.What happened before the Big Bang?
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It's not really space. But enjoy this artist's rendering as if it were (Shutterstock/Live Science)
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(Live Science) The Big Bang is commonly thought of as the start of it all: About 13.8 billion years ago, the observable universe went boom and expanded [popped] into being. [It did not expand into something, as there was nothing to expand into prior to that.]
But what were things like
before the
Big Bang?
Short answer: We don't know. Long answer: It could have been a lot of things, each mind-bending in its own way.
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| The Buddha (Gandhara) |
[What was the universe/multiverse like
before the before? Only the Buddha knows, and some high-plane
devas, and the people he told, and the
rishis or "seers" of the Vedas and other knowledge books, given what they saw and were told by extraterrestrial visitors to the Indus Valley Civilization, Emperor Ashoka's Bharat/India. Science does not really want to know for knowing's sake but to argue and posit and prove with the evidence it finds convincing, never mind the actual Truth. Because what if the answer is too weird, like this all being a
samsaric simulation, a trap, an endless cycle of karma and becoming in a loop, like Neitzche's nightmare scenario?]
In the beginning
The first thing to understand is what the Big Bang actually was.
"The Big Bang is a moment in time, not a point in space," said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology (
Caltech.edu) and author of
The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself (Dutton, 2016).
- [It is dumb for science to say there was a Big Bang and then define it as they do. It is like saying, "Religion and spirituality are stupid because they believe in miracles. We don't. So just give us this one miracle at the beginning, unexplained and inexplicable, and we promise not to resort to any more miracles after that. We'll explain everything else and define what is an isn't reality with reason and constructs hammered out by mere reasoning and then constantly update that picture with new ideas, theories, and assumptions, never getting anywhere but having fun and making lots of money along the way, unlike those stupid religionists and magicians talking their nonsense and mysticism.]
- Stern opposition faced in Deep Red States pushing Christianity in public schools
- Space photo of the week: Milky Way's galactic twin captured by dark energy camera
[There's a new beginning! It's called the Big Bounce, which isn't exactly new
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| The gods did it. |
The
Big Bang may not have been the beginning of the universe, according to a theory of cosmology that suggests the universe can “bounce” between phases of contraction and expansion. If that theory is true, then it could have profound implications about the nature of the cosmos, including two of its most mysterious components --
black holes and dark matter.
With this in mind, a recent study suggests that
dark matter could be composed of black holes formed during a transition from the universe's last contraction to the current expansion phase, which occurred before the Big Bang.
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| You can be happy. Here's how. Grab some paper |
If this hypothesis holds, the gravitational waves generated during the black hole formation process might be detectable by future gravitational wave observatories, providing a way to confirm this dark matter generation scenario. (Ergo, we just figured out a way to make a lot more money, funding new kinds of super-expensive observatories. And while we're at it, we need a bigger electron collider.)
Observations of stellar movements in galaxies and the cosmic microwave background — an afterglow of the Big Bang — indicate that about 80% of all matter in the universe is dark matter, a substance that doesn't reflect, absorb, or emit light (even though it's all around us, not just off in deep space where we can't see it because it's so far away).
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| Oh, Buddha, give me some insight it all. |
Despite its abundance, scientists have not yet identified what dark matter is made of. In the new study, researchers explored a scenario where dark matter consists of primordial black holes formed from density fluctuations that occurred during the universe's last contraction phase, not long before the period of expansion that we observe now.
[Back to the old theory]
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Demiurge: Check it out, Chugs. Quiick, give me your lighter. I'm going to create something.
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(Family Guy) God (Demiurge) created the universe
Thus, it's possible that the universe at the Big Bang was teeny-tiny or infinitely large, Carroll said, because there’s no way to look back in time at the stuff we can’t even see today.
- [Dumb. All we do is look back. And there are ways of looking back, not to mention the beings who were there when it happened because the universe, this universe, is far older. And we live in a multiverse. And it is possible to know things by direct perception, but that requires purification of mind and development of the dibba cakkhu or "divine eye," the human capacity to exhibit marvelous powers of perception, even us, even now.]
All we really know is that it [It? What? The pre-universe, something was preexisting?] was very, very dense and that it very quickly got less dense.
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As a corollary, there really isn't anything outside the universe, because the universe is, by definition, everything.
- [Unless we mean the multiverse, but they're separate, except for trans-dimensional travelers who have found a way to break through to other dimensions and universes, but they haven't told us how to do it, I mean they've told us, but they haven't gotten it published in a peer-reviewed journal of our liking and raked over the coals by friends of ours in the elite circles of The Academy who are gatekeepers to keep Truth and the riff-raff out, so until then there is just no way to be outside the All which is the Everything and the only Reality that we know of and can ever know.]
