BS: What went Big Bang?

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Donuel
Date: 29 Sep 09 - 12:45 PM

Question: what was before the big bang? Answere: Lots of stuff.



If you can accept that our universe was not the first universe but was spawned by two other universes floating in what physicists call 'branes' of existence in proximity to each other and "BUMPED" into one another... ,

then our big bang beginning of our universe was as simple as a fertilized egg that grew into larger and larger existence.

a universe can be spawned in different ways, one way is from a collision of branes and another is a super massive black hole concentrating mass to a sigularity that excapes into its own space-time.

Our universe alone has super massive black holes that can create a new universe, that in turn creates its own space-time separate from ours.

Possibly our universe came from a black hole from another universe somewhere. If it did we could say that in a sense we are living inside a past black hole. Weird huh?

If on the other hand you want to go back and ask how the first universes came into being I would ask you see it as an evolution of life starting from elemental building blocks that still had an earlier existence.

If you are asking what created those earliest building blocks, then I would have to say that those elemental building blocks were just there.

thus putting us back where we started.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 29 Sep 09 - 12:19 PM

Exellent answer, Dave.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Uncle_DaveO
Date: 29 Sep 09 - 11:02 AM

I often hear (read) people saying, "But what was before the Big Bang?

That's like asking, "What was above the site of the Big Bang?"
(Or below, or beside).

The answer is, there WAS no "before" or no "above", etc. Because time and space both were originated at the BB. Remember that time is merely a measurement of change or movement, which depend on the existence of what we might call physical reality.

And none of those ways we have of measuring what exists (weight, speed--which is to say time--magnetism, light, and so on, could exist without all the others. All of those things are abstractions from the one great existence which is existence.

Yes, that's difficult if not impossible to get one's mind around, but that's because every concept we have and must work with is based on our experience with existence, and we have none of that that applies to BB, let alone "before BB", "above BB", "heavier than BB", "faster than BB" or the like.

We may speculate about a cyclic BB/existence alternation, and it might make us feel a little better because it tends to seem similar to our existence experience, but we have no conceivable way of testing the concept. We have neither the language nor data nor the kind of mind that would be necessary to deal with the question of "What went Big Bang?"

Relax and have a beer.

Dave Oesterreich

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 10:27 PM

"Nothing" is a mental concept. "Something" is also a mental concept. And the two require each other in order to even exist AS mental concepts because the one is dependent on the other.

You thus need a mentality first that posits and observes what it calls "something" before you have something...and when it thinks it sees nothing, it calls it "nothing", but how does it know that it's nothing? It doesn't. It merely assumes that because it knows what "something" is, then it also knows what "nothing" is.

But it doesn't. ;-) No one knows what "nothing" is...but we all know what the concept of nothing is...or we think we do.

Without an observer there can be no observed. They also are dependent on one another. One can theorize the existence of various "things" without any observer...but one cannot experience them that way, therefore it remains theoretical whether or not anything exists in the absence of an observer.

If you think it does, fine. But you can't prove it. You can only assume so. If you're basically a materialist, you will make that assumption automatically. If not, perhaps not.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: SPB-Cooperator
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 06:47 PM

In my view.....

Think in more than 4 dimensions, then it all becomes plausible. So if the 'big bang' is no more than a multi-dimensional 'intrusion' - take comfort that if there is ever another big bang within the observable universe then it would probably be curtains in nanaseconds or even much much much shorter time.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 05:47 PM

"This is the essence of critical discrimination, yes?"

Why--yes, Socrates...of course. I have often said as much myself..

"...one might want to ask which assumptions in it are so distorted, no?"

Oh, certainly, Socrates! That is a commendable way to proceed..




Ummm....whom do I ask about these distortions? I seem to have a plethora of possibilities...

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 05:26 PM

I love it, Bill.

You will allow that one of the most fundamental errors in human reasoning is the assumption that htings are associated which need not be, or are not associated when they actually should be. This is the essence of critical discrimination, yes?

