Before the Big-Bang?

[Ian King]

I know that before the Big-Bang (supposedly) nothing, not even time and space existed.

How can this be possible.

The size of the Universe, and it come from nothing! I dont think so.
Surley its always been here?

I need answers damit!

:-)

[bernardo]

No it hasn't always existed.  Why does it need to have done?  Why can't it just have a beginning, with nothing before?  It's a bit like a person's life.  What were you doiung 10 years ago?  What were you doing 100 years ago?  Nothing, because you just weren't.

[Clanad]

The problem with bernardo's reasoning, in my humble opinion, is the implication that, at least with his example, there was something before... namely the ancestors.  While, the universe was created ex nihilo...out of nothing. The problem is compounded by our world view that everything had something before it.  The Big Bang has shown that our world view breaks down when confronting the conditions prior to the universe...

[jake-the-peg]

Clanad's right and it's not just our world view our languages too are structured about the concept of time. Describing these concepts in English is a little like trying to saw a piece of wood with a nail file - the tool is just not up to the job.

We know the big bang happened principally because of two strong pieces of evidence. Firstly all the distant galaxies are rushing away from us - we know this by studying their light it's called their red shift. The second is that we can 'listen to the echo'. There is a background heat in every direction in the universe - it's not much but it's there and it's exactly what is predicted from the big bang.

[Loosehead]

The thing is you have to discard your normal approach to thinking. The concept of before has no meaning as all four dimensions where created at the BB. there is no "time" therefor no "Before". You need to escape traditional temporal thinking very difficult as jake says we are not equiped to describe or comprehend only to realise what is most likely to have happenned.

[JudgeJ]

The “Big-Bang” theory simply supposes that what existed at the time of the bang was in a completely different and in a more compact form than it is today. You can liken this to a bomb. Unexploded the bomb consists of a few kilos of compact, fairly stable matter. After detonation the matter actually making up the bomb is scattered to the four winds and is unrecognisable from its previous form.

The problem with all of these discussions is that they are bound by what we like to believe. That is mainly that things have a beginning and end in terms of both space and time. This ain’t necessarily so, but we humans are not comfortable with the concept of eternity, either in time or space.

The Universe may have existed for ever and may be limitless in dimensions. The Big Bang could be something that happened in just the bit of the Universe that we can see at just the time (in cosmic terms) we happen to be around.

There is no reason to believe that the Big Bang was the first event in the Universe and that nothing existed beforehand, or that it explains the existence of all of the Universe. It just relates to the bit we can observe at the time we are able to observe it. There may be other things out there !  

It’s no answer at all I’m afraid, just a few thoughts.

[sod_the_m25]

2 more idle speculations here. If the universe is continually expanding, what is it expanding into ?

Everything we see is in the past, even the light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach us. Gaze up to the sky at night - you are looking at the universe as it was many millions of years ago (light years). This is mind-blowing and awesome.

[MargeB]

Well, sod, I think it's easy to continue the bomb analogy and imagine (wrongly) that as with the bomb analogy, there is a pre-existing 'room' into which the bomb bits fly. There isn't. The universe is at the same time the bomb and the room.

You could look at this by splitting the universe (small 'u') into space-time and 'matter' (I'm aware that it's more than this).When the Big Bang occurred, spacetime was created, and began expanding. For some reason which does not make sense to us, there ended up to be a tiny amount extra matter in the matter to energy ratio (a couple of parts in Billions), and this formed when exotic particles condensed. So when we talk of the universe expanding, its not that matter is expanding into something, its that spacetime itself, the very thing that allows matter to exist, itself is expanding into total nothingness.

This is the "universe" we know, but the "Universe" is anything and any dimension that could possibly exist, maybe lots of other universes which give rise to each other and which are very different from each other.

You can try to open this can of worms from the inside, not the outside.
-Conditions similar to the start of the big bang (singularity) exist possibly in Black Holes, now the subject of frantic probing for that reason
-attempts to resolve even the very very very basics of our existence have to be resolved before we start talking about Universe/universe, and will probably radically alter our picture of it. For example:

        

[MargeB]

TIME: Just what the hell is time? Forget common sense notions of it, as usual they are a complete waste of time. "Common sense" takes the view that there is some 'plane' of 'the present' making its way (with us aboard) from the past into the future. But there is no good reason why this idea should take precedence over, for example, the idea that all temporal states (past, present, future) are equally valid, and that you 'now' exist, but in that sense you also 'exist' yesterday.

PROBABILITY/DETERMINISM: What will you do after you read this post? Read another? Make a cup of coffee? Google for pictures of Maria Sharapova? When you do it, you don't do the others. Did you have to do it? Was it pre ordained? How do you explain that one happened when any of the three could have. When we have answers to this, we may be able to tunnel out to the realization (if all happen, for example) that there is a "universe" for each possible outcome, created at each twist in the path. Or there are parallel universes, each with a slightly different set of events.
PEOPLE-WHAT? (1) You need to understand extremely well the actual device doing all the measuring here. Oh sure, it may look perfect, but it looked perfect to the Greeks, to the Sumerians, to the Church Fathers, and they were all wrong. You need to know how people work, what they are capable of knowing, the dimensions in which they know and the biases to which they are susceptible. For example, people were probably made within the 'box' of spacetime. What of the other 7 dimensions? Are there people going around within that?