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| Question. Answer. I've got it! |
So at the Big Bang, everything was denser and hotter than it is now, but there was
no more an "outside" of it than there is today. As tempting as it is to take a godlike view and imagine you could stand in a void and look at the scrunched-up baby universe right before the Big Bang, that would be impossible, Carroll said.
The universe didn't expand into space; space [you know, that stuff that is nothing but holds everything, defined as the delimiting distance between things, yeah, that stuff] itself expanded.
"No matter where you are in the universe, if you trace yourself back 14 billion years, you come to this point where it was extremely hot, dense, and rapidly expanding," he said.
No one knows exactly what was happening in the universe until 1 second after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled off enough for
protons and neutrons to collide and stick together.
Many scientists [that we approve of and never mind the others] do think that the universe went through a process of exponential expansion called inflation during that first second. This would have smoothed out the fabric of space-time and could explain why matter is so evenly distributed in the universe today.
Before the bang
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| Secret life before the BIG bang |
It's possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite stretch of an ultrahot, dense material, persisting in a steady state until, for some reason, the Big Bang occurred.
This extra-dense universe [the previous universe before the current universe] may have been governed by quantum mechanics, the physics of the extremely small scale, Carroll said.
The Big Bang, then, would have represented the moment that classical physics took over as the major driver of the universe's evolution. [
What is Quantum Mechanics?]
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| Try hedonism. I liked it. |
For [horndog atheist] Stephen Hawking, this moment was all that mattered: Before the Big Bang, he said, events are unmeasurable, and thus undefined. Hawking called this the no-boundary proposal: Time and space,
he said, are finite, but they don’t have any boundaries or starting or ending points, the same way that the planet Earth is finite but has no edge.
"Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang,"
he said in an interview on the National Geographic show "StarTalk" in 2018.
Or perhaps there was something else before the Big Bang that's worth pondering. One idea is that the Big Bang isn't the beginning of time, but rather that it was a moment of symmetry.
In this idea, prior to the Big Bang, there was another universe, identical to this one but with entropy increasing toward the past instead of toward the future.
Increasing entropy, or increasing disorder in a system, is essentially the arrow of time, Carroll said, so in this mirror universe, time would run opposite to time in the modern universe and our universe would be in the past.
- [Strangely, the mathematical functions and Einstein's equations do not have an arrow and therefore time can run in either direction without violating math rules or fundamental quantum mechanics, what with retro-causation even being shown to possibly exist.]
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| E Questions, Buddha Answers |
Proponents of this theory also suggest that other properties of the universe would be flip-flopped in this
mirror universe.
For example, physicist David Sloan wrote in the
University of Oxford Science Blog, asymmetries in molecules and ions (called chiralities) would be in opposite orientations to what they are in our universe.
A related theory holds that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning of everything, but rather a moment in time when the universe switched from a period of contraction to a period of expansion.
- [Ah, this would be in line with Buddhist and Vedic cosmology and the views of the other Dharmic religions, which speak of periods of expansion and contraction within a great aeon or maha yuga, a staggering period of time humans had no business imagining if it were not for space beings filling their minds with explanations of what goes on out there in boundless reaches of space known as the akasha deva loka or "world of light beings in the sky."]
This "Big Bounce" notion suggests that there could be infinite Big Bangs as the universe expands, contracts, and expands again.
- [Ah, now we're getting somewhere, and the Indian books of the subcontinent have been reaching Western scientists by various means after all. This is exactly what the East posits, not a finite first point or cause, but only cycling that neither has a need for a beginning nor any end in sight. There is. And when is it? Now, the eternal now.]
The problem with these ideas, Carroll said, is that there's no explanation [that I know of] for why or how an expanding universe would contract and return to a low-entropy state. [But, of course, I haven't read the ancient texts, have I?]
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| Let's send this one up and see if it flies. |
Carroll and his colleague Jennifer Chen have their own pre-Big Bang vision.
In 2004, the physicists suggested that perhaps the universe as we know it is
the offspring of a parent universe from which
a bit of space-time has ripped off.
It's like a radioactive nucleus decaying, Carroll said: When a nucleus decays, it spits out an alpha or beta particle. The parent universe could do the same thing, except instead of particles, it spits out baby universes, perhaps infinitely.
"It's just a quantum fluctuation that lets it happen," Carroll said. These baby universes are "
literally parallel universes," Carroll said, and don't interact with or influence one another.
If that all sounds rather trippy [then you have been smoking 5-MeO-DMT or regular DMT or], it is — because scientists don't yet have a way to peer back to even the instant of the Big Bang, much less what came before it.
Theoretical physicists also have work to do, Carroll said, like making more-precise predictions about how quantum forces like quantum gravity might work.
"We don't even know what we're looking for," Carroll said, "until we have a theory."