Perhaps less readily, consider also the principle that a problem is knotty and persistant in direct proportion to the misassumptions, false assumptions or other distorted data used to examine it.

Since the nature of life and/or the physical universe is one of the knottiest and most persistant problems in philosophy, one might want to ask which assumptions in it are so distorted, no?

A

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 05:04 PM

serendipity...from today's paper.

you just have to have the right approach

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 05:00 PM

Thanks, Don [3 posts back]. Now your views on what went Original Supernova, please?

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 04:52 PM

Clarifying? *grin*.... that one GIVES me brain-strain.

(Hey..maybe you & I are just programmed to see these things differently...hmmm? ;>)

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 04:37 PM

That's a great photo, Bill--it really brings home the fact that so much of our pondering is map-making without territory, or independent thereof!

There is one postulate which I continually come back to as a relief from the brain-strain, which is the notion that space-time-energy, the normal continuum, does not "contain" consciousness. It is a very clarifying model in many ways.

A

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Don Firth
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 04:29 PM

When a massive star goes supernova and implodes into a black hole, all that is left behind is an immense gravitational field. Other than the gravitational field, there is nothing there. So—where did all that matter go!??

If I read theoretical physicist Michio Kaku correctly (Beyond Einstein, Hyperspace, Parallel Worlds, Physics of the Impossible, others), especially in Parallel Worlds, he hypothesizes that when such a star goes supernova, a Big Bang occurs—somewhere else (???)—and a new universe is created.

In this universe (the one we occupy), all the matter (and everything else) came from such a supernova in some other universe.

The word "universe" no longer means what it was originally intended to mean, i.e., all of Creation, or everything that is. A more accurate word would be "multiverse." Not unlike a bunch of grapes of infinite size. But with room to expand. More grapes popping onto the bunch all the time, any time a supernova occurs in any of these universes.

Then, of course, the matter of multiple dimensions. Eleven is the latest figure. Kaku says that this is a difficult concept to grasp, but the math is there to support it. All those other dimensions are interlaced, right where we are, but we are aware of only three (length, width, depth), with a concept of the fourth (duration, i.e., time).

Whimsical speculation:   what we (some of us) experience as paranormal phenomena may actually be real—"leakage" from one of the other dimensions.

(I'm getting a headache.)

Don Firth

P. S. "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
                                                                                                            —J. B. S. Haldane

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:59 PM

On an impulse, I went down to the catacombs to see if any of the old text books were where I remembered...even there, Husserl & Whitehead were on top of poor old Heidegger in the box.

ah, memories!

(Now why do I keep all these? Haven't done serious reading in years)

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:13 PM

Oh, lordy, Jack...of course.. Heidegger! *blush* (after the Heidegger class, I had a class in Husserl which was more 'interesting', and I had his name parked on 'later' brain cells, I guess. (ummm...1966-1969....some of those brain cells are worn about the edges)

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: bobad
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:13 PM

"Why is there something, rather than nothing?"

Because if there wasn't something, then there would be nothing. Easy!

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:09 PM

(My Master's thesis in Philosophy (never finished) was to be about another hotly debated topic..the "Free Will" vs "Determinism" issue.)

DO we have free will? Or are our actions simply based on physics & chemistry? My claim was to be: that the only way of even approaching a substantive resolution was through some theory like A.N. Whitehead's, where each 'actual entity' had a certain latitude about what it could 'do'...which would allow the organism to actually 'make decisions'...in some circumstances.
So, I was essentially arguing that we can't know, ultimately, what the answer is...but we must continue to act as though we DO have free will, no matter what 'truth' is.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:05 PM

In his seminal book on Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl asserts that the absolutely basic question in Philosophy is: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?"

I think you'll find that was Heidegger, not Husserl. Heidegger makes that the central question of all his later work. He sees it as not so much a philosophical question as an existential one: the question everybody has to to ask and nobody is ever going to get an answer to.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 02:57 PM

well,...ummm... not exactly, MtheGM...

