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Study reveals new details on what happened in the first microsecond of Big Bang
- webwielder2 5y agoNow do one microsecond before.
- niceairport 5y agoI know you're joking, but "before" the Big Bang doesn't really make sense.
- kazinator 5y agoIf so, then "first microsecond of the Big Bang" also doesn't make sense. And that may be the point of the above comment. The only time reference is the one within the universe that is doing the banging, and within that universe, time has no beginning, right? Every microsecond has another microsecond before it.
- azinman2 5y agoUnless you’re at t0. It doesn’t have to have a before.
- tshaddox 5y agoNot really? It makes sense to ask what happens in the first minute of The Matrix film, but it doesn’t really make sense to ask what happened one minute before that. That particular domain (a specific film) has a pretty clear “beginning time” and apparently this model of the Universe does as well.
- denton-scratch 5y agoHave you seen Memento? It's a murder mystery that scrambles time. Much better than The Matrix. There are two interwoven threads in the film, one in colour and the other in black-and-white. The B+W scenes are in chronological order, the colour scenes run backward in time. Colour and B+W scenes alternate. They meet up at the end - the murder scene, which in any sane movie would be near the beginning. The protagonist has lost his memory, as a result of a bang on the head during the murder; he has no idea what happened "before the beginning".
- caf 5y agoThere can be a point in time where you can't go further back - all directions point to the future - in the same way that there's a point on Earth where you can't go further North - all directions point South.
- noofen 5y agoYes, I believe it's called God. Maybe one day we can find a formula!
- alea_iacta_est 5y ago> Maybe one day we can find a formula! It'd be horribly depressing.
- mrwnmonm 5y agoScience will never say that. Maybe they want to see him or something.
- wyager 5y agoThe big bang is not a complete cosmological model and does not necessarily preclude things happening before it.
- niceairport 5y agoIt isn't a complete model, but it's the best one we've got and the most universally agreed upon.
- meowface 5y agoIt is, but it's not universally agreed that it's the first event of reality. I think most remain pretty agnostic on that point.
- badosu 5y agoIt might make sense if you subscribe to the idea of conformal cyclic cosmology. Where the big bang marks the transition between eons https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
- gremlinsinc 5y agoCould it be we create and always have the big bang by blowing shit up in a particle accelerator, and that is the great filter not just for us, but the rest of the universe since it just starts over?
- denton-scratch 5y agoIn conformal cyclic cosmology, there are no big bangs. Once everything in the old universe has been reduced to photons, and all the black holes have evaporated, the universe loses its sense of scale, and resumes operation as a universe the size of a grapefruit (or the size of the earth - I don't think it matters). I don't know how Penfold thinks this resizing is supposed to happen, for example whether it's instantaneous or a slow process. I'd love to have a few beers with Penfold; a lot of what he thinks about isn't maths or cosmology, and isn't all fit for publication, but I imagine it must be very interesting.
- badosu 5y agoI condensed my post for brevity, there's no exact defined boundary between aeons or how that transition exactly occurs. One could arguably say it's when there are no fermions from the previous one anymore, but that can be contested.
- meowface 5y agoNot necessarily. I think the physics consensus is they don't quite know if "before the Big Bang" does or doesn't makes sense.
- naikrovek 5y agoI wish scientists and reporters made it more clear that science, the process, can never know when it is right about something. The Scientific Process can only ever know when it's wrong. A scientist can gain confidence about their theory's correctness, but they can never be assured of it. A single discovery could completely overturn all of the understanding that appeared so rock solid the day before. I'm just saying that the headline should reflect this.
- tasty_freeze 5y ago"Scientists, and the process of science generally, who can only prove things wrong and can never be entirely sure if they are right, have produced a study revealing new details on what happened during the first microsecond of the Big Bang." Imagine if people followed your request. How many times would you read that disclaimer before you got sick of it?
- naikrovek 5y agoless tired than I am seeing things stated as fact, as if we know for sure, when we don't. less tired than I am explaining this to people who don't understand it. and the wording would be more like changing "Scientists now know..." to "Scientists now believe..."
- luxuryballs 5y agoI have a hard time believing it’s possible to know such a thing so specific without some kind of supernatural knowledge, there’s simply too many assumptions that all have to be correct. It almost feels arrogant, but they even admit it: “Their findings provide a piece of the puzzle to the evolution of the universe, as we know it today”.
- analog31 5y agoThis is why the researchers have to proceed with extreme caution. All of the assumptions have to be testable through consequences that are observable in our world. It's always struck me as odd that "arrogance" is applied to science, which is based on the ultimate humility of laying all of our cards on the table and agreeing to accept the consequences of empirical evidence that might overturn our beliefs. In consequence, supernatural knowledge has already produced a plurality of definitive answers. That strikes me as arrogant.
