Before the Big Bang

My first question, and I believe this is what the other posters are trying to convey, is when are you referring to? At what point are you looking for "something"?

Message 158Doesn't matter just tell me at what moment "something" began to exist.

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

At about 10^-43 seconds after general relativity gives a singularity as an answer there was something (lots of it) already in existence. Before that we don't know.I think that cosmologists used to suggest this could all be a quantum fluctuation. I don't know if that is completely discounted now but I think that there are lots of other ideas about how this came about. But all of those are not included in the big bang theory as currently formulated.At least that is my understanding. But we need cavediver or son koku to chime in. They would know a LOT better than I.

The question I asked is important though. How can you conclude that something came from nothing when it has not been said that the "something" came from anything. At what point do you see a problem, and therefore feel that "something came from nothing"?Nosey said it well:

quote:

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The entirety of what we know as our universe was in a very, very hot and dense state.

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All I see from this comment is that there is a something. When is it that your at odds with?

Exactly.My point to Mod was that the Big Bang theory states there was nothing by all the resources I referenced, and that now we have something. That being the case everything we have came from nothing which is impossible.Thus my dilemma:Either there was something before the Big Bang that the universe expanded out of.ORThere was nothing and the universe expanded out of that nothing.If there was something there to get the universe out of, then we have the problem of where that something came from etc.

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

? Was it there before the big bang or one planck time after the big bang.

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"John 5:39 (KJS) Search the scriptures; for in them ye think ye have eternal life: and they are they which testify of me."

That is what I perceive the situation to be. We don't know where the singularity originated from.M-theory as it's own idea of an answer. Penrose's speculation is that the conditions at the singularity look a lot like the math of space-time at the far end of the expansion of our universe and that this cycle goes on forever. For the details I refer you to him whenever (if ever) he publishes (maybe his students found a flaw in the math). There are other ideas none of which I can make much comment on.

Right now we don't know. But it is also totally irrelevant. It doesn't matter what was before the Big Bang even if that question makes any sense.BUT...it is possible that one day we may get some glimpses of what was before the Big Bang. See this National Geographic article.The point is that regardless, this Universe, the one we live in, did not exist before the Big Bang.The Universe we live in, the rules that govern it, all begin shortly after the Big Bang. Gradually, we are learning more and more about this Universe and its rules and one day we may even learn something about what came before.But the idea that "God did it" tells us nothing, is pretty much worthless and is just a waste of time and energy that could be put to better use.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

If Big Bang is the start of everything that science can study, or T=0, then there is no before big bang. To answer the question is not scientific. (NosyNed has brought up that science may be able to probe further back, though this makes no sense to me - I am not a physicist.)I do not believe that the singularity is the result of something from nothing. My faith/belief/imagination is that this universe was and is simply a part of a greater number of such universes. Or perhaps God got the ball rolling? The safest answer at this time would be "we don't know", but this still does not mean something came from nothing. Thats where you and I can let our imaginations go. Science, so far at least, has no say in the matter.**Sorry for the poor wording of my posts, I was hoping to approach it from a different angle. Finding the right words to approach something so bizarre left me struggling to make my point

