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Same I feel like that is the only way. I can’t wrap my head around the concept of infinity. There has to be a beginning and end. What the heck caused the Big Ba

Same I feel like that is the only way. I can’t wrap my head around the concept of infinity. There has to be a beginning and end. What the heck caused the Big Bang? Why?

NoMAD76 5y ago
There are things (trivial or not) that we can't know or explain with our limited knowledge. But reality is always beyond our wildest dreams.
gpderetta 5y ago
You think that there has to be a beginning, yet are looking for something that has caused the big bang. Isn't that inconsistent? Why cant the Big bang be the beginning? Otherwise you might next be looking for what caused whatever caused the big bang
- ErikVandeWater 5y ago
  The God's Daddy effect: Keep asking for progressively deeper causes until you find one you like.
  - podgaj 5y ago
    And this is why I feel science is a religion, both ask questions which can never be finally resolved by humanity's finite brains.
    - pixl97 5y ago
      Why does that make science a religion? Part of science is defining what is definable and what is not.
bencollier49 5y ago
Well we can use this to execute a reductio ad absurdam on scientific materialism. Let us assume that the logic of cause and effect is all there is to the universe. Then the big bang must have had a cause, and that cause a cause in turn, and so on. That's obviously absurd, even if we point at time beginning with the big bang. Within any human reasoning, things do not appear ex nihilo. The alternative is that the thing on which our universe depends (being careful not to say 'caused' here) is beyond our ideas of cause and effect, and certainly passes human understanding.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  What's far more reasonable is that the universe is a loop. The big bang is simply equivalent to the death of the universe: see conformal cyclic cosmology. Cause and effect cease to have priority over eachother. We are equally coupled to both faces of the boundary, the past and the future, which are actually two sides to the same coin, our origin and our destination.
  - bencollier49 5y ago
    Is it? That's still wedded to cause and effect, it just moves the frame of reference outside the looped universe to ask what sustains it or why it exists.
    - goldenkey 5y ago
      It is no longer unidirectional wedding, it's bidirectional as QM would predict, which is commonly known as coupling. Once a circle is drawn, the starting point is no longer visible. All you have is the symmetries of the circle itself :-)
podgaj 5y ago
>There has to be a beginning and end. Ha! No, there does not. Humans use create a hallucinated duality as a means of navigating a non-dual reality. Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead? As Julian Barbour puts it: "We see from this that time has no role to play as an independent element of reality." http://www.platonia.com/nature_of_time_essay.pdf http://www.platonia.com/nature_of_time_essay.pdf You should read his whole book, it's time to wake up!
- lloeki 5y ago
  (caveat: IANA astrophysicist/cosmologist/whatever, I just like to wrap my head around things with some bits of logic) > Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead? This is misleading as it posits that since there's a "before you" and an "after you", "you" are standing within some time continuum. > There has to be a beginning and end. Wrap your head around this: if there is a "beginning" and an "end" to our universe, both would define discrete stop points, thus there would be some way to say "before" or "after" these discrete points, and thus the universe sits inside something that has time. But then either this something of a container either has infinite time (which goes back to square one of things not having beginning and end) or has a beginning and end itself. But again, if this container has a discrete beginning and end then you can apply the same logic that you applied to our universe in the first place. So there's another container of the container, to which you can recursively apply the same logic (assuming logic itself somehow applies to this container). So if you want all these container things to have beginnings and ends, it implies there's an infinite set of nested containers. The alternative is that time exists within our universe, but our universe doesn't sit within time. Thus "beginning" and "end" are not discrete points but concepts that only exist as limits (in the mathematical sense of "limit"): by travelling the arrow of time forward or backward you can only move closer and closer to either but never actually reach these because these points don't actually exist. Such a universe could be freestanding (as in: it's all there is), or it could have a container of sorts, and maybe even neighbour universes. But since time only exists within our universe, there could very well be no concept of time in the container (or other universes), or similar concepts but behaving entirely differently. In any case these (the container, the other universes) would be unbelievably incomprehensible to us. These concepts of unreachable zero, unreachable infinite, or unreachable value do exist in other areas: absolute zero is basically unreachable, reaching c velocity requires infinite energy†... † which creates other interesting conundrums such as a pair of photons travel at the same delta speed whether they go away or towards each other, or there's no "velocity = 0" either, or tachyonic vs baryonic realms.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Maybe it’s not possible since our minds exist in space-time. Before the big bang space-time didn’t exist, so it’s not sure what that means…

Same I feel like that is the only way. I can’t wrap my head around the concept of infinity. There has to be a beginning and end. What the heck caused the Big Bang? Why?

