Before The Big Bang

[poliphilo]

According to Horizon it's no longer scientifically illiterate to wonder what happened before the Big Bang. A convenor asked a room full of mega brains, "Who believes there was something before the Big Bang?" and every hand went up- though some only to half mast. There are many theories to be considered. The one that sticks with me- probably because its so simple- is that the universe expands, contracts and expands again- like breathing in and out. 

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've always liked the 'breathing in and out' idea, too. But I don't see how you can imagine it without imagining that time continues as a steady pace independently of the state of the universe, whereas one thing I understood to be an implication of special relativity is that, if the universe were sucked into a primordial atom ready for the 'next' big bang, time would be sucked with it, rendering the concepts of 'next' and 'previous' meaningless. But I'd be happy to be wrong about that!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The concepts of "next" and previous" are meaningless in that. But it doesn't mean that things can't happen over and over -- just that they don't happen in a sequence.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I guess this is one of those areas where ordinary language, which has concepts of sequence, past and future built into its basic structures, ceases to be terribly useful.

The people who've put the most work into finding ways to talk about such things (other than physicists) are probably religious mystics. I can imagine Nicholas of Cusa taking all this in his stride.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Physicists don't really do well talking about it, either. They just rely on the math. At a certain point, your gut level understanding about how the world works is just wrong.

Richard Feynman was once asked to explain how magnets actually work. His point was that he couldn't, because it's too basic. He could explain how TOUCHING things works, in TERMS of magnetism, but he couldn't explain how MAGNETISM works in terms of how we actually do things in our daily life.

[ccord.livejournal.com]

When reading Augustine's Confessions a year or two ago, I remember being surprised when he began writing of this very issue -- how one can essentially, through reason, establish logical priority but not phenomenal, affective priority regarding "events" "before time". But, he also noted that the restrictions of language always cause one to talk about timeless events as if the were temporal, thus inviting confusion.