The fact that it is nonsensical should give you some clue that cosmologists don't accept it. There was no before. Have you been reading anything? What is outside reality? Nothing is outside reality. That does not mean reality rests within an infinite void of nothing, it means there isn't anything in existence that is not part of reality. The Big Bang saw the expansion of space. There is no more to that sentence - there is no 'expanded into nothing' if you are going to keep it non-confusing the best thing to say is 'space is not expanding into anything'. What is the moment? The singularity or nothing? Why - its the singularity of course! So once again, the singularity did not appear out of nothing! Or rather - there wasn't anything. There is nothing north of the north pole either. Nothing is not a something, it isn't anything. There was no 'before' the big bang. The universe wasn't contained in a single point, the universe was a single point. There is no space for the universe to exist in now! That mind boggling statement works just as well now as it does about the singularity. The singularity did not expand into a space - but it can be a confusing proposition.Still - my point still stands. The singularity did not appear out of nothing. There was no before. You don't understand the Big Bang - so it's rich for you to try and tell those that spend decades dedicated to cosmology what to do. However, the standard Big Bang model that we are predominantly discussing here is just cosmology with relativity. Not something that most cosmologists accept today - they have modified the theory to include aspects from quantum physics to give rise to inflationary cosmology.There's no point going into that until you understand the big bang theory and given that you think descriptions of the big bang confirm your view that the singularity came from somewhere (which was nowhere) just goes to show how far you are from understanding. I recommend reading a good book rather than websites. Try Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene. I've said this over and over and over. The big bang theory does not propose that something comes from nothing. The sentence doesn't even make sense. Until you can get your head around this property of the big bang you're going nowhere with understanding.Imagine the universe as a collective whole, the past, the present and the future all in one four dimensional bundle of space time. Relativity gives us the tools to begin to describe this four dimensional universe. The first being that as you move in the positive direction of time, space itself expands (not simply the distance between distant things, but space ITSELF).Four dimensions is difficult so let's imagine less than that. One space dimension and one time dimension. This is a map of this universe

time                      space
0                          .
...
.....
.......
.........
...........
.............
...............
now                .................

That's it, that's all the big bang says. It doesn't explain where the first dot came from, it just says that at time 0 there was one. The idea that something happened before it doesn't make sense. It is so very easy to fall into this trap. You just proposed that 'nothing was there'. Nothing was where? What kind of nonsense is that? Can nothing be somewhere? No!And since time began, you actually mean 'then and there'. Nothing existed when? Where? Does it make sense? No. There was no 'nothing'. For as long as there has been a 'when' there has been a 'where' - that is the Big Bang It gets confusing because there was once a where but no when, or some amalgamation of the two. If and only if the universe was created - yes. In the classic Big Bang there was no before the Big Bang, but more modern theories have helped describe some entities that might have existed and interacted to give rise to the existence of our universe. There was no before the big bang. Sorry. Where and when? There was no when before the big bang. There was no where prior to the big bang. You can't. Though the big bang wasn't an explosion.

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None of your resources state that. does not even begin to say itDoesn't say itdoes not say itdoes not say itdoes not say itNot one of your sources says that the singularity came from nothing. OR there was no before the Big Bang.Edited by Modulous, : No reason given.

As long as there have been moments there has been something. There was no moment in which there was nothing.

I'll try to stick to what is known and accepted.Any theory of physics has its domains of validity and General Relativity is no exception. Mathematical theories of ice for example all have singularities at the point where temperature equal 0 degrees, the melting point of ice. This is because there are a lot of factors that come into play when ice begins to melt, that the original theory doesn't account for. However, the impressive thing is that the theories of ice announce the fact that they don't work by producing singularities. In a sense they are saying "pretending ice is all there is at this point produces nonsensical results, hence there must be something unaccounted for".When you use General Relativity to model the universe's history you basically get a huge smooth 4-D shape as the answer, these kind of smooth shapes are called manifolds. However, we get a singularity at a certain point on the manifold. Hence for regions of spacetime near this point we can't be sure General Relativity is accurate. If we move out to points on the manifold where General Relativity can still be trusted to make sense, then we'll use only those points in our theories of cosmology.
So now that we have restricted our attention to the part of the manifold where General Relativity can be trusted, what does this part of the manifold tell us?Firstly we find that the points of the manifold can be put in order, by gathering them into huge 3-D shapes, that I'll call slices. Kind of like "First slice, Second slice, Third slice......" where each of these slice's is larger than the one previous. It also turns out that these slices are completely spatial (i.e. they are only space, not spacetime).So we've gotten a smooth 4-D spacetime shape and slices it up into slices of pure space and put the slices in order of increasing size.
You might be thinking "Why slice it up?", however this is because of a stunning fact. It turns out that every observer in the universe will agree (remember this is relativity, it's hard to get observers to agree) with the way we've sliced up spacetime. Although they mightn't agree with our exact order, everyone will agree that the very small slices come before the very large slices according to their personal clock. That the very small slices occurred early on in history.Basically, the slices are the whole spatial extent of the universe at a given moment in time according to one particular observers clock. Although other observers don't quite agree with his/her/its clock, everybody agrees the universe was much smaller in the past.Beyond the very first slice, General Relativity can't be trusted so we've no idea of what happened.It is similar to inhabitants of an ice cube that froze out of a pool of water in the distant past. The inhabitants of the cube have never seen water, however their best theories of the history of their ice cube develop singularities in the distant past, near the point where the water froze and the cube formed. What they need is a general theory of H2O in all its statesYou could see String Theory, M-Theory or any Quantum Gravitational theory as being an analogue of this "general theory of H2O".Edited by Son Goku, : Spelling and grammar.

