally) another British scientist for the longest time, thus leaving the author of the (later proved) correct theory, shunned for decades by the scientific community. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland_current https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birkeland_current
- d0m 7y agoSay 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.
- radarsat1 7y agoI 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.
- SubiculumCode 7y ago
- kazinator 7y agoThe 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?
- eternalny1 7y agoPure 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 7y agoIs 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 7y agoThe Big Bounce! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe
- selestify 7y agoI once heard of the hypothesis that once the last proton decays, the universe will once more be completely uniform in every way. With nothing to distinguish any part of the universe from any other part, space becomes meaningless and the universe has once more entered a state of nothingness much like how it was "before" the Big Bang. So, in a sense, the heat death is not so different from the big bounce. Unfortunately I did not bother to bookmark what I had read, and can no longer find a name or anything referring to it on the internet.
- marton78 7y ago
- golover721 7y agoFor 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 7y agoConversely, 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.
- sova 7y agoYou 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?
- golover721 7y agoAbsolutely, 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”.
- jhayward 7y 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?
- dghughes 7y agoWhenever 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 7y 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.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoOf course the Universe can arise from nothing. Especially when you give nothing specific properties beyond ‘not anything.’
- Zenst 7y agoThe 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 7y agoSlightly 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.
- Zenst 7y agoThat 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.
- JudgeWapner 7y agoto 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?
- tectonic 7y agoI really enjoyed "Why Anything? Why This?" by philosopher Derek Parfit. http://www.sfu.ca/~rpyke/cafe/parfit.pdf http://www.sfu.ca/~rpyke/cafe/parfit.pdf
- openfuture 7y agoThe world is just one big "console.assert(false, world)"
- anigbrowl 7y agoIf 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 7y agoPerhaps 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 7y agoScience 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.
- thatoneuser 7y agoI 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.
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- sgentle 7y agoPossibly 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_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism
- smitty1e 7y 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_dshiv 7y agoNote 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.
- chantelles 7y agoDistances between our limited repetitive Universe Origin Debates and meaning describe how our intellectual ecosystem interferes with knowing. That is something, at least.