NoMAD76 5y ago

There are things (trivial or not) that we can't know or explain with our limited knowledge. But reality is always beyond our wildest dreams.

gpderetta 5y ago

You think that there has to be a beginning, yet are looking for something that has caused the big bang. Isn't that inconsistent? Why cant the Big bang be the beginning? Otherwise you might next be looking for what caused whatever caused the big bang

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
The God's Daddy effect: Keep asking for progressively deeper causes until you find one you like.
- podgaj 5y ago
  And this is why I feel science is a religion, both ask questions which can never be finally resolved by humanity's finite brains.
  - pixl97 5y ago
    Why does that make science a religion? Part of science is defining what is definable and what is not.

bencollier49 5y ago

Well we can use this to execute a reductio ad absurdam on scientific materialism. Let us assume that the logic of cause and effect is all there is to the universe. Then the big bang must have had a cause, and that cause a cause in turn, and so on. That's obviously absurd, even if we point at time beginning with the big bang. Within any human reasoning, things do not appear ex nihilo. The alternative is that the thing on which our universe depends (being careful not to say 'caused' here) is beyond our ideas of cause and effect, and certainly passes human understanding.

goldenkey 5y ago
What's far more reasonable is that the universe is a loop. The big bang is simply equivalent to the death of the universe: see conformal cyclic cosmology. Cause and effect cease to have priority over eachother. We are equally coupled to both faces of the boundary, the past and the future, which are actually two sides to the same coin, our origin and our destination.
- bencollier49 5y ago
  Is it? That's still wedded to cause and effect, it just moves the frame of reference outside the looped universe to ask what sustains it or why it exists.
  - goldenkey 5y ago
    It is no longer unidirectional wedding, it's bidirectional as QM would predict, which is commonly known as coupling. Once a circle is drawn, the starting point is no longer visible. All you have is the symmetries of the circle itself :-)

podgaj 5y ago

>There has to be a beginning and end. Ha! No, there does not. Humans use create a hallucinated duality as a means of navigating a non-dual reality. Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead? As Julian Barbour puts it: "We see from this that time has no role to play as an independent element of reality." http://www.platonia.com/nature_of_time_essay.pdf http://www.platonia.com/nature_of_time_essay.pdf You should read his whole book, it's time to wake up!

lloeki 5y ago
(caveat: IANA astrophysicist/cosmologist/whatever, I just like to wrap my head around things with some bits of logic) > Let me ask you; How long was the time before you were alive, and how long will the time be after you are dead? This is misleading as it posits that since there's a "before you" and an "after you", "you" are standing within some time continuum. > There has to be a beginning and end. Wrap your head around this: if there is a "beginning" and an "end" to our universe, both would define discrete stop points, thus there would be some way to say "before" or "after" these discrete points, and thus the universe sits inside something that has time. But then either this something of a container either has infinite time (which goes back to square one of things not having beginning and end) or has a beginning and end itself. But again, if this container has a discrete beginning and end then you can apply the same logic that you applied to our universe in the first place. So there's another container of the container, to which you can recursively apply the same logic (assuming logic itself somehow applies to this container). So if you want all these container things to have beginnings and ends, it implies there's an infinite set of nested containers. The alternative is that time exists within our universe, but our universe doesn't sit within time. Thus "beginning" and "end" are not discrete points but concepts that only exist as limits (in the mathematical sense of "limit"): by travelling the arrow of time forward or backward you can only move closer and closer to either but never actually reach these because these points don't actually exist. Such a universe could be freestanding (as in: it's all there is), or it could have a container of sorts, and maybe even neighbour universes. But since time only exists within our universe, there could very well be no concept of time in the container (or other universes), or similar concepts but behaving entirely differently. In any case these (the container, the other universes) would be unbelievably incomprehensible to us. These concepts of unreachable zero, unreachable infinite, or unreachable value do exist in other areas: absolute zero is basically unreachable, reaching c velocity requires infinite energy†... † which creates other interesting conundrums such as a pair of photons travel at the same delta speed whether they go away or towards each other, or there's no "velocity = 0" either, or tachyonic vs baryonic realms.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Maybe it’s not possible since our minds exist in space-time. Before the big bang space-time didn’t exist, so it’s not sure what that means…