No, what I'm actually saying is that if, as you say, there was "no time" before the Big Bang, then the phrase "before the Big Bang" is meaningless, like "North of the North Pole", and your question makes no sense.That's why I wrote:

I suspect that you've misunderstood them.But that's by-the-by. My point is that these people, being physicists, would know if their ideas were breaking any of the basic laws of physics, because anything you and I can remember about physics from school is certainly known to them. And yet you yourself summarise their opinions as saying that there was no time before the Big Bang. In which case, there was no "time when there was nothing".

Hi ICANTFirst let's clear something up. The Universe may or may not have a time before the T=0 of the Big Bang. Classical General Relativity suggests that there is no T<0, and certain quantum investigations suggest that this remains true - the Hartle-Hawking No-Boundary proposal being the original. Other quantum investigations through string theory and other ideas suggest that the Big Bang was merely the start of our particular corner of existence. In this case, the true Universe is much larger and time may well be infinite in extent going backwards. Or it may not and we are back to our original T=0 of the Big Bang, just now sometime long before our own Big Bang.Let's take our original case of a Big Bang with no T<0. Let's look at God's view on the Universe from outside. He sees (I know 'cos he told me) something that looks like a large beach ball. Our entire Universe is the surface of the beach ball - not just now, but the entire past and the entire future - each point on the beach ball is a point in space-time: your birth, your wedding ceremony, your death, the death of the Sun, etc, etc.There is also the point of the Big Bang. From outside it doesn't look special at all. It's just another point on the ball. Admittedly, if you look closely enough, you will see that there is something special about that point, but nothing drastic. It is certainly not a point of creation. If God did create this Universe, he created the whole of it - the whole beach ball - in which case the moment of creation is all around us, in our past and in our future.If you were to travel through space and time back to the Big Bang, able to survive the temperatures and gravitational stresses, you would approach the region around T=0. As you tried to go back further, before T=0, you would find yourself travelling forward in time again, to T>0. No matter how you tried, you would find that the time 'before' T=0 is actualluy the time 'after' T=0. You would not see matter and energy appearing from nothing. You would start to appreciate the real nature of matter and energy, that they are like ripples on a pool:Ripples appear to be 'created' from a point on a pool, from where they spread out, but there is no 'somewhere' from where the ripples come. Ripples are just a feature of the pool.Matter and energy appear to be 'created' from a point in the Universe, from where they spread out, but there is no 'somewhere' from where the mattrer and energy come. Matter anmd energy are just a feature of the Universe.All of this is our (i.e Relativists) view on the Universe.This view is true even if the Universe is infinite in extent either through space or through time as well! These infinities are only aspects of our Universe from our internal viewpoint. From outisde it is very easy to compact these infinities into a nice manageable finite sized beach ball. This is what we do all the time in Relativity, so if we can do it, I'm more than sure God can.Whether the Universe is infinite or finite, it just looks like the same beach ball to God. The real fundemental question for us is why does the beach ball exist? Your answer is that God made it exist. Some others may have different ideas - such as it has to exist! That's an interesting topic in itself... That's all fine. But this has nothing to do with the Big Bang, T=0, and 'something from nothing'. The Big Bang is just one, albeit interesting, point on this wonderful beach ball we call the Universe...