When cosmologists say "multiple universes", they use that phrase to specifically indicate the possibility of entire realms that are not 'part' of where WE are. They talk of membranes which exist in some other 'place' than what we call normal space. (The italics are to indicate that even the words 'membranes' and 'exist' and 'place' aren't even accurate for the purpose.)

The distinctions use language that we can share to refer to concepts that are only theoretical. (If they said "multiple zprynxes", this would all get worse..*wry grin*)

There is some math and some theories, like "string theory" which can be played with to make some coherent sense of it all....once you accept certain premises...kinda like religion.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 02:38 PM

I am always worried semantically by the idea of 'multiple' or 'serial' universes. If it is a UNIverse, then there can only be one of it, by definition — if there are various - what - parts? bits? entities? whatever - they will all be subsumed under the ONE, won't they? Which brings us back to my OP...

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Paul Burke
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 02:24 PM

I suspect that, several Universe models down the line, it will turn out that a very slight non- linearity in Hubble's Law will turn out to mean that the Big Bang happened... an infinite time ago.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 01:30 PM

*grin*...that's sorta what *I* said, Mrzzy...only I don't phrase it as simply/clearly.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 01:29 PM

YEah, the time thing is a wicked loop--proposing "before time" and "outside space" are oxymoronic propositions, defying their own terminology.

If there was any space before the Big Bang (assuming it was space as we know it) then it was not the beginning of Universeness. This leads to the serial or parallel multiverse model.

If there was none then we are left with (as far as our terms cover it) a sort of "Only-Potentiality" capable of generating inconceivable amounts of energy and matter from nothing. THis is also cognitively very trying.

I prefer a model which allows the Big Bang as a transition between serial Universes, the first of which was a long, slow accumulation of moribund attention units and energetic points postulated by consciousness.

Oh, and turtle from there on down.


A

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 01:17 PM

Oops, meant to say that since I can neither conceive of the universe as having always existed, nor of there being a time before time, so, usually, I don't go there. That is, I'll philosophize on almost anything, but this one fairly stumps me until we come up with some new verb tenses, or something...

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 01:16 PM

um - what cannot be known?

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 12:16 PM

NO --- but LoL --- : >)

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Rasener
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:50 AM

Was it this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYgOlqinH7A&feature=related

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:49 AM

2. The matrix of Potential Realities held in suspension by universal Disbelief. (Sorry, I am waxing poetic).

Another: The mesh of a quintillion points of conscious about to make an Agreement.

A

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:48 AM

Amos... #1 is a subset of Whitehead.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Amos
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:47 AM

Two possible answers that habven't been mentioned:

1. The tail end of some insignificant, warped pocket of leftover continuum from the universe before this one.

2.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:47 AM

♫Nada, Nada ...nada, nada, nil,nil, nil♫

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:41 AM

Bobad - yours is best answer so far. Some day let's meet for dinner at The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe. So Long And Thanks For All The Fish.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: CarolC
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:41 AM

When I ponder on the concept of "nothing", I find myself thinking that even nothing is something. Which really makes any attempt to explain it all kind of fruitless. "Nothing" is an impossibility. But so is existence itself. Because if "something" exists, where did it come from? But if "nothing" exists, how can it be called "nothing"?

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:40 AM

(I like to imagine Alice (in Wonderland) asking Humpty Dumpty "What went Big Bang?)

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Bill D
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:35 AM

"...an infinitely small size of WHAT, precisely?"

stuff....in a philosophical sense, whatever Alfred North Whitehead's "Actual Entities" were.

More here

In his seminal book on Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl asserts that the absolutely basic question in Philosophy is: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?"

Humans tend to WANT an answer, whether or not it is even theoretically possible to either GET an answer OR frame the question correctly. This is why religion 'satisfies' so many.....they just say "In the beginning, God....etc" and presume they have covered it.

Science (read: those who DO science) wants to know all than can be known, and wants to to know why we can't know the rest.

Respecting science, but being of the philosophical temperament, I am content to shrug and take Whitehead's & Husserl's views, and 'assume' there was some basic 'actual entities', but admit that I cannot even conceive of how the process worked. Stating the conundrum in philosophical terms will do...for now.

