Universally Speaking

[WeAreBongo]

Could somebody please explain the origin of the universe in layman's terms? If matter is never destroyed, just reused, then everything in the universe must've been present at the dawn of time - or the big bang. If the universe started as an extremely dense singularity, it must've occupied some space in something to contain everything that was to come, in fact it must've been pretty big to contain everything, no matter how dense. I thank you clever peeps.

[Loosehead]

The theory is that all space, time and matter where created from an infinitely dense and therefore zero space singularity. You have to discard normal thinking about space and time to get your head around it. Word's like space and before are meaningless. I use a technique that I call Black boxing, ie all the stuff that is incomprehensable I just put in my black box. Then I am able to concentrate on the big bang from a micro second after it started. Hope that helps, I'm sure a more elegant explanation will follow.

[WeAreBongo]

Hmm, still turns my brain to blancmange..

[jake-the-peg]

Explaining the creation of the universe in Layman's terms is pretty tricky because the English language isn't up to the job.

The first thing to try to understand though is that all your ordinary notions of how the world works just dont hold in this situation.

We spend our lives in a mild gravitational field at mild densities and temperatures and all of our experience comes from that - when you rack the conditions up all of our daily experience and intuition becomes meaningless.

The next thing is that the Universe did no explode into an existing void. We are talking here about the creation of space itself - we are also therefore talking about the begining of time and this is where language starts to become a problem.

The term before the big bang is meaningless - before implies some sort of time which simply did not exist.

The notion of time as we experience it breaks down at high gravities and speeds and really becomes meaningless at that point.

A bit like asking you what you were doing 100 years ago and then insisting but you must have been doing something.

Your point about matter never being created or distroyed is partially right.

In fact matter and energy are constantly created and distroyed for tiny fractions of a second - but the books must always balance and the net change is always 0.

It's possible that the Universe displays this on a longer timescale and that the matter we see is cancelled out by gravitational energy.

We still lack the mathematical tools to see the really early picture, there's no good theory of quantum gravity which would be a huge step.

If your maths is good and you fancy winning a Nobel Prize it'd be a heck of a career move!

[WeAreBongo]

I guess thinking about such things whilst trying to get to sleep is just asking for a dose of brain soup! I recently read that the Large Hadron Collider being built at the moment just might undo everything thats been created so far - are some people right to be concerned?

[mibn2cweus]

All our observations lead us to the conclusion that the universe was once much smaller and with such a concentration of energy was much hotter, so hot that matter as we observe it now was dissolved in a hot soup of energy. Through the process of expanding the temperature reduced to the point where matter could form within the extreme pressures that still existed.

We learn this by observing the universe around us as it is today. We have yet to assemble a laboratory where the behavior of energy under the conditions of such extreme heat and pressure as existed at the beginning can be observed. What we know comes form what we have so far been able to observe and the learning process continues. We simply have to continue to follow the evidence that was created by the big bang to wherever it might lead.

recreating the big bang

�Should we be concerned?� What, were you planning on living forever? Perhaps the big bang that created our universe was a laboratory experiment gone bad (or good in our case). Should we find a way to go back in time and warn them? �Hey buddy, don�t push that button! You�re about to created the universe from which we evolved!�

Now go to bed and get some sleep. You just might have a big day tomorrow . . . If there is a tomorrow?

[meredith101]

these are some nice posts.

It helps a bit I think if you consider what Jake is saying from a Darwinian evolutionary perspective. You were designed to from and by the interaction of matter with its environment so that you could survive by interacting with this environment in an intelligent way. You need to know about basic physics, how objects move, that the same object is bigger if closer, all that kind of stuff. You can kind of extrapolate from it and synthesize these types of knowledge to more advanced types of things. But ultimately you're in some way working with the basic types of knowledge that ensured your survival.
There may have been 'some' kind of world or space or time in some universe of some bizarre kind 'before (in a sense) the Big Bang. But you were not made for that world. So how would it ever be possible for your mind to understand it, designed, as it were, for this world.