[MargeB]

PEOPLE-WHAT? (2) People may in fact be the mystery. Everything you know and everything I know and everything you will ever think and feel and believe has one thing in common: it all occurs subjectively, within your head. On the one hand, it may turn out that making the leap into the objective world of reality (which is at least a different 'flavour' from your own consciousness) is never ever achievable. On the other hand, it may be (this sounds ridiculous, but is not) that only one or other exists: that the universe out there exists, or consciousness exists, not both. If it is only consciousness that exists, then perhaps the idea of the universe to that consciousness is in fact some kind of simulation. I think therefore I am. No. I think therefore there is thought.

If this all sounds very far fetched, ask yourself this: what do I believe to be the case in its stead, and what gripping evidence do I have that allows me to promote my own idea and reject this one?

[MargeB]

I have (tried) to read a few books on this, to be honest I've often been disappointed. I found one that just totally absorbed me for a month on end and it is still my favourite book of all time: Cosmology, by Edward Harrison. Read the reviews on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/052166148X/ref=pd_sxp_f/002-7540446-2688849

[JudgeJ]

Sorry, MargeB, I've got to go an' wash me 'air !

[kermit911]

Does everything have to have a begining?

[ongelofelijk]

If the 'Big Bang' occurred when nothing else existed, how can the result (the universe) have been produced. It is the idea of something coming from nothing that I cannot fathom.

I have read the other answers and nowhere (although I may have missed it) is this problem addressed. It is easier to talk about what happened after the 'big bang'.  But I had alway thought that to produce an event that could bring about the creation of the universe, as we know,  would require some catalyst, some essential ingredients, or at least one atom/proton/photon/quark or something....

I will add that the Bible tells us that it was God, who created the universe from nothing, all in seven days.

To me it seems that Physics and religion ask us to have similar leaps of faith when we try to understand this topic...  

Hmmm....  

[MargeB]

Ongel, I think it requires a leap from one (false) understanding of what humans are to the right one.

False: They are in some way created to know and to come to absolute answers, by their nature.

True: They have evolved to survive, and this means that over many years they have developed a certain kind of brain, with a certain type of function in mind: to understand the environment around them, and its 'folk physics' (if I push this, this happens, etc). Most modern science is built on this foundation. Everything I then learn/experiment with builds on the foundations of what I already know: we use uranium in nuclear fission, not sand, because we know that material properties and their selection is important. To work out one thing (energy creation), I use info from something else (nuclear physics). This works for everything we do. It's so common place that we go on to imagine that it is the absolute measure of truth.

But it's not. There is no evidence that it should be. This is where most religious philosophies go completely wrong, at their very outset, their foundation. Just because I can DEDUCE things about this universe from other things in this universe does not mean for one instant that I can use them to deduce things about what goes on outside this universe.

For all we know, things could be totally different in the 'worlds' outside our universe...universes could be popping out of nowhere all the time.

[jake-the-peg]

In regard to things appearing from "nowhere". We do see this in the sub atomic realm already, they're called virtual particles. The more massive the less likely they are to spontaneously exist.

But likelihood is a time based concept an infinately massive Universe could easly come into existance where time has no meaning.

As to what the universe is expanding well just imagine getting in your rocket and ending up where you started.

Of course it's not that simple and theres a certain branch of maths called Riemann surfaces that is closely related to it and if you feel brave you could try a google on "Universe" and "Riemann surfaces"

Unfortunately these are the sort of answers that require quite a bit of personal effort

[jake-the-peg]

PS if you're up for it I can strongly reccomend Roger Penrose's book "The road to reality"

It's not easy but it covers all the principals behind current cosmology starting from basic number theory through complex numbers, vectors Riemann surfaces all the way through to string and twistor theory.

[landie]

If energy cannot be created or detroyed there should have been something there, always.

[MargeB]

why? I don't see energy being created out of nothing around me, how can I apply that to what was clearly an event that may have had no relation to the laws of physics that I see now?

[petsim]

The original perception is that the Universe started with a bang. Don't forget that the 'Universe' is everything that we perceive. So what we know of as the universe started with a bang. Unfortunately universe has come to mean everything. This may not be the case. There maybe other universes (other everythings). Our universe maybe inside another universe, but that one can only be perceived by things existing there. Consider:

Use a computer program to generate a universe - in years to come this maybe possible. So, using this I create a virtual universe. Within that universe living organism come into being on a planet. Their universe is what was created in my computer. They have no idea of my universe. Their universe is virtual to me, but perfectly real to them and started with a bang.

Many cosmologists have problems with this as it leads to the admission that we might be living in a virtual universe.

PS An even worse problem with this is that to the little organism living on the planet in my computer, I am god.

[MargeB]

Spyware took out an entire village on my PC last night.