Imagine that someone steps forward and asserts (in some context other than religion) that he 'has' the answer. How will we test his answer?
We are captives of our own intellectual limits and of the language we use to reference our own existence. We have FAR more words and 'concepts' than we do referents for them. (as...Unicorns...and ghosts...and 'actual entities')

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Mrrzy
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:24 AM

What went Bang was all the current energy/mass/space/time going from very, very small in all of those "dimensions" to very, very large in all of them. That is, potential space-time and mass-energy became those very things, very suddenly.
But I thought the Big Bang was being discredited?

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: bobad
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:17 AM

42

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: wysiwyg
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 11:12 AM

Or alternately, words do not adequately describe Scientific concepts, The language is not precise enough, this is, and has been, an ongoing problem since the beginning of science....

Right!

Simply change "science" to "religion" and we're in the same universe of wonderment. (If one prefers, as I do, wonderment to arguing, that is.)

~S~

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Dave the Gnome
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 10:19 AM

On the Disk World a there is a theory that the great A'Tuin, a giant turtle on who's back the world rests, is seeking for his mate in the infinity of the Universe. When he finds her (or possible when she finds him) is when the Big Bang will occur...

DeG

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: CarolC
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 09:02 AM

Everything is impossible. That's why it's so funny to me when people choose one set of impossibilities over any other and say that their's is the only possible truth and everything else is impossible (I speak here not only of people with specific religious dogmas, but also scientific dogmas).

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 07:59 AM

It used to be thought possible that the expansion might slow and reverse.
A few years ago it was found to be accelerating.
A new concept, dark energy, had to be made to explain that.

An infinitely small what? The universe. Space, matter, energy and time.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 07:20 AM

First you have a thought. Then you have a manifestation of the thought...appearing as a physical something or other.

One possibility. ;-)

But now I hear you asking, "Yeah, but who or what thought that thought?"

Good question. I do not have the answer, because I'm only one cell in the jellyfish, and if you were to ask any one cell in the jellyfish to explain the entire jellyfish, it probably wouldn't have any idea even how to begin.

Then too, there's the ocean around the jellyfish...and what lies beyond the ocean???

Just accept the fact that you will never know and be calm with it. There's a great deal we will never know.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Dead Horse
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 06:31 AM

I liken it to Pavarotti meeting Vanessa Phelps on a dating site.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Micca
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 04:46 AM

Or alternately, words do not adequately describe Scientific concepts, The language is not precise enough, this is, and has been, an ongoing problem since the beginning of science, words in Science as opposed to words as everyday communication, have a PRECISE meaning i.e. Green as a word means anywhere between Blue and Yellow as a Science concept it means a precise range of wavelengths of light between 50*10^-8 and 57*10^-8m . Therefore The Big Bang is a very fuzzy "word" description of what Scientists Theorize happend at the very beginning of the Universe,(the moment of Creation for any of our closet Creationists out there, The second after "Let there be light") any the models they use are all mathematical.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: 3refs
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 04:45 AM

Until they can figure out just exactly how gravity works, we'll not likely ever know!
I have read that the universe expands(the big bang)and then contracts, over and over again! Forever!

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Micca
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 04:32 AM

" In the Beginning was the Word and the Word was.....





Aardvark"

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:33 AM

... but a singularity, an infinitely small size of WHAT, precisely?

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Keith A of Hertford
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:21 AM

The whole universe, matter, space and energy, suddenly expanded from a singularity,i.e an infinitely small size.

Subject: RE: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: Darowyn
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 03:13 AM

Everything and nothing.
From nothing to everything... Bang
Cheers
Dave

Subject: BS: What went Big Bang?
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 28 Sep 09 - 02:28 AM

In one of his novels, Ben Elton makes a character say that he has been told, by one of those who didn't really know either, that this is a question that only stupid people ask. I have read Stephen Hawking (for all the good it did me) & all that stuff. But I still don't know how we are any further forward until someone answers this question, & the obvious related one as to whence it appeared so that it could do it. So I ask again:

What went Big Bang?