Before the Big Bang

Well, thinking is ideas so everything we talk about hence think about are idea about our sensory data. To say time is an idea is one thing, but to say it's ONLY an idea? How would you support that?Humans think about time in terms of sun (day/night), moon, seasons, lifetimes but in what sense do you hold we created time?lfen

I suppose I must rephrase my thoughts. The length of time that we think in is a creation, I suppose. I really am not sure anymore of my point, so forgive me.

The thing is time is no different to distance, it is just a degree of freedom in spacetime. When spacetime is reduced to a singularity then there is neither distance nor time. There are no degrees of freedom, no way to move position in space or time. The only things that are man made are the arbitrary division of space and time that we use, not the property that they measure.

Okay...I am not nearly intelligent enough for this subject

Almost none (me included) of us are. It is tough stuff if you keep digging deeply into it.

Don't even think that for a moment. You just haven't lived long enough to get all the underlying material needed to get to that step. Come on, you're doing great so far. The problem is you're trying to tackle stuff some folk here have spent twenty or thirty years beating on. They had a head start on you.It's all you parents fault. If they'd been smart enough to see that you were born twenty years earlier...

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Gotta disagree, Jar. There are something which even someone of average or a fair bit above average intelligence just isn't going to be able to handle in it's full detail.However, I should temper what I say: With time an person of average intelligence can at least get a grasp of the important points. It is just not more than that it is not a real, deep understanding.In that way you are right. One does not get this stuff the first time is it introduced. Nor the second, third, ... sixth. But eventually it becomes a little less murky.

Lol, I agree. I think I should have been a teenager in the 80s. Thank you.

TheClashFanJust be glad you picked something simple like big bang theory and not,say,loop quantum gravity or Ahranhov-Bohm Effect.We pretenders to the understanding of such levels of penetrating insight hold no candle to the people who actually originate in these fields.If you immerse yourself in these things it soon feels like jumping through Alice's looking glass.At least she found a way back out.

The problem is that we are bound by our common sense, our preconcieved views of what the universe is like. We're only able to directly experience a very small part of it, and its just really hard to imagine things that we have no way to directly experience. There's a wealth of things that go completely against what we would expect. There are likely 11 dimensions to the universe, but I honestly have no idea how to visualise more than 3. Thankfully maths doesn't care about things like that.Whats more, the topic you picked has no definte answer yet anyway. The point of the bigbang defies current understanding because Relativity and Quantum Mechanics are as yet incompatible. In most cases that is irrelevent because gravity has no effect on the quantum level, but at the point of the big bang the gravity is so strong that you can no longer ignore it. The best scientists in the world dream of uniting the two

Alright, could someone clarify something for me please? I've read that the idea of the big bang is that there was nothing (no time, no space, no matter) and that this nothing exploded somehow into what there is now. I've also heard that all the matter in the universe was in one small grouping which exploded. The latter is makes more sense, but where did the other idea come from? Which one is more commonly accepted?

SoulSlay where have you read that there was nothing? And you say you heard that all the matter in the universe was in one small grouping which exploded. And you wish to know where the idea came from? Why? The questions you ask are tedious to answer. You would have to spend some time reading , studying and making an honest attempt to understand. Appearing on a debate board and asking for us to digest 50 years of astonomy and phyiscs is a tall order. Since this subject of the BigBang has been discussed, explained and debated in so many numerous threads on this board, why is it you can not look at those? If you seriously wanted to find answers to your questions you would of by now have some inkling of the subject you are curious about. There has been at least 10 others who have asked those same questions and have received patient, honest answers from very knowlegable people on this board. I ask that you first explore those and if you still "Dont get it" then ask informed questions. If you can not do the needed foot work then you must not really want to know the answers to your questions. This is just my honest opinion others may be prepared to debate you on the bigbang.

An very old book (20 -25 years) is S. Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes". There has been a lot of work in those decades but it is a well written little book. It's been a very long time since I've read it though.It actually is, as the title suggests, only about the first 3 mintues after the big bang! Lots happened to say the least .I'm not enough of an expert to trust but here is one picture of what happened.There was nothing. No matter, no energy and no space/time. There was a spontaneous appearance of a lot of energy in a very, very small space. The space/time itself expanded. There was no explosion of anything. Basically the distances between points got bigger. Just as if you and a friend stood sholder to sholder on a big rubber mat and the mat was pulled very hard. You and your friend would be standing on exactly the same place on the mat (marked with red x's) but you would get further and further apart without moving (on the mat). As space expanded the energy was less concentrated. It "cooled" just like a gas cools if you let it expand (well sort of like). When it got cold enough matter "condensed" out of the energy.What happened before? We don't know. The math is good back to about 10 to the minus 30 or 40 of a second after the start. Before that it breaks down. It doesn't work any more. We need new physics.There are suggestions, speculations about "before". In the next few decades there may even be testable hypothoses. It is exciting.

Your still getting a lump of coal from Santa Ned. To late in the game to play Mr. Nice. I am thinking soulslay is a jasonchin incarnation. Although I may be wrong.

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I've also heard that all the matter in the universe was in one small grouping which exploded. The latter is makes more sense, but where did the other idea come from? Which one is more commonly accepted?

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First of all, at the inception of our universe there was nothing but time, space, and energy. Later, as the energy was spread over a larger, expanding universe, matter condensed as the temperature decreased. Einstein laid down the groundwork for this theory with his equation E=mc^2. Through math, he was able to show that matter and energy can become one another in certain situations. In the seconds after the "Big Bang" it was simply too hot for matter to form. Therefore, claiming that the universe started as a grouping of matter is not accurate, it was a small area with high temperatures and high energy content.And how do we "know" (tentatively) this? All observations of the universe support the theory that all of the mass of the universe is moving away from a central point. Therefore, all mass must have originated from that central point. If that central point were small enough in diameter, then matter could not have existed in such a small space, only energy could exist in such an environment.What happened before the Big Bang? This is like asking what your thoughts were before your conception. It is not something that the human mind can comprehend, but may, in the future, be modelled through physics and math.