- hoseja 5y agoIt's like the Drake equation. So many unknown unknowns even guessing is utterly useless.
- galaxyLogic 5y agoI can understand that there was a Big Bang. But why does time necessarily have to start at that point? Why not just assume that everything lay dormant for a very long time, maybe forever, before Big Bang. And then Big Bang happened. Like some quantum fluctuation perhaps. Just because we don't know how we could measure time before Big Bang doesn't mean time didn't 'exist" before it, does it?
- flaviojuvenal 5y agoCheck Conformal Cyclic Cosmology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conformal_cyclic_cosmology
- NZGumboot 5y agoYou're right. The Big Bang theory really only concerns itself with what happens starting at around 10^−43 seconds after the presumed singularity that started the universe. That presumed singularity is just a consequence of running General Relativity backwards, and we know that quantum effects are also important at these kinds of insane energy densities, so the singularity can be thought of as a placeholder, until something better comes along. (A complete theory of Quantum Gravity would help a lot.)
- kadoban 5y agoI think we don't know. But even if time or anything else existed before the Big Bang, we have seemingly no evidence of it, no reasonable expectation we could ever have any evidence of it, or any way to measure or deduce anything about it. It might as well not exist, for all intents and purposes it no longer does if it ever did. By contrast, we _do_ see evidence of the Big Bang itself, and our best models today are that everything we see is evidence of (and a product of) that Big Bang. Additionally, the space expansion aspect of the Big Bang means that space itself in some sense came from the Big Bang. Everything we see was indescribably compacted at that point and then expanded from there, over time. So if there was anything before the Big Bang, it wasn't space as we know it and it didn't have any knowable effect on the universe we see. In conclusion, if you have nothing, in no space, does time even mean anything?
- ahthat 5y agoTime is only the relativistic motion of measurable phenomena. We can’t know what we can’t measure, it is perhaps possible that things “happen/happened” outside of the limits of what we can measure and extrapolate from measurement. We will never know what we can’t know. I would argue.
- ahthat 5y agoCare to explain the - points?
- tengbretson 5y agoNeat!
- nxc18 5y agoI don’t have any physics background so maybe this doesn’t make sense but I’m betting someone can answer. If time is relative, what is a microsecond when there is nothing to relate it to? What does time dilation do to a microsecond when you’re at the center of a space with the mass of the entire universe? I’m struggling to interpret a microsecond (or any other unit of time) near the boundary at which time came into existence.
- zackees 5y agoPhysics is so broken that they cant even explain galaxy rotation (dark matter is a failure) but the media is reporting with authority what was happening microseconds after the “big bang”. Hard pass.
- uncletammy 5y agoI expect you're uninformed but I don't know enough to prove it. Either way, I'm annoyed that you've been downvoted without a single reply. I'd like to know if/why you're actually wrong.
- spindle 5y agoIt's true that physics can't explain galaxy rotation (speaking as someone who recently taught elementary cosmology at a good university). I don't know whether that has much to do with the big bang though. I expect the downvotes are for non sequitur.
- saagarjha 5y agoThis is just how science works: we find evidence for some things, and we don't have evidence for others, so the things we can explain is limited to what we can back up. For example, we don't know why people yawn but that doesn't mean that we can't explain in detail how sedatives work.
- wyager 5y agoBut we also can’t explain in detail how sedatives work... We have no idea whatsoever how most classes of sleeping meds function.
- Bancakes 5y agoA lot of sensible comments are getting downvoted here without any replies to them.
- wyager 5y agoWelcome to HN in the last 3-4 years.
- gremlinsinc 5y agoWe have studied a substance called quark-gluon plasma that was the only matter, which existed during the first microsecond of Big Bang. Our results tell us a unique story of how the plasma evolved in the early stage of the universe... Is this stuff at all... non-safe? I mean, could one use it to recreate the big-bang in a lab? It's hard to conceptualize how something like a "bang" happens without a catalyst, so couldn't the catalyst be scientists f**ed up?
- saagarjha 5y agoYou'd need to pour in insane amounts of energy. The people who build particle accelerators are trying to do exactly that!
- denton-scratch 5y ago"Fluent"? Like water? I think the writer perhaps meant "fluid". I found the article disappointing; apart from revealing that the for the first microsecond the universe consisted of quark-gluon plasma, which subsequently turned into hadrons, there's no substance. And zero "new details" - I knew about quark-gluon plasma. I think that title is linkbait.